Justified True Belief

(●) The Roman emperor who spent his last twelve years in army camps on the Danube, writing a private notebook that told himself to be patient, useful, and unafraid to die. + Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman empire from 161 to 180 AD, which means he held more power than almost any human being who has ever lived. What he is remembered for is a small book he never published and never titled, written at night in a tent, in Greek, in short entries addressed to nobody but himself. In the manuscripts it is called Ta eis heauton, "To Himself." Everyone else calls it the Meditations. He matters to Christian readers for two reasons that pull in opposite directions, and neither one can be dropped. The first is that his book is the high-water mark of what the ancient world could reach on its own. He was a Stoic, a follower of the school founded by Zeno of Citium four and a half centuries earlier, and Stoicism taught that one divine reason runs through the whole universe, that all human beings are kin, that the only real evil is a bad character, and that a person should meet loss without bitterness. Read the Meditations and you meet a man straining, entry after entry, to become good. Christian readers have always found the effort moving and the vocabulary familiar. The second reason is harder. While he was writing those entries, Christians were being killed in his provinces. Justin, the philosopher who had argued that Christ was the Reason the Greeks had been groping for, was beheaded at Rome on the sentence of the city prefect, the magistrate who ran the courts and the police of the capital, and that prefect was almost certainly Marcus’ own philosophy teacher. In 177 the churches of Lyons and Vienne in Gaul were torn apart, and the governor wrote to the emperor for instructions and got them. Marcus mentions Christians exactly once in his book, and the mention is a sneer. Both halves of that are true at the same time, and a reader who has only one of them has not met the man.

(●) 121 AD: Born in Rome into a family already circling the throne, and left fatherless while he was still a small boy. + One ancient biography, the late and often careless collection known as the Historia Augusta, reports that he was born on 26 April 121 AD in his grandfather’s gardens on the Caelian Hill in Rome, and it is the source for most of the household details of his life. His name at birth was Marcus Annius Verus. The family had come originally from southern Spain and had climbed, over three generations, into the innermost circle of Roman public life: his grandfather held the consulship, the highest office in the state, three separate times, in 97, 121 and 126, which almost no senator outside the imperial family ever did. His father died while Marcus was very young, young enough that the son later admitted he remembered him mostly by reputation. He was raised in his grandfather’s house, alongside his mother Domitia Lucilla, and the first page of the Meditations is a list of what he owed to each of them: from his grandfather, good morals and the government of his temper; from what he had heard of his father, modesty and a manly character. The emperor Hadrian noticed the boy and enjoyed him, and the same ancient biography says Hadrian gave him a nickname that was a pun on the family name Verus, "true." He called him Verissimus, "the most truthful of all." Whoever coined it, the name was public property: when Justin Martyr sent his defense of the faith to Antoninus Pius, he addressed it to the emperor "and to his son Verissimus the Philosopher." Nicknames given to children by emperors do not usually turn out to be prophetic. This one did.

(●) 138 AD: At sixteen he was written into the plan for the empire, and his life stopped belonging to him. + Hadrian was dying and had no son. In February 138 he adopted a respected senator, Antoninus Pius, on one condition: Antoninus in turn had to adopt two boys, Lucius Verus and Marcus. Hadrian was arranging not the next emperor but the two after that. He died that July, and Marcus left his grandfather’s house for the imperial one. Twenty-three years of apprenticeship followed, and it is worth seeing what those years actually consisted of. In 139 he took the name Caesar, which by that date no longer meant "emperor" and meant something closer to "the one who comes next," and in the same year he served as quaestor, the junior finance post that opened a senator’s career. In 140, at eighteen, he held the consulship his grandfather had held three times, and he held it again in 145. Most of the time, though, he simply sat at his adoptive father’s side reading petitions and hearing cases, which is how the empire was actually run: not by parades, by paperwork. In 145 he married Antoninus’ daughter Faustina, who was also his cousin. The grants that settled the succession came two years after the wedding. On 1 December 147, the day after Faustina bore their first child, he received the tribunician power, the old bundle of legal rights that made a man’s person untouchable and let him veto any act of state, together with an authority over the provinces second only to the emperor’s. In Rome that pair of grants was how an heir got announced without anyone having to say the word out loud. Nothing about this was chosen. He never applied for the job, never fought for it, and by every ancient account did not want it. What he did with it is the interesting part: he watched Antoninus closely for two decades and took notes. Long afterward, in a camp on the Danube, he was still writing instructions to himself that amount to be like him: never in a hurry, never listening to gossip, never blaming the people who blamed him.

