ENGLISH COMMENTARY
are prefaced by ὄτι, which is usually the mark of an extract, and a condensed extract, from some other source (chs. 16, 21, 22, and 24). The opening chapter is closely connected in thought and expression with xi. 20, so that the original beginning of the Book, presuming that the original was in Books, may have been xi. 19, after the long summary of remedies for anger. The concluding chapter is clearly intended for its place, at the end of a Book, if not at the close of the whole Meditations.
Ch. 1. The opening chapter resembles ix. 1, in that Holiness and Justice are made to stand for man's chief ends. The thread of discourse is resumed from xi. 20–1, where holiness and the service of God were coupled with Justice, the right relation to our fellows, the good of the Commonwealth of rational creatures.
There is also a resemblance to viii. 1 and x. 1 in the reminder that to adopt the right rule and to press straight to the goal, while there is still time, is an urgent necessity.
To fulfil these two duties man must ignore all externals; be true to himself and to the divine element within him. This is called 'mind' in ch. 3, and the life set before a man is a life which his own genius or divinity is propitious to (xii. 36). This recurrence to the notion of the indwelling deity connects this Book more closely with Books ii and iii than with the intermediate Books, and helps to give it the religious character which marks what is perhaps at the beginning, certainly at the close, regarded as the concluding section of the whole work.
Ch. 2. The mention of the divine element in man leads to a statement of the mode of intercourse between God and man. At the end of ii. 12 Marcus had said that we must observe 'with what part of himself man touches God'; here he says that God sees the selves of men stripped of material coverings, and touches with his mind alone only what has flowed into them from himself.
The lesson that he draws here is not, as we should expect, that man's concern is to keep the divine part of himself pure and untouched by passion (ii. 17), but that he must ignore, as God ignores, all material circumstance, the flesh and its adjuncts. He waits until ch. 3 to draw this conclusion, after making a fresh start.
