The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius - College of Stoic Philosophers

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTONINUS 61
merit, for this is
implied
in the recommendation to reflect
on the nature of the man s mind who has done the wrong,
and then you will have pity instead of resentment and
:
so it comes to the same as St Paul s advice to be angry
and sin not ; which, as Butler well explains it, is not a
recommendation to be angry, which nobody needs, for
anger is a natural passion, but it is a warning against
allowing anger to lead us into sin. In short the emperor s
doctrine about wrongful acts is this :
wrong-doers do not
know what good and bad are :
they offend out of ignor
ance, and in the sense of the Stoics this is true. Though
this kind of ignorance will never be admitted as a legal
excuse, and ought not to be admitted as a full excuse in
any way by society, there may be grievous injuries, such
as it is in a man s
power to forgive without harm to
society ;
and if he forgives because he sees that his
enemies know not what they do, he is acting in the spirit
of the sublime prayer, Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do.
The emperor s moral philosophy was not a feeble,
narrow system, which teaches a man to look directly to
or tran
his own happiness, though a man s happiness
quillity is indirectly promoted by living as he ought to
do. A man must live conformably to the universal nature,
which means, as the emperor explains it in many passages,
that a man s actions must be conformable to his true
relations to all
other human beings, both as a citizen of
a political community and as a member of the whole
human family. This implies, and he often expresses it in
the most forcible language, that a man s words and
actions, so far as they affect others, must be measured
by a fixed rule, which is their consistency with the con
servation and the interests of the particular society of
which he is a member, and of the whole human race. To
live conformably to such a rule, a man must use his
rational faculties in order to discern clearly the conse-