(●) c. 146 AD: A Stoic teacher lent him a book by a former slave, and he gave up the career in fine writing he had been trained for. + A Roman aristocrat was educated to speak. Marcus’ tutor was Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the most admired orator of the age, and the long correspondence between them survives: an older man coaxing a young prince toward the perfect Latin sentence, and the young prince obliging with real affection. Then Quintus Junius Rusticus, a Stoic philosopher whose advice Marcus took for the rest of his life, handed him something off his own shelf: a set of lecture notes taken down from Epictetus, a Greek who had been born a slave, was lame, and taught in a shabby school in western Greece that most of what people buy at great expense is not worth having. In the list of debts that opens the Meditations, Marcus thanks Rusticus for teaching him to stop showing off, to abstain from rhetoric and poetry and fine writing, to write letters plainly, and to make peace quickly with anyone who had wronged him. Then he adds the detail that changed his life: "I am indebted to him for being acquainted with the discourses of Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection." Nobody can put a firm year on the loan. Marcus never dates it, and scholars disagree over whether the turn was sudden or slow, so a date in the middle 140s is a convenience rather than a record. What can be dated is the mood. It is in the letters of those years that the pupil starts telling his tutor he is ashamed of arguing both sides of a question for practice, which is a strange thing for a student of oratory to be ashamed of, and exactly the shame Rusticus had been teaching him. Fronto did not enjoy losing him. The affection between them never broke, but the pupil had found something the tutor could not give, and the ornamented sentence stopped being the point.

(●) 161 AD: He became emperor at thirty-nine and immediately gave half of the office away. + Antoninus Pius died in March 161, and the ancient biography says the senate offered the empire to Marcus alone and that he refused it on those terms. His adoptive brother Lucius Verus had been named in the same arrangement back in 138, and Marcus insisted that Lucius be raised beside him with equal powers. For the first time in its history Rome had two emperors at once, and it was the senior one who had insisted on it. The quiet lasted about a year. Then the Tiber flooded and ruined the grain stores, and at the far end of the empire the Parthians, Rome’s old rivals on the eastern frontier, invaded Armenia and destroyed a Roman legion. Lucius went east to run that war; Marcus stayed in Rome and ran everything else, and married his daughter Lucilla to his co-emperor to hold the arrangement together. What the Meditations shows about these years is not statecraft but the inside of the man doing it. He tells himself, on mornings when he does not want to get up, that he was not made to lie in the bedclothes keeping warm, and that the little plants and the little birds are all already at their work.

(●) 165 AD: The armies came home from the east carrying plague, and the northern frontier gave way behind it. + The Parthian war was won, and the returning troops brought a disease back with them. It swept the empire from about 165 or 166 onward and kept returning in waves; the physician Galen, who lived through it, described the fever and the black pustules, and it is usually guessed today to have been smallpox. Nobody knows the death toll. The ancient biography says simply that the pestilence carried off thousands of civilians and soldiers, and modern estimates of how much of the empire’s population it killed range from a few percent to well over ten, which is another way of saying that the honest answer is that we do not know. Into that weakened empire came the war that would take the rest of his life. In 166 and 167 peoples from beyond the Danube, the Marcomanni and the Quadi among them, began crossing the river in force, and in 170 a raiding army pushed as far as Aquileia in northern Italy, the first foreign army to reach the peninsula in nearly three centuries. Marcus needed soldiers, and money for a treasury the plague had emptied, and he refused to squeeze the provinces for it. So, the ancient biography reports, he sold the palace: an auction in the Forum of Trajan that disposed of the imperial furnishings, robes, goblets, gold flagons, statues, paintings by famous artists. From 168 onward he was mostly away from Rome, apart from a stretch of nearly two years after the German triumph, the victory parade the city put on for a general who had won a foreign war. The rest of the time he was in the camps, and the camps are where the Meditations was written. The manuscripts attach a note of the place to two of the books: one written among the Quadi on the river Granua, one at Carnuntum on the Danube.

