In Marcus’s Meditations, there isn’t a strong distinction between nature and the divine. Everything in nature comes from the divine, and the divine is imbued in everything. This has direct implications for the way a person should live—especially if that person seeks to live according to Stoic teachings. Marcus credits the gods for laying out the conditions of his life in a favorable way: “I was shown clearly and often what it would be like to live as nature requires. The gods did all they could […] to ensure that I could live as nature demands.” The gods’ arrangement of the circumstances of Marcus’s life teach him how to live well. Based on his own experience of the gods’ favor, Marcus argues that a good life depends on living in harmony with natural processes, which ultimately means living the way the gods have designed us to live.
Marcus holds that nature is harmoniously designed and is itself divine. The gods have designed the world as a harmonious whole, and this shapes how people should react to events in their individual lives: “For there is a single harmony. Just as the world forms a single body comprising all bodies, so fate forms a single purpose, comprising all purposes. […] Accept [whatever happens] because of what it leads to: the good health of the world[.]” In other words, the gods’ concern is the harmony of all creation. This singleness of purpose should help a person accept whatever happens in their own lives as being an integral part of the harmony of the whole. One should also strive to live in harmony with nature because it makes them what they are: “I walk through what is natural, until the time comes to sink down and rest. To entrust my last breath to the source of […] my father's seed, of my mother's blood, of my nurse's milk. Of my daily food and drink through all these years.” One’s conception, birth, growth, sustenance—everything that forms and shapes a person—is part of nature.
When a person seeks to live in harmony with nature, they live their life according to the divine design. Because nature is harmoniously designed, it’s possible to discern the gods’ pattern for human behavior. For example, Marcus writes, “Injustice is a kind of blasphemy. Nature designed rational beings […] to help—not harm—one another […] To transgress [nature’s] will, then, is to blaspheme against the oldest of the gods.” Mocking the gods is not so much a matter of saying something offensive about them as living out of accord with other created beings—ignoring the clear, god-designed pattern of nature.
Behaving virtuously is acting in accordance with divinely created nature. Marcus explains, “Someone like that—someone who [strives to become virtuous]—is a kind of priest, a servant of the gods […] an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.” Someone who pursues virtue is not only living according to the gods’ design, but enjoys a kind of personal communion with the gods in daily life.
Walking in harmony and communion with the gods—by living according to nature’s pattern—even helps a person to die well. Marcus observes that living things are constantly undergoing change: “If it doesn't hurt the individual elements [of a living thing] to change continually into one another, why are people afraid of all of them changing and separating? It's a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil.” Because nature isn’t evil (nature was harmoniously designed by the gods), there is no evil to be feared in natural transformations, including death.
Marcus concludes that even if it turned out that life is random and not divinely directed, that doesn’t fundamentally change anything about what’s expected of a person. And in case life is directed by God, then a person should try to live in such a way that they’re “worthy of God's aid. If it's confusion and anarchy, then be grateful that on this raging sea you have a mind to guide you.” Marcus himself has faith that, indeed, “Providence” directs a harmonious world. However, even if a person doesn’t share Marcus’s belief in the gods’ design behind natural patterns, that person can still use their mind to live according to nature, and thereby live well.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Nature and the Gods ThemeTracker
Nature and the Gods Quotes in Meditations
l. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.
Then what can guide us?
Only philosophy. Which means making sure that the power within stays safe and free from assault […] And making sure that it accepts what happens and what it is dealt as coming from the same place it came from. And above all, that it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed. If it doesn't hurt the individual elements to change continually into one another, why are people afraid of all of them changing and separating? It's a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil.
39. Nothing that goes on in anyone else's mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you.
—Then where is harm to be found?
In your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine. Let the part of you that makes that judgment keep quiet even if the body it's attached to is stabbed or burnt, or stinking with pus, or consumed by cancer. Or to put it another way: It needs to realize that what happens to everyone—bad and good alike—is neither good nor bad. That what happens in every life—lived naturally or not—is neither natural nor unnatural.
l. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: "I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?"
—But it's nicer here....
So you were born to feel "nice"? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don't you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you're not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren't you running to do what your nature demands?
27. "To live with the gods." And to do that is to show them that your soul accepts what it is given and does what the spirit requires—the spirit God gave each of us to lead and guide us, a fragment of himself. Which is our mind, our logos.
And if [the gods] haven't made decisions about me as an individual, they certainly have about the general welfare. And anything that follows from that is something I have to welcome and embrace. […] [My nature] is rational. Rational and civic.
My city and state are Rome […] But as a human being? The world. So for me, "good" can only mean what's good for both communities.
35. We have various abilities, present in all rational creatures as in the nature of rationality itself. And this is one of them. Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it—turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself—so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.
A healthy sense of hearing or smell should be prepared for any sound or scent; a healthy stomach should have the same reaction to all foods, as a mill to what it grinds.
So too a healthy mind should be prepared for anything. The one that keeps saying "Are my children all right?" or "Everyone must approve of me" is like eyes that can only stand pale colors, or teeth that can handle only mush.
36. You've lived as a citizen in a great city. Five years or a hundred—what's the difference? […]
And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by Nature, who first invited you in—why is that so terrible?
[…] This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine.
So make your exit with grace—the same grace shown to you.
