The times were ripe for a theodicy. Religion of every mood and tone, of every age and clime, was in the air, and philosophy had abandoned speculation and turned to the direction of conduct and spiritual life. The mission of philosophy is to find the one in the many, and never did the religious life of men offer a more bewildering multiplicity and variety, not to say chaos, to the ordering power of philosophy. The scepticism of the Neronian age had almost disappeared. The only rationalists of any distinction in the second century were Lucian and Galen.2034 It was an age of imperious spiritual cravings, alike among the cultivated and the vulgar. But the thin abstractions of the old Latin faith and the brilliant anthropomorphism of Greece had ceased to satisfy even the crowd. It was an age with a longing for a religious system less formal and coldly external, for a religion more satisfying to the deeper emotions, a religion which should offer divine help to human need and misery, divine guidance amid the darkness of time; above all, a divine light in the mystery of death. The glory of classic art had mysteriously closed. It was an age rather of material splendour, and, at first sight, an age of bourgeois ideals of parochial fame and mere enjoyment of the hour. Yet the Antonine age has some claim to spiritual distinction. In the dim, sub-conscious feelings of the masses, as well as in the definite spiritual effort of the higher minds, there was really a great movement towards a ruling principle of conduct and a spiritual vision. Men often, indeed, followed [pg 385]the marsh-light through strange devious paths into wildernesses peopled with the spectres of old-world superstition. But the light of the Holy Grail had at last flashed on the eyes of some loftier minds. From the early years of the second century we can trace that great combined movement of the new Platonism and the revived paganism,2035 which so long retarded the triumph of the Church, and yet, in the Divinely-guided evolution, was destined to prepare men for it.
The old religion had not lost all hold on men’s minds, as it is sometimes said to have done, in rather too sweeping language. The punctilious ritual with which, in the stately narrative of Tacitus, the Capitol was restored by Vespasian, the pious care with which the young Aurelius recited the Salian litany in words no longer understood, the countless victims which he offered to the guardian gods of Rome in evil days of pestilence and doubtful war, these things reveal the strength of the religion of Numa. Two centuries after M. Aurelius was in his grave, the deities which had cradled the Roman state, and watched over its career, were still objects of reverence to the conservative circle of Symmachus. A religion which was intertwined with the whole fabric of government and society, which gave its sanction or benediction to every act and incident in the individual life, which was omnipresent in game and festival, in temple and votive monument, was placed far beyond the influence of changing fashions of devotion. It was a powerful stay of patriotism, a powerful bond of civic and family life; it threw a charm of awe and old-world sanctity around everything it touched. But for the deeper spiritual wants and emotions it furnished little nutriment. To find relief and cleansing from the sense of guilt, cheer and glad exaltation of pious emotion, consolation in the common miseries of life, and hope in the shadow of death, men had to betake themselves to other systems. The oriental religions were pouring in like a flood, and spreading over all the West. One Antonine built a shrine of Mithra,2036 another took the tonsure of Isis.2037 The priests and acolytes of the Egyptian goddess were everywhere, chanting their litanies in solemn processions [pg 386]along the streets, instructing and baptizing their catechumens, and, in the alternating gloom and splendour of their mysteries, bearing the entranced soul to the boundaries of life and death.2038 Mithra, “the Unconquered,” was justifying his name. In every district from the Euxine to the Solway he brought a new message to heathendom. Pure from all grossness of myth, the Persian god of light came as the mediator and comforter, to soothe the poor and broken-hearted, and give the cleansing of the mystic blood. His hierarchy of the initiated, his soothing symbolic sacraments, his gorgeous ritual, and his promise of immortality to those who drank the mystic Haoma, gratified and stimulated religious longings which were to find their full satisfaction in the ministry of the Church.
But the religious imagination was not satisfied with historic and accredited systems. Travel and conquest were adding to the spiritual wealth or burden of the Roman race. In lonely Alpine passes, in the deserts of Africa, or the Yorkshire dales, in every ancient wood or secret spring which he passed in his wanderings or campaigns, the Roman found hosts of new divinities, possible helpers or possible enemies, whose favour it was expedient to win.2039 And, where he knew not their strange outlandish names, he would try to propitiate them all together under no name, or any name that pleased them.2040 And, as if this vague multitude of ghostly powers were not large enough for devotion, the fecundity of imagination created a host of genii, of haunting or guarding spirits, attached to every place or scene, to every group or corporation of men which had a place in Roman life. There were genii of the secret spring or grove, of the camp, the legion, the cohort, of the Roman people, above all, there was the genius of the emperor.2041 Apotheosis went on apace—apotheosis not merely of the emperors, but of a theurgic philosopher like Apollonius, of a minion like Antinous, of a mere impostor like Alexander of Abonoteichos.2042 Old oracles, which had been suppressed or decadent in the reign of Nero, sprang into fresh life and popularity in the reign of Trajan. New sources of oracular [pg 387]inspiration were opened, some of them challenging for the time the ancient fame of Delphi or Dodona.2043 According to Lucian, oracles were pealing from every rock and every altar.2044 Every form of revelation or divination, every avenue of access to the Divine, was eagerly sought for, or welcomed with pious credulity. The study of omens and dreams was reduced to the form of a pseudo-science by a host of writers like Artemidorus. The sacred art of healing through visions of the night found a home in those charming temples of Asclepius, which rose beside so many hallowed springs, with fair prospect and genial air, where the god revealed his remedy in dreams, and a lore half hieratic, half medical, was applied to relieve the sufferer.2045 Miracles and special providences, the most marvellous or the most grotesque, were chronicled with unquestioning faith, not only by fanatics like Aelian, but by learned historians like Tacitus and Suetonius. Tales of witchcraft and weird sorcery are as eagerly believed at Trimalchio’s dinner-table2046 as in lonely villages of Thessaly. On the higher level of the new Pythagorean faith, everything is possible to the pure spirit. To such a soul God will reveal Himself by many voices to which gross human clay is deaf; the future lays bare its secrets; nature yields up her hidden powers. Spiritual detachment triumphs over matter and time; and the Pythagorean apostle predicts a plague at Ephesus, casts out demons, raises the dead, vanishes like a phantom from the clutches of Domitian.2047
At a superficial glance, a state of religion such as has been sketched might seem to be a mere bewildering chaos of infinitely divided spiritual interest. Men seem to have adopted the mythologies of every race, and to have superadded a new mythology of positively boundless fecundity. A single votive tablet will contain the names of the great gods of Latium and Greece, of Persia, Commagene, and Egypt, and beside them, strange names of British or Swiss, Celtic, Spanish, or Moorish gods, and the vaguely-designated spirits who now seemed to float in myriads around the scenes of human life.2048 Yet, [pg 388]unperceived by the ordinary devotee, amid all this confused ferment, a certain principle of unity or comprehension was asserting its power. Although the old gods in Lucian’s piece might comically complain that they were being crowded out of Olympus by Mithra and Anubis and their barbarous company,2049 there was really little jealousy or repulsion among the pagan cults. Ancient ritual was losing its precision of outline; the venerable deities of classical myth were putting off the decided individuality which had so long distinguished them in the popular imagination.2050 The provinces and attributes of kindred deities melted into one another and were finally identified; syncretism was in the air. Without the unifying aid of philosophy, ordinary piety was effecting unconsciously a vast process of simplification which tended to ideal unity. In the Sacred Orations of Aristides, Poseidon, Athene, Serapis, Asclepius, are dropping the peculiar powers by which they were so long known, and rising, without any danger of collision, to all-embracing sway. So, the Isis of Apuleius, the “goddess of myriad names,” in her vision to Lucius, boldly claims to be “Queen of the world of shades, first of the inhabitants of Heaven, in whom all gods find their unchanging type.”2051 Of course, to the very end, the common superstitious devotion of the masses was probably little influenced by the great spiritual movement which, in the higher strata, was moulding heathen faith into an approach to monotheism. The simple peasant still clung to his favourite deity, as his Catholic descendant has to-day his favourite saint. But it is in the higher minds that the onward sweep of great spiritual movements can really be discerned. The initiation of Apuleius in all the mysteries, the reverent visits of Apollonius to every temple and oracle from the Ganges to the Guadalquivir, the matins of Alexander Severus in a chapel which enshrined the images of Abraham and Orpheus, of Apollonius and Christ;2052 these, and many other instances of all-embracing devotion, point forward to the goal of that Platonist thÉodicÉe which it is the purpose of this chapter to expound.
The spectacle of an immense efflorescence of pure paganism, [pg 389]most of it born of very mundane fears and hopes and desires, to men like Lucian was a sight which might, according to the mood, move to tears or laughter. But the same great impulse which drove the multitude into such wild curiosity of superstition, was awaking loftier conceptions of the Divine, and feelings of purer devotion in the educated. And sometimes the very highest and the very lowest developments of the protean religious instinct may be seen in a single mind. Was there ever such a combination of the sensualist imagination with the ideal of ascetic purity, of the terrors and dark arts of anile superstition with the mystic vision of God, as in the soul of Apuleius? The painter of the foulest scenes in ancient literature seems to have cherished the faith in a heavenly King, First Cause of all nature, Father of all living things,2053 Saviour of spirits, beyond the range of time and change, remote, ineffable. The prayer of thanksgiving to Isis might, mutatis mutandis, be almost offered in a Christian church. The conception of the unity and purity of the Divine One was the priceless conquest of Greek philosophy, and pre-eminently of Plato. It had been brought home to the Roman world by the teaching of Stoicism. But there is a new note in the monotheism of the first and second centuries of the Empire. God is no longer a mere intellectual postulate, the necessary crown and lord of a great cosmic system. He has become a moral necessity. His existence is demanded by the heart as well as by the intellect. Men craved no longer for a God to explain the universe, but to resolve the enigma of their own lives; not a blind force, moving on majestically and mercilessly to “some far-off event,” but an Infinite Father guiding in wisdom, cherishing in mercy, and finally receiving His children to Himself. This is the conception of God which, from Seneca to M. Aurelius, is mastering the best minds, both Stoic and Platonist.2054 Seneca, as we have seen in a former chapter, often speaks in the hard tones of the older Stoicism. Sometimes [pg 390]God, Nature, Fate, Jupiter, are identical terms2055. But the cold, materialistic conception of God is irreconcilable with many passages in his writings. Like Epictetus and M. Aurelius, Seneca is often far more emotional, we may say, far more modern, than his professed creed. The materialistic Anima Mundi, interfused with the universe and the nature of man, becomes the infinitely benign Creator, Providence, and Guardian, the Father, and almost the Friend of men. He is the Author of all good, never of evil: He is gentle and pitiful, and to attribute to Him storm or pestilence or earthquake or the various plagues of human life is an impiety. These things are the result of physical law. To such a God boundless gratitude is due for His goodness, resignation in the wise chastenings of His hand. He chastises whom he loves. In bereavement, He takes only what He has given. He is our ready helper in every moral effort; no goodness is possible without His succour. In return for all His benefits, He asks for no costly material offerings, no blood of victims, no steaming incense, no adulation in prayer. Faith in God is the true worship of Him. If you wish to propitiate Him, imitate His goodness. And for the elect soul the day of death is a birthday of eternity, when the load of corporeal things is shaken off, and the infinite splendour of the immortal life spreads out with no troubling shadow.2056
Hardly less striking is the warmth of devout feeling which suffuses the moral teaching of Epictetus and M. Aurelius. They have not indeed abandoned the old Stoic principle that man’s final good depends on the rectitude of the will. But the Stoic sage is no longer a solitary athlete, conquering by his proud unaided strength, and in his victory rising almost superior to Zeus. Growing moral experience had taught humility, and inspired the sense of dependence on a Higher Power in sympathy with man.2057 No true Stoic, of course, could ever forget the Divine element within each human soul which linked it with the cosmic soul, and through which man might bring himself into harmony with the great polity of [pg 391]gods and men. But, somehow, the Divine Power immanent in the world, from a dim, cold, impalpable law or fate or impersonal force, slowly rounds itself off into a Being, if not apart from man, at any rate his superior, his Creator and Guardian, nay, in the end, his Father, from whom he comes, to whom he returns at death. Some may think this a decline from the lofty plane of the older school. The answer is that the earlier effort to find salvation through pure reason in obedience to the law of the whole, although it may have been magnificent, was not a working religion for man as he is constituted. The eternal involution of spirit and matter in the old Stoic creed, the cold, impersonal, unknowable power, which, under whatever name, Law, Reason, Fate, Necessity, permeates the universe, necessarily exclude the idea of design, of providence, of moral care for humanity. The unknown Power which claims an absolute obedience, has no aid or recognition for his worshipper. The monism of the old Stoics breaks down. The human spirit, in striving to realise its unity with the Universal Spirit, realises with more and more intensity the perpetual opposition of matter and spirit, while it receives no aid in the conflict from the power which ordains it; it “finds itself alone in an alien world.” The true Stoic has no real object of worship. If he addresses the impassive centre and soul of his universe, sometimes in the rapturous tones of loving devotion, it is only a pathetic illusion born of the faiths of the past, or inspired by a dim forecast of the faiths of the coming time. How could the complex of blind forces arouse any devotion? It demanded implicit submission and self-sacrifice, but it gave no help, save the name of a Divine element in the human soul; it furnished no inspiring example to the sage in the conflicts of passion, under obloquy, obstruction, and persecution. Meanwhile, in this forlorn struggle, the human character was through stress and storm developing new powers and virtues, lofty courage in the face of lawless power, pious resignation to the blows of fortune, gentle consideration and mercy even for slaves and the outcasts of society, ideals of purity unknown to the ancient world in its prime. The sage might, according to orthodox theory, rest in a placid content of rounded perfection. But human nature is not so constituted. In proportion to spiritual progress is the force of spiritual longings; beati [pg 392]mundo corde, ipsi Deum videbunt. The fruitful part of Stoicism as a religion was the doctrine that the human reason is a part of the soul of the world, a spark of the Divine mind. At first this was only conceived in the fashion of a materialistic pantheism.2058 The kindred between the individual and the general soul was little more than a physical doctrine. But it developed in minds like Epictetus and Seneca a profound spiritual meaning; it tapped the source of all real religion. Pure reason can never solve the religious problem. The history of religions shows that a conception of God which is to act effectually on composite human nature is never reached by the speculative intellect. What reason cannot do is effected by the “sub-conscious self,”2059 which is the dim seat of the deeper intuitions, haunted by vague memories, hereditary pieties, and emotional associations, the spring of strange genius, of heroic sacrifice, of infinite aspiration. There throbs the tide “which drew from out the boundless deep.” Thus the Stoic of the later time became a mystic, in the sense that “by love and emotion he solved the dualism of the world.”2060 God is no longer a mere physical law or force, however subtilised, sweeping on in pitiless impetus or monotony of cyclic change. God is within the human soul, not as a spark of empyreal fire, but as the voice of conscience, the spiritual monitor and comforter, the “Holy Spirit,”2061 prompting, guarding, consoling in life and death. God is no longer found so much in the ordered movement of the spheres and the recurring processes or the cataclysms of the material universe. He is heard in the still small voice. It is thus that the later Stoicism melts into the revived Platonism.