(●) 175 AD: His best general in the east declared himself emperor, and Marcus set out for the war intending to pardon him. + Avidius Cassius, the general who had won the Parthian war and now governed the whole east, had himself proclaimed emperor in the spring of 175. The ancient account says a false report of Marcus’ death was going around, and that Cassius acted on it, or spread it. Egypt and Syria went over to him. Marcus broke off the German campaign and started east. He was not, the biography says, much disturbed by the revolt, and he took no harsh measures against the people close to Cassius, though the senate declared the man a public enemy and seized his property. The war never happened. Cassius was killed by his own officers after about three months. Later, in Alexandria, Marcus pardoned the city that had openly wished the usurper well. The journey east cost him more than the revolt did. In the foothills of the Taurus mountains, in a village the ancient biography calls Halala, Faustina died suddenly. She had been his wife for thirty years and the mother of his children. The same biography says he asked the senate to grant her divine honors and a temple, delivered the eulogy for her himself, and paid no attention at all to the things that had been said about her.

(●) 180 AD: He died in camp at fifty-eight, and the son he had trained undid a great deal of it. + He died on 17 March 180 AD, in the field, with the German war unfinished. Ancient writers disagree about where: some say Vindobona, the fort that became Vienna, and some say Sirmium on the Save. He was fifty-eight, and had been emperor for nineteen years. He had made his surviving son Commodus co-emperor three years earlier, and Commodus, who was eighteen, promptly bought peace on the frontier and went home to Rome to enjoy himself. He is the emperor who fought in the arena dressed as Hercules, and he was strangled in his bath twelve years later. Cassius Dio, a senator who lived through both reigns, wrote the obituary of the whole period in a single clause: with the death of Marcus, "our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust" (Roman History 72.36.4 in the Loeb numbering, 71.36.4 in older editions, Earnest Cary’s translation). Two things outlived him that nobody planned. One is the bronze equestrian statue that still stands in Rome, spared when almost every other imperial bronze was melted down, because medieval Christians took the rider for Constantine. The other is the notebook. He wrote it for an audience of one, and it has never stopped finding readers.

What He Taught

(T1) The universe is one living thing governed by one reason, and a person is a limb of it rather than a stranger in it. + Watch someone weave. The shuttle goes across, the thread crosses a hundred other threads, and no single crossing means much by itself; the cloth is the thing, and every thread is holding some part of it up. That is close to how Marcus saw the world, and he reaches for the image himself: the continuous spinning of the thread, and the contexture of the web. Behind it stands the central Stoic claim. The universe is not a heap of separate objects but one enormous living being, and running through it is what the Stoics called the Logos: the Greek word for word, speech, or reason, used by the school to mean the rational order built into things, which is also what they meant by God. On this view God is not outside the world looking at it. God is the world’s own reason, in it the way your mind is in you, and so the words "nature," "reason," "providence," "fate," and "Zeus" all end up naming the same thing. Two consequences follow, and Marcus draws both constantly. Since one reason governs everything, whatever happens to you is assigned to you by the whole and is not an accident. And since every human being carries a share of that same reason, all people are relatives: not merely fellow citizens of Rome, which Marcus happened to rule, but fellow citizens of the universe. He puts it in one line that is easy to read past. His city and country, so far as he is Antoninus, is Rome; so far as he is a man, it is the world. Christian readers hear the vocabulary and should handle it carefully. John’s Gospel opens with the Logos too, and Paul told the Athenians that in God "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). But a Logos that is the universe is not the Logos who made the universe and then became a man, and a reason that pervades everything is not yet someone who can say "I."

