Tending the God Within
Read the full text in our reader
Οὐδὲν ἀθλιώτερον τοῦ πάντα κύκλῳ ἐκπεριερχομένου καὶ ʽ τὰ νέρθεν γᾶς ( φησὶν) ἐρευνῶντος ʼ καὶ τὰ ἐν ταῖς ψυχαῖς τῶν πλησίον διὰ τεκμάρσεως ζητοῦντος, μὴ αἰσθομένου δέ, ὅτι ἀρκεῖ πρὸς μόνῳ τῷ ἔνδον ἑαυτοῦ δαίμονι εἶναι καὶ τοῦτον γνησίως θεραπεύειν. θεραπεία δὲ αὐτοῦ, καθαρὸν πάθους διατηρεῖν καὶ εἰκαιότητος καὶ δυσαρεστήσεως τῆς πρὸς τὰ ἐκ θεῶν καὶ ἀνθρώπων γινόμενα. τὰ μὲν γὰρ ἐκ θεῶν αἰδέσιμα δι’ ἀρετήν· τὰ δὲ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων φίλα διὰ συγγένειαν, ἔστι δὲ ὅτε καὶ τρόπον τινὰ ἐλεεινὰ δι’ ἄγνοιαν ἀγαθῶν καὶ κακῶν· οὐκ ἐλάττων ἡ πήρωσις αὕτη τῆς στερισκούσης τοῦ διακρίνειν τὰ λευκὰ καὶ μέλανα.
Nothing is more wretched than the man who ranges over everything in circles, "searching out," as the poet says, "the depths beneath the earth," and who pries by conjecture into the souls of his neighbors, never perceiving that it is enough to be devoted to the god within himself alone, and to serve him with sincerity. And to serve him means keeping him pure of passion, of rashness, and of discontent with whatever comes from gods and from men. For what comes from the gods deserves our reverence, on account of their excellence; and what comes from men is dear to us through kinship — though sometimes, in a way, it is pitiable too, owing to men's ignorance of good and evil, a blindness no less grave than the one that robs us of the power to tell white from black.
Marcus contrasts the wasted energy of ranging over the whole world to pry into other people's secrets and motives with the one discipline that actually matters: keeping the divinity within oneself undisturbed by passion, caprice, and discontent.
Marcus turns a scrap of quoted poetry — apparently about a busybody who scours even the underworld for buried secrets — into a diagnosis of ordinary curiosity. The man who circles the earth trying to infer (τεκμάρσεως, "by conjecture") what is going on in other people's souls is not merely nosy; he has simply misplaced his attention. The cure is not moral effort applied outward but a redirection inward, toward the δαίμων he already carries and need only serve with sincerity. The move recalls 3.4, where Marcus warns against squandering imagination on other people's business, and it restates the whole discipline of the inner citadel: the real work is always at home.
The second half defines what "serving" the inner god means in practice: staying clear of πάθος, of εἰκαιότης (a fine, underused word for reflexive, thoughtless impulse), and of chronic δυσαρέστησις, dissatisfaction with what gods and men send. The closing distinction — reverence for what comes from the gods, an affection tempered by pity for what comes from men, since human wrongdoing is usually ignorance rather than malice — is one of Marcus's most consistent moves. Calling moral blindness a πήρωσις equal to color-blindness frames vice as a cognitive defect rather than a stain on the will, which is exactly what lets him feel pity instead of contempt for the people who wrong him.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Meditations 2.13 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Meditations — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Meditations 2.13 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/2.13/