PLUTARCH
Stoicism as a system did not capture the ancient world, and even upon
individuals it did not retain an undivided hold. To pronounce with its
admirers to-day that it failed because the world was not worthy of it,
would be a judgment, neither quite false nor altogether true, but at
best not very illuminative. Men are said to be slow in taking in new
thoughts, and yet it is equally true that somewhere in nearly every man
there is something that responds to ideas, and even to theories; but if
these on longer acquaintance fail to harmonize with the deeper
instincts within him, they alarm and annoy, and the response comes in
the form of re-action.
In modern times, we have seen the mind of a great people surrendered
for a while to theorists and idealists. The thinking part of the
French nation was carried away by the inspiration of Rousseau into all
sorts of experiments at putting into hasty operation the principles and
ideas they had more or less learnt from the master. Even theories
extemporized on the moment, it was hoped, might be made the foundations
of a new and ideal social fabric. The absurdities of the old religion
yielded place to Reason--embodied symbolically for the hour in the
person of Mme Momoro--afterwards, more vaguely, in Robespierre's
Supreme Being, who really came from Rousseau. And then--"avec ton Etre
Supreme tu commences a m'embeter," said Billaud to Robespierre himself.
Within a generation Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Bonald, and de la
Mennais were busy refounding the Christian faith. "The rites of
Christianity," wrote Chateaubriand, "are in the highest degree moral,
if for no other reason than that they have been practised by our
fathers, that our mothers have watched over our cradles as Christian
women, that the Christian religion has chanted its psalms over our
parents' coffins and invoked peace upon them in their graves."
{76}
Alongside of this let us set a sentence or two of Plutarch. "Our
father then, addressing Pemptides by name, said, 'You seem to me,
Pemptides, to be handling a very big matter and a risky one--or rather,
you are discussing what should not be discussed at all (_ta akineta
kinein_), when you question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask
reason and demonstration for everything. For the ancient and ancestral
faith is enough (_arkei gar he patrios kai palaia pistis_), and no
clearer proof could be found than itself--
Not though man's wisdom scale the heights of thought--
but it is a common home and an established foundation for all piety;
and if in one point its stable and traditional character (_to bebainon
autes kai nenomismenon_) be shaken and disturbed, it will be undermined
and no one will trust it.... If you demand proof about each of the
ancient gods, laying hands on everything sacred and bringing your
sophistry to play on every altar, you will leave nothing free from
quibble and cross-examination (_ouden asykophanteton oud
abasaniston_).... Others will say that Aphrodite is desire and Hermes
reason, the Muses crafts and Athene thought. Do you see, then, the
abyss of atheism that lies at our feet, if we resolve each of the gods
into a passion or a force or a virtue?'"[1]
Such an utterance is unmistakeable--it means a conservative re-action,
and in another place we find its justification in religious emotion.
"Nothing gives us more joy than what we see and do ourselves in divine
service, when we carry the emblems, or join in the sacred dance, or
stand by at the sacrifice or initiation.... It is when the soul most
believes and perceives that the god is present, that she most puts from
her pain and fear and anxiety, and gives herself up to joy, yes, even
as far as intoxication and laughter and merriment.... In sacred
processions and sacrifices not only the old man and the old woman, nor
the poor and lowly, but
The thick-legged drudge that sways her at the mill,
and household slaves and hirelings are uplifted by joy and triumph.
Rich men and kings have always their own banquets and feasts--but the
feasts in the temples and at initiations, when men seem to touch the
divine most nearly in their thought, {77} with honour and worship, have
a pleasure and a charm far more exceeding. And in this no man shares
who has renounced belief in Providence. For it is not abundance of
wine, nor the roasting of meat, that gives the joy in the festivals,
but also a good hope, and a belief that the god is present and
gracious, and accepts what is being done with a friendly mind."[2]
[Sidenote: Continuity of religion]
One of Chateaubriand's critics says that his plea could be advanced on
behalf of any religion; and Plutarch had already made it on behalf of
his own. He looks past the Stoics, and he finds in memory and
association arguments that outweigh anything they can say. The
Spermaticos Logos was a mere Etre Supreme--a sublime conception
perhaps, but it had no appeal to emotion, it waked no memories, it
touched no chord of personal association. We live so largely by
instinct, memory and association, that anything that threatens them
seems to strike at our life,
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Some such thought is native to every heart, and the man who does not
cling to his own past seems wanting in something essentially human.
The gods were part of the past of the ancient world, and if Reason took
them away, what was left? There was so much, too, that Reason could
not grasp; so much to be learnt in ritual and in mystery that to the
merely thinking mind had no meaning,--that must be received. Reason
was invoked so lightly, and applied so carelessly and harshly, that it
could take no account of the tender things of the heart. Reason
destroyed but did not create, questioned without answering, and left
life without sanction or communion. It was too often a mere affair of
cleverness. It had its use and place, no doubt, in correcting
extravagances of belief, but it was by no means the sole authority in
man's life, and its function was essentially to be the handmaid of
religion. "We must take {78} Reason from philosophy to be our
mystagogue and then in holy reverence consider each several word and
act of worship."[3]
Plutarch is our representative man in this revival of religion, and
some survey of his life and environment will enable us to enter more
fully into his thought, and through him to understand better the
beginnings of a great religious movement, of which students too often
have lost sight.
For centuries the great men of Greek letters were natives of every
region of the eastern Mediterranean except Greece, and Plutarch stands
alone in later literature a Hellen of the motherland--Greek by blood,
birth, home and instinct, proud of his race and his land, of their
history, their art and their literature. When we speak of the
influence of the past, it is well to remember to how great a past this
man looked back, and from what a present. Long years of faction and
war, as he himself says, had depopulated Greece, and the whole land
could hardly furnish now the three thousand hoplites that four
centuries before Megara alone had sent to Plataea. In regions where
oracles of note had been, they were no more; their existence would but
have emphasized the solitude--what good would an oracle be at Tegyra,
or about Ptoum, where in a day's journey you might perhaps come on a
solitary shepherd?[4] It was not only that wars and faction fights had
wasted the life of the Greek people, but with the opening of the far
East by Alexander, and the development of the West under Roman rule,
Commerce had shifted its centres, and the Greeks had left their old
homes for new regions. Still keen on money, philosophy and art, they
thronged Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, and a thousand other cities.
The Petrie papyri have revealed a new feature of this emigration, for
the wills of the settlers often mention the names of their wives, and
these were Greek women and not Egyptian, as the names of their fathers
and homes prove.[5] Julius Caesar had restored Corinth a century after
Mummius destroyed it, and Athens was still as she had been and was to
be for centuries, the resort of every one who loved philosophy and
literature.[6] These were the two {79} cities of Greece; the rest were
reminders of what had been. In one of these forsaken places Plutarch
was born, and there he was content to live and die, a citizen and a
magistrate of Chaeronea in Boeotia.
[Sidenote: His family circle]
His family was an old one, long associated with Chaeronea. From
childhood his life was rooted in the past by the most natural and
delightful of all connexions. His great-grandfather, Nicarchus, used
to tell how his fellow-citizens were commandeered to carry wheat on
their own backs down to Anticyra for Antony's fleet--and were quickened
up with the whip as they went; and "then when they had taken one
consignment so, and the second was already done up into loads and
ready, the news came that Antony was defeated, and that saved the city;
for at once Antony's agents and soldiers fled, and they divided the
grain among themselves."[7] The grandfather, Lamprias, lived long and
saw the grandson a grown man. He appears often in Plutarch's _Table
Talk_--a bright old man and a lively talker--like incense, he said, he
was best when warmed up.[8] He thought poorly of the Jews for not
eating pork--a most righteous dish, he said.[9] He had tales of his
own about Antony, picked up long ago from one Philotas, who had been a
medical student in Alexandria and a friend of one of the royal cooks,
and eventually medical attendant to a son of Antony's by Fulvia.[10]
Plutarch's father was a quiet, sensible man, who maintained the
practice of sacrificing,[11] kept good horses,[12] knew his Homer, and
had something of his son's curious interest in odd problems. It is
perhaps an accident that Plutarch never mentions his name, but, though
he often speaks of him, it is always of "my father" or "our
father"--the lifelong and instinctive habit. There were also two
brothers. The witty and amiable Lamprias loved laughter and was an
expert in dancing--a useful man to put things right when the dance went
with more spirit than music.[13] Of Timon we hear less, but Plutarch
sets Timon's goodness of heart among the very best gifts Fortune has
sent him.[14] He emphasizes the bond that brothers have in the family
sacrifices, {80} ancestral rites, the common home and the common
grave.[15] That Plutarch always had friends, men of kindly nature and
intelligence, and some of them eminent, is not surprising. Other human
relationships, to be mentioned hereafter, completed his circle. He was
born, and grew up, and lived, in a network of love and sympathy, the
record of which is in all his books.