Probably Seneca and Epictetus, had they been interrogated, would have loyally resolved their most rapturous and devout language into the cold terms of Stoic orthodoxy. But the emotional tone is a really new element in their teaching, and the language of spiritual abandonment, joyful resignation to a Higher Will, free and cheerful obedience to it in the confidence of love, would be absurdly incongruous if addressed to an [pg 393]abstract law or physical necessity.2062 The fatherhood of God and the kinship of all men as His sons is the fundamental principle of the new creed, binding us to do nothing unworthy of such an ancestry.2063 At other times we are soldiers of God in a war with evil, bound to military obedience, awaiting calmly the last signal to retreat from the scene of struggle.2064 The infinite benevolence of God is asserted in the face of all appearances to the contrary. This of course is all the easier to one trained in the doctrine that the external fortune of life has nothing to do with man’s real happiness. The fear of God is banished by the sense of His perfect love. The all-seeing eye, the all-embracing providence, leave no room for care or foreboding. The Stoic optimism is now grounded on a personal trust in a loving and righteous will: “I am Thine, do with me what Thou wilt.”“For all things work together for good to them who love Him.” The external sufferings and apparent wrongs of the obedient sons of God are no stumbling-blocks to faith.2065 The great heroic example, Heracles, the son of Zeus, was sorely tried by superhuman tasks, and won his crown of immortality through toil and battle. “Whom He loves He chastens.” Even apparent injustice is only an education through suffering. These things are “only light afflictions” to him who sees the due proportions of things and knows Zeus as his father. Even to the poor, the lame, the blind, if they have the divine love, the universe is a great temple, full of mystery and joy, and each passing day a festival. In the common things of life, in ploughing, digging, eating, we should sing hymns to God. “What else can I do,” says Epictetus, “a lame old man, than sing His praise, and exhort all men to join in the same song?”2066 Who shall say what depth of religious emotion, veiled under old-world phrase, there was in that outburst of M. Aurelius: “All harmonises with me which is in harmony with thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late which is in due season for thee.... For thee are all things, in thee are all things, [pg 394]to thee all things return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt not thou say, Dear City of Zeus?”2067
The attitude of such souls to external worship in every age may be easily divined without the evidence of their words. If God is good and wishes only the good of His creatures, then to seek to appease His wrath and avert His capricious judgments becomes an impiety. If men’s final good lies in the moral sphere, in justice, gentleness, temperance, obedience to the higher order, then prayer for external goods, for mere indulgences of sense or ambition, shows a hopeless misconception as to the nature of God and the supreme destiny of man.2068 On the other hand, without giving up the doctrine that the highest good depends on the virtuous will, the later Stoics and Platonists have begun to feel that man needs support and inspiration in his moral struggles from a higher Power, a Power without him and beyond him, yet who is allied to him in nature and sympathy. Prayer is no longer a means of winning temporal good things “for which the worthy need not pray, and which the unworthy will not obtain.” It is a fortifying communion with the Highest, an act of thanksgiving for blessings already received, an inspiration for a fuller and diviner life.2069 It is an effort of gratitude and adoration to draw from the Divine source of all moral strength.
It must always remain to moderns an enigma how souls living in such a spiritual world refused to break with heathen idolatry. Seneca, indeed, poured contempt on the grossness of myth in a lost treatise on superstition;2070 and he had no liking for the external rites of worship. But in some strange way M. Aurelius reconciled punctilious devotion to the popular gods with an austere pantheism or monotheism. It is in Platonists such as Dion or Maximus of Tyre that we meet with an attempted apology for anthropomorphic symbolism of the Divine.2071 The justification lies in the vast gulf which separates the remote, ineffable, and inconceivable purity of God from the feebleness and grossness of man. Few [pg 395]are they who can gaze in unaided thought on the Divine splendour unveiled. Images, rites, and sacred myth have been invented by the wisdom of the past, to aid the memory and the imagination of weak ordinary souls. The symbols have varied with the endless variety of races. Animals or trees, mountain or river, rude unhewn stones, or the miracles of Pheidias in gold and ivory, are simply the sign or picture by which the soul is pointed to the Infinite Essence which has never been seen by mortal eye or imaged in human phantasy. The symbol which appeals to one race may be poor and contemptible in the eyes of another. The animal worship of Egypt gave a shock to minds which were lifted heavenwards by the winning majesty of the Virgin Goddess or of the Zeus of Olympia. The human form, as the chosen tabernacle of an effluence of the Divine Spirit, might well seem to Dion and Maximus the noblest and most fitting symbol of religious worship. Yet, in the end, they are all ready to tolerate any aberration of religious fancy which is justified by its use.2072 The most perfect symbol is only a faint adumbration of “the Father and Creator of all, Who is older than the sun and heavens, stronger than time and the ages and the fleeting world of change, unnamed by any lawgiver, Whom tongue cannot express nor eye see. Helpless to grasp His real essence, we seek a stay in names or images, in beast or plant, in river or mountain, in lustrous forms of gold and silver and ivory. Whatever we have of fairest we call by His name. And for love of Him, we cling, as lovers are wont, to anything which recalls Him. I quarrel not with divers imagery, if we seek to know, to love, to remember Him.”2073 This is the outburst of a tolerant and eclectic Platonism, ready to condone everything in the crudest religious imagery. But a more conscientious scrutiny even of Grecian legend demanded, as we shall see, a deeper solution to account for dark rites and legends which cast a shadow on the Infinite Purity.
The Stoic theology, which resolved the gods of legend into thin abstractions, various potencies of the Infinite Spirit interfused with the universe,2074 was in some respects congenial [pg 396]to the Roman mind, and reflected the spirit of old Roman religion. That religion of arid abstractions, to which no myth, no haunting charm of poetic imagination attached,2075 easily lent itself to a system which explained the gods by allegory or physical rationalism. That was not an eirenicon for the second century, at least among thoughtful, pious men. The philosophic effort of so many centuries had ended in an eclecticism for purely moral culture, and a profound scepticism as to the attainment of higher truth by unaided reason.2076 Mere intellectual curiosity, the desire of knowledge for its own sake, and the hope of attaining it, are strangely absent from the loftiest minds, from Seneca, Epictetus, and M. Aurelius.2077 Men like Lucian, sometimes in half melancholy, half scornful derision, amused themselves with ridiculing the chaotic results of the intellectual ambition of the past.2078 They equally recognised the immense force of that spiritual movement which was trying every avenue of accredited religious system or novel superstition, that might perchance lead the devotee to some glimpse of the divine world. And side by side with the recrudescence of old-world superstitions, there were spreading, from whatever source, loftier and more ethical conceptions of God, a dim sense of sin and human weakness, a need of cleansing and support from a Divine hand. Stoicism, with all its austere grandeur, had failed in its interpretation both of man and of God. Popular theology, however soothing to old associations and unregenerate feelings, often gave a shock to the quickened moral sense and the higher spiritual intuitions. Yet the venerable charm of time-honoured ritual, glad or stately, the emotional effects and dim promise of revelation in the mysteries of many shrines, the seductive allurements of new cults, with a strange blending of the sensuous and the mystic, all wove around the human soul such an enchanted maze of spiritual fascination that escape was impossible, even if it were desired. But it was no longer desired even by the highest intellects. The efforts of pure reason to solve the mystery of God and of man’s destiny had failed. Yet men were ever “feeling after God, if haply they might find Him.” And the [pg 397]God whom they sought for was one on whom they might hang, in whom they might have rest. Where was the revelation to come from? Where was the mediator to be sought to reconcile the ancient faiths or fables with a purified conception of the Deity and the aspiration for a higher moral life?
The revived Pythagorean and Platonist philosophy which girded itself to attempt the solution was really part of a great spiritual movement, with its focus at Alexandria.2079 In that meeting-point of the East and West, of all systems of thought and worship, syncretism blended all faiths. Hadrian, in his letter to Servianus, cynically observes that the same men were ready to worship impartially Serapis or Christ.2080 Philosophy became more and more a religion; its first and highest aim is a right knowledge of God. And philosophy, having failed to find help in the life according to nature, or the divine element in individual consciousness, had now to seek support in a God transcending nature and consciousness, a God such as the mysticism of the East or the systems of Pythagoras and Plato had foreshadowed. But such a God, transcending nature and consciousness, remote, ineffable, only, in some rare moment of supreme exaltation, dimly apprehensible by the human spirit,2081 could not call forth fully the loving trust and fervent reverence which men longed to offer. Heaven being so far from earth, and earth so darkened by the mists of sense, any gleam of revelation must be welcomed from whatever quarter it might break. And thus an all-embracing syncretism, while it gratified ancestral piety, and the natural instinct of all religion to root itself in the past, offered the hope of illumination from converging lights. Or rather, any religion which has won the reverence of men may transmit a ray from the central Sun. The believer in God, who longs for communion with Him, for help at His hands, might by reverent selection win from all religions something to satisfy his needs. A revelation was the imperious demand. Where should men be so likely to find it as in the reverent study of great historic efforts of humanity to pierce the veil?
