The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 13

There are double causes for everything. The ancients said that all things come from Zeus; those who came later, natural philosophers (_physido_), on the contrary "wandered away from the fair and divine principle," and made everything depend on bodies, impacts, changes and combinations (_krasis_); and both miss something of the truth. "We do not make Mantic either G.o.dless or void of reason, when we give it the soul of man as its material, and the enthusiastic spirit and exhalation as its tool or plectron. For, first, the earth that produces these exhalations--and the sun, who gives the earth the power of combination (_krasis_) and change, is by the tradition of our fathers a G.o.d; and then we leave daemons installed as lords and warders and guards of this combination (_kraseos_), now loosening and now tightening (as if it were a harmony), taking away excessive ecstasy and confusion, and gently and painlessly blending the motive power for those who use it.

So we shall not seem guilty of anything unreasonable or impossible."[98]

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Plutarch gives an interesting account of a potion, which will produce the same sort of effect. The Egyptians compound it in a very mystical way of sixteen drugs, nearly all of which are fragrant, while the very number sixteen as the square of a square has remarkable properties or suggestions. The mixture is called Kyphi, and when inhaled it calms the mind and reduces anxiety, and "that part of us which receives impressions (_phantastikn_) and is susceptive of dreams, it rubs down and cleans as if it were a mirror."[99]

The G.o.ds, he says, are our first and chiefest friends.[100] Not every one indeed so thinks--"for see what Jews and Syrians think of the G.o.ds!"[101] But Plutarch insists that there is no joy in life apart from them. Epicureans may try to deliver us from the wrath of the G.o.ds, but they do away with their kindness at the same moment; and Plutarch holds it better that there should even be some morbid element (_phathos_) of reverence and fear in our belief than that, in our desire to avoid this, we should leave ourselves neither hope, nor kindness, nor courage in prosperity, nor any recourse to the divine when we are in trouble.[102] Superst.i.tion is a rheum that gathers in the eye of faith, which we do well to remove, but not at the cost of knocking the eye out or blinding it.[103] In any case, its inconvenience is outweighed "ten thousand times" by the glad and joyous hopefulness that counts all blessing as coming from the G.o.ds. And he cites in proof of this that joy in temple-service, to which reference has already been made. Those who abolish Providence need no further punishment than to live without it.[104]

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But the pleasures of faith are not only those of imagination or emotion. For while the G.o.ds give us all blessings, there is none better for man to receive or more awful for G.o.d to bestow than truth.

Other things G.o.d gives to men, mind and thought he shares with them, for these are his attributes, and "I think that of G.o.d's own eternal life the happiness lies in his knowledge being equal to all that comes; for without knowledge and thought, immortality would be time and not life."[105] The very name of Isis is etymologically connected with knowing (_eidenai_); and the goal of her sacred rites is "knowledge of the first and sovereign and intelligible, whom the G.o.ddess bids us seek and find in her."[106] Her philosophy is "hidden for the most part in myths, and in true tales (_logois_) that give dim visions and revelations of truth."[107] Her temple at Sais bears the inscription: "I am all that has been and is and shall be, and my veil no mortal yet has lifted."[108] She is the G.o.ddess of "Ten Thousand Names."[109]

Plutarch connects with his belief in the G.o.ds "the great hypothesis" of immortality. "It is one argument that at one and the same time establishes the providence of G.o.d and the continuance of the human soul, and you cannot do away with the one and leave the other."[110]

If we had nothing divine in us, nothing like G.o.d, if we faded like the leaves (as Homer said), G.o.d would hardly give us so much thought, nor would he, like women with their gardens of Adonis, tend and culture "souls of a day," growing in the flesh which will admit no "strong root of life." The dialogue, in which this is said, is supposed to have taken place in Delphi, so Plutarch turns to Apollo. "Do you think that, if Apollo knew that the souls of the dying perished at once, blowing away like mist or smoke from their bodies, he would ordain so many propitiations for the dead, and ask such great gifts and honours for the departed--that he would cheat and humbug believers? For my part, I will never let go the continuance of the soul, unless some Herakles shall come and take away the Pythia's tripod and abolish and destroy the oracle. For as long as so many oracles of this kind are given even in our day, it is not holy to condemn the soul to {105} death."[111] And Plutarch fortifies his conviction with stories of oracles, and of men who had converse with daemons, with apocalypses and revelations, among which are two notable Descents into Hades,[112] and a curious account of daemons in the British Isles.[113]

The theory of daemons lent itself to the explanation of the origin of evil, but speculation in this direction seems not to have appealed to Plutarch. He uses bad daemons to explain the less pleasant phases of paganism, as we shall see, but the question of evil he scarcely touches. In his book on Isis and Osiris he discusses Typhon as the evil element in nature, and refers with interest to the views of "the Magian Zoroaster who, they say, lived about five hundred years before the Trojan War." Zoroaster held that there were two divine beings, the better being a G.o.d, Horomazes (Ormuzd), the other a daemon Areimanios (Ahriman), the one most like to light of all sensible things, the other to darkness and ignorance, "and between them is Mithras, for which reason the Persians call Mithras the Mediator." But the hour of Mithras was not yet come, and in all his writings Plutarch hardly alludes to him more than half a dozen times.[114] It should be noted that, whatever his interest in Eastern dualism with its Western parallels, Plutarch does not abandon his belief in the One Ultimate Good G.o.d.

