attempted to show in a separate dissertation) motives of high political
economy, suggested by the relative conditions of land and agriculture
in Thrace and Asia Minor, by comparison with decaying Italy; but a
paramount motive, we are satisfied, and the earliest motive, was the
incurable Pagan bigotry of Rome. Paganism for Rome, it ought to have
been remembered by historians, was a mere necessity of her Pagan origin.
Paganism was the fatal dowry of Rome from her inauguration; not only
she had once received a retaining fee on behalf of Paganism, in the
mysterious _Ancile_, supposed to have fallen from heaven, but she
actually preserved this bribe amongst her rarest jewels. She possessed a
palladium, such a national amulet or talisman as many Grecian or Asiatic
cities had once possessed--a _fatal_ guarantee to the prosperity of the
state. Even the Sibylline books, whatever ravages they might be supposed
by the intelligent to have sustained in a lapse of centuries, were
popularly believed, in the latest period of the Western empire, to exist
as so many charters of supremacy. Jupiter himself in Rome had put on a
peculiar Roman physiognomy, which associated him with the destinies of
the gigantic state. Above all, the solemn augury of the twelve vultures,
so memorably passed downwards from the days of Romulus, through
generations as yet uncertain of the event, and, therefore,
chronologically incapable of participation in any fraud--an augury
_always_ explained as promising twelve centuries of supremacy to Rome,
from the year 748 or 750 B. C.--coöperated with the endless other Pagan
superstitions in anchoring the whole Pantheon to the Capitol and
Mount Palatine. So long as Rome had a worldly hope surviving, it was
impossible for her to forget the Vestal Virgins, the College of Augurs,
or the indispensable office and the _indefeasible_ privileges of the
_Pontifex Maximus_, which (though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work,
for many years sought to fight off the evidences for that fact,
yet afterwards partially he confessed his error) actually
availed--historically and _medallically_ can be demonstrated to
have availed--for the temptation of Christian Cæsars into collusive
adulteries with heathenism. Here, for instance, came an emperor that
timidly recorded his scruples--feebly protested, but gave way at once
as to an ugly necessity. There came another, more deeply religious, or
constitutionally more bold, who fought long and strenuously against
the compromise. "What! should he, the delegate of God, and the
standard-bearer of the true religion, proclaim himself officially head
of the false? No; that was too much for his conscience." But the fatal
meshes of prescription, of superstitions ancient and gloomy, gathered
around him; he heard that he was no perfect Cæsar without this office,
and eventually the very same reason which had obliged Augustus not to
suppress, but himself to assume, the tribunitian office, namely, that
it was a popular mode of leaving democratic organs untouched, whilst he
neutralized their democratic functions by absorbing them into his own,
availed to overthrow all Christian scruples of conscience, even in the
most Christian of the Cæsars, many years _after_ Constantine. The pious
Theodosius found himself literally compelled to become a Pagan pontiff.