Plutarch was born about the year 50 A.D., and, when Nero went on tour
through Greece in 66 A.D., he was a student at Athens under
Ammonius.[16] He recalls that among his fellow-students was a
descendant of Themistocles, who bore his ancestor's name and still
enjoyed the honours granted to him and his posterity at Magnesia.[17]
Ammonius, whom he honoured and quoted throughout life, was a
Platonist[18] much interested in Mathematics.[19] He was a serious and
kindly teacher with a wide range of interests, not all speculative.
Plutarch records a discussion of dancing by "the good Ammonius."[20]
He was thrice "General" at Athens,[21] and had at any rate once the
experience of an excited mob shouting for him in the street, while he
supped with his friends indoors.
Plutarch had many interests in Athens, in its literature, its
philosophy and its ancient history--in its relics, too, for he speaks
of memorials of Phocion and Demosthenes still extant. But he lingers
especially over the wonders of Pericles and Phidias, "still fresh and
new and untouched by time, as if a spirit of eternal youth, a soul that
was ageless, were in the work of the artist."[22] Athens was a
conservative place, on the whole, and a great resort for strangers.
The Athenian love of talk is noticed by Luke with a touch of satire,
and Dio Chrysostom admitted that the Athenians fell short of the glory
of their city and their ancestors.[23] Yet men loved Athens.[24]
Aulus Gellius in memory of his years there, called his book of
collections _Attic Nights_, and here and there he speaks of student
life--"It was from AEgina to Piraeus that some of us who were
fellow-students, Greeks and Romans, were crossing in the same ship.
{81} It was night. The sea was calm. It was summertime and the sky
was clear and still. So we were sitting on the poop, all of us
together, with our eyes upon the shining stars," and fell to talking
about their names.[25]
[Sidenote: His travels]
When his student days were over, Plutarch saw something of the world.
He alludes to a visit to Alexandria,[26] but, though he was interested
in Egyptian religion, as we shall see, he does not speak of travels in
the country. He must have known European Greece well, but he had
little knowledge, it seems, of Asia Minor and little interest in it.
He went once on official business for his city to the pro-consul of
Illyricum--and had a useful lesson from his father who told him to say
"We" in his report, though his appointed colleague had failed to go
with him.[27] He twice went to Italy in the reigns of Vespasian and
Domitian, and he seems to have stayed for some time in Rome, making
friends in high places and giving lectures. Of the great Latin writers
of his day he mentions none, nor is he mentioned by them. But he tells
with pride how once Arulenus Rusticus had a letter from Domitian
brought him by a soldier in the middle of one of these lectures and
kept it unopened till the end.[28] The lectures were given in Greek.
He confesses to his friend Sossius Senecio that, owing to the pressure
of political business and the number of people who came about him for
philosophy, when he was in Rome, it was late indeed in life that he
attempted to learn Latin; and when he read Latin, it was the general
sense of a passage that helped him to the meaning of the words. The
niceties of the language he could not attempt, he says, though it would
have been a graceful and pleasant thing for one of more leisure and
fewer years.[29] That this confession is a true one is shown by the
scanty use he makes of Roman books in his biographies, by his want of
acquaintance with Latin literature, poetry and philosophy, and by
blunders in detail noted by his critics. _Sine patris_ is a poor
attempt at Latin grammar for a man of his learning, and in his life of
Lucullus he has turned the streets of Rome into villages through
inattention to the various meanings of _vicus_.[30]
{82}
But, as he says, he was a citizen of a small town, and he did not wish
to make it smaller,[31] and he went back to Chaeronea and obscurity. A
city he held to be an organism like a living being,[32] and he never
cared for a man on whom the claims of his city sat loosely--as they did
on the Stoics.[33] The world was full of Greek philosophers and
rhetoricians, lecturing and declaiming, to their great profit and
glory, but Plutarch was content to stay at home, to be magistrate and
priest. If men laughed to see him inspecting the measurement of tiles
and the carrying of cement and stones--"it is not for myself, I say,
that I am doing this but for my native-place."[34] This was when he
was Telearch--an office once held by Epameinondas, as he liked to
remember. Pliny's letters show that this official inspection of
municipal building operations by honest and capable men was terribly
needed. But Plutarch rose to higher dignities, and as Archon Eponymos
he had to preside over feasts and sacrifices.[35] He was also a
Boeotarch. The Roman Empire did not leave much political activity even
to the free cities, but Plutarch loyally accepted the new era as from
God, and found in it many blessings of peace and quiet, and some
opportunities still of serving his city. He held a priesthood at
Delphi, with some charge over the oracle and a stewardship at the
Pythian games. He loved Delphi, and its shrine and antiquities,[36]
and made the temple the scene of some of his best dialogues. "The kind
Apollo (_ho philos_)," he says, "seems to heal the questions of life,
and to resolve them, by the rules he gives to those who ask; but the
questions of thought he himself suggests to the philosophic
temperament, waking in the soul an appetite that will lead it to
truth."[37]
He does not seem to have gained much public renown, but he did not seek
it. The fame in his day was for the men of rhetoric, and he was a man
of letters. If he gave his time to municipal duties, he must have
spent the greater part of his days in reading and writing. He says
that a biographer needs a great many books and that as a rule many of
them will not be readily accessible--to have the abundance he requires,
he ought really to be in some "famous city where learning is loved and
{83} men are many"; though, he is careful to say, a man may be happy
and upright in a town that is "inglorious and humble."[38] He must have
read very widely, and he probably made good use of his stay in Rome.
In philosophy and literature it is quite probable that he used
hand-books of extracts, though this must not imply that he did not go
to the original works of the greater writers. But his main interest
lay in memoirs and travels. He had an instinct for all that was
characteristic, or curious, or out-of-the-way; and all sorts of casual
references show how such things attached themselves to his memory.
Discursive in his reading, as most men of letters seem to be, with a
quick eye for the animated scene, the striking figure, the strange
occurrence, he read, one feels, for enjoyment--he would add, no doubt,
for his own moral profit; indeed he says that he began his Biographies
for the advantage of others and found them to be much to his own.[39]
He was of course an inveterate moralist; but unlike others of the
class, he never forgets the things that have given him pleasure. They
crowd his pages in genial reminiscence and apt allusion. There is
always the quiet and leisurely air of one who has seen and has enjoyed,
and sees and enjoys again as he writes. It is this that has made his
Biographies live. They may at times exasperate the modern historian,
for he is not very systematic--delightful writers rarely are. He
rambles as he likes and avowedly passes the great things by and
treasures the little and characteristic. "I am not writing histories
but lives," he says, "and it is not necessarily in the famous action
that a man's excellence or failure is revealed. But some little
thing--a word or a jest--may often show character better than a battle
with its ten thousand slain."[40]
But, after all, it is the characteristic rather than the character that
interests him. He is not among the greatest who have drawn men, for he
lacks the mind and patience to go far below the surface to find the key
to the whole nature. When he has shown us one side of the hero, he
will present another and a very different one, and leave us to
reconcile them if we can. The contradictions remain contradictions,
and he wanders pleasantly on. The Lives of Pericles and Themistocles,
for instance, are little more than mere collectanea from sources widely
discrepant, and often quite worthless. Of the mind of Pericles he had
little {84} conception; he gathered up and pleasantly told what he had
read in books. He had too little of the critical instinct and took
things too easily to weigh what he quoted.