This then in bare outline is a scheme of Plutarch's religion, though, as already noted, the scheme is not of his own making, but is put together from incidental utterances, all liable to qualification. It is not the religion of a philosopher; and the qualifications, which look like concessions to philosophic hesitation, mean less than they suggest. They are entrenchments thrown up against philosophy. He is an educated Greek who has read the philosophers, but he is at heart an apologist--a defender of myth, ritual, mystery and polytheism. He has {106} compromised where Plato challenged. His front (to carry out the military metaphor) extends over a very long line--a line in places very weakly supported, and the daemons form its centre. It is the daemons who link men to the G.o.ds, and through them to the Supreme, making the universe a unity; who keep the G.o.ds immune from contact with matter and from the suggestion of evil; and what is more, they enable Plutarch to defend the myths of Greek and Egyptian tradition from the attack of philosopher and unbeliever. And this defence of myth was probably more to him than the unity of the universe. Every kind of myth was finding a home in the eventual Greek religion, many of them obscene, b.e.s.t.i.a.l and cruel--revolting to the purity and the tenderness developing more and more in the better minds of Greece. They could not well be detached from the religion, so they had to be defended.

There are, for example, many elements in the myth of Isis and Osiris that are disgusting. Plutarch recommends us first of all, by means of the preconceptions supplied by Greek philosophy upon the nature of G.o.d, to rule out what is objectionable as unworthy of G.o.d, but not to do this too harshly. Myth after all is a sort of rainbow to the sun of reason,[115] and should be received "in a holy and philosophic spirit."[116] We must not suppose that this or the other story "happened so and was actually done." Many things told of Isis and Osiris, if they were supposed to have truly befallen "the blessed and incorruptible nature" of the G.o.ds, would be "lawless and barbarous fancy" which, as aeschylus says--

You must spit out and purify your mouth.[117]

But, all the same, myth must be handled tenderly and not in too rationalistic a spirit--for that might be opening the doors to "the atheist people." Euhemerus, by recklessly turning all the G.o.ds into generals and admirals and kings of ancient days, has covered the whole world with atheism,[118] and the Stoics, as we have seen, are not much better, who turn the G.o.ds into their own gifts. No, we may handle myth far too freely--"ah! yet {107} consider it again!" There are so many possibilities of acceptance. And "in the rites of Isis there is nothing unreasonable, nothing fict.i.tious, nor anything introduced by superst.i.tion, but some things have an ethical value, others a historical or physical suggestion."[119]

[Sidenote: Evil daemons]

In the second place, if nothing can be done for the myth or the rite--if it is really an extreme case--Plutarch falls back upon the daemons. There are differences among them as there are among men, and the elements of pa.s.sion and unreason are strong in some of them; and traces of these are to be found in rites and initiations and myths here and there. Rituals in which there is the eating of raw flesh, or the rending asunder of animals, fasting or beating of the breast, or again the narration of obscene legends, are to be attributed to no G.o.d but to evil daemons. How many such rituals survived, Plutarch does not say and perhaps he did not know; but the Christian apologists were less reticent, and Clement of Alexandria and Firmicus Maternus and the rest have abundant evidence about them. Some of these rites, Plutarch says, must have been practised to avert the attention of the daemons. "The human sacrifices that used to be performed," could not have been welcome to the G.o.ds, nor would kings and generals have been willing to sacrifice their own children unless they had been appeasing the anger of ugly, ill-tempered, and vengeful spirits, who would bring pestilence and war upon a people till they obtained what they sought. "Moreover as for all they say and sing in myth and hymn, of rapes and wanderings of the G.o.ds, of their hiding, of their exile and of their servitude, these are not the experiences of G.o.ds but of daemons." It is not right to say that Apollo fought a dragon for the Delphic shrine.[120]