A _bon mot_ [Footnote: "A _bon mot_."--This was built on the accident
that a certain _Maximus_ stood in notorious circumstances of rivalship
to the emperor [Theodosius]: and the bitterness of the jest took this
turn that if the emperor should persist in declining the office of
_Pont. _Maximus_, in that case, "erit Pontifex Maximus;" that is,
Maximus (the secret aspirant) shall be our Pontifex. _So_ the words
sounded to those in the secret [_synetoisi_], whilst to others they
seemed to have no meaning at all.] circulating amongst the people warned
him that, if he left the cycle of imperial powers incomplete, if he
suffered the galvanic battery to remain imperfect in its circuit of
links, pretty soon he would tempt treason to show its head, and would
even for the present find but an imperfect obedience. Reluctantly
therefore the emperor gave way: and perhaps soothed his fretting
conscience, by offering to heaven, as a penitential litany, that same
petition which Naaman the Syrian offered to the prophet Elijah as a
reason for a personal dispensation. Hardly more possible it was that a
camel should go through the eye of a needle, than that a Roman senator
should forswear those inveterate superstitions with which his own system
of aristocracy had been riveted for better and worse. As soon would the
Venetian senator, the gloomy "magnifico" of St. Mark, have consented to
Renounce the annual wedding of his republic with the Adriatic, as
the Roman noble, whether senator, or senator elect, or of senatorial
descent, would have dissevered his own solitary stem from the great
forest of his ancestral order; and this he must have done by doubting
the legend of Jupiter Stator, or by withdrawing his allegiance from
Jupiter Capitolinus. The Roman people universally became agitated
towards the opening of the fifth century after Christ, when their own
twelfth century was drawing near to its completion. Rome had now reached
the very condition of Dr. Faustus--having originally received a known
term of prosperity from some dark power; but at length hearing the
hours, one after the other, tolling solemnly from the church-tower, as
they exhausted the waning minutes of the very final day marked down in
the contract. The more profound was the faith of Rome in the flight of
the twelve vultures, once so glorious, now so sad, an augury, the
deeper was the depression as the last hour drew near that had been
so mysteriously prefigured. The reckoning, indeed, of chronology was
slightly uncertain. The Varronian account varied from others. But these
trivial differences might tell as easily against them as for them, and
did but strengthen the universal agitation. Alaric, in the opening of
the fifth century [about 4l0]--Attila, near the middle [445]--already
seemed prelusive earthquakes running before the final earthquake. And
Christianity, during this era of public alarm, was so far from assuming
a more winning aspect to Roman eyes, as a religion promising to survive
their own, that already, under that character of reversionary triumph,
this gracious religion seemed a public insult, and this meek religion a
perpetual defiance; pretty much as a king sees with scowling eyes, when
revealed to him in some glass of Cornelius Agrippa, the portraits of
that mysterious house which is destined to supplant his own.
Now, from this condition of feeling at Rome, it is apparent not only as
a fact that Constantine did not overthrow Paganism, but as a possibility
that he could not have overthrown it. In the fierce conflict he would
probably have been overthrown himself; and, even for so much as he _did_
accomplish, it was well that he attempted it at a distance from Rome.
So profoundly, therefore, are the fathers in error, that instead of that
instant victory which they ascribe to Christianity, even Constantine's
revolution was merely local. Nearly five centuries, in fact, it cost,
and not three, to Christianize even the entire Mediterranean empire of
Rome; and the premature effort of Constantine ought to be regarded as
a mere _fluctus decumanus_ in the continuous advance of the new
religion,--one of those ambitious billows which sometimes run far ahead
of their fellows in a tide steadily gaining ground, but which inevitably
recede in the next moment, marking only the strength of that tendency
which sooner or later is destined to fill the whole capacity of the
shore.
To have proved, therefore, if it could have been proved, that
Christianity had been fatal in the way of a magical charm to the Oracles
of the world, would have proved nothing but a perplexing inconsistency,
so long as the fathers were obliged to confess that Paganism itself,
as a gross total, as the parent superstition (sure to reproduce Oracles
faster than they could be extinguished), had been suffered to exist
for many centuries concurrently with Christianity, and had finally been
overthrown by the simple majesty of truth that courts the light, as
matched against falsehood that shuns it.
As applied, therefore, to the first problem in the whole question upon
Oracles,--_When, and under what circumstances, did they cease?_--the
_Dissertatio_ of Van Dale, and the _Histoire des Oracles_ by Fontenelle,
are irresistible, though not written in a proper spirit of gravity,
nor making use of that indispensable argument which we have ourselves
derived from the analogy of all scriptural precedents.