Above all, despite his "political" energy and enthusiasm, it was
impossible, for a Greek of his day to have the political insight that
only comes from life in a living state. How could the Telearch of
Chaeronea under the Roman Empire understand Pericles? Archbishop Trench
contrasts his enthusiasm about the gift of liberty to Greece by
Flamininus with the reflection of Wordsworth that it is a thing
which is not to be given
By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven.
Plutarch really did not know what liberty is; Wordsworth on the other
hand had taken part in the French Revolution, and watched with keen and
sympathetic eyes the march of events throughout a most living epoch.
It is worth noting that indirectly Plutarch contributed to the
disasters of that epoch, for his _Lycurgus_ had enormous influence with
Rousseau and his followers who took it for history. Here was a man who
made laws and constitutions in his own head and imposed them upon his
fellow-countrymen. So Plutarch wrote and believed, and so read and
believed thinking Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, like himself
subjects of a despotism and without political experience.
Besides Biographies he wrote moral treatises--some based on lectures,
others on conversation, others again little better than
note-books--pleasant and readable books, if the reader will forgive a
certain want of humour, and a tendency to ramble, and will surrender
his mind to the long and leisurely sentences, for Plutarch is not to be
hurried. Everything he wrote had some moral or religious aim. He was
a believer, in days of doubt and perplexity. The Epicurean was heard
at Delphi. Even in the second century, when the great, religious
revival was in full swing, Lucian wrote and found readers. Men brought
their difficulties to Plutarch and he went to meet them--ever glad to
do something for the ancestral faith. Nor was he less ready to
discuss--or record discussions of--questions much less serious. Was
the hen or the egg first? Does a varied diet or a single dish help the
digestion more? Why is fresh water better than salt for {85} washing
clothes? Which of Aphrodite's hands did Diomed wound?
It is always the same man, genial, garrulous, moral and sensible.
There are no theatricalities in his style--he is not a rhetorician even
on paper.[41] He discards the tricks of the school, adoxography,
epigram and, as a rule, paradox. His simplicity is his charm. He is
really interested in his subject whatever it is; and he believes in its
power of interesting other men, too much to think it worth while to
trick it out with extraneous prettinesses. Yet after he has discussed
his theme, with excursions into its literary antecedents and its moral
suggestions, we are not perhaps much nearer an explanation of the fact
in question,[42] nor always quite sure that it is a fact. Everything
interests him, but he is in no hurry to get at the bottom of anything;
just as in the _Lives_ he is occupied with everything except the depths
of his hero's personality. It remains that in his various works he has
given us an unexampled pageant of antiquity over a wide reach of time
and many lands, and always bright with the colour of life--the work of
a lover of men. "I can hardly do without Plutarch," wrote Montaigne;
"he is so universal and so full, that upon all occasions, and what
extravagant subject soever you take in hand, he will still intrude
himself into your business, and holds out to you a liberal and not to
be exhausted hand of riches and embellishments." What Shakespeare
thought of him is written in three great plays.[43]
[Sidenote: His wife and children]
But so far nothing has been said of Plutarch's own home. The lot of
the wife of a great preacher or moralist is not commonly envied; and
the tracts which Plutarch wrote upon historic women and their virtues,
and on the duties of married life, on diet and on the education of the
young, suggest that Timoxena must have lived in an atmosphere of high
moral elevation, with a wise saw and an ancient instance for every
occurrence of the day. But it is clear that he loved her, and his
affection for their four little boys must have been as plain to her as
to his readers--and his joy when, after long waiting, at last a little
girl was born. "You had longed for a daughter {86} after four sons,"
he writes to her, "and I was glad when she came and I could give her
your name." The little Timoxena lived for two years, and the letter of
consolation which Plutarch wrote her mother tells the story of her
short life. "She had by nature wonderful good temper and gentleness.
So responsive to affection, so generous was she that it was a pleasure
to see her tenderness. For she used to bid her nurse give the breast
to other children and not to them only, but even to toys and other
things in which she took delight. She was so loving that she wished
everything that gave her pleasure to share in the best of what she had.
I do not see, my dear wife, why things such as these, which gave us so
much happiness while she lived, should give us pain and trouble now
when we think of them."[44] He reminds her of the mysteries of
Dionysus of which they were both initiates. In language that recalls
Wordsworth's great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, he suggests
that old age dulls our impressions of the soul's former life, and that
their little one is gone from them, before she had time to fall in love
with life on earth. "And the truth about this is to be seen in the
ancient use and wont of our fathers," who did not observe the ordinary
sad rites of burial for little children, "as if they felt it not right
in the case of those who have passed to a better and diviner lot and
place.... And since to disbelieve them is harder than to believe, let
us comply with the laws in outward things, and let what is within be
yet more stainless, pure and holy."[45]
Two of the sons had previously died--the eldest Soclaros, and the
fourth, "our beautiful Chaeron"--the name is that of the traditional
founder of Chaeronea. The other two, Autobulus and Plutarch grew up.
Some of these names appear in the _Table Talk_, while others of his
works were written at the suggestion of his sons.
[Sidenote: His slaves]
From the family we pass to the slaves, and here, as we should expect,
Plutarch is an advocate of gentleness. In the tract _On Restraining
Anger_ a high and humane character is drawn in Fundanus, who had
successfully mastered a naturally passionate temper. It has been
thought that Plutarch was drawing {87} his own portrait over his
friend's name. A naive tendency to idealise his own virtues he
certainly shares with other moralists. Fundanus urges that, while all
the passions need care and practice if they are to be overcome, anger
is the failure to which we are most liable in the case of our slaves.
Our authority over them sets us in a slippery place; temper here has
nothing to check it, for here we are irresponsible and that is a
position of danger. A man's wife and his friends are too apt to call
gentleness to the slaves mere easy-going slackness (_atonian kai
rhathumian_). "I used to be provoked by such criticism myself against
my slaves. I was told they were going to pieces for want of
correction. Later on I realized that, first of all, it is better to
let them grow worse through my forbearance than by bitterness and anger
to pervert oneself for the reformation of others. And, further, I saw
that many of them, through not being punished, began to be ashamed of
being bad, and that forgiveness was more apt than punishment to be the
beginning of a change in them--and indeed that they would serve some
men more readily for a silent nod than they would others for blows and
brandings. So I persuaded myself that reasoning does better than
temper."[46] It will be remarked that Fundanus, or his recording
friend, does not here take the Stoic position that the slave is as much
a son of God as the master,[47] nor does he spare the slave for the
slave's sake but to overcome his own temper. So much for theory; but
men's conduct does not always square with their theories, and in life
we see men guilty of kind-heartedness and large-mindedness not at all
to be reconciled with the theories which they profess, when they
remember them.
It is curious that one of the few stories of Plutarch that come from
outside sources should concern this very tract and the punishment of a
slave. Gellius heard it from the philosopher Taurus after one of his
classes. Plutarch, Taurus said, had a worthless slave and ordered him
a flogging. The man loudly protested he had done no wrong, and at
last, under the stimulus of the lash, taunted his master with
inconsistency--what about the fine book on controlling Anger? he was
angry enough now. {88} "Then Plutarch, slowly and gently" asked what
signs of anger he showed in voice or colour or word? "My eyes, I
think, are not fierce; nor my face flushed; I am not shouting aloud;
there is no foam on my lip, no red in my cheek; I am saying nothing to
be ashamed of; nothing to regret; I am not excited nor gesticulating.
All these, perhaps you are unaware, are the signs of anger."[48] Then
turning to the man who was flogging the slave, he said, "In the
meantime, while I and he are debating, _you_ go on with your
business."[49] The story is generally accepted, and it is certainly
characteristic. The philosopher, feeling his pulse, as it were, to
make sure that he is not angry, while his slave is being lashed, is an
interesting and suggestive picture, which it is well to remember.