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The philosophy which was to attempt the revival of paganism in the second century, and which was to fight its last battles in the fourth and fifth, traced itself to Pythagoras and Plato. Plato’s affinity with the older mystic is well known. And the reader of the Phaedo or the Republic will not be surprised to find the followers of the two masters of Greek thought who believed most in a spiritual vision and in an ordered moral life, united in an effort which extended to the close of the Western Empire,2082 to combine a lofty mysticism with ancestral faith. The two systems had much in common, and yet each contributed a peculiar element to the great movement. Pythagoreanism, although its origin is veiled in mystery, was always full of the mysticism of the East. Platonism was essentially the philosophy of Greek culture. The movement in which their forces were combined was one in which the new Hellenism of Hadrian’s reign reinforced itself for the reconstruction of western paganism with those purer and loftier ideas of God of which the East is the original home. The effort of paganism to rehabilitate itself in the second century drew no small part of its inspiration from the regions which were the cradle of the Christian faith.2083
Seneca seems to regard Pythagoreanism as extinct.2084 Yet one of his own teachers, Sotion, practised its asceticism,2085 and in the first century B.C., the traces of at least ninety treatises by members of the school have been recovered by antiquarian care, many of them forgeries foisted on ancient names.2086 As a didactic system, indeed, the school had long disappeared, but the Pythagorean askesis seems never to have lost its continuity. It drew down the ridicule of the New Comedy. It may have had a share in forming the Essene and Therapeutic discipline.2087 In the first century B.C. it had a distinguished adherent in P. Nigidius Figulus, and a learned expositor in Alexander Polyhistor. Its enduring power as a spiritual creed congenial to paganism is shown by the fact that Iamblichus, one of the latest Neo-Platonists, and one of the ardent devotees of superstition, expounded the Pythagorean system in many treatises and composed an imaginative biography [pg 399]of the great founder.2088 To the modern it is best known through the romantic life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus, which was composed at the instance of Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus, who combined with a doubtful virtue a love for the mysticism of her native East.2089 Apollonius is surrounded by his biographer with an atmosphere of mystery and miracle. But although the critical historian must reject much of the narrative, the faith of the Pythagorean missionary of the reign of Domitian stands out in clear outline. Apollonius is a true representative of the new spiritual movement. His mother had a vision before his birth. His early training at Aegae was eclectic, like the spirit of the age, and he heard the teaching of doctors of all the schools, not even excluding the Epicurean.2090 But he early devoted himself to the severe asceticism of the Pythagorean sect, wore pure linen, abstained from wine and flesh, observed the five years of silence, and made the temple his home. The worship of Asclepius, which was then gaining an extraordinary vogue, had a special attraction for him, with its atmosphere of serenity and ritual purity and its dream oracles of beneficent healing. Apollonius combines in a strange fashion, like Plutarch and the eclectic Platonists, a decided monotheism with a conservative devotion to the ancient gods. He looks to the East, to the sages of the Ganges, for the highest inspiration. He worships the sun every day.2091 Yet he has a profound interest in the popular religion of the many lands through which he travelled. He frequented the temples of all the gods, discoursed with the priests on the ancient lore of their shrines, and corrected or restored, with an authority which seems to have never been challenged, their ritual where it had been forgotten or mutilated in the lapse of ages.2092 He sought initiation in all the mysteries. He wrote a book on Sacrifices which dealt with the most minute details of worship.2093 He had a profound interest in ancient legend, and the fame of the great Hellenic heroes, and, having spent a weird night with the shade of Achilles in the Troad, he constrained the Thessalians [pg 400]to restore his fallen honours.2094 The temples recognised in him at once a champion and a reformer. The oracular seats of Ionia showed an unenvious admiration of his gift of prophecy, and hailed him as a true son of Apollo.2095 His visit to Rome in the darkest hour of the Neronian terror seems to have aroused a strange religious fervour; the temples were thronged with worshippers; it was a heathen revival.2096
Yet this strange missionary held principles which ought to have been fatal to heathen worship. He drew his central principle from Eastern pantheism, which might seem irreconcilable with the anthropomorphism of the West. It is true that under the Infinite Spirit, as in the Platonist thÉodicÉe, the gods of heathen devotion find a place as His ministers and viceroys.2097 But the eternal antithesis of spirit and matter, and the contempt for the body as a degrading prison of the divine element in man,2098 the ascetic theory that by crucifying the flesh and attenuating its powers, the spirit might lay itself open to heavenly influences, these are doctrines which might appear utterly hostile to a gross materialist ritual. And as a matter of fact, Apollonius to some extent obeyed his principles. He scorned the popular conception of divination and magic.2099 The only legitimate power of foreseeing the future or influencing the material world is given to the soul which is pure from all fleshly taint and therefore near to God. He feels profoundly that the myths propagated by the poets have lowered the ideal of God and the character of man, and he greatly prefers the fables of Aesop, which use the falsehoods of the fancy for a definite moral end.2100 The mutilation of a father, the storming of Olympus by the Giants, incest and adultery among the gods, must be reprobated, however they have been glorified by poetry. Apollonius poured contempt on the animal worship of Egypt, even when defended by the dialectic subtlety of Greece.2101 He was repelled by the grossness of bloody sacrifices, however consecrated by immemorial use. For the nobler symbolism of [pg 401]Hellenic art he had a certain sympathy, like Dion, but only as symbolism. Any sensible image of the Supreme, which does not carry the soul beyond the bounds of sense, defeats its purpose and is degrading to pure religion. Pictured or sculptured forms are only aids to that mystic imagination through which alone we can see God. Finally, his idea of prayer is intensely spiritual or ethical. “Grant me, ye gods, what is my due” is the highest prayer of Apollonius.2102 Yet, as we have already seen, the religion of Apollonius is thoroughly practical. He was a great preacher. He addressed vast crowds from the temple steps at Ephesus or Olympia, rebuking their luxury and effeminacy, their feuds and mean civic ambition, their love of frivolous sports or the bloody strife of the arena.2103 Next to the knowledge of God, he preached the importance of self-knowledge, and of lending an attentive ear to the voice of conscience. He crowned his life by asserting fearlessly the cause of righteousness in the awful presence-chamber of Domitian.
About the very time when Apollonius was bearding the last of the Flavians, and preaching a pagan revival in the porticoes of the Roman temples, it is probable that Plutarch, in some respects a kindred spirit, was making his appearance as a lecturer at Rome.2104 The greatest of biographers has had no authentic biography himself.2105 The few certain facts about his life must be gleaned from his own writings. He was the descendant of an ancient family of Chaeronea, famous as the scene of three historic battles, “the War-God’s dancing-place,” and his great-grandfather had tales of the great conflict at Actium.2106 In the year 66 A.D., when Nero was distinguishing or disgracing himself as a competitor at the Greek festivals, Plutarch was a young student at the university of Athens, under Ammonius,2107 who, if he inspired him with admiration for Plato, also taught him to draw freely from all the treasures of Greek thought. Plutarch, before he finally settled down at Chaeronea, saw something of the great Roman world. He had visited Alex[pg 402]andria and some part of Asia Minor.2108 He was at an early age employed to represent his native town on public business,2109 and he had thus visited Rome, probably in the reign of Vespasian, and again, in the reign of Domitian.2110 It was a time when original genius in Roman literature was showing signs of failure, but when minute antiquarian learning was becoming a passion.2111 It was also the age of the new sophist. Hellenism was in the air, and the lecture theatres were thronged to hear the philosophic orator or the professional artist in words.2112 Although Plutarch is never mentioned beside men like Euphrates, in Pliny’s letters, he found an audience at Rome, and the famous Arulenus Rusticus was once among his hearers.2113 While he was ransacking the imperial libraries, he also formed the acquaintance, at pleasant social parties, of many men of academic and official fame, some of whom belonged to the circle of Pliny and Tacitus.2114
But his native Greece, with its great memories, and his native Chaeronea, to which he was linked by ancestral piety, had for a man like Plutarch far stronger charms than the capital of the world. With our love of excitement and personal prominence, it is hard to conceive how a man of immense culture and brilliant literary power could endure the monotony of bourgeois society in depopulated and decaying Greece.2115 Yet Plutarch seems to have found it easy, and even pleasant. He was too great to allow his own scheme of life to be crossed and disturbed by vulgar opinion or ephemeral ambition. His family relations were sweet and happy. His married life realised the highest ideals of happy wedlock.2116 He had the respectful affection of his brothers and older kinsmen. The petty magistracies, in which he made it a duty to serve [pg 403]his native town, were dignified in his eyes by the thought that Epameinondas had once been charged with the cleansing of the streets of Thebes.2117 His priesthood of Apollo at Delphi was probably far more attractive than the imperial honours which, according to legend, were offered to him by Trajan and Hadrian.2118 To his historic and religious imagination the ancient shrine which looked down on the gulf from the foot of the “Shining Rocks,” was sacred as no other spot on earth. Although in Plutarch’s day Delphi had declined in splendour and fame,2119 it was still surrounded with the glamour of immemorial sanctity and power. It was still the spot from which divine voices of warning or counsel had issued to the kings of Lydia, to chiefs of wild hordes upon the Strymon, to the envoys of the Roman Tarquins, to every city of Hellenic name from the Euxine to the Atlantic. We can still almost make the round of its antiquarian treasures under his genial guidance. Probably Plutarch’s happiest hours were spent in accompanying a party of visitors,—a professor on his way home from Britain to Tarsus, a Spartan traveller just returned from far Indian seas,—around those sacred scenes; we can hear the debate on the doubtful quality of Delphic verse or the sources of its inspiration: we can watch them pause to recall the story of mouldering bronze or marble, and wake the echoes of a thousand years.2120
Plutarch must have been a swift and indefatigable worker, for his production is almost on the scale of Varro, Cicero, or the elder Pliny. Yet he found time for pleasant visits to every part of Greece which had tales or treasures for the antiquary. He enjoyed the friendship of the brightest intellects of the day, of Herodes Atticus, the millionaire rhetorician,2121 of Favorinus, the great sophist of Gaul, the intimate friend of Herodes and the counsellor of the Emperor Hadrian, of Ammonius, who was Plutarch’s tutor; of many others, noted in their time, but who are mere shadows to us. They met in a convivial way in many places, at Chaeronea, at Hyampolis, at Eleusis after the Mysteries, at Patrae, at Corinth during [pg 404]the Isthmian games, at Thermopylae, and Athens in the house of Ammonius, or at Aedepsus, the Baden of Euboea, where in the springtime people found pleasant lodgings and brisk intercourse to relieve the monotony of attendance at the baths.2122 Plutarch had a large circle of relatives,—his grandfather Lamprias, who had tales from an actual witness of the revels of Antony at Alexandria;2123 Lamprias his elder brother, a true Boeotian in his love of good fare, a war-dance, and a jest;2124 his younger brother Timon, to whom Plutarch was devotedly attached.2125 His ordinary society, not very distinguished socially, was composed of grammarians, rhetoricians, country doctors, the best that the district could afford.2126 The talk is often on the most trivial or absurd subjects, though not more absurdly trivial than those on which the polished sophist displayed his graces in the lecture-hall.2127 Yet graver and more serious themes are not excluded,2128 and the table-talk of Greece in the end of the first century is invaluable to the student of society. In such scenes Plutarch not only cultivated friendship, the great art of life, not only watched the play of intellect and character; he also found relief from the austere labours which have made his fame. It is surely not the least of his titles to greatness that, in an environment which to most men of talent would have been infinitely depressing, with the irrepressible vitality of genius he contrived to idealise the society of decaying Greece by linking it with the past.
And, with such a power of reviving the past, even the dulness of the little Boeotian town was easily tolerable. We can imagine Plutarch looking down the quiet street in the still vacant noontide, as he sat trying to revive the ancient glories of his race, and to match them with their conquerors, while he reminded the lords of the world, who, in Plutarch’s [pg 405]early youth, seemed to be wildly squandering their heritage, of the stern, simple virtue by which it had been won. For in the Lives of great Greeks and Romans, the moral interest is the most prominent. It is biography, not history, which Plutarch is writing.2129 Setting and scenery of course there must be; but Plutarch’s chief object is to paint the character of the great actors on the stage. Hence he may slur over or omit historic facts of wider interest, while he records apparently trivial incidents or sayings which light up a character. But Plutarch has a fine eye both for lively social scenes and the great crises of history. The description of the feverish activity of swarming industry in the great days of Pheidias at Athens, once read, can never be forgotten.2130 Equally indelible are the pictures of the younger Cato’s last morning, as he finished the Phaedo, and the birds began to twitter,2131 of the flight and murder of Pompey, of the suicide of Otho on the ghastly field of Bedriacum, which seemed to atone for an evil life. Nor can we forget his description of one of the saddest of all scenes in Greek history, which moved even Thucydides to a restrained pathos,—the retreat of the Athenians from the walls of Syracuse.