But the case is far otherwise as concerns the second problem,--_How,
and by what machinery, did the Oracles, in the days of their prosperity,
conduct their elaborate ministrations?_ To this problem no justice at
all is done by the school of Van Dale. A spirit of mockery and banter is
ill applied to questions that at any time have been centres of fear, and
hope, and mysterious awe, to long trains of human generations. And
the coarse assumption of systematic fraud in the Oracles is neither
satisfactory to the understanding, as failing to meet many important
aspects of the case, nor is it at all countenanced by the kind of
evidences that have been hitherto alleged. The fathers had taken the
course--vulgar and superstitious--of explaining everything sagacious,
everything true, everything that by possibility could seem to argue
prophetic functions in the greater Oracles, as the product indeed of
inspiration, but of inspiration emanating from an evil spirit. This
hypothesis of a diabolic inspiration is rejected by the school of Van
Dale. Both the power of at all looking into the future, and the fancied
source of that power, are dismissed as contemptible chimeras. Upon
the first of these dark pretensions we shall have occasion to speak at
another point. Upon the other we agree with Van Dale. Yet, even here,
the spirit of triumphant ridicule, applied to questions not wholly
within the competence of human resources, is displeasing in grave
discussions: grave they are by necessity of their relations, howsoever
momentarily disfigured by levity and the unseasonable grimaces of
self-sufficient "philosophy." This temper of mind is already advertised
from the first to the observing reader of Van Dale by the character
of his engraved frontispiece. Men are there exhibited in the act of
juggling, and still more odiously as exulting over their juggleries
by gestures of the basest collusion, such as protruding the tongue,
inflating one cheek by means of the tongue, grinning, and winking
obliquely. These vilenesses are so ignoble, that for his own sake a man
of honor (whether as a writer or a reader) shrinks from dealing with any
case to which they do really adhere; such a case belongs to the province
of police courts, not of literature. But, in the ancient apparatus
of the Oracles although frauds and _espionage_ did certainly form an
occasional resource, the artifices employed were rarely illiberal in
their mode, and always ennobled by their motive. As to the mode, the
Oracles had fortunately no temptation to descend into any tricks that
could look like "thimble-rigging;" and as to the motive, it will be
seen that this could never be dissociated from some regard to public or
patriotic objects in the first place; to which if any secondary interest
were occasionally attached, this could rarely descend so low as even
to an ordinary purpose of gossiping curiosity, but never to a base,
mercenary purpose of fraud. Our views, however, on this phasis of the
question, will speedily speak for themselves.
Meantime, pausing for one moment to glance at the hypothesis of the
fathers, we confess ourselves to be scandalized by its unnecessary
plunge into the ignoble. Many sincere Christian believers have doubted
altogether of any evil spirits, as existences, warranted by Scripture,
that is, as beings whose principle was evil ["evil, be thou my good:" P.
L.]; others, again, believing in the possibility that spiritual beings
had been (in ways unintelligible to us) seduced from their state of
perfection by temptations analogous to those which had seduced man,
acquiesced in the notion of spirits tainted with evil, but not therefore
(any more than man himself) essentially or causelessly malignant. Now,
it is well known, and, amongst others, Eichhorn _(Einletung in das alte
Testament) has noticed the fact, which will be obvious, on a little
reflection, to any even unlearned student of the Scriptures who can
throw his memory back through a real familiarity with those records,
that the Jews derived their obstinate notions of fiends and demoniacal
possessions (as accounting even for bodily affections) entirely from
their Chaldean captivity. Not before that great event in Jewish history,
and, therefore, in consequence of that event, were the Jews inoculated
with this Babylonian, Persian, and Median superstition. Now, if Eichhorn
and others are right, it follows that the elder Scriptures, as they
ascend more and more into the purer atmosphere of untainted Hebrew
creeds, ought to exhibit an increasing freedom from all these modes of
demoniacal agency. And accordingly so we find it. Messengers of God are
often concerned in the early records of Moses; but it is not until we
come down to Post-Mosaical records, Job, for example (though that book
is doubtful as to its chronology), and the chronicles of the Jewish
kings (_Judaic or Israelitish)_, that we first find any allusion
to malignant spirits. As against Eichhorn, however, though readily