How long Plutarch lived we do not know. He refers to events of the
year 104 or 105, and in his _Solon_ he speaks of Athens and Plato each
having an unfinished masterpiece, so that he cannot have known of the
intention of the Emperor Hadrian to finish the temple of Zeus
Olympics.[50] All that this need imply is that the _Solon_ was written
before 125 A.D. As to his death, it is certainly interesting when we
recall how full of dreams and portents his Biographies are, to learn
from Artemidorus' great work on the Interpretation of Dreams (written
some forty years later) that Plutarch, when ill, dreamed that he was
ascending to heaven, supported by Hermes. Next day he was told that
this meant great happiness. "Shortly after he died, and this was what
his dream and the interpretation meant. For ascent to heaven means
destruction to a sick man, and the great happiness is a sign of
death."[51] Plutarch might well have accepted this himself.
Such was Plutarch's life--the life of a quiet and simple-minded Greek
gentleman, spent amid scenes where the past predominated over the
present,--_nullum sine nomine saxum_, where Antiquity claimed him for
her own by every right that it has ever had upon man. The land of his
fathers, the literature, the art, the philosophy, the faith, and the
reproduction of the {89} good old life in the pleasant
household[52]--everything conspired to make him what he was. We now
come to his significance in the story of the conflict of religions in
the Roman Empire.
[Sidenote: Plutarch not a philosopher]
A good deal has been written about Plutarch's philosophy. His works
are full of references to philosophy and philosophers, and he leaves us
in no doubt as to his counting himself a disciple of Plato; his
commentaries on Platonic doctrines give him a place in the long series
of Plato's expositors. But no one would expect a writer of the first
century to be a man of one allegiance, and Plutarch modifies the
teaching of Plato with elements from elsewhere. It has then been
debated whether he should, or should not, be called an Eclectic, but
not very profitably. The essential thing to note is that he is not
properly a philosopher at all, much as the statement would have
astonished him.[53] His real interest is elsewhere; and while he, like
the Greeks of his day, read and talked Philosophy interminably, as men
in later ages have read and talked Theology, it was not with the
philosophic spirit. Philosophy is not the mistress--rather, he avows,
the servant of something else; and that means that it is not
Philosophy. His test of philosophic thought and doctrine was
availability for the moral and religious life--a test which may or may
not be sound, as it is applied. But Plutarch was an avowed moralist,
didactic in every fibre; and everything he wrote betrays the essential
failure of the practical man and the moralist--impatience, the short
view. From his experience of human life in its manifold relations of
love and friendship, he came to the conclusion that "the ancient faith
of our fathers suffices." It is also plain that he was afraid of life
without religion. So far as a man of his training would--a man
familiar with the history of philosophy, but without patience or depth
enough to be clear in his own mind, he associated truth with his
religion; at all events it was "sufficient," for this he had found in
his course through the world. Definite upon this one central point, he
approached philosophy, but not with the true philosopher's purpose of
examining his experience, in accordance with the Platonic {90}
suggestion[54]; rather, with the more practical aim of profiting by
every serviceable thought or maxim which he could find. And he
certainly profited. If he started with preconceptions, which he
intended to keep, he enlarged and purified them--in a sense, we may
say, he adorned and enriched them. For whereever he found a moving or
suggestive idea, a high thought, he adopted it and found it a place in
his mind, though without inquiring too closely whether it had any right
to be there. In the end, it is very questionable whether the sum of
his ideas will hold together at all, if we go beyond the quick test of
a rather unexamined experience. We have already seen how he protested
against too curious examination. "There is no philosophy possible,"
wrote John Stuart Mill, "where fear of consequences is a stronger
principle than love of truth."
But to such criticisms a reply is sometimes suggested, which is best
made in the well-known words of Pascal--"the heart has its reasons
which the reason does not know."[55] The experience which led Plutarch
to his conclusion was real and sound. There is an evidential value in
a good father, in wife and children--even in a telearchy with its tiles
and cement--which is apt to be under-estimated. For with such elements
in life are linked passions and emotions, which are deeply bound up
with human nature, and rule us as instincts--blind reasons of the
heart. Like all other things they require study and criticism if they
are not to mislead, and those who most follow them are sometimes the
worst judges of their real significance. On the other hand the danger
of emotion, instinct and intuition as guides to truth is emphasized
enough,--it was emphasized by the Stoics; and a contribution is made to
human progress, when the value of these guides to truth is re-asserted,
even to the extent of obvious exaggeration, by some one, who, like
Plutarch, has had a life rich in various human experience. It remains
however, in Plutarch's case as in all such cases, the fundamental
question, whether the supposed testimony of instinct and intuition is
confirmed. If it is not confirmed, it may be taken to have been
misunderstood.
Keeping the whole life of this man in view, and realizing its
soundness, its sweetness and its worth, we must see what {91} he made
of the spiritual environment of man's life in general--laying stress on
what in his system, or his attempt at a system, is most significant,
and postponing criticism. It should be said once for all that a
general statement of Plutarch's views cannot be quite faithful, for he
was a man of many and wandering thoughts, and also something of an
Academic; and whatever he affirmed was with qualifications, which in a
short summary must be understood rather than repeated.
[Sidenote: The knowledge of God]
Our knowledge of God and of things divine comes to us, according to
Plutarch, from various sources. There is the consensus of mankind.
"Of all customs first and greatest is belief in gods. Lycurgus, Numa,
Ion and Deucalion, alike sanctified men, by prayers and oaths and
divinations and oracles bringing them into touch with the divine in
their hopes and fears. You might find communities without walls,
without letters, without kings, without houses, without money, with no
need of coinage, without acquaintance with theatres and gymnasia; but a
community without holy rite, without a god, that uses not prayer nor
oath, nor divination, nor sacrifice to win good or avert evil--no man
ever saw nor will see.... This is what holds all society together and
is the foundation and buttress of all law."[56]
This evidence from the consensus of mankind is brought to a higher
point in the body of myth inherited from the past, and in custom and
law--and is so far confirmed by reason. But we can go further and
appeal to the highest and best minds of antiquity, who in their own
highest moments of inspiration confirmed the common view. "In the
matter of belief in gods, and in general, our guides and teachers have
been the poets and the lawgivers, and, thirdly, the philosophers--all
alike laying down that there are gods, though differing among
themselves as to the number of the gods and their order, their nature
and function. Those of the philosophers are free from pain and death;
toil they know not, and are clean escaped the roaring surge of {92}
Acheron."[57] "It is likely that the word of ancient poets and
philosophers is true," he says.[58] Plutarch was a lover of poetry and
of literature, and he attributed to them a value as evidence to truth,
which is little intelligible to men who have not the same passion.[59]
Still the appeal to the poets in this connexion was very commonly made.
But men are not only dependent on the tradition of their fathers and
the inspiration of poets and philosophers, much as they should, and do,
love and honour these. The gods make themselves felt in many ways.
There was abundant evidence of this in many established cases of
theolepsy, enthusiasm (_entheos_) and possession. Again there were the
oracles, in which it was clear that gods communicated with men and
revealed truths not otherwise to be gained--a clear demonstration of
the spiritual. Men were "in anguish and fear lest Delphi should lose
its glory of three thousand years," but Delphi has not failed; for "the
language of the Pythian priestess, like the right line of the
Mathematicians--the shortest between two points, makes neither
declension nor winding, has neither double meaning nor ambiguity, but
goes straight to the truth. Though hard to believe and much tested,
she has never up to now been convicted of error,--on the contrary she
has filled the shrine with offerings and gifts from barbarians and
Greeks, and adorned it with the beautiful buildings of the
Amphictyons."[60] The revival of Delphi in Plutarch's day, "in so
short a time," was not man's doing--but "the God came here and inspired
the oracle with his divinity." And Delphi was not the only oracle.
