ENGLISH COMMENTARY
The expression 'a Providence which admits intercession' is remarkable. Marcus cannot mean the propitiation of a god who is angry with human offences, for the gods of Stoicism are as free from anger as those of Epicurus. Neither can he mean that prayer might change the settled progress of the Universe, an order which is independent of man's desires or will and cannot be turned aside by prayer. He must mean that God is ready to accept man's service, his offering, and his supplication.
What a good man's prayers should be he has spoken of in ix. 40: not for material blessings, not even to preserve the life of his child, but for right understanding and right impulses. The worshipper can, if there is a Providence, establish a right relation between himself, as he endeavours to preserve his own integrity, to perform his social and religious service, and the Divine will, which is the reason of all that befalls him. The Reason of the Whole will then be propitious to him, as he too will be in a propitious habit of heart and mind (xii. 36).
Should he, however, embrace the Epicurean view, a world of Natural law, then he can rely upon the entire freedom of the human spirit, a freedom in which both Stoic and Epicurean believed.
The image of the Lamp illustrates the light-bearing, life-giving function of the Spirit in the vessel of the body. This is the vital fluid, informing all parts of the animated organism; it is spent and renewed every day. As the Norwich physician[1] writes: 'though the radical humour contain in it sufficient oil for seventy, yet in some I perceive it gives no light past thirty.' Again the lamp sheds the light of Reason, enlightening the understanding and throwing its little ray upon the darkness:
Shine, lantern, shine and be silent
Never dies down the radiance of the stars.[2]
Ch. 16. Now he resumes from ch. 12 the subject of how to treat a wrongdoer. My fancied injury may be erroneous or, if wrong has been done to me, I cannot be sure that my fellow man has not defaced his own image by his act. Moreover, it is madness to expect other fruit from such a tree. My duty is to attempt a remedy.