conceding that the agency is not often recognized, we would beg leave
to notice, that there is a three-fold agency of evil, relatively to
man, ascribed to certain spirits in the elder Scriptures, namely: 1,
of _misleading_ (as in the case of the Israelitish king seduced into a
fatal battle by a falsehood originating with a spiritual being); 2,
of _temptation_; 3, of calumnious _accusation_ directed against absent
parties. It is not absolutely an untenable hypothesis, that these
functions of malignity to man, as at first sight they appear, may be in
fact reconcilable with the general functions of a being not malignant,
and not evil in any sense, but simply obedient to superior commands:
for none of us supposes, of course, that a "destroying angel" must be
an evil spirit, though sometimes appearing in a dreadful relation of
hostility to _all_ parties (as in the case of David's punishment). But,
waiving all these speculations, one thing is apparent, that the negative
allowance, the toleration granted to these later Jewish modes of belief
by our Saviour, can no more be urged as arguing any positive sanction to
such existences (to _demons_ in the bad sense), than his toleration of
Jewish errors and conceits in questions of science. Once for all, it was
no purpose of his mission to expose errors in matters of pure curiosity,
and in speculations _not_ moral, but exclusively intellectual. And,
besides the ordinary argument for rejecting such topics of teaching,
as not necessarily belonging to any known purpose of the Christian
revelation (which argument is merely negative, and still leaves it
open to have regarded such communications as a possible _extra_
condescension, as a _lucro ponatur_, not absolutely to have been
expected, but if granted as all the more meritorious in Christianity),
we privately are aware of an argument, far more rigorous and coërcive,
which will place this question upon quite another basis. This argument,
which, in a proper situation, and with ampler disposable space, we
shall expose in its strength, will show that it was not that neutral
possibility which men have supposed, for the founder of our faith to
have granted light, casually or indirectly, upon questions of curiosity.
One sole revelation was made by Him, as to the nature of the intercourse
and the relations in another world; but _that_ was for the purpose of
forestalling a vile, unspiritual notion, already current amongst the
childish Jews, and sure to propagate itself even to our own days, unless
an utter _averruncatio_ were applied to it. This was its purpose, and
not any purpose of gratification to unhallowed curiosity; we speak
of the question about the reversionary rights of marriage in a future
state. This memorable case, by the way, sufficiently exposes the gross,
infantine sensualism of the Jewish mind at that period, and throws an
indirect light on their creed as to demons. With this one exception,
standing by itself and self-explained, there never was a gleam of
revelation granted by any authorized prophet to speculative curiosity,
whether pointing to science, or to the mysteries of the spiritual world.
And the true argument on this subject would show that this abstinence
was not accidental; was not merely on a motive of convenience, as
evading any needless extension of labors in teaching, which is the
furthest point attained by any existing argument; but, on the
contrary, that there was an obligation of consistency, stern, absolute,
insurmountable, which made it _essential_ to withhold such revelations;
and that had but one such condescension, even to a harmless curiosity,
been conceded, there would have arisen instantly a rent--a fracture--a
schism--in another vast and collateral purpose of Providence.
From all considerations of the Jewish condition at the era of
Christianity, the fathers might have seen the license for doubt as to
the notions of a diabolic inspiration. Why must the prompting spirits,
if really assumed to be the efficient agency behind the Oracles, be
figured as holding any relation at all to moral good or moral evil?
Why not allow of demoniac powers, excelling man in beauty, power,
prescience, but otherwise neutral as to all purposes of man's moral
nature? Or, if revolting angels were assumed, why degrade their agency
in so vulgar and unnecessary a way, by adopting the vilest relation to
man which can be imputed to a demon--his function of secret _calumnious
accusation_; from which idea, lowering the Miltonic "archangel ruined"
into the assessor of thieves, as a private slanderer (_diabolos_),
proceeds, through the intermediate Italian _diavolo_, our own grotesque
vulgarism of the _devil_; [Footnote: But, says an unlearned man, Christ
uses the word _devil_. Not so. The word used is _diabolos_. Translate v.
g. "The accuser and his angels."] an idea which must ever be injurious,
in common with all base conceptions, to a grand and spiritual religion.