The Stoics perhaps had pointed the way here with their teaching on
divination, but as it stands the argument (such as it is) is said to be
Plutarch's own.[61] Lastly in this connexion, the mysteries offered
evidence, but here he is reticent. "As to the mysteries, in which we
may receive the greatest manifestations and illuminations of the truth
{93} concerning daemons--like Herodotus, I say, 'Be it unspoken.'"[62]
[Sidenote: Absolute being]
Philosophy, poetry, tradition, oracles and mysteries[63] bring Plutarch
to belief in gods. "There are not Greek gods and barbarian, southern
or northern; but just as sun, moon, sky, earth and sea are common to
all men and have many names, so likewise it is one Reason that makes
all these things a cosmos; it is one Providence that cares for them,
with ancillary powers appointed to all things; while in different
people, different honours and names are given to them as customs vary.
Some use hallowed symbols that are faint, others symbols more clear, as
they guide their thought to the divine."[64] This one ultimate Reason
is described by Plutarch in terms borrowed from all the great teachers
who had spoken to the Greeks of God. The Demiurge, the One and
Absolute, the World-Soul and the rest all contribute features.[65]
"We," he says, "have really no share in Being, but every mortal nature,
set between becoming and perishing, offers but a show and a seeming of
itself, dim and insecure"; and he quotes the famous saying of
Heraclitus that it is impossible to descend into the same river twice,
and develops the idea of change in the individual. "No one remains,
nor is he one, but we become many as matter now gathers and now slips
away about one phantasm and a common form (or impress).... Sense
through ignorance of Being is deceived into thinking that the
appearance is. What then indeed is Being? The eternal, free from
becoming, free from perishing, for which no time brings change.... It
is even impious to say 'Was' or 'Will be' of Being; for these are the
varyings and passings and changings of that which by nature cannot
abide in Being. But God _is_, we must say, and that _not_ in time, but
in the aeon that knows no motion, time or variation, where is neither
former {94} nor latter, future nor past, older nor younger; but God is
one, and with one Now he has filled Always, and is alone therein the
one that Is."[66]
The symbol E at Delphi affords him a text here. It is one of "the kind
Apollo's" riddles to stimulate thought. Plutarch read it as Epsilon
and translates it "Thou Art," and from this as from the very name of
Apollo he draws a lesson as to the nature of real Being. The name
_A-poll-o_ means of itself the "Not-Many," and the symbol E is the
soul's address to God--God is, and God is one. Not every one
understands the nature of the divine; men confuse God with his
manifestations. "Those who suppose Apollo and the sun to be one and
the same, we should welcome and love for their pious speech, because
they attach the idea (_epinoia_) of God to that thing which they honour
most of all they know and crave for," but we should point them higher,
"bid them go upward and see the truth of their dream, the real Being
(_ten ousian_)." They may still honour the image--the visible sun.
But that a god should do the work of the sun, that there should be
changes and progressions in a god, that he should project fire from
himself and extend himself into land, sea, winds and animals, and into
all the strange experiences of animals and plants (as the Stoics
taught)--it is not holy even to hear such things mentioned. No, God is
not like Homer's child playing on the sand, making and unmaking; all
this belongs to another god, or rather daemon, set over nature with its
becomings and perishings.[67] To confuse gods and daemons is to make
disorder of everything.
It is here that the real interest of Plutarch's theology begins; for,
as Christian apologists were quick to point out, all the philosophers
were in the last resort monotheists. But the ultimate One God is by
common consent far from all direct contact with this or any other
universe of becoming and perishing. For it was questioned how many
universes (_kosmoi_) there might be[68]--some conjecturing there would
be one hundred and eighty-three--and if there were more than one, the
Stoics asked what became of Fate and Destiny, and would there not be
many "Zeuses or Zenes"? Why should there be? asked {95} Plutarch; why
not in each universe a guide and ruler with mind and reason, such as he
who in our universe is called lord and father of all? What hinders
that they should all be subjects of the Fate and Destiny that Zeus
controls; that he should appoint to each several one of them his own
realm, and the seeds and reasons of everything achieved in it; that he
should survey them, and they be responsible to him? That in the whole
scheme of things there should be ten universes, or fifty, or a hundred,
all governed by one Reason, all subordinate to one rule, is not
impossible. The Ultimate God rules through deputies.[69]
[Sidenote: The deputies of the supreme]
These deputies are Plutarch's chief concern in theology. The Stoics
and he were at one about the Supreme and Ultimate God, waiving the
matter of personality, which he asserted and which they left open. But
when the Stoics turned the deputy gods into natural forces, which we
might call laws of nature, or, still worse, into natural objects like
wine and grain,[70] Plutarch grew angry and denounced such teaching as
atheism. "We must not as it were turn them into queen-bees who can
never go out, nor keep them shut up in the prison of matter, or rather
packed up, as they (the Stoics) do, when they turn the gods into
conditions of the atmosphere and mingled forces of water {96} and fire,
and thus beget them with the universe and again burn them up with it;
they do not leave the gods at liberty and free to move, as if they were
charioteers or steersmen; no! like images they are nailed down, even
fused to their bases, when they are thus shut up into the material,
yes, and riveted to it, by being made partakers with it in destruction
and resolution and change."[71] This is one of many assertions of the
existence of ancillary gods, who are not metaphors, nor natural laws,
but personal rulers of provinces, which may very well be each a
universe, free and independent. "The true Zeus" has a far wider survey
than "the Homeric Zeus" who looked away from Troy to Thrace and the
Danube, nor does he contemplate a vacant infinite without, nor yet (as
some say) himself and nothing else. To judge from the motions of the
heavens, the divine really enjoys variety, and is glad to survey
movement, the actions of gods and men, the periods of the stars.[72]
[Sidenote: Daemons]
Thus under the Supreme is a hierarchy of heavenly powers or gods, and
again between them and men is another order of beings, the daemons.[73]
These, unlike the gods, are of mixed nature, for while the gods are
emanations or Logoi of the Supreme, the daemons have something of the
perishable. "Plato and Pythagoras and Xenocrates and Chrysippus,
following the ancient theologians, say that daemons are stronger than
men and far excel us in their natural endowment; but the divine element
in them is not unmixed nor undiluted, but partakes of the soul's nature
and the body's sense-perception, and is susceptive of pleasure and
pain, while the passions which attend these mutations affect them, some
of them more and others less. For there are among daemons, as among
men, differences of virtue and wickedness."[74] "It can be proved on
the testimony of wise and ancient witnesses that there are natures, as
it were on the frontiers of gods and men, that admit mortal passions
and inevitable changes, whom we may rightly, after the custom of {97}
our fathers, consider to be daemons, and so calling them, worship
them."[75] If the atmosphere were abolished between the earth and the
moon (for beyond air and moon it was generally supposed that the gods
lived[76]), the void would destroy the unity of the universe; and in
precisely the same way "those who do not leave us the race of daemons,
destroy all intercourse and contact between gods and men, by abolishing
what Plato called the interpretive and ancillary nature, or else they
compel us to make confusion and disorder of everything, by bringing God
in among mortal passions and mortal affairs, fetching him down for our
needs, as they say the witches in Thessaly do with the moon."[77] And
"he, who involves God in human needs, does not spare his majesty, nor
does he maintain the dignity and greatness of God's excellence."[78]
The Stoic teaching that men are "parts of God" makes God responsible
for every human act of wickedness and sin--the common weakness of every
pantheistic system.[79]
Thus the daemons serve two purposes in religious philosophy. They
safeguard the Absolute and the higher gods from contact with matter,
and they relieve the Author of Good from responsibility for evil. At
the same time they supply the means of that relation to the divine
which is essential for man's higher life--"passing on the prayers and
supplications of men thitherward, and thence bringing oracles and gifts
of blessing."[80] "They say well, who say that when Plato discovered
the element underlying qualities that are begotten--what nowadays they
call matter and nature--he set philosophers free from many great
difficulties; but to me they seem to solve more difficulties and
greater ones, who set the race of daemons between gods and {98} men and
discovered that in some such way it made a community of us and brought
us together, whether the theory belongs to the Magians who follow
Zoroaster, or is Thracian and comes from Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or
Phrygian."[81] Homer, he adds, still uses the terms "gods" and
"daemons" alike; "it was Hesiod who first clearly and distinctly set
forth the four classes of beings endowed with reason, gods, daemons,
heroes and finally men."