But some such tales were to be found in the finest literature of the Greeks, and they were there told of the G.o.ds.[121] In reply to this, one of Plutarch's characters quotes the narrative of a hermit by the Red Sea.[122] This holy man conversed with men once a year, and the rest of the time he consorted with {108} wandering nymphs and daemons--"the most beautiful man I ever saw, and quite free from all disease." He lived on a bitter fruit which he ate once a month. This sage declared that the legends told of Dionysus and the rites performed in his honour at Delphi really pertained to a daemon. "If we call some daemons by the names that belong to G.o.ds,--no wonder," said this stranger, "for a daemon is constantly called after the G.o.d, to whom he is a.s.signed, and from whom he has his honour and his power"--just as men are called Athenaeus or Dionysius--and many of them have no sort of t.i.tle to the G.o.ds' names they bear.[123]

[Sidenote: Superst.i.tion]

With Philosophy so ready to be our mystagogue and to lead us into the true knowledge of divine goodness, and with so helpful a theory to explain away all that is offensive in traditional religion, faith ought to be as easy as it is happy and wholesome. But there is another danger beside Atheism--its exact opposite, superst.i.tion; and here--apart from philosophical questions--lay the practical difficulty of Plutarch's religion. He accepted almost every cult and mythology which the ancient world had handed down; Polytheism knows no false G.o.ds. But to guide one's course aright, between the true myth and the depraved, to distinguish between the true and good G.o.d and the pseudonymous daemon, was no easy task. The strange ma.s.s of Egyptian misunderstandings was a testimony to this--some in their ignorance thought the G.o.ds underwent the actual experience of the grain they gave men to sow, just as untaught Greeks identified the G.o.ds with their images; and some Egyptians wors.h.i.+pped the animals sacred to the G.o.ds; and so religion was brought into contempt, while "the weak and harmless" fell into unbounded superst.i.tion, and the shrewder and bolder into "beastly and atheistic reflections."[124] And yet on second thoughts Plutarch has a kindly apology for animal-wors.h.i.+p.[125]

Plutarch himself wrote a tract on superst.i.tion in which some have found a note of rhetoric or special pleading, for he decidedly gives the atheist the superiority over the superst.i.tious, {109} a view which Amyot, his great translator, called dangerous, for "it is certain that Superst.i.tion comes nearer the mean of true Religion than does Atheism."[126] Perhaps it did in the sixteenth century, but in Plutarch's day superst.i.tion was the real enemy to be crushed. Nearly every superst.i.tious practice he cites appears in other writers.

Superst.i.tion, the worst of all terrors, like all other terrors kills action. It makes no truce with sleep, the refuge from other fears and pains. It invents all kinds of strange practices, immersions in mud, baptisms,[127] prostrations, shameful postures, outlandish wors.h.i.+ps.

He who fears "the G.o.ds of his fathers and his race, saviours, friends and givers of good"--whom will he not fear? Superst.i.tion adds to the dread of death "the thought of eternal woes." The atheist lays his misfortunes down to accident and looks for remedies. The superst.i.tious makes all into judgments, "the strokes of G.o.d," and will have no remedies lest he should seem "to fight against G.o.d" (_theomachein_).

"Leave me, Sir, to my punishment!" he cries, "me the impious, the accursed, hated of G.o.ds and daemons"--so he sits in rags and rolls in the mud, confessing his sins and iniquities, how he ate or drank or walked when the daemonion forbade. "Wretched man!" he says to himself, "Providence ordains thy suffering; it is G.o.d's decree." The atheist thinks there are no G.o.ds; the superst.i.tious wishes there were none. It is they who have invented the sacrifices of children that prevailed at Carthage[128] and other things of the kind. If Typhons and Giants were to drive out the G.o.ds and become our rulers, what worse could they ask?

A hint from the _Conjugal Precepts_ may be added here, as it suggests a difficulty in practice. "The wife ought not to have men friends of her own but to share her husband's; and the G.o.ds are our first and best friends. So those G.o.ds whom the the husband acknowledges, the wife ought to wors.h.i.+p and own, and those alone, and keep the great door shut on superfluous devotions and foreign superst.i.tions. No G.o.d really enjoys the {110} stolen rites of a woman in secret."[129] This is a counsel of peace, but if "ugly, ill-tempered and vengeful spirits" seem to the mother to threaten her children, who will decide what are superfluous devotions?

The religion of Plutarch is a different thing from his morality. For his ethics rest on an experience much more easy to a.n.a.lyse, and like every elderly and genial person he has much that he can say of the kindly duties of life. Every reader will own the beauty and the high tone of much of his teaching, though some will feel that its centre is the individual, and that it is pleasant rather than compulsive and inevitable. After all nearly every religion has, somewhere or other, what are called "good ethics," but the vital question is, "What else?"

In the last resort is ecstasy, independently of morality, the main thing? Are words and acts holy as religious symbols which in a society are obviously vicious? What propellent power lies behind the morals?