If the Oracles _were_ supported by mysterious agencies of spiritual
beings, it was still open to have distinguished between mere modes of
power or of intelligence, and modes of illimitable evil. The _results_
of the Oracles were beneficent: that was all which the fathers had any
right to know: and their unwarranted introduction of wicked or rebel
angels was as much a surreptitious fraud upon their audiences, as their
neglect to distinguish between the conditions of an extinct superstition
and a superstition dormant or decaying.
To leave the fathers, and to state our own views on the final question
argued by Van Dale--"What was the essential machinery by which the
Oracles moved?"--we shall inquire,
1. What was the relation of the Oracles (and we would wish to be
understood as speaking particularly of the Delphic Oracle) to the
credulity of Greece?
2. What was the relation of that same Oracle to the absolute truth?
3. What was its relation to the public welfare of Greece?
Into this trisection we shall decompose the coarse unity of the question
presented by Van Dale and his Vandals, as though the one sole "issue,"
that could be sent down for trial before a jury, were the likelihoods of
fraud and gross swindling. It is not with the deceptions or collusions
of the Oracles, as mere matters of fact, that we in this age are
primarily concerned, but with those deceptions as they affected the
contemporary people of Greece. It is important to know whether the
general faith of Greece in the mysterious pretensions of Oracles were
unsettled or disturbed by the several agencies at work that naturally
tended to rouse suspicion; such, for instance, as these four which
follow:--1. Eminent instances of scepticism with regard to the oracular
powers, from time to time circulating through Greece in the shape
of _bon mots_; or, 2, which silently amounted to the same virtual
expression of distrust, Refusals (often more speciously wearing the name
of _neglects_) to consult the proper Oracle on some hazardous enterprize
of general notoriety and interest; 3. Cases of direct failure in
the event, as understood to have been predicted by the Oracle, not
unfrequently accompanied by tragical catastrophes to the parties misled
by this erroneous construction of the Oracle; 4. (which is, perhaps, the
climax of the exposures possible under the superstitions of Paganism),
A public detection of known oracular temples doing business on a
considerable scale, as accomplices with felons.
Modern appraisers of the oracular establishments are too commonly in
all moral senses anachronists. We hear it alleged with some plausibility
against Southey's portrait of Don Roderick, though otherwise conceived
in a spirit proper for bringing out the whole sentiment of his pathetic
situation, that the king is too Protestant, and too evangelical, after
the model of 1800, in his modes of penitential piety. The poet, in
short, reflected back upon one who was too certain in the eighth century
to have been the victim of dark popish superstitions, his own pure and
enlightened faith. But the anachronistic spirit in which modern sceptics
react upon the Pagan Oracles is not so elevating as the English poet's.
Southey reflected his own superiority upon the Gothic prince of Spain.
But the sceptics reflect their own vulgar habits of mechanic and
compendious office business upon the large institutions of the
ancient Oracles. To satisfy them, the Oracle should resemble a modern
coach-office--where undoubtedly you would suspect fraud, if the question
"How far to Derby?" were answered evasively, or if the grounds of choice
between two roads were expressed enigmatically. But the _to loxon_,
or mysterious indirectness of the Oracle, was calculated far more to
support the imaginative grandeur of the unseen God, and was designed to
do so, than to relieve the individual suitor in a perplexity seldom of
any capital importance. In this way every oracular answer operated upon
the local Grecian neighborhood in which it circulated as one of the
impulses which, from time to time, renewed the sense of a mysterious
involution in the invisible powers, as though they were incapable
of direct correspondence or parallelism with the monotony and slight
compass of human ideas. As the symbolic dancers of the ancients,
who narrated an elaborate story, _Saltando Hecubam_, or _Saltando
Loadamiam_, interwove the passion of the advancing incidents into the
intricacies of the figure--something in the same way, it was understood
by all men, that the Oracle did not so much evade the difficulty by
a dark form of words, as he revealed his own hieroglyphic nature. All
prophets, the true equally with the false, have felt the instinct for
surrounding themselves with the majesty of darkness. And in a religion
like the Pagan, so deplorably meagre and starved as to most of the
draperies connected with the mysterious and sublime, we must not seek to
diminish its already scanty wardrobe. But let us pass from speculation
to illustrative anecdotes. We have imagined several cases which might
seem fitted for giving a shock to the general Pagan confidence in
Oracles. Let us review them.