The daemons, then, are the agents of Providence, of the One Reason,
which orders the universe; they are the ministers of the divine care
for man. And here perhaps their mediation is helped by the fact that
the border lines between themselves and the gods above on the one hand,
and men below on the other, are not fixed and final. Some daemons, such
as Isis, Osiris, Herakles and Dionysos, have by their virtue risen to
be gods,[82] while their own numbers have been recruited from the souls
of good men.[83] "Souls which are delivered from becoming (_geneseos_)
and thenceforth have rest from the body, as being utterly set free, are
the daemons that care for men, as Hesiod says";[84] and, just as old
athletes enjoy watching and encouraging young ones, "so the daemons, who
through worth of soul are done with the conflicts of life," do not
despise what they have left behind, but are kindly minded to such as
strive for the same goal,--especially when they see them close upon
their hope, struggling and all but touching it. As in the case of a
shipwreck those on shore will run out into the waves to lend a hand to
the sailors they can reach (though if they are out on the sea, to watch
in silence is all that can be done), so the daemons help us "while the
affairs of life break over us (_baptixomenous hypo ton pragmaton_) and
we take one body after another as it were carriages." Above all they
help us if we strive of our own virtue to be saved and reach the
haven.[85]
But this is not all, for in his letter written to console Apollonios
Plutarch carries us further. There was, he says, a {99} man who lost
his only son--he was afraid, by poison. It perhaps adds confidence to
the story that Plutarch gives his name and home; he was Elysios of
Terina in Southern Italy. The precision is characteristic. Elysios
accordingly went to a _psychomanteion_, a shrine where the souls of the
dead might be consulted.[86] He duly sacrificed and went to sleep in
the temple. He saw in a dream his own father with a youth strikingly
like the dead son, and he was told that this was "the son's daemon,"[87]
and that the death had been natural, and right for the lad and for his
parents. Elsewhere Plutarch quotes the lines of Menander--
By each man standeth, from his natal hour,
A daemon, his kind mystagogue through life--[88]
but he prefers the view of Empedocles that there are two such beings in
attendance on each of us.[89] The classical instance of a guardian
spirit was the "daimonion" of Socrates, on which both Plutarch and
Apuleius wrote books.[90] Plutarch discusses many theories that had
been given of it, but hardly convinces the reader that he really knew
what Socrates meant.
In a later generation it was held that if proper means were taken the
guardian spirit would come visibly before a man's eyes. So Apuleius
held, and Porphyry records that when an Egyptian priest called on the
daemon of Plotinus to manifest himself in the temple of Isis (the only
"pure" spot the Egyptian {100} could find in Rome), there came not a
daemon but a god; so great a being was Plotinus.[91] Plutarch discusses
the question of such bodily appearances in connexion with the legend of
Numa and Egeria. He can believe that God would not disdain the society
of a specially good and holy man, but as for the idea that god or daemon
would have anything to do with a human body--"that would indeed require
some persuasion." "Yet the Egyptians plausibly say that it is not
impossible for the spirit of a god to have intercourse with a woman and
beget some beginnings of life," though Plutarch finds a difficulty in
such a union of unequals.[92]
Plutarch has comparatively little to say of visible appearances of
tutelary or other daemons. To what lengths of credulity men went in
this direction will be shown in a later chapter. Yet a guardian who
does not communicate in some way with the person he guards, and a
series of daemonic and divine powers content to be inert and silent,
would be futile; and in fact there was, Plutarch held, abundance of
communication between men and the powers above them. It was indeed one
of the main factors of his religion that man's life is intimately
related to the divine.
Plutarch, of course, could know nothing of the language in use to-day,
but it is clear that he was familiar with some or all of the phaenomena,
which in our times have received a vocabulary of their own, for the
moment very impressive. Psychopathic, auto-suggestion, telepathy, the
subliminal self--the words may tell us something; whether what they
tell us is verifiable, remains to be seen. Plutarch's account of the
facts, for the description of which this language has been invented,
seems even more fantastic to a modern reader, but it must be remembered
that he and his contemporaries were led to it at once by observation of
psychical phaenomena, still to be observed, and by philosophic
speculation on the transcendence of God. As a body of theories, the
ancient system holds together as well as most systems in the abstract.
It was not in theory that it broke down. Plutarch as usual presents it
with reservations.
{101}
[Sidenote: The mantic art]
The daemons are not slow to speak; it is we who are slow to hear. "In
truth we men recognize one another's thoughts, as it were feeling after
them in the dark by means of the voice. But the thoughts of the daemons
are luminous and shine for those who can see; and they need no words or
names, such as men use among themselves as symbols to see images and
pictures of what is thought, while, as for the things actually thought,
those they only know who have some peculiar and daemonic light. The
words of the daemons are borne through all things, but they sound only
for those who have the untroubled nature and the still soul--those, in
fact, whom we call holy and happy (_daimonious_)."[93] Most people
think the daemon only comes to men when they are asleep, but this is due
to their want of harmony. "The divine communicates immediately (_di
autou_) with few and but rarely; to most men it gives signs, from which
rises the so-called Mantic art"[94]--prophecy or soothsaying. All
souls have the "mantic" faculty--the capacity for receiving impressions
from daemons--though not in an equal degree. A daemon after all is, from
one point of view, merely a disembodied soul, and it may meet a soul
incorporated in a body; and thus, soul meeting soul, there are produced
"impressions of the future,"[95] for a voice is not needed to convey
thought.
But if a disembodied soul can foresee the future, why should not a soul
in a body also be able? In point of fact, the soul has this power, but
it is dulled by the body. Memory is a parallel gift. Some souls only
shake off the influence of the body in dreams, some at the approach of
death.[96] The mantic element is receptive of impressions and of
anticipations by means of feelings, and without reasoning process
(_asyllogistos_) it touches the future when it can get clear of the
present. The state, in which this occurs, is called "enthusiasm,"
god-possession--and into this the body will sometimes fall of itself,
and sometimes it is cast into it by some vapour or exhalation sent up
by the earth. This vapour or whatever it is (_to mantikon theuma kai
pneuma_) pervades the body, and produces {102} in the soul a
disposition, or combination (_krasin_), unfamiliar and strange, hard to
describe, but from what is said it may be divined. "Probably by heat
and diffusion it opens pores [or channels] whereby impressions of the
future may be received."[97] Such a vapour was found to issue from the
ground at Delphi--the accidental discovery of a shepherd, Coretas by
name, who spoke "words with God in them" (_phonas enthousiodeis_) under
its influence; and it was not till his words proved true that attention
was paid to the place and the vapour. There is the same sort of
relation between the soul and the mantic vapour as between the eye and
light.
But does not this vapour theory do away with the other theory that
divination is mediated to us by the gods through the daemons? Plutarch
cites Plato's objection to Anaxagoras who was "entangled in natural
causes" and lost sight of better causes and principles beyond them.
There are double causes for everything. The ancients said that all
things come from Zeus; those who came later, natural philosophers
(_physidoi_), on the contrary "wandered away from the fair and divine
principle," and made everything depend on bodies, impacts, changes and
combinations (_krasis_); and both miss something of the truth. "We do
not make Mantic either godless or void of reason, when we give it the
soul of man as its material, and the enthusiastic spirit and exhalation
as its tool or plectron. For, first, the earth that produces these
exhalations--and the sun, who gives the earth the power of combination
(_krasis_) and change, is by the tradition of our fathers a god; and
then we leave daemons installed as lords and warders and guards of this
combination (_kraseos_), now loosening and now tightening (as if it
were a harmony), taking away excessive ecstasy and confusion, and
gently and painlessly blending the motive power for those who use it.
