SOURCE: “The ‘Self’ as ‘Sufferer’,” in Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 85, No. 3, July, 1992, pp. 265-72.

In the following essay, Perkins contends that Aurelius's obsession with suffering and death indicates that he never gained the self-mastery he sought.

The early Roman Empire provides little evidence for the personal religious feelings of its inhabitants; only a few texts reflect what we would call individual testimony of personal religious experience. The works of second-century authors which in fact display such religious feelings often offend modern sensibilities.¹ Commentators have described Aelius Aristides' Orationes sacrae, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as neurotic or pathological.² In a recent book, for example, Charles A. Behr introduced a discussion of Aristides with the deprecatory comment: “peculiar and unpleasant though his personality may seem to us today.”³ The same offense, moreover, is ascribed to all three men, the basis of their...