The first is the case of any memorable scepticism published in a pointed
or witty form; as Demosthenes avowed his suspicions "that the Oracle was
_Philippizing_." This was about 344 years B.C. Exactly one hundred years
earlier, in the 444th year B.C., or the _locus_ of Pericles, Herodotus
(then forty years old) is universally supposed to have read, which for
_him_ was publishing, his history. In this work two insinuations of the
same kind occur: during the invasion of Darius the Mede (about 490 B.C.)
the Oracle was charged with _Medizing_; and in the previous period of
Pisistratus (about 555 B.C.) the Oracle had been almost convicted
of _Alcmonidizing_. The Oracle concerned was the same,--namely, the
Delphic,--in all three cases. In the case of Darius, fear was the ruling
passion; in the earlier case, a near self-interest, but not in a
base sense selfish. The Alemonidae, an Athenian house hostile to
Pisistratus, being exceedingly rich, had engaged to rebuild the ruined
temple of the Oracle; and had fulfilled their promise with a munificence
outrunning the letter of their professions, particularly with regard to
the quality of marble used in facing or "veneering" the front elevation.
Now, these sententious and rather witty expressions gave wings and
buoyancy to the public suspicions, so as to make them fly from one end
of Greece to the other; and they continued in lively remembrance for
centuries. Our answer we reserve until we have illustrated the other
heads.
In the second case, namely, that of sceptical slights shown to the
Oracle, there are some memorable precedents on record. Everybody knows
the ridiculous stratagem of Crsus, the Lydian king, for trying the
powers of the Oracle, by a monstrous culinary arrangement of pots and
pans, known (as he fancied) only to himself. Generally the course of
the Delphic Oracle under similar insults was--warmly to resent them. But
Crsus, as a king, a foreigner, and a suitor of unexampled munificence,
was privileged, especially because the ministers of the Delphic temple
had doubtless found it easy to extract the secret by bribery from
some one of the royal mission. A case, however, much more interesting,
because arising between two leading states of Greece, and in the
century subsequent to the ruder age of Crsus (who was about coeval with
Pisistratus, 555 B. C.), is reported by Xenophon of the Lacedæmonians
and Thebans. They concluded a treaty of peace without any communication,
not so much as a civil notification to the Oracle; _to men Teo ouden
ekoinosanto, hopis hæ eirpnp genoito_--to the god (the Delphic god) they
made no communication at all as to the terms of the peace; _outoi de
ebeleuonto_, but they personally pursued their negotiations in private.
That this was a very extraordinary reach of presumption, is evident from
the care of Xenophon in bringing it before his readers; it is probable,
indeed, that neither of the high contracting parties had really acted
in a spirit of religious indifference, though it is remarkable of
the Spartans, that of all Greek tribes they were the most facile and
numerous delinquents under all varieties of foreign temptations to
revolt from their hereditary allegiance--a fact which measures the
degree of unnatural constraint and tension which the Spartan usages
involved; but in this case we rather account for the public outrage to
religion and universal usage, by a strong political jealousy lest the
provisions of the treaty should transpire prematurely amongst states
adjacent to Botia.