So we shall not seem guilty of anything unreasonable or impossible."[98]
{103}
Plutarch gives an interesting account of a potion, which will produce
the same sort of effect. The Egyptians compound it in a very mystical
way of sixteen drugs, nearly all of which are fragrant, while the very
number sixteen as the square of a square has remarkable properties or
suggestions. The mixture is called Kyphi, and when inhaled it calms
the mind and reduces anxiety, and "that part of us which receives
impressions (_phantastikon_) and is susceptive of dreams, it rubs down
and cleans as if it were a mirror."[99]
The gods, he says, are our first and chiefest friends.[100] Not every
one indeed so thinks--"for see what Jews and Syrians think of the
gods!"[101] But Plutarch insists that there is no joy in life apart
from them. Epicureans may try to deliver us from the wrath of the
gods, but they do away with their kindness at the same moment; and
Plutarch holds it better that there should even be some morbid element
(_phathos_) of reverence and fear in our belief than that, in our
desire to avoid this, we should leave ourselves neither hope, nor
kindness, nor courage in prosperity, nor any recourse to the divine
when we are in trouble.[102] Superstition is a rheum that gathers in
the eye of faith, which we do well to remove, but not at the cost of
knocking the eye out or blinding it.[103] In any case, its
inconvenience is outweighed "ten thousand times" by the glad and joyous
hopefulness that counts all blessing as coming from the gods. And he
cites in proof of this that joy in temple-service, to which reference
has already been made. Those who abolish Providence need no further
punishment than to live without it.[104]
{104}
But the pleasures of faith are not only those of imagination or
emotion. For while the gods give us all blessings, there is none
better for man to receive or more awful for God to bestow than truth.
Other things God gives to men, mind and thought he shares with them,
for these are his attributes, and "I think that of God's own eternal
life the happiness lies in his knowledge being equal to all that comes;
for without knowledge and thought, immortality would be time and not
life."[105] The very name of Isis is etymologically connected with
knowing (_eidenai_); and the goal of her sacred rites is "knowledge of
the first and sovereign and intelligible, whom the goddess bids us seek
and find in her."[106] Her philosophy is "hidden for the most part in
myths, and in true tales (_logois_) that give dim visions and
revelations of truth."[107] Her temple at Sais bears the inscription:
"I am all that has been and is and shall be, and my veil no mortal yet
has lifted."[108] She is the goddess of "Ten Thousand Names."[109]
Plutarch connects with his belief in the gods "the great hypothesis" of
immortality. "It is one argument that at one and the same time
establishes the providence of God and the continuance of the human
soul, and you cannot do away with the one and leave the other."[110]
If we had nothing divine in us, nothing like God, if we faded like the
leaves (as Homer said), God would hardly give us so much thought, nor
would he, like women with their gardens of Adonis, tend and culture
"souls of a day," growing in the flesh which will admit no "strong root
of life." The dialogue, in which this is said, is supposed to have
taken place in Delphi, so Plutarch turns to Apollo. "Do you think
that, if Apollo knew that the souls of the dying perished at once,
blowing away like mist or smoke from their bodies, he would ordain so
many propitiations for the dead, and ask such great gifts and honours
for the departed--that he would cheat and humbug believers? For my
part, I will never let go the continuance of the soul, unless some
Herakles shall come and take away the Pythia's tripod and abolish and
destroy the oracle. For as long as so many oracles of this kind are
given even in our day, it is not holy to condemn the soul to {105}
death."[111] And Plutarch fortifies his conviction with stories of
oracles, and of men who had converse with daemons, with apocalypses and
revelations, among which are two notable Descents into Hades,[112] and
a curious account of daemons in the British Isles.[113]
The theory of daemons lent itself to the explanation of the origin of
evil, but speculation in this direction seems not to have appealed to
Plutarch. He uses bad daemons to explain the less pleasant phases of
paganism, as we shall see, but the question of evil he scarcely
touches. In his book on Isis and Osiris he discusses Typhon as the
evil element in nature, and refers with interest to the views of "the
Magian Zoroaster who, they say, lived about five hundred years before
the Trojan War." Zoroaster held that there were two divine beings, the
better being a god, Horomazes (Ormuzd), the other a daemon Areimanios
(Ahriman), the one most like to light of all sensible things, the other
to darkness and ignorance, "and between them is Mithras, for which
reason the Persians call Mithras the Mediator." But the hour of
Mithras was not yet come, and in all his writings Plutarch hardly
alludes to him more than half a dozen times.[114] It should be noted
that, whatever his interest in Eastern dualism with its Western
parallels, Plutarch does not abandon his belief in the One Ultimate
Good God.
This then in bare outline is a scheme of Plutarch's religion, though,
as already noted, the scheme is not of his own making, but is put
together from incidental utterances, all liable to qualification. It
is not the religion of a philosopher; and the qualifications, which
look like concessions to philosophic hesitation, mean less than they
suggest. They are entrenchments thrown up against philosophy. He is
an educated Greek who has read the philosophers, but he is at heart an
apologist--a defender of myth, ritual, mystery and polytheism. He has
{106} compromised where Plato challenged. His front (to carry out the
military metaphor) extends over a very long line--a line in places very
weakly supported, and the daemons form its centre. It is the daemons who
link men to the gods, and through them to the Supreme, making the
universe a unity; who keep the gods immune from contact with matter and
from the suggestion of evil; and what is more, they enable Plutarch to
defend the myths of Greek and Egyptian tradition from the attack of
philosopher and unbeliever. And this defence of myth was probably more
to him than the unity of the universe. Every kind of myth was finding
a home in the eventual Greek religion, many of them obscene, bestial
and cruel--revolting to the purity and the tenderness developing more
and more in the better minds of Greece. They could not well be
detached from the religion, so they had to be defended.
There are, for example, many elements in the myth of Isis and Osiris
that are disgusting. Plutarch recommends us first of all, by means of
the preconceptions supplied by Greek philosophy upon the nature of God,
to rule out what is objectionable as unworthy of God, but not to do
this too harshly. Myth after all is a sort of rainbow to the sun of
reason,[115] and should be received "in a holy and philosophic
spirit."[116] We must not suppose that this or the other story
"happened so and was actually done." Many things told of Isis and
Osiris, if they were supposed to have truly befallen "the blessed and
incorruptible nature" of the gods, would be "lawless and barbarous
fancy" which, as AEschylus says--
You must spit out and purify your mouth.[117]
But, all the same, myth must be handled tenderly and not in too
rationalistic a spirit--for that might be opening the doors to "the
atheist people." Euhemerus, by recklessly turning all the gods into
generals and admirals and kings of ancient days, has covered the whole
world with atheism,[118] and the Stoics, as we have seen, are not much
better, who turn the gods into their own gifts. No, we may handle myth
far too freely--"ah! yet {107} consider it again!" There are so many
possibilities of acceptance. And "in the rites of Isis there is
nothing unreasonable, nothing fictitious, nor anything introduced by
superstition, but some things have an ethical value, others a
historical or physical suggestion."[119]
[Sidenote: Evil daemons]
In the second place, if nothing can be done for the myth or the
rite--if it is really an extreme case--Plutarch falls back upon the
daemons. There are differences among them as there are among men, and
the elements of passion and unreason are strong in some of them; and
traces of these are to be found in rites and initiations and myths here
and there. Rituals in which there is the eating of raw flesh, or the
rending asunder of animals, fasting or beating of the breast, or again
the narration of obscene legends, are to be attributed to no god but to
evil daemons. How many such rituals survived, Plutarch does not say and
perhaps he did not know; but the Christian apologists were less
reticent, and Clement of Alexandria and Firmicus Maternus and the rest
have abundant evidence about them. Some of these rites, Plutarch says,
must have been practised to avert the attention of the daemons. "The
human sacrifices that used to be performed," could not have been
welcome to the gods, nor would kings and generals have been willing to
sacrifice their own children unless they had been appeasing the anger
of ugly, ill-tempered, and vengeful spirits, who would bring pestilence
and war upon a people till they obtained what they sought. "Moreover
