ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Marcus, in his train of thought, combines two arguments. One is from the goodness of the gods (or of Nature). Material blessings and sufferings would not be permitted by Heaven, if they were real goods and evils, to fall equally upon the just and the unjust. The second is that material goods and ills are not real goods and ills because they do not affect a man's moral integrity or (he might have added) compensate his moral failure.
The axioms that gods exist, and that they are all wise and all powerful, and that they are the cause only of good, are derived ultimately from Plato's teaching in The Republic and The Laws. In the later Books Marcus prefers generally to preserve an open mind between belief in the gods and the Epicurean atomism, and again between believing in a divine general providence and in divine care for the individual. Here there is no hesitation in his belief.
Incidentally he rejects a statement of Epictetus,[1] who taught that the gods did not put material things in men's power, 'not because they would not, but because they could not', and of Seneca that 'what is refused to us was not in their power to give'.[2] Lastly, it will be observed that neither here nor anywhere else does he discuss the later Stoic view that these material goods and evils may, where moral freedom is not affected, be treated by the good man as 'preferred' or 'rejected'. Presumably he believed, as is indeed the case, that to admit this kind of casuistry is to tamper with the purity of the moral doctrine he had accepted.
Ch. 12. The transition is from the 'indifferent' goods and ills of the last chapter to the power of thought in man, which can judge of the worthlessness of all temporal things by comparison with itself and the Divine, which it can touch if it is rightly disposed. The dread of death is removed by disillusionment in regard to life and by recognizing that the king of terrors, stripped of his trappings, is nothing else whan a work of Nature and a work which serves her purpose. The reference to the child's dread is an allusion to the fable of the boy who was frightened by the mask he had himself made. The two kinds of disillusionment are followed by the reassertion of the mind's power to dwell in contact with the godhead. These closing words are the motive of ch. 13 and are continued in ch. 15 and ch. 17.