Plutarch was before all else a moralist, with a genius for religion. His ethical treatises deserve to be thoroughly explored, and as sympathetically expounded, for the light which they throw on the moral aspirations of the age, as Dr. Mahaffy has skilfully used them for pictures of its social life. He must be a very unimaginative person who cannot feel the charm of their revelation. But the man of purely speculative interest will probably be disappointed. Plutarch is not an original thinker in morals or religion. He has no new gospel to expound. He does not go to the roots of conduct or faith. Possessing a very wide knowledge of past speculation, he might have written an invaluable history of ancient philosophy. But he has not done it. And, as a man of genius, with a strong practical purpose to do moral good to his fellows, his choice of his vocation must be accepted without cavil. He was the greatest Hellenist of his day, when Hellenism was capturing [pg 406]the Roman world. He was also a man of high moral ideals, sincere piety, and absorbing interest in the fate of human character. With all that wealth of learning, philosophic or historical, with all that knowledge of human nature, what nobler task could a man set himself than to attempt to give some practical guidance to a generation conscious of moral weakness, and distracted between new spiritual ideals and the mythologies of the past? The urgent need for moral culture and reform of character, for a guiding force in conduct, was profoundly felt by all the great serious minds of the Flavian age, by Pliny and Tacitus, by Juvenal and Quintilian. But Plutarch probably felt it more acutely than any, and took endless pains to satisfy it. It was an age when the philosophic director and the philosophic preacher were, as we have seen, to be met with everywhere. And Plutarch took his full share in the movement, and influenced a wide circle.2132 If he did not elaborate an original ethical system, he had studied closely the art of moral reform, and Christian homilists, from Basil to Jeremy Taylor, have drawn freely from the storehouse of his precept and observation. In many tracts he has analysed prevailing vices and faults of his time,—flattery, vain curiosity, irritable temper, or false modesty,—and given rules for curing or avoiding them. In these homilies, the fundamental principle is that of Musonius, perhaps adapted from an oracle to the people of Cirrha “to wage war with vice day and night, and never to relax your guard.”2133 The call to reform sounded all the louder in Plutarch’s ears because of the high ideal which he had conceived of what life might be made if, no longer left to the play of passion and random influences, character were moulded from early youth to a temperate harmony. To such a soul each passing day might be a glad festival, the universe an august temple full of its Maker’s glories, and life an initiation into the joy of its holy mysteries.2134
In the work of moral and religious reconstruction Plutarch and his contemporaries could only rely on philosophy as their guide. Philosophy to Plutarch, Apollonius, or M. Aurelius, had a very different meaning from what it bore to the great [pg 407]thinkers of Ionia and Magna Graecia. Not only had it deserted the field of metaphysical speculation; it had lost interest even in the mere theory of morals. It had become the art rather than the science of life. The teacher of an art cannot indeed entirely divorce it from all scientific theory. The relative importance of practical precept and ethical theory was often debated in that age. But the tendency was undoubtedly to subordinate dogma to edification.2135 And where dogma was needed for practical effect, it might be drawn from the most opposite quarters. Seneca delights in rounding off a letter by a quotation from Epicurus. M. Aurelius appeals both to the example of Epicurus and the teaching of Plato.2136 Man might toy with cosmic speculation; the Timaeus had many commentators in the first and second centuries.2137 But, for Plutarch and his contemporaries, the great task of philosophy was to bring some sort of order into the moral and religious chaos. It was not original thought or discovery which was needed, but the application of reason, cultivated by the study of the past, to the moral and religious problems of the present. The philosopher sometimes, to our eyes, seems to trifle with the smallest details of exterior deportment or idiom or dress; he gives precepts about the rearing of children; he occupies himself with curious questions of ritual and antiquarian interest.2138 These seeming degradations of a great mission, after all, only emphasise the fact that philosophy was now concerned with human life rather than with the problems of speculation. It had in fact become an all-embracing religion. It supplied the medicine for moral disease; it furnished the rational criterion by which all myth and ritual must be judged or explained.2139
Plutarch was an eclectic in the sense that, knowing all the moral systems of the past, he was ready to borrow from any of these principles which might give support to character. Whether, if he had been born four or five hundred years earlier, he might have created or developed an original theory himself, is a question which may be variously answered. One may reasonably hesitate to assent to the common opinion that [pg 408]Plutarch had no genius for original speculation. Had he come under the influence of Socrates, it is not so certain that he might not have composed dialogues with a certain charm of fresh dialectic and picturesque dramatic power. It is a little unhistorical to decry a man of genius as wanting in speculative originality, who was born into an age when speculation had run dry, and thought was only subsidiary to conduct. When the dissonant schools forsook the heights of metaphysic and cosmology to devote themselves to moral culture, an inevitable tendency to eclecticism, to a harmony of moral theory, set in. The practical interest prevailed over the infinitely divisive forces of the speculative reason. Antiochus, the teacher of Cicero,2140 while he strove to re-establish Platonism, maintained the essential agreement of the great schools on the all-important questions, and freely adopted the doctrines of Zeno and Aristotle.2141 Panaetius, the chief representative of Roman Stoicism in the second century B.C., had a warm admiration for Plato and Aristotle, and in some essential points forsook the older teaching of the Porch.2142 Seneca, as we have seen, often seems to cling to the most hard and repellent tenets of the ancient creed. Yet a sense of practical difficulties has led him to soften and modify many of them—the identity of reason and passion, the indifference of so-called “goods,” the necessity of instantaneous conversion, the unapproachable and unassailable perfection of the wise man. Plutarch’s own ethical system, so far as he has a system, is a compound of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, with a certain tincture of Stoicism.2143 Platonism, which had shaken off its sceptical tendencies in the first century B.C., had few adherents at Rome in the first century of the Empire.2144 The Stoic and Epicurean systems divided the allegiance of thinking people till the energetic revival of Hellenism set in. Epictetus indeed speaks of women who were attracted by the supposed freedom of sexual relations in Plato’s Utopia.2145 Seneca often refers to Plato, and was undoubtedly influenced by his spirit. [pg 409]But in the second century, the sympathetic union of Platonic and Pythagorean ideas with a vigorous religious revival became a real power, with momentous effects on the future of philosophy and religion for three centuries. Plutarch’s reverence for the founder of the Academy, even in little things, was unbounded.2146 It became with him almost a kind of cult. And he paid the most sincere reverence to his idol by imitating, in some of his treatises, the mythical colouring by which the author of the Phaedo and the Republic had sought to give body and reality to the unseen world.2147 Plutarch condemned in very strong language the coarse and sophistical modes of controversy with which the rival schools assailed one another’s tenets.2148 Yet he can hardly be acquitted of some harshness in his polemic against the Stoics and Epicureans. Archbishop Trench, in his fascinating and sympathetic treatment of Plutarch, laments that he did not give a more generous recognition to that noblest and most truly Roman school which was the last refuge and citadel of freedom.2149 We may join the archbishop in wishing that Plutarch, without compromising principle, had been more tolerant to a system with which he had so much in common, and which, in his day, had put off much of its old hardness. But he was essentially a practical man, with a definite moral aim. He took from any quarter principles which seemed to him to be true to human nature, and which furnished a hopeful basis for the efforts of the moral teacher. But he felt equally bound to reject a system which absorbed and annihilated the emotional nature in the reason,2150 which cut at the roots of moral freedom, which recognised no degrees in virtue or in vice, which discouraged and contemned the first faint struggles of weak humanity after a higher life, and froze it into hopeless impotence by the remote ideal of a cold, flawless perfection, suddenly and miraculously raised to a divine independence of all the minor blessings and helps to virtue.2151[pg 410]Such an ideal may be magnificent, but it is not life. For man, constituted as he is, and placed in such an environment, it is a dangerous mental habit to train the soul to regard all things as a fleeting and monotonous show, to cultivate the taedium vitae, or a calm resignation to the littleness of man placed for a brief space between the two eternities.2152 The philosophic sufferer may brace himself to endure the round of human duties, and to live for the commonwealth of man; he may he generous to the ungrateful and tolerant to the vulgar and the frivolous; he may make his life a perpetual sacrifice to duty and the higher law, but it is all the while really a pathetic protest against the pitiless Power which has made man so little and so great, doomed to the life of the leaves and the insects, yet tortured with the longing for an infinite future.
On some great central truths, such as the inwardness of happiness and the brotherhood of man, Plutarch and the Stoics were at one. And the general tone of his moral teaching bears many marks of Stoic influence.2153 But the Stoic psychology, the Stoic fatalism and pantheism aroused all the controversial vehemence of Plutarch.2154 The Stoic held the essential unity of the soul, that reason and passion are not two distinct principles, but that passion is reason depraved and diverted to wrong objects. It is the same simple, indivisible power which shifts and changes and submits itself to opposing influences. Passion, in fact, is an impetuous and erring motion of the reason, and vice, in the old Socratic phrase, is an error of judgment, a fit of ignorance of the true ends of action. But as, according to Stoic theory, the human reason is a portion of the Divine, depravity becomes thus a corruption of the Divine element, and the guarantee for any hope of reform is lost. For himself, Plutarch adopts the Platonic division of the soul into the rational, spirited, and concupiscent elements, with some Aristotelian modifications.2155 The great fact of man’s moral nature is the natural opposition between the passions and the rational element of the soul; it corresponds to a similar division in the mundane soul.2156 All experience attests a con[pg 411]stant, natural, and sustained rebellion of the lower against the higher. Principles so alien and disparate cannot be identified, any more than you can identify the hunter and his quarry.2157 But, although in the unregulated character, they are in violent opposition, they may, by proper culture, be brought at last into a harmony. The function of the higher element is not to extinguish the lower, but to guide and control and elevate it.2158 Passion is a force which may be wasted in vagrant, wild excess, but which may also be used to give force and energy to virtue. To avoid drunkenness, a man need not spill the wine; he may temper its strength. A controlled anger is the spur of courage. Passion in effect is the raw material which is moulded by reason into the forms of practical virtue, and the guiding principle in the process is the law of the mean between excess and defect of passion.2159 This is, of course, borrowed from Aristotle, and along with it the theory of education by habit, which to Plato had seemed a popular and inferior conception of the formation of the virtuous character.2160 By the strong pressure of an enlightened will, the wild insurgent forces of the lower nature are brought into conformity to a higher law. It is a slow, laborious process, demanding infinite patience, daily and hourly watchfulness, self-examination, frank confession of faults to some friend or wise director of souls.2161 It needs the minutest attention to the details of conduct and circumstance, and a steady front against discouragement from the backsliding of the wavering will.2162 In such a system the hope of reform lies not in any sudden revolution. Plutarch has no faith in instant conversion, reversing in a moment the ingrained tendencies of years, and setting a man on a lofty height of perfection, with no fear of falling away. That vain dream of the older Stoicism, which recognised no degrees in virtuous progress, made virtue an unapproachable ideal, and paralysed struggling effort. It was not for an age stricken or blest with a growing sense of moral weakness, and clutching eagerly at any spiritual stay. Plutarch loves rather to think of character under the image of a holy and royal building whose founda[pg 412]tions are laid in gold, and each stone has to be chosen and carefully fitted to the line of reason.2163
Plutarch also accepted from the Peripatetic school the principle, which Seneca was in the end compelled to admit, that the finest paragon of wisdom and virtue is not quite self-sufficing, that virtuous activity needs material to work upon,2164 and that the good things of the world, in their proper place, are as necessary to the moral musician as the flute to the flute-player. Above all, Plutarch, with such a theory of character, was bound to assert the cardinal doctrine of human freedom. He had a profound faith in a threefold Providence, exercised by the remote Supreme Deity, by the inferior heavenly powers, and by the daemons.2165 But Providence is a beneficent influence, not a crushing force of necessity. To Plutarch fatalism is the blight of moral effort. Foreknowledge and Fate are not conterminous and coextensive. Although everything is foreseen by heavenly powers, not everything is foreordained.2166 The law of Fate, like the laws of earthly jurisprudence, deals with the universal, and only consequentially with the particular case. Certain consequences follow necessarily from certain acts, but the acts are not inevitably determined.2167 Man, by nature the most helpless and defenceless of animals, becomes lord of creation by his superior reason, and appropriates all its forces and its wealth by his laborious arts.2168 And the art of arts, the art of life, neither trusting to chance nor cowed by any fancied omnipotence of destiny, uses the will and reason to master the materials out of which happiness is forged. Thus the hope of a noble life is securely fenced in the fortress of the autonomous will. To the Stoic the vicious man was a fool, whose reason was hopelessly besotted. The Platonist cherished the better hope, that reason, though darkened for a time and vanquished by the forces of sense, could never assent to sin, that there still remained in every human soul a witness to the eternal law of conduct.
