One can imagine the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) sitting at night in his tent, pitched on one of the far-flung frontiers of the Roman Empire, making yet another entry in what would become his famous Meditations. A quintessential Stoic, the emperor believed that the universe was governed by an all-pervading Reason and that, accordingly, whatever happened in the external world must be good. The appropriate goal for every human being was to attain a proper interior attitude toward the world: to live in such a way as not to be troubled by the ebb and flow of events.
In the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius would remind himself that, when he was tempted to react in anger or sorrow to what he experienced, he should: “Consider the alternatives afresh, namely ‘Providence or atoms,’ and how many proofs there are that the universe is like a city community.” For Aurelius, “atoms” meant randomness, chance collocations. Order or chaos; purpose or chance; these are mutually exclusive (and exhaustive) possibilities for our world, and for a Stoic like Aurelius it was clear that, as soon as one reflects on such a dichotomy, one realizes that there really can be no alternative to Providence.
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