ENGLISH COMMENTARY
The exact history of this remarkable doctrine of the Genius is obscure, but, whether or not it was inherent in Stoicism from its inception (as Bonhöffer, for instance, maintained), it illustrates a double tendency, not only in Stoicism but in Greek thought generally. There is on the one hand an attempt to give reasonable expression to men's ordinary beliefs, on the other an effort to retain the substance of those beliefs, however much the reasoning process may have modified them. 'Greek thought moved from Myth to Logos', it has been said, and in Plato myth remains by the side of reason in his most completed work. To Roman thinkers, though not so much in Marcus, this kind of religious speculation was made easier by the deep-seated belief in the good genius of the family, and the genius or spiritual power in the individual's being. These notions were also present to the Greek naive consciousness, and were submitted by philosophers to extreme rationalization, whereas by the more religious thinkers and the great mass of unconscious men they were used to embody that without which ordinary belief and philosophic interpretation both became unintelligible.
The remarkable feature in all Marcus' meditations is the way in which he keeps himself true to a spiritual conviction of the communion between God and man, free from the superstitions of a world full of strange credulity and fantastic devotions.
Ch. 14. Like ch. 12 this chapter is written in the interests of disillusionment. To emphasize life's brevity is intended to make death seem less dreadful.
Two lines of thought are combined: we lose by death no more than we lose as each moment of the present passes, and secondly, death does not rob us of any new experience, since life has revealed all its secrets to one who has lived even a little while.
The former thought is repeated, differently put, in the second half of § 2. The very old man and the infant dying immaturely suffer an identical loss, the present passing moment. Both thoughts are derived from the Epicurean school; they appear in Lucretius, the first[1] in the form that however long a man lives, death that lasts for eternity still awaits him; the difference between a long and a short life is negligible when compared with Eternal Time.
- ↑ Lucr. 3. 1090.