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With such a faith as this, an earnest man like Plutarch was bound to become a preacher of righteousness and a spiritual director. Many of his moral treatises are the expanded record of private counsel or the more formal instruction of the lecture-hall. He had disciples all over the Roman world, at Rome, Chaeronea, Ephesus, and Athens.2169 His conception of the philosophic gathering, in which these serious things were discussed, is perhaps the nearest approach which a heathen ever made to the conception of the Christian church.2170 In theory, the philosopher’s discourse on high moral themes was a more solemn affair than the showy declamation of the sophist, whose chief object was to dazzle and astonish his audience by a display of rhetorical legerdemain on the most trivial or out-worn themes. But the moral preacher in those days, it is to be feared, often forgot the seriousness of his mission, and degraded it by personal vanity and a tinsel rhetoric to win a cheap applause.2171 The sophist and the philosopher were in fact too often undistinguishable, and the philosophic class-room often resounded with new-fangled expressions of admiration. For all this Plutarch has an indignant contempt. It is the prostitution of a noble mission. It is turning the school into a theatre, and the reformer of souls into a flatterer of the ear. To ask rhetoric from the true philosopher is as if one should require a medicine to be served in the finest Attic ware.2172 The profession of philosophy becomes in Plutarch’s eyes a real priesthood for the salvation of souls. He disapproves of the habit, which prevailed in the sophist’s lecture theatre, of proposing subtle or frivolous questions to the lecturer in order to make a display of cleverness. But he would have those in moral difficulty to remain after the sermon, for such it was, and lay bare their faults and spiritual troubles.2173 He watched the moral progress of his disciples, as when Fundanus is congratulated on his growing mildness of temper.2174 The philosopher was in those [pg 414]days, and often too truly, charged with gross inconsistency in his private conduct. Plutarch believed emphatically in teaching by example. The preacher of the higher life should inspire such respect that his frown or smile shall at once affect the disciple.2175 Plutarch evidently practised his remedies on himself. His great gallery of the heroes of the past was primarily intended to profit others. But he found, as the work went on, that he was himself “much profited by looking into these histories, as if he looked into a glass, to frame and fashion his life to the mould and pattern of these virtuous noblemen.”2176
Plutarch, as we have seen, waged determined war with the older Stoic and Epicurean systems; yet his practical teaching is coloured by the spirit of both. This is perhaps best seen in the tract on Tranquillity, which might almost have been written by Seneca. Although Plutarch elsewhere holds the Peripatetic doctrine that the full life of virtue cannot dispense with the external gifts of fortune, he asserts as powerfully as any Stoic that life takes its predominant colour from the character, that “the kingdom of Heaven is within,” that no change of external fortune can calm the tumults of the soul. You seem to be listening to a Stoic doctor when you hear that most calamities draw their weight and bitterness from imagination, that excessive desire for a thing engenders the fear of losing it, and makes enjoyment feeble and uncertain, that men, by forgetting the past in the vanishing present, lose the continuity of their lives.2177 Is it Plutarch himself, or some Christian preacher, who tells us that seeming calamity may be the greatest blessing, that the greatest folly is unthankfulness and discontent with the daily lot, that no wealth or rank can give such enchanted calm of spirit as a conscience unstained by evil deed or thought, and the power of facing fortune with steady open eye?2178 It is surely the greatest literary genius of his age, buried in a dull Boeotian town, who bids us think of the good things we have, instead of envying a life whose inner griefs we know not, who ever looks on the brighter side of things and dignifies an obscure [pg 415]lot by grateful content, who is not vexed by another’s splendid fortune, because he knows that seeming success is often a miserable failure, and that each one has within him the springs of happiness or misery.2179
The discipline by which this wise mood, which contains the wisdom of all the ages, is to be attained is expounded by Plutarch in many tracts, which are the record of much spiritual counsel. The great secret is a lover’s passion for the ideal and a scorn for the vulgar objects of desire.2180 Yet moral growth must be slow, though steady and unpausing, not the rush of feverish excitement, which may be soon spent and exhausted.2181 The true aspirant to moral perfection will not allow himself to be cast down by the obstacles that meet him at the entrance to the narrow way, nor will he be beguiled by pomp of style or subtlety of rhetoric to forget the true inwardness of philosophy. He will not ask for any witness of his good deeds or his growth in virtue; he will shrink from the arrogance of the mere pretender. Rather will he be humble and modest, harsh to his own faults, gentle to those of others. Like the neophyte in the mysteries, he will be awed into reverent silence, when the light bursts from the inner shrine.2182 This humility will be cultivated by daily self-scrutiny, and in this self-examination no sins will seem little, and no addition to the growing moral wealth, however slight, will be despised.2183 To stimulate effort, we must set the great historic examples of achievement or self-conquest before our eyes, and in doubt or difficulty, we must ask what would Plato or Socrates have done in such a case?2184 Where they have suffered, we shall love and honour them all the more. Their memory will work as a sacred spell.
Plutarch expounded the gospel of a cheerful and contented life, and he evidently practised what he preached. Yet, like all finely strung spirits, he had his hours when the pathos of [pg 416]life was heavy upon him, and death seemed the sovereign remedy for it all. Any one who shares the vulgar notion that the Greeks, even of the great age, were a race living in perpetual sunshine and careless enjoyment of the hour, should read the Consolation to Apollonius on the death of his son. He will there find all the great poets, from Homer downwards, cited in support of the most pessimist view of human life.2185 In the field of philosophy, it finds the most withering expression in the doctrine of Heraclitus, which did so much to mould the thought of Plutarch’s great master, and which coloured so many of the meditations of M. Aurelius.2186 Our life is but in miniature a counterpart of the universal flux, and each moment is the meeting place of life and death. Years, many or few, are but a point, a moment in the tract of infinite age.2187 The noble fulness of a life must be sought not in a sum of years, but in a rounded completeness of virtue. When we look at the chance and change and sorrow of life, death seems really the great deliverer, and in certain moments, it may be hailed as Heaven’s last, best gift.2188 Whether it be an unawaking sleep or the entrance to another scene of being, it cannot be an evil; it may perchance be a blessing. If there is nothing after it, we only return to our calm antenatal unconsciousness.2189 Or if there be another life, then for the good and noble there is a place assuredly prepared in some happy island of the West, or other mystic region, which we may picture to ourselves, if we please, in the Orphic visions glorified by Pindar.2190
We are now on the threshold of another world, from which many voices were coming to the age of Plutarch. After philosophy has done its utmost to mould the life of sixty or seventy years into a moral harmony, with its music in itself,2191 the effort ends in a melancholy doubt. The precept of Seneca and Plutarch, that you should live under the tutelary eye of some patron sage of the past, revealed a need of exterior help [pg 417]for the virtuous will. The passion for continued existence was sobered by the sense of continued moral responsibility and the shadow of a judgment to come. Vistas of a supernatural world opened above the struggling human life on earth and in far mysterious distances beyond. When philosophy had done its utmost to heal the diseases of humanity, it was confronted with another task, to give man a true knowledge of God and assurance of His help in this world and the next. Philosophy had for ages held before the eyes of men a dim vision of Him, sublime, remote, ineffable. But it was a vision for the few, not for the many. It was rather metaphysical than moral and spiritual. It paid little heed to the myths and mysteries by which humanity had been seeking to solve its spiritual enigmas. This long travail of humanity could not be ignored by a true religious philosophy. Some means must be found to reconcile ancient religious imagination with the best conception of the Divine.
The problem indeed was not a new one, except in the sense that an intense revival of religious faith or superstition demanded a fresh thÉodicÉe. As early as the sixth century B.C., the simple faith in legend had been shaken among the higher minds in a great philosophic movement which extended over many ages. Some had rejected the myths with scorn. Others had proceeded by the method of more or less critical selection. Others, again, strove to find in them a historical kernel, or an esoteric meaning veiled in allegory. The same methods reappeared in the age of Varro and Scaevola,2192 and, five centuries later, in the theology of Macrobius.2193 The effort, however, of the Platonists of the second century has a peculiar interest, because some fresh elements have been added to the great problem since the days of Xenophanes and Euhemerus and Varro.
To Plutarch, theology is the crown of all philosophy.2194 To form true and worthy conceptions of the Divine Being is not less important than to pay Him pious worship. Plutarch’s lofty conception of the Infinite and Supreme, like that of Maximus of Tyre, dominates all his system. In a curious [pg 418]treatise on Isis and Osiris, he reviews many a device of scholastic subtlety, many a crude guess of embryonic science, many a dream of Pythagorean mysticism, to find an inner meaning in the Egyptian myth. Yet it embalms, in all this frigid scholasticism, the highest and purest expression of Plutarch’s idea of the Supreme. In the end he breaks away from all lower mundane conceptions of the Divine, and reveals a glimpse of the beatific vision. “While we are here below,” he says, “encumbered by bodily affections, we can have no intercourse with God, save as in philosophic thought we may faintly touch Him, as in a dream. But when our souls are released, and have passed into the region of the pure, invisible, and changeless, this God will be their guide and king who depend on Him and gaze with insatiable longing on the beauty which may not be spoken of by the lips of man.”2195 To Plutarch God is the One, Supreme, Eternal Being, removed to an infinite distance from the mutable and mortal—the Being of whom we can only predicate that “He is,” who lives in an everlasting “now,” of whom it would be irrational and impious to speak in the terms of the future or the past.2196 He is the One, the Absolute of Eleatic or Pythagorean philosophy, the Demiurgus of Plato, the primal motive power of Aristotle, the World-Soul of the Stoics. Yet Plutarch is as far removed from the Epicureanism which banishes God from the universe as he is from the pantheism of east or west, which interfuses the world and God.2197 Plutarch never abandons the Divine personality, in whatever sense he may hold it. God is the highest perfection of goodness and intelligence, the Creator, the watchful and benevolent Providence of the world, the Author of all good. His power, indeed, is not unlimited. There is a power of evil in the world which must be recognised. And, as good cannot be the author of evil, the origin of evil must be sought in a separate and original principle, distinct from, but not co-equal with, God: a principle recognised in many a theology and philosophy of east and west, and called by many [pg 419]names—Ahriman or Hades, the “dyad” of Pythagoras, the “strife” of Empedocles, the “other” of Plato.2198 Its seat is the World-Soul, which has a place alongside of God and Matter, causing all that is deadly in nature, all moral disorder in the soul of man. Matter is the seat both of evil and good.2199 In its lower regions it may seem to be wholly mastered by the evil principle; yet in its essence it is really struggling towards the good, and, as a female principle, susceptible to the formative influence of the Divine, as well as exposed to the incursions of evil. Plutarch’s theory of creation is, in the main, that of the Timaeus, with mingled elements of Stoic cosmogony. Through number and harmony the Divine Mind introduces order into the mass of lawless chaos. But while God stands outside the cosmos as its creator, He is not merely the divine craftsman, but a penetrating power. For from Him proceeds the soul which is interfused with the world and which sustains it. Through the World-Soul, God is in touch with all powers and provinces of the universe. Yet throughout the universe, as in the human soul, there are always present the two elements side by side, the principles of reason and unreason, of evil and of good.2200
The vision of the one eternal, passionless Spirit, far removed from the world of chance and change and earthly soilure, was the conquest of Greek philosophy, travailing for 800 years. But it was a vision far withdrawn; it was separated by an apparently impassable gulf alike from the dreams of Hellenic legend and from the struggling life of humanity. The poets, and even the poet of divinest inspiration, had bequeathed a mass of legend, often shocking to the later moral sense, yet always seductive by its imaginative charm. How to reconcile the fictions of poetry, which had so long enthralled all imaginations, with higher spiritual intuitions, that was the problem. It was not indeed a new problem. It had driven Xenophanes into open revolt, it had exercised the mind of the reverent Pindar and the sceptical Euripides. It had suggested to Plato the necessity of recasting myth in the light of the Divine purity.2201 But the [pg 420]new Hellenism of the second century was a great literary, even more than a theological or philosophic, movement; and the glory of Greek literature was inseparably linked with the glory and the shame of Greek mythology. To discard and repudiate the myths was to give the lie to the divine poets. To explain them away by physical allegory, in the fashion of the Stoic theology, or to lower the “blessed ones” of Olympus to the stature of earthly kings and warriors, after the manner of Euhemerus, was to break the charm of poetic legend, and violate the instincts of ancestral piety.2202 And there were many other claimants for devotion beside the ancient gods of Rome and Greece. Persia and Phrygia, Commagene and Egypt, every region from the Sahara to Cumberland, were adding to the pantheon. Soldiers and travellers were bringing their tales of genii and daemons from islands in the British seas and the shores of the Indian Ocean.2203 How could a man trained in the mystic monotheism of 800 years reconcile himself to this immense accretion of alien superstition?
