Book 2, letter 15

Part 1 of 2

To Marcus Aurelius: on Meditation, virtue and violence

                           Alec Guiness as Marcus Aurelius

                               The Real Marcus Aurelius

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Dear Marcus Aurelius,

I've been trying to figure out where to start. It's not like your book Meditations, is a story, or even a philosophical treatise that groups each theme into chapters. It's just bite sized wisdom, page after page of authentic meditations on the subjects of existence, honour, duty...it's about life and death and everything in between. So, unable to find a narrative thread to pick up on, I just opened your book to a random page, and lo, I found one of my favourite passages from the beginning of Book V.

“...You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practising their arts...”

...or this from book VII

6. So many who were remembered already forgotten, and those who remembered them long gone.

...or this from Book II

1. 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 recognised 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.

So, you see, there seems very little for me to say. You have said it all. I love the conversations you have with yourself, and with the wise responses your inner voice seems to give you. I have talked to a lot of my friends about you and I've been simultaneously reading two translations of your book, one from 2002, the other from 1862. It seems amazing to me, that you, a Roman Emperor, fighting a war in western Europe, dealing with civil wars at home, the eastern part of the empire also under attack; amidst all the chaos and political intrigue, you found within yourself the inner peace to write a book that seems to me, so thoroughly Buddhist, so peaceful, yet, unashamed of the everyday violence of your own time and place in history. So, you appear to me, to share something with Yamamoto Tsunetomo, the samurai philosopher, only you're a lot less grumpy. Still, even he was capable of great peacefulness and a wisdom akin to yours. The following quote is from the second chapter of his book, The Hagakure, from the 1979 translation by William Scott Wilson.

“If one were to say in a word what the condition of being a samurai is...it would be to fit oneself inwardly with intelligence, humanity and courage, The combining of these three virtues may seem unobtainable to the ordinary person, but it is easy. Intelligence is nothing more than discussing things with others. Limitless wisdom comes from this. Humanity is something done for the sake of others, simply comparing oneself with them and putting them in the fore. Courage is gritting one's teeth; it is simply doing that and pushing ahead, paying no attention to the circumstances. Anything that seems above these three is not necessary to be known.”

I'm actually very interested in what people mean by “virtue”, since a great deal seems to have been written about it, and not everyone agrees on definitions. I sometimes suspect that the words courage and valour are smokescreen terms used to cover up the terrible things that warrior cultures do to each other. These words appear to be an attempt to morally and socially justify the butchery required of men in times of war. Actually, perhaps that's my real question about virtue. Men are actually required, by law, to be brutal murderers in times of war, and a great deal of effort is made by poets, politicians and philosophers to conjure a narrative of pride and glamour to ease the minds of the men sent to do the killing. Is all this man talk of virtue and courage an illusion we cast over the violence of our world?

Or, some more difficult questions:

Is human nature contrary, dualistic?

Are we an ecosystem that doesn't resolve peacefully, but that actually requires war to rejuvenate itself? Like the Australian bush land that need fire to propagate.

Are we animals, or something else?

What is poetry for, if not to cast in a better light, the horror of reality?

But it's not just men's ideas about violence that confound me, since women are often cited as being just as passionate about the wartime virtues of men. Julius Caesar, in his Gallic War Commentaries, claims that the women of some Celtic tribes were terrifying, known to kill their own men if they retreated, then to kill their children and themselves, rather than to submit to capture and slavery. Then there is that classic Spartan quote, “With it or on it.”, uttered by Spartan mothers as they gave their sons their shields before going into battle. Come back with this shield, or on this shield. Kill, or be killed. Surrender is dishonour, and dishonour is shame, and men are motivated in a massive way, by shame, and its ugly twin brother, pride.

Women in England and Australia were famous during the First World War, for their “White Feather Brigades”, in which groups of pretty young girls would walk the streets handing out white feathers to any young men they found. The white feather symbolised that the recipient was a coward, and nothing short of a traitor to his country. The girls would insult and berate the men in public and in private, shaming them until they volunteered to join the war.

I'm not blaming or shaming women. I'm telling a story, and only a small part of the story at that, a fragment. I'm just fascinated by the justifications we as civilised people make for violence, and the different kinds of violence that we promote or decry, and how we delineate the difference between killing in times of war and peace. I think it's an aspect of society that lots of people experience in their daily lives, but which very few give due consideration. The different kinds of violence.

I do have a funny story about white feathers though. When I was about twenty one years old, I was working in a library and just finishing my university studies, when my country became involved in a fresh war in Afghanistan, and there was a great deal of chest thumping and nationalistic pride about our boys going to fight the terrorists. I wore a white feather in my long hair for weeks. One day an elderly lady, a customer at the library who looked old enough to have lived through the First World War, recognised the symbolism, and congratulated me on having the courage to wear the feather as a sign of protest against the war.

Was my peaceful stance cowardice or virtue?

Does the nature of the enemy define the difference?

I don't have a single answer.

I will meditate on this, and write more later.