This conjecture was taken up again in 1624 by Caspar Barth, who, recognizing that one could detect traces of organization and sometimes lengthy reasoning in the Meditations, claimed that the text that had reached us consisted only of extracts from a vast, systematic treatise of ethics that the emperor had written."" Such conjectures, and their variations, have accompanied the Medi1atio11s throughout its history, always trying to account for the disorder and haphazardousness of this work.45 The contemporary reader may find individual aphorisms that seem to speak for themselves, but will be left with the basic impression that, as Hadot puts it, "these sentences seem to follow one another without order, with the randomness of the impressions and states of soul of the emperor-philosopher."46
Hadot has recognized that Marcus Aurelius' Meditations belong to the type of writing known as h_ypomnemata, personal notes and reflections written day to day. This kind of writing existed throughout antiquity, and at least two of Marcus' seventeenth-century editors and translators also recognized his work
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11
as consisting of personal notes.47 Marcus wrote day to day without trying to compose a work intended for the public; his Meditations arc for the most part exhortations to himself, a dialogue with himself. 4H Moreover, his thoughts and reflections were written down according to "a very refined literary form, hccause it was precisely the perfection of the formulas that could assure them their psychological efficacy, their power of persuasion." 49 Thus, although Marcus' work belongs to the literary genre of personal notes written day to dny (�l'Pomne111att1), they are also quite distinct from other examples of such notes. As Hadot concludes, "it appears indeed that unlike other /1ypomnemt1lt1, the Metlilt1lions of Marcus Aurelius are 'spiritual exercises,' practiced accordinl( to a certain method." 50
Spiritual exercises arc practiced in the Meditations according to a method, I ludot has written, "as rigorous, as codified, as systematic as the famous Spirit11t1/ E.l'ercises of Saint Ignatius." 51 And the key to this method, and thus 111 the Metlitt1tio11s, is to be found in the three philosophical topoi distinguished hy Epictetus. Epictetus distinguished three acts or functions of the soul -
iudl(tnent, desire, and inclination or impulsion. Since each of these activities 11f' 1hc soul depends on us, we can discipline them, we can choose to judge or 11111 111 judl(c ;1nd to judge in a particular way, we can choose to desire or not lo llcHirc, to will en· not to will. And so to each of these activities corresponds 11 r.pirit 11111 exercise, n discipline of representation and judgment, a discipline 111 1h·Nil'l'i nnd 11 lliNciplinc of inclin111ions or impulses to action.12 Moreover,
12
Introduction
Hadot has shown that Epictetus identified the three disciplines with the three parts of philosophy - the discipline of assent with logic, the discipline of desire with physics, and the discipline of inclinations with ethics.53 And he used the word topos "to designate the three lived exercises that ... are in a certain way the putting into practice of the three parts of philosophical discourse."54 Thus Epictetus' three topoi are three lived spiritual exercises.
Marcus Aurelius took up these three topoi and employed them as the underlying structure of his Meditations. They are the key to the interpretation of virtually the entire work, and our recognition of their role allows the surface disorder of the Meditations to transform itself, so that we see beneath this apparent lack of order a rigorous underlying form or structure: beneath this apparent disorder hides a rigorous law that explains the content of the Meditations. This law is, moreover, expressed clearly in a ternary schema that reappears often in certain maxims. But this schema was not invented by Marcus Aurelius: in fact it corresponds exactly to the three philosophical topoi that Epictetus distinguishes in his Discourses. It is this ternary schema that inspires the whole composition of the Meditations of the emperor. Each maxim develops either one of these very characteristics topoi, or two of them, or three of them.5s These three disciplines of life are truly the key to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It is in fact around each of them that the different dogmas ... are organized, are crystallized. To the discipline of judgment are linked the dogmas that affirm the freedom of judgment, the possibility that man has to criticize and modify his own thought; around the discipline that directs our attitude with regard to external events are gathered all the theorems on the causality of universal Nature; lastly, the discipline of action is nourished by all the theoretical propositions relative to the mutual attraction that unites reasonable beings.
Finally, one discovers that behind an apparent disorder, one can uncover, in the Meditations, an extremely rigorous conceptual system.56
Each maxim, aphorism, sentence of the Meditations is an exercise of actualization and assimilation of one or more of the three disciplines of life. 57 Thus Hadot, discovering the form "that renders all the details necessary," allows us to read the Meditations coherently, transforms our experience from that of reading a disconnected journal to one of reading a rigorously structured philosophical work.sx
Hadot's discovery of the ternary schema underlying the Meditations not only allows us to give structure to its merely apparent disorder. It also allows us to keep from falling into misplaced psychological judgments about the author of these spiritual exercises. Precisely because the Meditatitms arc
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traditional Stoic spiritual exercises, we must be very prudent about drawing conclusions concerning the personal psychological states of iyiarcus. As Hadot has said, we are all too ready to project our own attitudes and intentions on ancient works, to see the Meditations as the spontaneous effusion of Marcus'
everyday feelings, to see Lucretius' On the Nature of Things as the work of an anxious man attempting to combat his anxiety, or to understand Augustine's Confessions as the expression of his desire to confess and so to give us an autobiographical account of his life.59 But in antiquity, the rules of discourse were rigorously codified: in order to say what one wanted to say, an author had to say it in a certain way, according to traditional models, according to rules prescribed by rhetoric and philosophy . . . [the Meditations] are an exercise realized according to .definite rules; they imply . . . a pre-existent outline which the emperorphilosopher can only amplify. Often, he only says certain things because he must say them in virtue of the models and precepts that impose themselves on him. One will therefore only be able to understand the sense of this work when one has discovered, among other things, the prefabricated schemata that were imposed on it.60
Hadot has charted all of the supposed psychological portraits of Marcus drawn from the Meditations, which see him as suffering from gloomy resignation, extreme skepticism, despair. Some modern authors have claimed to find in the Meditations evidence of a gastric ulcer and its psychological consequences, or of the psychological effects of Marcus' abuse of opium.61 But all of these attempts at historical psychology ignore the mechanisms of literary composition in antiquity, and fail to take into account Marcus' modes of thought, the fact that he was practicing spiritual exercises, derived from Stoicism, more particularly from Epictetus, whose essential goal is to influence himself, to produce an effect in himself.62