On the other hand, from whatever quarter, a new spiritual vision had opened, strange to the ancient world. It is not merely that the conception of God has become more pure and lofty; the whole attitude of the higher minds to the Eternal had altered. A great spiritual revolution had concurred with a great political revolution. The vision of the divine world which satisfied men in the age of Pericles or in the Punic wars, when religion, politics, and morality were linked in unbroken harmony, when, if spiritual vision was bounded, spiritual needs were less clamorous, and the moral life less troubled and self-conscious, could no longer appease the yearnings of the higher minds. Both morality and religion had become less formal and external, more penetrating and exigent. Prayer was no longer a formal litany for worldly blessings or sinful indulgence, but a colloquy with God, in a moment of spiritual exaltation.2204 The true sacrifice was no longer “the blood of bulls,” but a quiet spirit. Along with a sense of frailty and bewilderment, men felt the need of [pg 421]purification and spiritual support. The old mysteries and the new cults from the East had fostered a longing for sacramental peace and assurance of another life, in which the crooked should be made straight and the perverted be restored.
In Maximus of Tyre,2205 although he has no claim to the reputation of a strong and original thinker, we see this new religious spirit of the second century perhaps in its purest form. Man is an enigma, a contradiction, a being placed on the confines of two worlds. A beast in his fleshly nature, he is akin to God in his higher part, nay, the son of God.2206 Even the noblest spirits here below live in a sort of twilight, or in a heady excitement, an intoxication of the senses. Yet, cramped as it is in the prison of the flesh, the soul may raise itself above the misty region of perpetual change towards the light of the Eternal. For, in the slumber of this mortal life, the pure spirit is sometimes visited by visions coming through the gate of horn,2207 visions of another world seen in some former time. And, following them, the moral hero, like Heracles, the model of strenuous virtue, through toil and tribulation may gain the crown. On this stormy sea of time, philosophy gives us the veil of Leucothea to charm the troubled waters. It is true that only when release comes at death, does the soul attain to the full vision of God. For the Highest is separated from us by a great gulf. Yet the analysis of the soul which Maximus partly borrows from Aristotle, discovers His seat in us, the highest reason, that power of intuitive, all-embracing, instantaneous vision, which is distinct from the slower and tentative operations of the understanding. It is by this higher faculty that God is seen, so far as He may be, in this mixed and imperfect state.2208 For the vision of God can only in any degree be won by abstraction from sense and passion and everything earthly, in a struggle ever upwards, beyond the paths of the heavenly orbs, to the region of eternal calm “where falls not rain or hail or any snow, but a white cloudless radiance spreads over all.”2209 And when may we see God? “Thou shalt see Him fully,” Maximus says, “only when [pg 422]He calls thee, in age or death, but meantime glimpses of the Beauty which eye hath not seen nor can tongue speak of, may be won, if the veils and wrappings which hide His splendour be torn away.2210 But do not thou profane Him by offering vain prayers for earthly things which belong to the world of chance or which may be obtained by human effort, things for which the worthy need not pray, and which the unworthy will not obtain. The only prayer which is answered, is the prayer for goodness, peace, and hope in death.”2211
How could a Platonist of the second century, we may ask, holding such a spiritual creed, reconcile himself to Greek mythology, nay, to all the mythologies, with all the selfish grossness of their ritual? Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre answer the question by a piously ingenious interpretation of ancient legend, and partly by a system of daemons, of mediating and ministering spirits, who fill the interval between the changeless Infinite and the region of sin and change.
In religion, they say, in effect, we must take human nature as we find it. We are not legislating for a young race, just springing from the earth, but for races with conceptions of the Divine which run back through countless ages. There may be, here and there, an elect few who can raise their minds, in rare moments, to the pure vision of the Eternal. But heaven is so far from earth, and earth is so darkened by the mists of sense, that temple and image and sacred litany, and the myths created by the genius of poets, or imposed by lawgivers, are needed to sustain and give expression to the vague impotent yearnings of the mass of men.2212 The higher intuitions of religion must be translated into material symbolism; “here we see, as through a glass darkly.” And the symbols of sacred truth are as various as the many tribes of men. Some, like the Egyptian worship of animals, are of a degraded type. The Greek anthropomorphism, although falling far short of the grandeur and purity of the Infinite, yet furnishes its noblest image, because it has glorified by artistic genius the human body, which has been chosen as the earthly home of the rational soul.2213 And the cause of myth and plastic art are really one; nay, there is no opposition or con[pg 423]trast, in fact, between poetic mythology and religious philosophy. They are different methods of teaching religious truth, adapted to different stages of intellectual development. Myth is the poetic philosophy of a simple age, for whose ears the mystic truth must be sweetened by music, an age whose eyes cannot bear to gaze on the Divine splendour unveiled.2214 Philosophic theology is for an age of rationalism and inquiry; it would have been unintelligible to the simple imaginative childhood of the race. Maximus has the same faith as Plutarch that the mythopoeic age possessed, along with an enthralling artistic skill, all the speculative depth and subtlety of later ages. It is almost a profanity to imagine that Homer or Hesiod or Pindar were less of philosophers than Aristotle or Chrysippus.2215 It was assumed that the early myth-makers and lawgivers possessed a sacred lore of immense value and undoubted truth, which they dimly shadowed forth in symbolism of fanciful tale or allegory.2216 The myth at once hides and reveals the mystery of the Divine. If a man comes to its interpretation with the proper discipline and acumen, the kernel of spiritual or physical meaning which is reverently veiled from the profane eye will disclose itself. And thus the later philosophic theologian is not reading his own higher thoughts of God into the grotesque fancies of a remote antiquity; he is evolving and interpreting a wisdom more original than his own. In this process of rediscovering a lost tradition, he pushes aside the mass of erroneous interpretations which have perverted the original doctrine, by literal acceptance of what is really figurative, by abuse of names and neglect of realities, by stopping at the symbol instead of rising to the divine fact.2217
The treatise of Plutarch on Isis and Osiris is the best illustration of this attitude to myth. Plutarch’s theology, though primarily Hellenic, does not confine its gaze to the Greek Olympus; it is intended to be the science of human religion in general. It gives formal expression to the growing tendency to syncretism. The central truth of it is, that as the sun and moon, under many different names, shed their [pg 424]light on all, so the gods are variously invoked and honoured by various tribes of men.2218 But there is one supreme Ruler and Providence common to all. And the lower deities of different countries may often be identified by the theologian, under all varieties of title and attribute. So, to Plutarch as to Herodotus, the immemorial worships of Egypt were the prototypes or the counterparts of the cults of Greece.2219 There was a temple of Osiris at Delphi, and Clea, to whom Plutarch’s treatise is addressed, was not only a hereditary priestess of the Egyptian god, but held a leading place among the female ministers of Dionysus.2220 It was fitting that a person so catholic in her sympathies should have dedicated to her the treatise in which Plutarch expounds his all-embracing theology.
In this treatise we see the new theology wrestling in a hopeless struggle to unite the thought of Pythagoras and Plato with the grossness of Egyptian myth. It is a striking, but not a solitary, example of the misapplication of dialectic skill and learning, to find the thoughts of the present in the fancies of the past, and from a mistaken piety, to ignore the onward march of humanity. Arbitrary interpretations of myth, alike unhistorical and unscientific, make us wonder how they could ever have occurred to men of intellect and learning. Yet the explanation is not far to seek. More elevated conceptions of God, the purged and clarified religious intuition, do not readily find a substitute for the old symbolism to express their visions. Religion, beyond any other institution, depends for its power on antiquity, on the charm of ancestral pieties. A religious symbol is doubly sacred when it has ministered to the devotion of many generations.
In interpreting the powerful cult of Isis, which was spreading rapidly over the western world, Plutarch had two objects in view. By reverent explanation of its legends and ritual, he desired to counteract its immoral and superstitious tendencies;2221 he also wished, in discussing a worship so multiform as that of Isis, to develop his attitude to myth in general. We [pg 425]cannot follow him minutely in his survey of the various attempts of philosophy to find the basis of truth in Egyptian legend. Some of these explanations, such as the Euhemerist, he would dismiss at once as atheistic.2222 On others, which founded themselves on physical allegory, he would not be so dogmatic, although he might reject as impious any tendency to identify the gods with natural powers and products.2223 As a positive contribution to religious philosophy, the treatise is chiefly valuable for its theory of Evil and of daemonic powers, and above all for the doctrine of the unity of God, the central truth of all religions.
The daemonology of the Platonists of the second century had its roots deep in the Hellenic past, as it was destined to have a long future. But it was specially evoked by the needs of the pagan revival of the Antonine age. The doctrine had assumed many forms in previous Greek thought from the days of Hesiod, and it has various aspects, and serves various purposes, in the hands of Plutarch, Apuleius, and Maximus of Tyre. It was in the first place an apologetic for heathenism in an age distracted between a lofty conception of one infinite Father and legends of many lands and many ages, which were consecrated by long tradition, yet often shocking to the spiritual sense. As the conception of God became purer and seemed to withdraw into remoter distances, souls like Apuleius, wedded to the ancient rites, found in the daemons, ranging between earth and ether, the means of conveying answers to prayer, of inspiring dreams and prophecy, of ordering all the machinery of divination.2224 To others, such as Maximus of Tyre, the doctrine seemed to discover a spiritual support for human frailty, guardians in temptation and the crises of life, mediators between the human spirit, immured for a time in the prison of the flesh, and the remote purity of the Supreme.2225 To other minds the daemon is no external power, but dwelling within each soul, as its divine part, a kind of ideal personality,2226 in following whose ghostly promptings lies the secret of happiness. [pg 426]Finally, the doctrine created an eschatology by which vistas of moral perfection were opened before purer spirits in worlds to come, and the infinite responsibilities of this life were terribly enforced by threats of endless degradation.2227
The daemons who came to the aid of mythology in the Antonine age, were composite beings, with a double nature corresponding to the two worlds of the Divine and human which they linked together. They are at once divine in power and knowledge, and akin to humanity in feeling and passion.2228 They are even liable to mortality, as was proved by the famous tale of the voice which floated to the Egyptian pilot from the Echinad isles, announcing that the great Pan was dead.2229 Their sphere is the middle space between the lofty ether and the mists of earth. This spiritual mediation, as Maximus points out, is not an exceptional principle. There is a chain of being in the universe, as it had been developed in the cosmic theory of Aristotle, by which the remote extremes are linked in successive stages, and may be blended or reconciled, in a mean or compound, as in a musical harmony. The principle is seen operating in the relation of the great physical elements. Thus, for example, fire and water are at opposite poles: they cannot pass immediately into one another, but air furnishes a medium between the two, and reconciles their opposition by participating in the warmth of the one element and in the moisture of the other.2230 The suggestions of cosmic theory seemed to receive support from many tales which, in that age of luxuriant superstition, were accepted even in educated circles. Travellers, returning from Britain, told weird stories of desolate islands in the northern seas which were the haunts of genii.2231 A Spartan visitor to Delphi related how, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, he had met with a hermit of a beautiful countenance and proof against all disease, who spoke with many tongues, and derived his mystic powers from intercourse with the spirits which haunted those distant solitudes.2232
Plutarch also justifies his theory of daemons by an appeal to the authority of Hesiod, of Pythagoras and Plato, Xenocrates [pg 427]and Chrysippus.2233 He might have added others to the list. For, indeed, the conception of these mediators between the ethereal world and the world of sense has a long history—too long to be developed within our present limits. Its earliest appearance in Greece was in the Works and Days of Hesiod, who first definitely sketched a great scale of being—gods, heroes, daemons, and mortal men. Hesiod’s daemons are the men of the golden age, translated to a blissful and immortal life, yet linked in sympathy with those still on earth—“Ministers of good and guardians of men.”2234 The conception was introduced at a time when new moral and spiritual forces were at work, which were destined to have a profound and lasting influence on paganism for a thousand years. The glamour of the radiant Olympus and the glory of heroic battle were fading. Men were settling down to humdrum toil, and becoming acutely conscious of the troubles and sadness of life. With a craving for support and comfort which the religion of Homer could not give, the pessimist view of life, which colours Hesiod’s poetry, sought consolation in a mysticism altogether strange to Homer, and even to Hesiod. The feeling that humanity had declined from a glorious prime and, in its weakness and terror at death, needed some new consolations, was met by a system which, although Orpheus may never have existed, will always be called by his name.2235 The Chthonian deities, Dionysus and Demeter, sprang into a prominence which they had not in Homer. The immortal life began to overshadow the present, and in the mysteries men found some assurance of immortality, and preparation for it by cleansing from the stains of time. That idea, which was to have such profound influence upon later thought, that there is a divine element in man, which is emancipated from the prison of the flesh at death, became an accepted doctrine. At the same time, the faith in helpers and mediators, half human, half divine, lent itself to the support of human weakness. The heroic soul who passed victoriously through the ordeal of this life, might in another world become the guardian and exemplar of those who were still on earth.
