HKB
he is led, as Antoninus says, to believe that there is a greater power, which, as the old Stoics tell us, pervades the whole universe as the intellect pervades man.
God exists then, but what do we know of his nature? Antoninus says that the soul of man is an efflux from the divinity. We have bodies like animals, but we have reason, intelligence, as the gods. Animals have life and what we call instincts or natural principles of action: but the rational animal man alone has a rational, intelligent soul. Antoninus insists on this continually: God is in man, and so we must constantly attend to the divinity within us, for it is only in this way that we can have any knowledge of the nature of God. The human soul is in a sense a portion of the divinity, and the soul alone has any communication with the Deity; for as he says (XII. 2): “With his intellectual part alone God touches the intelligence only which has flowed and been derived from himself into these bodies.” In fact he says that which is hidden within a man is life, that is the man himself. All the rest is vesture, covering, organs, instrument, which the living man, the real man, uses for the purpose of his present existence. The air is universally diffused for him who is able to respire; and so for him who is willing to partake of it the intelligent power, which holds within it all things, is diffused as wide and free as the air (VIII. 54). It is by living a divine life that man approaches to a knowledge of the divinity. It is by following the divinity within, as Antoninus calls it, that man comes nearest to the Deity, the supreme good; for man can never attain to perfect agreement with his internal guide. “Live with the gods. And he does live with the gods who constantly shows to them that his own soul is satisfied with that which is assigned to him, and that it does all the daemon wishes, which Zeus hath given to every man for his guardian and guide, and a portion of himself. And this daemon is every man’s understanding and reason” (V. 27).
There is in man, that is in the reason, the intelligence, a superior faculty which if it is exercised rules all the rest. A man must reverence only his ruling faculty and the divinity within him. As we must reverence that which is supreme in the universe, so we must reverence that which is supreme in ourselves; and this is that which is of like kind with that which is supreme in the universe (V. 21).
Antoninus speaks of a man’s condemnation of himself when the diviner part within him has been overpowered and yields to the less honorable and to the perishable part, the body, and its gross pleasures.
Antoninus did not view God and the material universe as the same, any more than he viewed the body and soul of man as one. Antoninus has no speculations on the absolute nature of the Deity. It was not his fashion to waste his time on what man cannot understand. He was satisfied that God exists, that he governs all things, that man can only have an imperfect knowledge of his nature, and he must attain this imperfect knowledge by reverencing the divinity which is within him, and keeping it pure.
From all that has been said, it follows that the universe is administered by the Providence of God and that all things are wisely ordered. There are passages in which Antoninus expresses doubts, or states different possible theories of the constitution and government of the universe; but he always recurs to his fundamental principle; that if we admit the existence of a deity, we must also admit that he orders all things wisely and well (IV. 27; VI. 1; IX. 28; XII. 5).