ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Prayer should be for good gifts, not for ourselves only but for our neighbour also. For a fuller discussion of Prayer from a different angle see ix. 40. The words preserved by Marcus are thought to be a primitive formula, a magic incantation to the Rain-god. They were perhaps used in connexion with a rude image of Earth, which Pausanias records to have been dedicated at a time of drought either in Attica or in all Hellas. Perhaps the learned had questioned whether prayer should not pass beyond the bounds of Attica, to embrace the fields of their neighbours and even of their enemies.[1]
By 'simply' Marcus means that, as Socrates said, we are to ask God for good, not for good either for ourselves individually or for some private end; by 'freely' he means 'without cringing or crawling', a freeman's devotion, not a slave's. We are to stand up when we pray, as Socrates was said to have done.
No doubt Marcus knew what Plato had said on this subject in the Euthyphro, and was familiar with Persius' second Satire and its source, the dialogue Alcibiades ii.
Ch. 8. The subject of Prayer leads him to open the hardest of all problems to a consistent Stoic, the existence of physical and mental suffering and moral evil.
A conspicuous example of men's prayer is that directed to Aesculapius, god of healing. Men ask the god for relief, his answer is to prescribe a painful and severe remedy.
Suffering, then, in this world, Marcus argues, may be looked on as prescribed to man, like a regimen given by a good physician to his patient. What men commonly call ills are part of the economy of the Whole. You must therefore not only submit to suffering; you must welcome it as assigned to you by a long chain of necessary sequence, and also as contributory to the perfection of the Whole. Marcus goes even further. He says paradoxically that apparent evil assists the permanence of the eternal Cause, while human discontent actually injures the perfect Unity.
Notice that he does not say (though some thinkers have said it) that my suffering benefits me; only that my suffering is for the good of the whole. The individual is regarded as a member of the body that is treated, even chastised, for the good of that great body, the City of God.
- ↑ Paus. i. 24. 3.