In the Ionian and Eleatic schools the doctrine was held [pg 428]in some sense by all the great thinkers, by Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Xenophanes. To Thales the world was full of daemons.2236 In the mystic teaching of Heraclitus the universe teems with such spirits, for in the perpetual flux and change, the divine is constantly passing into the death of mortal life and the mortal into the divine.2237 Empedocles, in conformity with his cosmic dualism, first made the distinction between good and bad daemons, and followed Pythagoras in connecting daemonic theory with the doctrine of a fall from divine estate, and long exile and incarnation in animal forms.2238 It was in the dim system of Pythagoras that the doctrine became a really religious tenet, as it was to the Platonists of the Antonine age. Pythagoras was more priest and mystic than philosopher. He had far more in common with the Orphici, with Abaris and Epimenides, than with Thales or Anaximander. His school, for we can hardly speak of himself, connected the doctrine of daemons with the doctrines of metempsychosis and purification and atonement in another world. Souls released from the prison-house of the flesh are submitted to a purgatorial cleansing of a thousand years. Some pass the ordeal victoriously, and ascend to higher spheres. Others are kept in chains by the Erinnyes. The beatified souls become daemons or good spirits, ranging over the universe, and manifesting themselves in dreams and omens and ghostly monitions, sometimes becoming even visible to the eye.2239 But their highest function is to guide men in the path of virtue during life, and after death to purify the disembodied spirit, which may become a daemon in its turn. This is the theory, which, with some modifications, was adopted by the later Platonists. It was popularised by Pindar, “the Homer of the Pythagorean school.” He was captivated by its doctrine of the migrations of the soul, of its ordeal in a future life, and its chastisement or elevation to lofty spiritual rank as daemon or hero. In the second Olympian ode, the punishment of the [pg 429]wicked and the beatitude of noble spirits, in the company of Peleus and Achilles in the happy isles, are painted in all the glowing imagery of the Apocalypse.2240
The daemonology of Pythagoras, along with the doctrine of metempsychosis in its moral aspect, was adopted by Plato, whether as a serious theory or as a philosophic myth. The chief passages in Plato where the daemons are mentioned are suffused with such mythic colour that it would perhaps be rash to extract from them any sharp dogmatic theory.2241 But Plato, holding firmly the remote purity of God, strove to fill the interval between the mortal and the Infinite by a graded scheme of superhuman beings. The daemon is a compound of the mortal and the divine, spanning the chasm between them. This is the power which conveys to God the prayers and sacrifices of men, and brings to men the commands and rewards of the gods, which operates in prophecy, sacrifice, and mystery. And again the daemon is a power which is assigned to each soul at birth, and which at death conducts it to the eternal world, to receive judgment for its deeds, and perhaps to be condemned to return once more to earth. The reason in man, his truly divine part, is also called his daemon, his good genius. It is the power whose kindred is with the world of the unseen, which is immortal, and capable of a lofty destiny.
Like his master Plato, Maximus of Tyre seems to know nothing of the evil daemons, who, as we shall presently see, were used by Plutarch to account for the immorality of myth. To Maximus the daemons are rather angelic ministers, sent forth to advise and succour weak mortal men.2242 They are the necessary mediators between the one Supreme and our frail mortal life. Dwelling in a region between earth and ether, they are of mingled mortal and divine nature, weaker than the gods, stronger than men, servants of God and overseers of men, by kinship with either linking the weakness of the mortal with the Divine. Great is the multitude of this heavenly host, interpreters between God and man: “thrice ten thousand are they upon the fruitful earth, immortal, ministers of Zeus,” healers of the sick, revealers of what is dark, aiding the [pg 430]craftsman, companions of the wayfarer. On land and sea, in the city and the field, they are ever with us. They inspired a Socrates, a Pythagoras, a Diogenes, or a Zeno; they are present in all human spirits. Only the lost and hopeless soul is without the guardianship of such an unearthly friend.
The earlier Platonist or Pythagorean daemonology was not employed to explain or rehabilitate polytheism. Although Plato would not banish myth from his Utopia, he placed his ban on the mythopoeic poets who had lent their authority to tales and crimes and passions of the gods. Myth could only be tolerated in the education of the young if it conformed to the standard of Divine perfection.2243 God cannot be the author of evil, evil is the offspring of matter; it is a limitation or an incident of the fleeting world of sense. It is only relative and transitory, and can never penetrate the realm of the ideal. But to Plutarch evil was an ultimate principle in the universe, ever present along with the good, although not perhaps of equal range and power.2244 And Plutarch would not banish and disown the poets for attributing to the gods passions and crimes which would have been dishonouring to humanity. He would not abandon the ancient ritual because it contained elements of gloom and impurity which shocked a refined moral sense. Mythology and ritual, as they had been moulded by poets or imposed by lawgivers, were intertwined with the whole life of the people and formed an essential element in the glory of Hellenic genius. The piety and aesthetic feeling of the priest of Delphi still clung to ancient ritual and legend, even when the lofty morality of the Platonist was offended by the grossness which mingled with their artistic charm. Might it not be possible to moralise the pagan system without discrediting its authors, to reconcile the claims of reason and conservative religious feeling? Might it not be possible to save at once the purity and majesty of God and the inspiration of the poets?
To Plutarch the doctrine of daemons seemed to furnish an answer to this question; it also satisfied other spiritual cravings which were equally urgent. The need of some mixed nature [pg 431]to mediate between the ethereal world and the region of sense became all the more imperious as the philosophic conception of God receded into a more remote and majestic purity. The gradation of spiritual powers, which had been accepted by so many great minds from the time of Hesiod, at once guarded the aloofness of the Supreme and satisfied the craving of the religious instinct for some means of contact with it, for divine help in the trials of time. These mediating spirits were also made in Plutarch’s theology to furnish an explanation of oracles and all forms of prophecy, of the inspired enthusiasm of artist, sage, and poet. Finally, the theory, with the aid of mythic fancy, cast a light on the fate of souls beyond the grave, and vindicated the Divine justice by a vision of a judgment to come.
Plutarch’s daemonology, as he admits himself, is an inheritance from the past. The daemons are beings half divine, half human; they are godlike in power and intelligence, they are human in liability to the passions engendered by the flesh. This host of spirits dwell in the borderland below the moon, between the pure changeless region of the celestial powers and the region of the mutable and the mortal. Linking the two worlds together by their composite nature, the daemons differ in degrees of virtue; some are more akin to the Divine perfection, others more tainted by the evil of the lower world.2245 The good spirits, as they are described by Maximus of Tyre, are true servants of God and faithful guardians of human virtue. But the bad daemons assume a special prominence in the theology of Plutarch. Nor was the development unnatural. His conception of immortality, and the necessity of purification in another world, raised the question as to the destiny of souls whose stains were indelible. If purified souls are charged as daemons with offices of mercy, may not the impure prolong their guilt in plaguing and corrupting mankind? May not the existence of such sombre spirits account for the evil in the world, the existence of which cannot be blinked? Although there are traces of this moral dualism long before Plutarch’s time, both in Greek poetry and speculation, it was Xenocrates who first formulated the doctrine of evil daemons in relation to mythology.2246“It can[pg 432]not be,” he taught, “that unlucky days and festivals, conducted with scourgings and fasts, lamentations and lacerations and impure words and deeds, are celebrated in honour of the blessed gods or good daemons. They are rather offered to those powerful and terrible spirits of evil in the air whose sombre character is propitiated by such gloomy rites.” These sinister spirits assert their vast power, and display their malevolence, not only in plague, pestilence, and dearth, and all the desolating convulsions of the physical world, but in the moral perversion and deception of the human race. They are accountable for all that shocks the moral sense in the impure or ghastly tales which the poets have told of the gods, and in the gloomy or obscene rites which are celebrated in their honour. The poets and early myth-makers have not invented the evil in myth and rite; they have been deceived as to the authors of the evil. Each of the blessed gods has attached to him a daemon who is in some respects his counterpart, wielding his power, but who may perpetrate every kind of moral enormity in his name, and who demands to be honoured and propitiated after his own evil nature. The bad daemons, in fact, masquerade as gods and bring disgrace upon them. It was not the Blessed Ones who mutilated a father, who raised rebellion in Olympus and were driven into exile, who stooped to be the lovers of mortal women. These are the works of spirits of evil, using their fiendish cunning to deceive a simple age. Its poetry was seduced to cast a magical charm over their lusts and crimes; its superstition was terrified into appeasing the fiends by shameful orgies or dark bloody rites. Poets and founders of ritual have been faithful to supernatural fact, but they did not see that in the supernatural order there are evil powers as well as good. They are sound in their record but wrong in their interpretation. In this fashion Plutarch and his school strove to reconcile a rational faith with the grossness of superstition, to save the holiness of God and the glory of Homer.