(Q) "Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being." + Source: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV.40 (George Long translation). The entry runs a few lines further and ends with the picture of the spinning thread and the woven web (T1). Elsewhere he compresses the same thought into a sentence: there is one universe made up of all things, one god who pervades all things, one substance, one law.

(T2) Nothing that happens to you can harm you; only your judgment about it can. + Two men are laid off on the same Friday. One goes home shaken but steady, tells his wife, and starts making calls on Monday. The other is wrecked for a year. The event was identical. Something else was not. That gap is where Stoic ethics lives, and Marcus got the idea from Epictetus, who put it as a division: some things are up to us, and some are not. What is not up to us is everything outside our own minds, our health, our money, our reputation, how long we live, what other people choose to do. What is up to us is the judgment we pass on all of that, and what we do next. So the Stoics held that only virtue is genuinely good and only vice is genuinely bad, and that everything else, illness and wealth and death included, is what they called adiaphora, "indifferent." That word does not mean it makes no difference to your comfort. It means it cannot by itself make you a worse person. Nobody can damage your character except you. Marcus is not writing this from a comfortable chair. He wrote it during a plague, in a war he could not finish, having buried several of his children and, in the last years, his wife, in a body that Cassius Dio says was never strong. The line has weight because of who is holding the pen. The place a Christian reader should slow down is what this does to grief. Paul also says he has learned to be content in any circumstances (Philippians 4:11), and Peter tells Christians to throw their anxiety onto God because he cares for them (1 Peter 5:7). But Scripture never says the loss was not a loss. It says there is someone to hand it to. Marcus has no one to hand it to, so the whole weight has to be carried by getting his own opinions right, and that is a heavier thing to ask of a man than it first sounds.

(Q) "If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgement now." + Source: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VIII.47 (George Long translation). The entry goes on to press the point as an argument with himself: and if the pain comes from something in your own disposition, who is stopping you from correcting your opinion? And if it comes from not having done something you believe is right, why complain instead of acting? (T2)

(T3) People wrong you because they cannot tell good from bad, so the answer is patience rather than anger. + The most famous entry in the book is a morning exercise, and it is startlingly practical. Before you get up, run through the people you are going to meet today: the busybody, the ungrateful one, the arrogant one, the liar, the man eaten up with envy, the one who will not cooperate with anybody. Expect them. Then remember why they are like that. His answer is that nobody does wrong in the deliberate way we imagine. People act badly because they have never seen clearly what is genuinely good and genuinely bad, and no one chooses what he believes to be worse for himself. Socrates had argued the same thing more than five centuries earlier. So the wrongdoer is not an enemy but a relative who has been misinformed, and Marcus adds the image that makes it stick: we were made to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the upper and lower rows of teeth. Being angry at such a person is the top row of your teeth resenting the bottom row. The rule he draws from it is not passive. Correct the man if you can, and teach him, since he is ignorant. If you cannot, put up with him, and do not let his fault become yours by turning you bitter. This is as close as a pagan ethic ever came to the Sermon on the Mount, and the distance that remains can be measured exactly. Jesus also says to meet hostility without retaliation, but the reason he gives is a Father: "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good" (Matthew 5:44–45). And forgiveness, in the Christian sense, takes the offense seriously as a real wrong done by someone genuinely responsible for it. Marcus dissolves the offense by explaining it. That is a way of not being angry. It is not the same as pardon.

(Q) "For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature." + Source: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations II.1 (George Long translation). This closes the morning entry that begins "Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial" (T3). Long’s note traces the image of the teeth back to Xenophon, Memorabilia II.3.18.

