CRITICS OF MAGIC
The reader will remember how men in the Roman Empire condemned “magic”
but understood the word in a restricted and bad sense; how Pliny made
pretensions to complete freedom from all belief in magic and how
inconsistent was his actual attitude; how Seneca rejected magic only in
part, accepting divination in all its ramifications. This partial
rejection and partial acceptance of magic by the same individual seem
characteristic of the age of the Empire, as one would expect of a time
when magic was in a state of decay and science in a process of
development. It is true that this rejection of certain varieties of
magic often proceeded from the motive of morality rather than of
scepticism. Thus in Cicero’s _De Divinatione_, Quintus Cicero is
represented as closing his long argument in favor of the truth of
divination by solemnly asserting that he does not approve of sorcerers,
nor of those who prophesy for sake of gain, nor of the practice of
questioning spirits of the dead—which nevertheless, he says, was a
custom of his brother’s friend Appius.[193] But there were some men, we
may well believe, who would reject even those varieties of magic which
found a welcome in the minds of most educated people and in the general
mass of the thought and science of the age. Such cases we shall now
consider.
I. _Opponents of astrology._—Astrology, as we have seen, was very
popular. Yet there was some scepticism as to its truth beyond the
ridicule of satirists, who perhaps at bottom were themselves believers
in the art. Outside of Christian writers the three chief opponents of
astrology in the Roman world, judging by the works that have come down
to us, were Cicero—who lived before the Empire in the constitutional
sense can be said to have begun—in his _De Divinatione_; Favorinus, a
Gaul who resided at Rome in the reigns of Hadrian and Trajan, and was a
friend of Plutarch, and whose arguments against astrology have been
preserved only in the pages of Aulus Gellius; and Sextus Empiricus, a
physician who flourished at about the beginning of the third century of
our era.[194]
When, however, we come to examine both the men and their arguments, we
somehow do not find their assault upon astrology especially impressive
or satisfactory. First, as to the men. Gellius says that he heard
Favorinus make the speech the substance of which he repeats, but that he
is unable to state whether the philosopher really meant what he said or
argued merely in order to exercise and to display his genius.[195] There
was reason for this perplexity of Gellius, since Favorinus was fond of
writing such essays as Eulogies of Thersites and of Quartan Fever. There
is no particular reason for doubting Sextus’s seriousness, but, besides
being a medical man, he was a member of the sceptical school of
philosophy, a circumstance which warns one not to attribute too much
emphasis to his attack on astrology. Indeed, the attack occurs in a work
directed against learning in general, in which he assails grammarians,
rhetoricians, geometricians, arithmeticians, students of music,
logicians, “physicists,” and students of ethics as well as astrologers.
Cicero was not prone to such sweeping scepticism or sophistry, but the
force of his opposition to astrology is somewhat neutralized by the fact
that in his _Dream of Scipio_ he apparently attributes to planets
influence over man.
Now as to their arguments. We have spoken of their “attack on
astrology,” but in reality they can scarcely be said to attack astrology
as a whole. Indeed, it is the doctrines of the Chaldeans which Cicero
makes the object of his assault; he says nothing about astrology.
Favorinus will not even admit that he attacks the “disciplina
Chaldaeorum” in any true sense, but affirms that the Chaldeans were not
the authors of such theories at all, but that these have originated of
late among traveling fakirs who beg their bread by means of such deceits
and trickeries.[196] Some of the arguments of our sceptics are really
directed merely against the methods of interpreting the decrees of the
stars which they give us to understand that the astrologers employ. Such
objections might suffice to pierce the presumption of the ordinary
popular astrologer but they fall back blunted from the system of
Ptolemy.[197] If our sceptics thought that they were overthrowing the
astrology of the man of learning by such arguments, they labored under a
misapprehension, and in the eyes of one who really understood the art
must have cut the figure of ignoramuses making false charges against a
science of which they knew next to nothing.
As some of the arguments of our sceptics apply solely to defects in
method of which the best astrologers were not guilty, so others do not
deny the existence of sidereal influence over the life of man, but
contend that it is impossible to determine with essential accuracy what
will be the effects of that influence. Sextus, for example, seems to lay
most stress upon such points as the difficulty of exactly determining
the date of birth or of conception, or the precise moment when a star
passes into a new sign of the zodiac. He calls attention to the fact
that observers at varying altitudes, as well as in different localities,
would arrive at different conclusions, that differences in eyesight
would also affect results, and that it is hard to tell just when the sun
sets owing to refraction.[198] He almost becomes scholastic in the
minuteness of his objections, leaving us somewhat in doubt whether they
are to be taken as indicative of a spirit of captious criticism towards
an art the fundamental principles of which he tacitly recognized as
well-nigh incontestible, or whether he is simply trying to make his case
doubly sure by showing astrology to be impracticable as well as
unreasonable.