But the bad daemons who were called in to save the ancient cults proved dangerous allies in the end. Few who really know him will be inclined to question the sincere monotheistic piety of Plutarch. And a sympathetic critic will even not withhold from him a certain respect for his old-world [pg 433]attachment to the forms of his ancestral worship. He knew no other avenue of approaching the Divine. Yet only the imperious religious cravings and the spiritual contradictions of that age could excuse or account for a system which was disastrous both to paganism and philosophy. The union of gross superstition with ingenious theology, the licence of subtlety applied to the ancient legends, demanded too much credulity from the cultivated and too much subtlety from the vulgar. It undermined the already crumbling polytheism; it made philosophy the apostle of a belief in a baleful daemonic agency. If a malign genius was seated beside every god to account for the evil in nature or myth, might not a day come when both friends and enemies would confound the daemon and the god?2247 Might not philosophy be led on in a disastrous decline to the justification of magic, incantations, and all theurgic extravagance? That day did come in the fourth century when Platonism and polytheism in close league were making a last stand against the victorious Church. Even then indeed a purer Platonism still survived, as well as a purer paganism sustained by the mysteries of Mithra or Demeter. But the paganism which the Christian empire found it hardest to conquer, and which propagated itself far into the Christian ages, was the belief in magic and occult powers founded on the doctrine of daemons. And the Christian controversialist, with as firm a faith in daemons as the pagan, turned that doctrine against the faith which it was invented to support. The distinction of good and bad daemons, first drawn by Xenocrates and Chrysippus, and developed by Plutarch, was eagerly seized upon by Tatian and S. Clement of Alexandria, by Minucius Felix and S. Cyprian.2248 But the good became the heavenly host of Christ and His angels; the bad were identified with the pagan gods. What would have been the anguish of Plutarch could he have foreseen that his theology, elaborated [pg 434]with such pious subtlety and care, would one day be used against the gracious powers of Olympus, and that the spirits he had conjured up to defend them would be exorcised as maleficent fiends by the triumphant dialectic of S. Augustine.2249
The daemonology of Plutarch also furnished a theory of prophetic powers, and especially of the inspiration of Delphi. It was in the porticoes of the shrine of Apollo, or among the monuments of ancient glory and devotion, that the most interesting of Plutarch’s religious essays were inspired. He probably bore the honours of the Delphic priesthood down to the last days of his long life. But in the years when Plutarch was ordering a sacrifice or a procession, or discussing antiquarian and philosophic questions with travellers from Britain or the eastern seas, Delphi had lost much of its ancient power and renown. Great political and great economic changes had reduced the functions of the oracle to a comparatively humble sphere. It was no longer consulted on affairs of state by great potentates of the East and West. The farmers of Boeotia or the Arcadian shepherds now came to seek the causes of failure in their crops or of a murrain among their herds, to ask advice about the purchase of a piece of land or the marriage of a child. So far back as the days of Cicero the faith in oracles had been greatly shaken,2250 and even the most venerable shrines were no longer resorted to as of old. Powerful philosophic schools, the Cynic and the Epicurean, poured contempt on all the arts of divination. Many of the ancient oracles had long been silent. In Boeotia, where, in the days of Herodotus, the air was full of inspiration,2251 the ancient magic only lingered around Lebadea. Sheep grazed around the fanes of Tegyra and the Ptoan Apollo. While in old days at Delphi, the services of two, and even three, Pythian priestesses were demanded by the concourse of votaries, in Plutarch’s time one priestess sufficed.2252 But the second century brought, along with a general religious revival, a restoration of the ancient faith in oracles. The voice of Delphi had been silenced for a time by Nero, and the sacred chasm had been choked with corpses because the [pg 435]priestess had branded the emperor as another Orestes.2253 But the oracle, although shorn of much of its glory, recovered some of its popularity in the second century. It received offerings once more from wealthy votaries. The emperor Hadrian characteristically tested its omniscience by a question as to the birthplace of Homer. Curious travellers from distant lands, even philosophers of the Cynic and Epicurean schools, came to visit the ancient shrine, to make the round of its antiquarian treasures, and to discuss the secret of its inspiration.2254 A new town sprang up at the gates of the sanctuary; sumptuous temples, baths, and halls of assembly replaced the solitude and ruins of many generations. The god himself seemed to the pious Plutarch to have returned in power to his ancient seat.2255
The revival of Delphi gladdened the heart of Plutarch as a sign of reviving religion and Hellenism. And although the oracle no longer wielded an oecumenical primacy, its antiquities and its claims to inspiration evidently attracted many curious inquirers. We are admitted to their conversations in the Delphic treatises of Plutarch. His characters bear the names of the old-world schools, but there is a strangely modern tone in their discussions. Sometimes we might fancy ourselves listening to a debate on the inspiration of Scripture between an agnostic, a Catholic, and an accommodating broad Churchman. Plutarch himself, or his representative, generally holds the balance between the extreme views, and tries to reconcile the claims of reason and of faith. It is clear that even in that age of religious revival there was no lack of a scepticism like that of Lucian. Even in the sacred courts of Delphi the Epicurean might be heard suggesting that, because, among a thousand random prophecies of natural events, one here and there may seem to tally with the fact, it does not follow that the prediction was sure and true at the moment of deliverance;2256 the wandering word may sometimes hit the mark. The fulfilment is a mere coincidence, a happy chance. Boethus, the sceptic, is easily refuted by the orthodox Serapion, who makes an [pg 436]appeal to well-known oracles which have been actually fulfilled, not merely in a loose, apparent fashion, but down to the minutest details of time, place, and manner.2257 In these discussions, although the caviller is heard with a tolerant courtesy, it is clear that faith is always in the ascendant. Yet even faith has to face and account for an apparent degeneracy which might well cause some uneasiness. For instance, is it not startling that, in the name of the god of music, many oracles should be delivered in trivial, badly-fashioned verses?2258 Can it be that Apollo is a meaner artist than Hesiod or Homer? On the other side, it may be said that the god is too lofty to care to deck his utterances in the graces of literary form, or, by a more probable theory, he inspires the vision but not the verse. But what of the oracles of later days, which are delivered in the baldest prose? Is this not a disturbing sign of degeneracy? Can this be worthy of the god? The defender of the faith has no difficulty in quieting the suspicion. Even in the great ages we know that oracles were sometimes delivered in prose,2259 and in ancient times excited feeling ran naturally into verse.2260 The stately hexameter was the appropriate form of utterance when the oracle had to deal with great events affecting the fate of cities and of nations. Inspiration is not independent of surrounding circumstances, and the functions of the oracle have changed since the days of Croesus and Themistocles. The whole style of human life and the taste of men are less imposing and stately. The change in the style of the oracle is only part of a general movement.2261 For ages simple prose has taken the place of artistic rhythm in other departments besides the sphere of prophecy. We do not despise the philosophy of Socrates and Plato, because it does not come to us clothed in verse, like the speculations of Thales, Parmenides, and Empedocles. And who can expect the simple peasant girl, who now occupies the tripod, to speak in the tones of Homer?2262 The dim grandeur of the old poetic oracles had indeed some advantages, in aiding the memory by the use of measured and musical expression, and in veiling the full meaning of the God from irreverent or hostile eyes. But [pg 437]their pompous ambiguity, providing apparently so many loopholes for evasion, brought discredit on the sacred art, and encouraged the imitative ingenuity of a host of venal impostors who, around the great temples, cheated the ears of slaves and silly women with a mockery of the mysterious solemnity of the Pythian verse.2263
The more serious question as to the cause of the extinction of oracles brings the discussion nearer to the great problem of the sources of inspiration. It is true that the fact may be accounted for to some extent by natural causes. Oracles have never ceased, but the number has been diminished. God measures His help to men by their needs, and as they grow more enlightened they feel less need for supernatural guidance. This, however, is evidently dangerous ground. But surely the poverty and depopulation of Greece are enough to account for the disappearance of oracles. A country which can hardly put three thousand hoplites in the field—as many as Megara alone sent forth to fight at Plataea—cannot need the many shrines which flourished when Greece was in its glory.2264 But it may be admitted that oracles can and do disappear. And this is in no way derogatory to the power of God. For it is not the great God Himself who utters the warning or the prophecy by the voice of the priestess. Such a doctrine is lowering to His greatness and majesty. In prophecy and divination, as in other fields, God operates, through instruments and agents, on a given matter, and in concurrence with physical causes. The matter in this case is the human soul, which, in greater or less degrees, can be acted on by supernatural influences.2265 The exciting cause of the “enthusiasm” or inspiration, applying a sudden stimulus to the soul, may be some vapour or exhalation from the earth, such as that which rose from the cleft beneath the Delphic tripod.2266 Lastly, there is the daemon, a supernatural being, who, by his composite nature, as we have seen, is the channel of sympathy between the human and the Divine.2267 But among the causes of afflatus or inspiration, [pg 438]some may, in cases, disappear and cease to operate. The intoxicating fume or vapour is a force of varying intensity and may exhaust itself and be spent, as a spring may fail, or a mine may be worked out.2268 The daemon may migrate from one place to another, and with its disappearance, the oracle will become silent, as that of Teiresias at Orchomenus has long been, just as the lyre becomes silent when the musician ceases to strike the strings.2269
In all this theory Plutarch is careful to guard himself against a purely materialistic theory of the facts of inspiration.2270 Physical causes may assist and predispose, but physical causes alone will not account for the facts of inspiration. The daemon is a necessary mediator between the human soul and God, a messenger of the divine purpose. But the real problem of inspiration is in the soul of man himself, in the possibility of contact between the soul and a supernatural power. This question is illuminated in Apuleius and Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre by a discussion of the daemon of Socrates. It was by a natural instinct that the Antonine Platonists went back to the great teacher of Plato for support of the system which was to link religion with philosophy by the daemonic theory. In Plutarch’s dialogue on the Genius of Socrates, the various theories of that mysterious influence current in antiquity are discussed at length. The language in which Socrates or his disciples spoke of its monitions lent itself to different interpretations. Was his daemon an external sign, as in augury, an audible voice, or an inner, perhaps supernatural light, a voice of reason, speaking to the soul’s highest faculty, through no uttered word or symbol?2271 The grosser conceptions of it may be dismissed at once. The daemon of Socrates does not belong to the crude materialism of divination, although the philosopher could forecast the disaster of Syracuse.2272 Nor was it any ordinary faculty of keen intellectual shrewdness, strengthened and sharpened by the cultivation of experience. Still less was it any hallucination, [pg 439]bordering on insanity, which is merely a perversion of the senses and reason. It was rather a spiritual intuition, an immediate vision, not darkened or weakened by passing through any symbolic medium of the senses, a flash of sudden insight such as is vouchsafed only to the select order of pure and lofty spirits, in whom from the beginning the higher portion of the soul has always risen high above the turbid and darkening influence of the senses.2273 That such a faculty exists is certain to the Platonist and the Pythagorean. But in the mass of men it is struggling against fleshly powers, sometimes defeated, sometimes victorious, inspiring ideals, or stinging with remorse, until perchance, late and slowly, after chastisement and struggle, it emerges into a certain calm. Pythagoreans, such as Apollonius, taught that the diviner, the mantic, faculty in man was more open to higher influences when emancipated from the body in sleep, and that it could be set free in waking hours by abstinence and ascetic discipline.2274 Plutarch laid stress on the latter part of this theory, but ridiculed the notion that the soul could be most clear and receptive when its powers were relaxed. But the capacity of the higher reason in the loftier souls is almost without limit. The reason, which is the daemon in each, when unimpeded by bodily obstruction, is open to the lightest, most ethereal touch. Spirit can act directly by immediate influence upon spirit, without any sensuous aid of word or sign.2275 The influence is a “wind blowing where it listeth,” or a strange sudden illumination, revealing truth as by a flash. The disembodied spirit, cleansed and freed from the servitude of the body, and now a real daemon, possesses all these powers and receptivities in the fullest measure. But it gains no new power when it quits the body, although its spiritual faculties may have been dulled and obstructed by the flesh. The sun does not lose its native radiance when for a moment it is obscured by clouds.2276 And thus a Socrates may even here below have a spiritual vision denied to us; a Pythia may be inspired by the daemon of the shrine to read the future of a campaign. Nor is there anything more [pg 440]wonderful in prediction than in memory.2277 In this unresting flux of existence, the present of brief sensation is a mere moment between the past which has ceased to be and the future which is to be born. If we can still grasp the one, may we not anticipate the other?
It is thus that, by a far-reaching theory of inspiration, Plutarch strove to rehabilitate the faith in oracular lore. The loftier philosophic conception of the Supreme is saved from contamination with anything earthly by the doctrine of daemons themselves released from the body, yet, through the higher faculty in all souls, able to act directly upon those still in the flesh. The influence is direct and immediate, yet not independent of purely physical causes or temperament. “The treasure is in earthen vessels.” But the full vision is only reserved for the spirit unpolluted and untroubled by sense and passion. Plutarch is preparing the way for the “ecstasy” of later Neo-Platonism. All this speculation of course lent itself to a revival of heathen superstition. Yet it is interesting to see how, in many a flash of insight, Plutarch reveals a truth for all generations. We, in our time, are perhaps too much inclined to limit the powers of the human spirit to the field of sense and observation. The slackening hold on faith in a spiritual world and a higher intuition may well be visited by the proper Nemesis, in the darkening of the divine vision, whether as religious faith or artistic inspiration. The dream of an earthly paradise enriched with every sensuous gratification by a science working in bondage to mere utility may have serious results for the spiritual future of humanity. It may need a bitter experience to dispel the gross illusion; yet men may once more come to believe with Plutarch that, as it were, at the back of every soul there is an opening to the divine world from which yet may come, as of old, the touch of an unseen hand.