(T4) Death is close and ordinary, and remembering it is meant to make a man good today. + A soldier on the Danube in the 170s did not need reminding that life was short. The plague had been through the camps, and the emperor himself was a frail man: Cassius Dio says he ate very little and only at night, because his stomach and his chest were in bad condition. And still, over and over, Marcus writes himself the same short memo: you are not going to live ten thousand years, death is standing over you, so while you are alive and it is still in your power, be good. The point is not gloom. It is proportion. Almost everything people burn their lives on, being praised, being remembered, winning an argument, will be under the same earth shortly, and he says so bluntly: soon the earth will cover us all. What that clears away is the excuse. If there is not much time, there is no sense spending the afternoon being offended. He also has a picture for the ending that is worth sitting with. Life is a play, and a man complains that he has only finished three acts out of five. But in life, Marcus says, the three acts are the whole drama, because the one who decided when the piece would end is the same one who decided that it would begin, and you are the author of neither. Depart satisfied, since the one who releases you is satisfied. What he cannot say is what is on the other side. The Stoic expectation was dissolution: the elements you were assembled from are taken back and used again, and that is all. He states it as calmly as everything else, and he is honest enough to admit he is not certain even of that. His recurring alternative is providence or atoms, a governing mind or a lucky collision, and he tells himself that either way his own job is unchanged. The honesty is admirable, and it is also the exact place where the Christian claim goes somewhere he cannot follow, because Paul stakes everything on a fact rather than a posture: if the hope is only for this life, Christians are of all people most to be pitied, but the fact is that Christ has been raised (1 Corinthians 15:19–20).

(Q) "Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good." + Source: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV.17 (George Long translation). The whole entry is those three sentences. It is one of the shortest in the book and one of the most quoted (T4).

(T5) Power stains the man who holds it, and a ruler’s hardest work is to keep from taking the dye. + Roman purple was not a shade of paint. It was a dye, drawn from sea snails at enormous expense, and once wool had been through the vat the color was in the fiber and never came out again. That is the image Marcus reaches for when he warns himself about his own job: take care that you are not dyed with this dye. Notice the direction of the fear. Everyone else in the empire worried about what the emperor might do to them. The emperor worried about what being emperor was doing to him. He had watched the alternative in the histories: Caligula, Nero, Domitian, men who began ordinary and were slowly cooked by having nobody left who could tell them no. Absolute power is not chiefly dangerous because it lets a man hurt people. It is dangerous because it makes him into the sort of man who wants to. His defense against it was a person. Antoninus Pius had held the same office for twenty-three years without being ruined by it, and Marcus writes himself the instruction to do everything as that man’s pupil: his steadiness, his even temper, his indifference to empty fame, the way he bore unjust blame without blaming back, how little he needed in the way of bed and food and clothes. It is worth being fair about how far this reached in practice, and honest about where it stopped. The ancient biography records an emperor who punished crimes more lightly than the laws required, who gave whole days to hearing cases himself and heard them out, who kept faith with captured enemies, and who sold his own furniture rather than tax the provinces harder. The same reign is the one in which the church at Lyons was destroyed. Both belong in the ledger, and no honest account of the man can keep the first and quietly drop the second.

(Q) "Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen. Keep thyself then simple, good, pure, serious, free from affectation, a friend of justice, a worshipper of the gods, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all proper acts." + Source: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VI.30 (George Long translation). The entry continues into the long portrait of Antoninus Pius that Marcus sets himself as the standard, beginning "Do everything as a disciple of Antoninus" (T5).