as for all they say and sing in myth and hymn, of rapes and wanderings
of the gods, of their hiding, of their exile and of their servitude,
these are not the experiences of gods but of daemons." It is not right
to say that Apollo fought a dragon for the Delphic shrine.[120]
But some such tales were to be found in the finest literature of the
Greeks, and they were there told of the gods.[121] In reply to this,
one of Plutarch's characters quotes the narrative of a hermit by the
Red Sea.[122] This holy man conversed with men once a year, and the
rest of the time he consorted with {108} wandering nymphs and
daemons--"the most beautiful man I ever saw, and quite free from all
disease." He lived on a bitter fruit which he ate once a month. This
sage declared that the legends told of Dionysus and the rites performed
in his honour at Delphi really pertained to a daemon. "If we call some
daemons by the names that belong to gods,--no wonder," said this
stranger, "for a daemon is constantly called after the god, to whom he
is assigned, and from whom he has his honour and his power"--just as
men are called Athenaeus or Dionysius--and many of them have no sort of
title to the gods' names they bear.[123]
[Sidenote: Superstition]
With Philosophy so ready to be our mystagogue and to lead us into the
true knowledge of divine goodness, and with so helpful a theory to
explain away all that is offensive in traditional religion, faith ought
to be as easy as it is happy and wholesome. But there is another
danger beside Atheism--its exact opposite, superstition; and
here--apart from philosophical questions--lay the practical difficulty
of Plutarch's religion. He accepted almost every cult and mythology
which the ancient world had handed down; Polytheism knows no false
gods. But to guide one's course aright, between the true myth and the
depraved, to distinguish between the true and good god and the
pseudonymous daemon, was no easy task. The strange mass of Egyptian
misunderstandings was a testimony to this--some in their ignorance
thought the gods underwent the actual experience of the grain they gave
men to sow, just as untaught Greeks identified the gods with their
images; and some Egyptians worshipped the animals sacred to the gods;
and so religion was brought into contempt, while "the weak and
harmless" fell into unbounded superstition, and the shrewder and bolder
into "beastly and atheistic reflections."[124] And yet on second
thoughts Plutarch has a kindly apology for animal-worship.[125]
Plutarch himself wrote a tract on superstition in which some have found
a note of rhetoric or special pleading, for he decidedly gives the
atheist the superiority over the superstitious, {109} a view which
Amyot, his great translator, called dangerous, for "it is certain that
Superstition comes nearer the mean of true Religion than does
Atheism."[126] Perhaps it did in the sixteenth century, but in
Plutarch's day superstition was the real enemy to be crushed. Nearly
every superstitious practice he cites appears in other writers.
Superstition, the worst of all terrors, like all other terrors kills
action. It makes no truce with sleep, the refuge from other fears and
pains. It invents all kinds of strange practices, immersions in mud,
baptisms,[127] prostrations, shameful postures, outlandish worships.
He who fears "the gods of his fathers and his race, saviours, friends
and givers of good"--whom will he not fear? Superstition adds to the
dread of death "the thought of eternal woes." The atheist lays his
misfortunes down to accident and looks for remedies. The superstitious
makes all into judgments, "the strokes of God," and will have no
remedies lest he should seem "to fight against God" (_theomachein_).
"Leave me, Sir, to my punishment!" he cries, "me the impious, the
accursed, hated of Gods and daemons"--so he sits in rags and rolls in
the mud, confessing his sins and iniquities, how he ate or drank or
walked when the daemonion forbade. "Wretched man!" he says to himself,
"Providence ordains thy suffering; it is God's decree." The atheist
thinks there are no gods; the superstitious wishes there were none. It
is they who have invented the sacrifices of children that prevailed at
Carthage[128] and other things of the kind. If Typhons and Giants were
to drive out the gods and become our rulers, what worse could they ask?
A hint from the _Conjugal Precepts_ may be added here, as it suggests a
difficulty in practice. "The wife ought not to have men friends of her
own but to share her husband's; and the gods are our first and best
friends. So those gods whom the the husband acknowledges, the wife
ought to worship and own, and those alone, and keep the great door shut
on superfluous devotions and foreign superstitions. No god really
enjoys the {110} stolen rites of a woman in secret."[129] This is a
counsel of peace, but if "ugly, ill-tempered and vengeful spirits" seem
to the mother to threaten her children, who will decide what are
superfluous devotions?
The religion of Plutarch is a different thing from his morality. For
his ethics rest on an experience much more easy to analyse, and like
every elderly and genial person he has much that he can say of the
kindly duties of life. Every reader will own the beauty and the high
tone of much of his teaching, though some will feel that its centre is
the individual, and that it is pleasant rather than compulsive and
inevitable. After all nearly every religion has, somewhere or other,
what are called "good ethics," but the vital question is, "What else?"
In the last resort is ecstasy, independently of morality, the main
thing? Are words and acts holy as religious symbols which in a society
are obviously vicious? What propellent power lies behind the morals?
And where are truth and experience?
[Sidenote: Apology or truth?]
What then is to be said of Plutarch's religion? Here his experience
was not so readily intelligible, and every inherited and acquired
instinct within him conspired to make him cling to tradition and
authority as opposed to independent judgment. His philosophy was not
Plato's, in spite of much that he borrowed from Plato, for its motive
was not the love of truth. The stress he lays upon the pleasure of
believing shows that his ultimate canon is emotion. He does not really
wish to find truth on its own account, though he honestly would like
its support. He wishes to believe, and believe he will--_sit pro
ratione voluntas_. "There is something of the woman in Plutarch," says
Mr Lecky. Like men of this temperament in every age, he surrenders to
emotion, and emotion declines into sentimentalism. He cannot firmly
say that anything, with which religious feeling has ever been
associated, has ceased to be useful and has become false. He may talk
bravely of shutting the great door against Superstition, but
Superstition has many entrances--indeed, was indoors already.
We have only to look at his treatise on Isis and Osiris to see the
effects of compromise in religion. He will never take a firm stand;
there are always possibilities, explanations, parallels, suggestions,
symbolisms, by which he can escape from facing {111} definitely the
demand for a decisive reformation of religion. As a result, in spite
of the radiant mist of amiability, which he diffuses over these
Egyptian gods, till the old myths seem capable of every conceivable
interpretation, and everything a symbol of everything else, and all is
beautiful and holy--the foolish and indecent old stories remain a
definite and integral part of the religion, the animals are still
objects of worship and the image of Osiris stands in its original naked
obscenity.[130] And the Egyptian is not the only religion, for, as
Tertullian points out, the old rites are still practised every where!"
with unabated horrors, symbol or no symbol.[131] Plutarch emphasizes
the goodness and friendliness of the gods, but he leaves the evil
daemons in all their activity. Strange and awful sacrifices of the past
he deprecates, but he shows no reason why they should not continue.
God, he says, is hardly to be conceived by man's mind as in a dream;
and he thanks heaven for its peculiar grace that the oracles are
reviving in his day; he believes in necromancy, theolepsy and nearly
every other grotesque means of intercourse with gods and daemons. He
calls himself a Platonist; he is proud of the great literature of
Greece; but nearly all that we associate in religious thought with such
names as Xenophanes, Euripides and Plato, he gently waves aside on the
authority of Apollo. It raises the dignity of Seneca when we set
beside him this delightful man of letters, so full of charm, so warm
with the love of all that is beautiful, so closely knit to the tender
emotions of ancestral piety--and so unspeakably inferior in essential
truthfulness.
The ancient world rejected Seneca, as we have seen, and chose Plutarch.
If Plutarch was not the founder of Neo-Platonism, he was one of its
precursors and he showed the path. Down that path ancient religion
swung with deepening emotion into that strange medley of thought and
mystery, piety, magic and absurdity, which is called the New Platonism
and has nothing to do with Plato. Here and there some fine spirit
emerged into clearer air, and in some moment of ecstasy {112} achieved
"by a leap" some fleeting glimpse of Absolute Being, if there is such a
thing. But the mass of men remained below in a denser atmosphere,
prisoners of ignorance and of fancy--in an atmosphere not merely dark
but tainted, full of spiritual and intellectual death.