And where are truth and experience?

[Sidenote: Apology or truth?]

What then is to be said of Plutarch's religion? Here his experience was not so readily intelligible, and every inherited and acquired instinct within him conspired to make him cling to tradition and authority as opposed to independent judgment. His philosophy was not Plato's, in spite of much that he borrowed from Plato, for its motive was not the love of truth. The stress he lays upon the pleasure of believing shows that his ultimate canon is emotion. He does not really wish to find truth on its own account, though he honestly would like its support. He wishes to believe, and believe he will--_sit pro ratione voluntas_. "There is something of the woman in Plutarch," says Mr Lecky. Like men of this temperament in every age, he surrenders to emotion, and emotion declines into sentimentalism. He cannot firmly say that anything, with which religious feeling has ever been a.s.sociated, has ceased to be useful and has become false. He may talk bravely of shutting the great door against Superst.i.tion, but Superst.i.tion has many entrances--indeed, was indoors already.

We have only to look at his treatise on Isis and Osiris to see the effects of compromise in religion. He will never take a firm stand; there are always possibilities, explanations, parallels, suggestions, symbolisms, by which he can escape from facing {111} definitely the demand for a decisive reformation of religion. As a result, in spite of the radiant mist of amiability, which he diffuses over these Egyptian G.o.ds, till the old myths seem capable of every conceivable interpretation, and everything a symbol of everything else, and all is beautiful and holy--the foolish and indecent old stories remain a definite and integral part of the religion, the animals are still objects of wors.h.i.+p and the image of Osiris stands in its original naked obscenity.[130] And the Egyptian is not the only religion, for, as Tertullian points out, the old rites are still practised every where!"

with unabated horrors, symbol or no symbol.[131] Plutarch emphasizes the goodness and friendliness of the G.o.ds, but he leaves the evil daemons in all their activity. Strange and awful sacrifices of the past he deprecates, but he shows no reason why they should not continue.

G.o.d, he says, is hardly to be conceived by man's mind as in a dream; and he thanks heaven for its peculiar grace that the oracles are reviving in his day; he believes in necromancy, theolepsy and nearly every other grotesque means of intercourse with G.o.ds and daemons. He calls himself a Platonist; he is proud of the great literature of Greece; but nearly all that we a.s.sociate in religious thought with such names as Xenophanes, Euripides and Plato, he gently waves aside on the authority of Apollo. It raises the dignity of Seneca when we set beside him this delightful man of letters, so full of charm, so warm with the love of all that is beautiful, so closely knit to the tender emotions of ancestral piety--and so unspeakably inferior in essential truthfulness.

The ancient world rejected Seneca, as we have seen, and chose Plutarch.

If Plutarch was not the founder of Neo-Platonism, he was one of its precursors and he showed the path. Down that path ancient religion swung with deepening emotion into that strange medley of thought and mystery, piety, magic and absurdity, which is called the New Platonism and has nothing to do with Plato. Here and there some fine spirit emerged into clearer air, and in some moment of ecstasy {112} achieved "by a leap" some fleeting glimpse of Absolute Being, if there is such a thing. But the ma.s.s of men remained below in a denser atmosphere, prisoners of ignorance and of fancy--in an atmosphere not merely dark but tainted, full of spiritual and intellectual death.

Chapter III Footnotes:

[1] _Amatorius_, 13, 756 A, D; 757 B. The quotation is from Euripides, _Bacchae_, 203.

[2] _Non suaviter_, 21, 1101 E-1102 A.

[3] _de Iside_, 68, 378 A.

[4] _de def. orac._ 8, 414 A.

[5] Mahaffy, _Silver Age of Greek World_, p. 45.

[6] Horace is the best known of Athenian students. The delightful letters of Synesius show the hold Athens still retained upon a very changed world in 400 A.D.

[7] Life of Antony, 68.

[8] _Symp._ i, 5, 1.

[9] _Symp._ iv, 4, 4.

[10] _v. Ant._ 28.

[11] _Symp._ iii, 7, 1.

[12] _Symp._ ii, 8, 1.

[13] _Symp._ viii, 6, 5, _hubristes n ka philogelos physei_. _Symp._ ix, 15, 1.

[14] _de fraterno amore_, 16, 487 E. Volkmann, _Plutarch_, i, 24, suggests he was the Timon whose wife Pliny defended on one occasion, _Epp._ i, 5, 5.

[15] _de frat. am._ 7, 481 D.

[16] _de E._ 1, 385 B.

[17] _v. Them._ 32, end.

[18] Zeller, _Eclectics_, 334.

[19] _de E._ 17, 391 E. Imagine the joys of a Euclid, says Plutarch, in _non suaviter_, 11, 1093 E.