(Q) "What a soul that is which is ready, if at any moment it must be separated from the body, and ready either to be extinguished or dispersed or continue to exist; but so that this readiness comes from a man’s own judgement, not from mere obstinacy, as with the Christians, but considerately and with dignity and in a way to persuade another, without tragic show." + Source: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations XI.3 (George Long translation). This is the only place in the whole book where Christians are named, and it repays a slow reading, because he is not accusing them of cowardice. He is complaining that they die too easily and too theatrically: that they go to execution out of sheer stubbornness and a taste for the dramatic rather than out of a reasoned readiness. It is the reaction of a man watching martyrdom from the outside and finding it undignified. Some scholars have suspected the words "as with the Christians" of being a later insertion, since the phrase sits loosely in the sentence, but it stands in the manuscript tradition. Epictetus, the teacher Marcus learned from, refers to the same people as Galilaeans, and says they meet death by habit (Discourses IV.7).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The apologists treated Stoic reason as common ground, and Paul had already stood on it before them. + Paul once stood on the Areopagus in Athens, the rocky outcrop under the Acropolis that gave its name to the city’s oldest council and was the place a stranger with an unfamiliar idea could expect a hearing. He wanted a line his listeners already believed, so he quoted one of their own poets: "for In him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said" (Acts 17:28). The line he hands to the poets is the second one, and it stands at line five of the Phaenomena of Aratus of Soli, who had studied under Zeno himself; words all but identical to it stand in the hymn to Zeus written by Cleanthes, Zeno’s successor as head of the school. Paul had picked up a plank from the school Marcus belonged to and used it to lay a bridge. He does something similar in Romans, where Gentiles who never had the Law of Moses do by instinct what the Law requires, showing "the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness" (Romans 2:14–15). That is the seed of what later theology calls natural law: a moral order built into human beings and into creation, real enough that people who have never opened a Bible can read some of it off their own conscience. The Stoics had been arguing for exactly such an order for three and a half centuries, and they had the best vocabulary anyone had yet worked out for it. So the second-century Christian apologists, the writers whose job was to explain the faith to a hostile pagan public, worked that seam hard. Justin Martyr argued that those who lived by reason before Christ, naming Socrates and Heraclitus among them, belonged to Christ already (First Apology 46), and that the divine Word had sown seeds of truth through the whole human race, so that every people had grasped some piece of what Christians hold whole (Second Apology 8, 13). Tertullian, who agreed with almost nobody, allowed of the Stoic Seneca that he was often one of us (On the Soul 20). Ambrose of Milan later built his manual of Christian ethics on the frame of Cicero’s, which is Stoic ethics in Latin dress, and the natural-law tradition ran on from there through Aquinas into the way Christians still argue about right and wrong with people who share no Scripture with them. None of this was borrowing for the sake of sounding educated. It follows from something Christians already believed, that God made everybody and left his fingerprints on the human mind, and that is why a pagan emperor writing privately to himself can sound, page after page, like a man half-remembering something.

