ENGLISH COMMENTARY
may have a semi-mystical suggestion. The persons who are in appearance obstacles to goodness are like solid bodies which refuse to transmit the illumination or (if that is his meaning) to reflect it. This image is employed by St. John and St. Paul. Those who do not believe in the Light walk in darkness because they refuse to receive the illumination of the Logos.[1] Everything, says St. Paul, which is shone upon becomes light,[2] and he follows this with the image, which Marcus also uses,[3] of awaking from the slumber of sin, of rising from death into the light of Christ. Is something like this what Marcus means here? He certainly elsewhere[4] employs the image of light to illustrate the doctrine of the penetration of the whole universe by one spirit of life, as the world of reason is lightened by one reasonable spirit. There, too, he closes with the remark that the path of thought is direct, like a ray of sunshine.
The question, like the question of the effusion of the light, is interesting and suggestive. We must, however, hesitate before giving a mystical interpretation to the words of a writer who is above all simple and direct in his moral teaching. He seems here rather to seek an illustration from the phenomena of light than to hint at a deeper religious significance in the beautiful effect of sunshine streaming into a dark chamber and kindling to life its secret recesses.
Ch. 58. The attitude to death in this chapter is different from that taken by Marcus elsewhere. The first alternative is indeed that of Epicurus, the second resembles rather the Pythagorean belief in the migration of the life-spirit, itself immortal, from one animate being to another. In the second case life, Marcus says, will persist, but personality will not, so that he decidedly rejects the teaching of the Pythagorean school of metempsychosis (or metensomatosis), with its cycles of existence for the individual soul.
Ch. 59. A variant on the maxim 'Bear or Forbear'. Our social duty is to instruct our fellows or to suffer them gladly.
Ch. 60. The exact meaning is difficult to discover. Marcus seems to be recurring to ch. 57, with its emphasis on the direct
