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| Fragment of a bronze head of Marcus Aurelius, 2nd century CE |
I recently read Marcus
Aurelius’ Meditations – a book I had
long been curious about. The Meditations
are essentially the spiritual diary of a Roman emperor and that in itself is
interesting, better still, every now and again he writes with great wisdom,
though reading the Meditations from
cover to cover is not always very engaging. However, despite my respect
for the Meditations, I will admit
that the view expressed therein that the world is somehow fundamentally ordered and
that the universe is ruled by some kind of divine and ultimately benevolent
plan (see, eg, Books 8.5, and12.5) strikes me as deeply flawed. Try telling all the children who are periodically raped by
their fathers in their own bedrooms that the universe is ruled by principals of
justice and benevolent order. And how easy to live “according to nature” – this is another recurrent theme throughout the Meditations – when your nature is to be the emperor of Rome! When it comes to the power of (a pantheist or
ultimate) God, as identified with the Stoic concept of the benevolent and
ordered universe, I share the following concerns as expressed by Cicero:
“Either God wishes to remove evils and cannot, or he can do so and is unwilling, or he has neither the will nor the power, or he has both the will and the power. If he has the will but not the power he is a weakling, and this is not characteristic of God. If he has the power but not the will, he is grudging, and this is a trait equally foreign to God. If he has neither the will nor the power, he is both grudging and weak, and is therefore not divine. If he has both the will and the power (and this is the sole circumstance appropriate to God), what is the source of evils, or why does God not dispel them [Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, 3.65]?”