(†) Christians were dying in his provinces during the same years he was writing about kindness. + Around 165 AD, at Rome, Justin Martyr was tried and beheaded with six companions. The record of the trial survives, and it names the judge: the prefect of the city, Rusticus. He is almost certainly Quintus Junius Rusticus, who was city prefect in those years, the Stoic who had lent the young Marcus his own copy of Epictetus and whom Marcus thanks by name on the first page of the Meditations. The philosophy teacher who taught the emperor to be gentle sentenced the philosopher who taught that Christ was the Logos. Twelve years later came Lyons. In the summer of 177, in the Rhone valley towns of Lyons and Vienne, mob hatred turned into official prosecution, and the surviving churches of the region wrote down an account of what had happened to them. It reaches us because Eusebius, a bishop at Caesarea in the early fourth century, copied long stretches of it into his history of the church, which is how a great many early documents that would otherwise have vanished still exist at all (Church History 5.1). He says he kept the full text in a separate collection of martyr accounts, and that collection is itself lost. Pothinus, the bishop, was over ninety and could scarcely breathe; he was dragged before the tribunal, beaten on the way, and died in prison two days later. A slave girl named Blandina wore out relays of torturers from morning until evening, and was killed in the arena on the last day of the games. The detail that concerns Marcus comes near the close of the letter. The governor did not know what to do with prisoners who held Roman citizenship, so he wrote to the emperor and waited. The answer came back, and the letter reports it in a line: Caesar commanded that those who confessed should be put to death, and that any who denied should be set free (5.1.47). How much of this belongs to Marcus? Less than the worst version, and more than the kindest. There is no evidence that he issued a new general edict against Christians. The standing legal position went back to about 112, when a governor named Pliny wrote from his province in what is now northern Turkey to ask the emperor Trajan what on earth he was supposed to do with the Christians people kept denouncing to him, and Trajan wrote back: they were not to be hunted down, but they were to be punished if they were accused and would not recant. That answer was still the rule sixty years later, and most of the killing under Marcus began with local hatred rather than with imperial policy. But the answer that sent the Christians of Lyons to the beasts was his, and his one remark about them (Q) shows that he found their willingness to die mulish rather than admirable. Meanwhile they were writing to him. Melito, bishop of Sardis, addressed an appeal on behalf of the faith to him, and Eusebius quotes a piece of it (Church History 4.26). So did Athenagoras of Athens, whose Plea for the Christians opens "To the Emperors Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Aurelius Commodus." They argued that Christians were loyal subjects, that the charges of cannibalism and incest were slander, and that a philosopher on the throne of all people ought to be able to tell a rumor from a fact. There is no sign that he ever read a word of it. One story from his reign runs the other way, and it is worth telling for how tangled it is. During a campaign against the Quadi his army was trapped without water and was saved by a sudden storm. Everyone who reported the storm reported a different reason for it. The ancient biography credits the emperor’s own prayers. Cassius Dio credits an Egyptian in his entourage named Arnuphis. Christian writers from Apolinarius onward, whom Eusebius quotes (Church History 5.5), claimed the rain came in answer to the prayers of Christian soldiers in one of the legions, and Tertullian went further and said that letters of Marcus survived in which the emperor admitted it (Apology 5). The letter that later circulated under Marcus’ name saying so is a forgery. The rainstorm itself is real enough to be carved on the column that still stands in Rome. Who was praying is a question the evidence cannot settle.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who cannot love back, a death with nothing on the far side, and a goodness a man has to supply himself. + The Meditations is one of the noblest books written by anyone who never heard the gospel, and that is exactly why the differences are worth stating at full strength rather than blurred. - The God. Marcus’ divine reason is the universe’s own intelligence, not a person outside it who made it. He can revere it; he cannot be loved by it. And he is not sure it is there. His recurring formula is providence or atoms, a governing mind or a chance collision of particles, and his conclusion is that his duty is the same either way. Christian faith cannot be held on those terms, because it rests on something a person did in history: "But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). - The end. For Marcus, death is dissolution: the elements are handed back and put to other uses, and the actor leaves the stage. Scripture promises not dissolution but resurrection, and Paul refuses to soften it into an attitude: if the hope stops at this life, Christians are the most pitiable people alive, and the answer he gives is not courage but an empty tomb (1 Corinthians 15:19–20). - The tears. Stoicism trains a man out of the passions that cloud his judgment, and Marcus admires those who take loss without being shaken by it. Jesus, standing outside the tomb of a friend he was about to raise, wept anyway (John 11:35). Christian faith does not ask a mourner to correct his opinion about the loss. It says the loss is real, and that God came into it. - The way up. Marcus’ road to goodness is self-command, worked at daily by a man of rare discipline and rare advantages, and even he had to write himself the same reminders for twelve years. Scripture puts the rescue on the other side of the ledger: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8–9). - The direction. Marcus’ deepest fear was being dyed by the purple, and his solution was to hold the office without being changed by it. The Christian story runs the opposite way: someone who "already existed in the form of God" did not clutch at the rank but "emptied Himself by taking the form of a bond-servant," down as far as a cross (Philippians 2:6–8). The best pagan ruler tries not to be corrupted by his throne. The Christian claim is about a king who left one. There is one more thing to say, and it is not a criticism. A man who ruled the world spent his nights telling himself to stop being angry, to stop chasing praise, to be useful, and to be ready to die, and he kept having to tell himself because it kept not taking. That is the most honest self-portrait antiquity produced of a good man working under his own power. Christians read it and recognize a diagnosis they happen to know the rest of.