The Emperor Marcus Aurelius

CHAPTER X. The Pagan à Kempis 128

THE PAGAN À KEMPIS 128

Even in a palace, life may be led well! So spake the imperial sage, purest of men, Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell.

Our freedom for a little bread we sell, And drudge under some foolish master’s ken Who rates us if we peer outside our pen-- Matched with a palace, is not this a hell?

Even in a palace! On his truth sincere Who spake these words, no shadow ever came And when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame.

Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win, I’ll stop and say, “There were no succour here, The aids to noble life are all within.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius

CHAPTER I. Prelude

PRELUDE

“Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the most beautiful figure in history. He is one of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks which stand for ever to remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have once been carried and may be carried again. The interest of mankind is peculiarly attracted by examples of signal goodness in high places; for that testimony to the worth of goodness is the most striking which is borne by those to whom all the means of pleasure and self-indulgence lay open, by those who had at their command the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Marcus Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of Empires and he was one of the best of men. Besides him history presents one or two other sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis and Alfred. But Marcus Aurelius has for us Moderns this great superiority of interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant centre of civilisation. Trajan talks of ‘our enlightened age’ just as glibly as The Times talks of it. Marcus Aurelius thus becomes for us a man like ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are. Saint Louis inhabits an atmosphere of medieval Catholicism which the man of the nineteenth century may admire, indeed, and passionately wish to inhabit, but which, strive as he will, he cannot really inhabit. Alfred belongs to a state of society half barbarous. Neither Alfred nor Saint Louis can be morally and intellectually as near to us as Marcus Aurelius.”

These are the words of a writer in the highest degree representative of modern thought--Matthew Arnold. As such they will serve as a text for this study, and, I hope, as a justification for including it amongst the publications of the Catholic Truth Society. They will be a text since they touch on the points of greatest interest in the life of Marcus Aurelius; his high natural ideals; his fidelity in great part to those ideals; the contrast thus presented between him and his surroundings. This quotation from such a writer will also perhaps justify the appearance of this study in the good company of the C.T.S. catalogue, since it proves the interest which this pagan Emperor of Rome has for the men of our own time, whatever their opinions. For Christians there is the additional interest afforded by the contrast between his ideals and those of the martyrs--the ideals of nature and those of grace. Incidentally, a study of his life and age shows, as Mr. F. H. Myers well points out, how futile are the neo-pagan theories, so much in fashion in our own times, of the self-sufficiency of nature; and also, as Mr. Myers does not point out, how essential for heroic virtue is the indwelling of the Spirit of God, the supernatural aid of grace.

The life of Marcus Aurelius has had a fascination for those in all ages who are interested in the strivings of human nature after the ideal--and these are, I suppose, most men of culture (humani the Romans rightly called them). The early Christians took the same interest in him which they took in all the nobler pagans, in Plato and in Socrates, in Vergil, Seneca, and Epictetus; they praised his virtue and found in it a spur to higher things. If unregenerate nature could do so much, how ought not the regenerate blush for their tepidity? This was the sentiment also of that Cardinal Barberini who translated the Meditations which Marcus has left us. He dedicated the translation to his own soul “in order to make it redder than his purple at the sight of the virtues of this gentile.” Marcus’ contemporaries of all shades of opinion--Christians no less than pagans--bore testimony to the integrity of his life and, on the whole, the wisdom and justice of his rule. Long after his death his bust might be found amongst the household gods all over the Empire. In our own age when men are losing hold of the supernatural and trying to live without it, the high attainments of a mere pagan are held up for admiration. Dilettanti are in love with a moral code which brings with it no shocking sanctions; a generation sick unto death with scepticism seeks peace in an undogmatic philosophy of life: but it is all oil and no wine; therefore it heals not.

Yet honour where honour is due; we have no wish to detract from the greatness of the good Emperor--a greatness which is only realised by contrast with the surroundings in which he lived.

Rome, when Marcus came to rule over it, was the centre of a vast Empire and no capital has ever surpassed it in immorality. It had all the viciousness of Paris without its grace, the gross materialism of London enhanced by a system of slavery which brutalised master as well as slave, and all this joined to the superstition of Pekin. It had not improved, but rather the reverse, since St. Paul saw it delivered over to a reprobate sense. It was the spoiled child of its Empire. All Europe except Germany and Russia owned its sway and ministered to its desires; so did Asia Minor and Syria as far East as the Euphrates; so too did Egypt and the whole northern part of Africa. The wealth of all these provinces was borne by fleets of merchantmen to its port of Ostia; and not of these alone but the wealth also of India and China. But besides wealth they gave her something which she needed more: they gave her life. She must long ago have perished of corruption, did not the fresh pure blood of Britain, Gaul and Spain come throbbing through the Empire to give health to its diseased heart. Only when the heart itself became surcharged with corruption and poured its foulness back into the system did the Empire decay. But this was not yet. More than two centuries had to pass after the reign of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 160-181) before the final rot set in: such was the strange vitality of that Empire, the greatest the world has ever seen.

From time to time the Emperors made desperate efforts to stem the rising tide of immorality. As practical men they recognised what Napoleon and even Voltaire recognised, that there could be no morality for the masses without religion; but they did not realise so clearly that there could be religion, especially pagan religion, without morality. This was indeed what came about in the second century, especially during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and his predecessor. There was a great revival in religion but no corresponding improvement in morals. Nor was this strange. The gods themselves were represented as grossly immoral beings; religion was merely a business transaction with them--a quid pro quo--and under the code of honour which too often marks such transactions. Hence, if you safely could, it was quite the thing to cheat the gods; you took your chance, but the probability was that you would get the worst of it, since the gods were the more dexterous sharpers.

Such were the old Græco-Roman gods; but just at this time there was new and better blood introduced into the Pantheon. The gods of Egypt and the East--Mithra and Isis--strange mystic deities, began to be in high honour all over the Empire. In these new cults there was much that was higher and nobler than the old Roman religion--in every religion, as St. Augustine says, there is something good and true--but mixed with this good there was gross immorality officially sanctioned.

It is strange to think of Marcus as a devotee of all these superstitions; yet such he was. The intellectual and the cultured usually were sceptical about the tales of the gods; but few of them forbore paying them the customary homage. They looked on religion as a political and social duty and went through its functions as such. Marcus took the ceremonies more seriously than did the usual Roman of high rank; but even his faith in the old myths wavered. He was content, however, not to pry into high matters, and adopted the Stoic attitude towards them. These philosophers interpreted the legends, often by Procrustean methods, to suit their own doctrine, but in reality thought their truth or falsehood of little practical importance. For them the chief thing was to live a life of virtue, relying on one’s own strength. He who lived such a life they held to be better than the gods; and in fact many of them did lead admirable lives, as far as we can judge. Their virtue, if mingled most frequently with an unlovely and repellant pride, was at all events a relief amidst the universal corruption of pagan Rome.

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