ENGLISH COMMENTARY
viii. A profound and wholesome observation. Anger and sorrow bring in their train more suffering than the causes of those passions in a presumed injury. One of the commonest causes of suffering is what is called an 'imaginary' grievance, and it is one we recognize to be foolish in our neighbour.
ix. Kindness, if genuine, is invincible. This passage is one which has been justly admired in Marcus. His life was, by all accounts, a running commentary on his precept.
Two remarks are rather negligently interposed in § 5, to avoid breaking the symmetry of the 'sacred Nine'. One, if not both, is a separate remedy for anger. To flatter men is as unsocial as to be angry with them; gentleness is stronger than wrath, because to be gentle is to be free from passion (vii. 52; xi. 9).
§ 6. The tenth gift is from Apollo himself, the leader of the Nine Muses. To expect fools not to offend is madness; to permit them to harm others, and yet to resent their conduct to ourselves, is to play the despot.
Ch. 19. At the close of ch. 18 it might well be considered that Book xii begins. Otherwise we may think that Marcus returns to the soul, the inward man, with which he began Book xi.
Four tempers of the mind are to be avoided: superfluity in imagination, unsocial thoughts, insincere speech, slavery of the divine element to the government of the flesh.
Ch. 20. This chapter touches upon a moral paradox, which especially embarrassed the Stoics. If Nature made man with impulses to achieve his own good, why does his governing self, in despite of natural law, resist the right? They refused to divide the soul into two powers, reason and desire, as though two rival powers struggled for the mastery of the soul; they said truly that it is the self which errs, the self which identifies itself with its desires.
St. Augustine has examined this point, in relation to his own life, in one of the most subtle and difficult passages of his Confessions, at the climax of his spiritual struggle.[1] Marcus does not, like Augustine, reveal his own past difficulties; he is content to say that vice, and especially injustice and wrong, are solvents of the social bond. He adds that the unjust man not only sins
- ↑ St. Augustine, Confessions, viii. 8–ix. 1.
