An objection written out at full strength. The passage is unusual in that Marcus sets down the argument against providence entire and unabridged: the gods ordered everything καλῶς καὶ φιλανθρώπως — and "overlooked this one thing alone." This is the school form of an ἀπορία: first the objection in its strongest version, then the examination. Usually in the Meditations the opponent's case is compressed into half a line; here it is given half the entry.

The example is chosen to sting. It is not about himself, nor about people in general, but about the "thoroughly good" (πάνυ χρηστούς) — those who had as it were entered into συμβόλαια with the divine. The word is commercial: contracts, engagements, the things concluded in a market and in a court. And further: through ἔργα ὅσια and ἱερουργίαι they became συνήθεις τῷ θείῳ, "on familiar terms with the divine," habituated to one another. The metaphor is almost impudent — piety described as a long business relationship, and the end of it put in the verb ἀπεσβηκέναι, "to have been snuffed out entirely." The same verb stands in the disjunction of 5.33: σβέσις ἢ μετάστασις, "extinction or transposition."

The first answer: from fact to obligation. The argument is split in two: if it were TERMjust, it would also be possible; if it were according to TERMnature, nature would have brought it about. Hence the reverse inference: since it is not so, it ought not to have been so. The move is vulnerable — it derives the ought from the is — and Marcus seems to feel it: twice a cautious εἴπερ is inserted, "if indeed that is how it is." Nowhere does he assert that there is no immortality; he reasons on the supposition that there is none.

The second answer, and it is the stronger. ὁρᾷς γὰρ καὶ αὐτὸς ὅτι τοῦτο παραζητῶν δικαιολογῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. Δικαιολογέομαι is a courtroom verb: "to plead a case, to argue one's right at law." And then: we would not argue with the gods like this unless they were the best and the most just. The objection is overturned by the very fact of its being brought: a suit about injustice makes sense only where there is a just judge — and in presupposing the judge you have already granted what you are contesting. The argument does not answer the question about the afterlife; it shows that the form of the complaint itself is a confession of providence.

What Marcus does not do. He neither proves immortality nor denies it — the question is left open, as in 5.33, where "extinction or transposition" are awaited with equal calm; cf. the disjunction of 12.14 in this same book, and 10.6. The governing discipline is desire (consent to the ordering of the whole), the sustaining one assent: the whole passage is work upon an argument.