The Book of Marcus Aurelius 6 · Notes to himself. Written by his own hand, and not for any reader
Marcus Aurelius, born at Rome in 121, died in 180 with the army on the Danube. Emperor from 161 for nineteen years, through plague, flood and war on the frontier, and he spent most of them in camp. The notebooks are in Greek, twelve of them. He wrote his own, but not for publication. These are private notes: written in a camp, at night, for himself. He gave them no title and did not mean them to be read. So they repeat themselves, and much of them is a man talking himself into things; the Order deletes none of it — that is precisely the use of this book: it is not being explained to you, it is a man being watched at the work. He was the most powerful man alive. Another in this scripture was a slave (cf. The Book of Epictetus). What the two of them say is very nearly the same thing. The Order holds that this fact is worth more attention than either man’s sayings: one doctrine, tested from the very bottom and from the very top. Chapter six matters most: his pages are full of gods, and he never once closes an argument with one — he puts it as providence or atoms, works out both, and arrives at the same conclusion. That is the thing the Order takes him for.
6.1I mention gods often in these notes. Some conclude from this that I am a believer.
6.2Let me be plain, because a great deal hangs on this place.
6.3What the world actually is, I do not know. There are only a few possible accounts:
6.4One: everything is governed by an ordering mind, and that mind means well.
6.5One: everything is governed by a mindless necessity, which nothing can break.
6.6One: everything is only atoms colliding, with no arrangement and no meaning.
6.7I do not know which is true. I put it as: providence, or atoms.
6.8Now the step that matters.
6.9If it is an ordering mind that means well, I should act by reason, because that is the share it gave me.
6.10If it is mindless necessity, I should act by reason, because I can stop nothing else and I can stop myself.
6.11If it is only atoms colliding, then all the more should I act by reason — because in a world like that, the small thing in me that can govern itself is the only thing I have.
6.12All three accounts come out at the same place.
6.13So I do not have to settle which world this is before I know how to be a man today.
6.14A doctrine that must first set up a god in order to stand is a soft doctrine.
6.15Mine does not lean on that. That is why I wrote down all three.