The Logos Within and Without
The Teaching
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into one another, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life.
You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight. That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.
The Logos — the rational principle of the universe — is within you and without you simultaneously. To live according to nature is to live according to the Logos. The Logos is what all things share.
Commentary
Marcus Aurelius uses ‘Logos’ as Heraclitus and the Stoics before him did: the rational principle that pervades all things, makes them intelligible, and provides the standard for virtuous living. This Logos is John’s Word, is the Tao, is the Dharma of Buddhist cosmology.
‘That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees’, the Stoic cosmic perspective: the individual is always embedded in larger wholes, and authentic wellbeing requires alignment with those wholes. The Zoroastrian Asha and the Taoist Tao describe the same cosmic order.
Marcus, the most powerful man on Earth, writing these meditations for himself alone, never intending them to be published. The inner life is where it all happens. Same teaching as the Kingdom of God within.
Themes
Connections 12
Travelled
Stoicism reached Christianity by 50 CE. Paul debates Stoics in Athens (Acts 17:18), and Stoic ethics runs through the Church Fathers.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Stoicism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Stoicism and Zoroastrianism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Stoicism while these teachings took shape. Their worlds touched after Alexander, but no Stoic text shows Buddhist influence, or the reverse.
Travelled
Stoicism reached Hermeticism by 100 CE. Stoic cosmology runs through the Hermetica.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Stoicism while these teachings took shape. Their worlds touched after Alexander, but no Stoic text shows Buddhist influence, or the reverse.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Stoicism and Zoroastrianism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known line from Stoicism to this scientific work.
Arose apart
No known line from Stoicism to this scientific work.
Unsure
Chaeremon of Alexandria (1st c.), both a Stoic and an Egyptian priest, wrote on Egyptian religion in Stoic terms. One figure.
Unsure
No documented reading of Stoicism behind this teaching, or against it.