The main thing to be noted about Cicero, Favorinus and Sextus is that
they pay almost no attention to the general problem of sidereal
influence on terrestrial matter and life. It is to the denial of an
absolute, complete and immutable rule of the heavenly bodies over man
that they devote their energies. The premises of astrology they leave
pretty much alone. One might accept almost all their statements and
still believe in a large influence of the stars over our physical
characteristics and mental traits. The question of sidereal influence
upon lower animal life, vegetation and inert matter they avoid with a
sneer.[199]
II. _Cicero’s attack upon divination._—A more satisfactory example of
scepticism may be found in other chapters of the _De Divinatione_ than
those which assail the art of the Chaldeans. Moreover, although the
discussion is limited to the specific theme of divination, still that is
a subject which admits of very broad interpretation, and Cicero employs
some arguments which are capable of an even wider application and oppose
the hypotheses on which magic in general rests. He rejects divination as
unscientific. It is to such arguments that we shall confine our
attention. “Natural divination,” that is, predictions made under direct
divine inspiration without interposition of signs and portents, is not
magic and so the discussion of it will not concern us. Much less shall
we waste any time over such trite contentions against divination in
general as that there is no use of knowing predetermined events since
you cannot avoid them,[200] and that even if we can learn the future we
shall be happier not to do it.
_De Divinatione_ takes the form of a suppositious conversation, or
better, informal debate, between the author and his brother Quintus. In
the first book Quintus, in a rather rambling and leisurely fashion, and
with occasional repetition of ideas, upholds divination to the best of
his ability, citing many reported instances of successful recourse to it
in antiquity. In the second book Tully proceeds, with an air of somewhat
patronizing superiority, to pull entirely to pieces the arguments of his
brother, who assents with cheerful readiness to their demolition.
It is interesting to note that as Pliny’s magic was not his own, so
Cicero’s scepticism did not originate wholly with himself. As his other
philosophical writings draw their material largely from Greek
philosophy, so the second book of the _De Divinatione_ is supposed to
have been under considerable obligations to Clitomachus and
Panætius.[201] As for the future, the _De Divinatione_ was known in the
Middle Ages but its influence seems to have often been scarcely that
intended by its author.
One of the main points in the argument of Quintus had been his appeal to
the past. What race or state, he asked, has not believed in some form of
divination?
For before the revelation of philosophy, which was discovered
recently, public opinion had no doubt of the truth of this art; and
after philosophy came forth no philosopher of authority thought
otherwise. I have mentioned Pythagoras, Democritus, Socrates. I have
left out no one of the ancients save Xenophanes. I have added the Old
Academy, the Peripatetics, the Stoics. Epicurus alone dissented.[202]
When Tully’s turn to speak came, he rudely disturbed his brother’s
reliance upon tradition. “I think it not the part of a philosopher to
employ witnesses, who are only haply true, often purposely false and
deceiving. He ought to show why a thing is so by arguments and reasons,
not by events, especially those I cannot credit.”[203] “Antiquity,”
Cicero declared later, “has erred in many respects.”[204] The existence
of the art of divination in every age and nation had little effect upon
him. There is nothing, he asserted, so widespread as ignorance.[205]
Both brothers distinguished divination from the natural sciences and
assigned it a place by itself.[206] Quintus said that medical men,
pilots and farmers foresee many things, yet their arts are not
divination. “Not even Pherecydes, that famous Pythagorean master, who
prophesied an earthquake when he saw there was no water in a well
usually full, should be regarded as a diviner rather than a
physicist.”[207] In like manner Tully pointed out that the sick seek a
doctor, not a soothsayer, that diviners cannot instruct us in astronomy,
that no one consults them concerning philosophic problems or ethical
questions, that they can give us no light on the problems of the natural
universe, and that they are of no service in logic, dialectic or
political science.[208] Such would be the ideal condition, but in
practice, as we have seen much reason to believe, divination, at least
in the broad sense, was confused with science and with other subjects to
no small extent both under the Empire and in the Middle Ages. A doctor
might be something of a diviner as well: the astrologer was skilled in
astronomy; “mathematicus” came within a short time after Cicero’s own
day to be the word regularly used to denote a soothsayer;[209] Pierre du
Bois and Bodin found astrology an aid to political science.
Cicero, however, went further than the assertion that divination had no
connection with science and declared that it was contrary to science.
Such a figment, he scornfully affirmed, as that the heart will vanish
from a corpse for one man’s benefit and remain in the body to suit the
future of another, was not believed even by old wives now-a-days.[210]
Nay more, he asked, how can the heart vanish from the body? Surely it
must be there while life lasts, and can it disappear in an instant?
Believe me, you are abandoning the citadel of philosophy while you
defend its outposts. For in your effort to prove soothsaying true you
utterly pervert physiology.... For there will be something which
either springs from nothing or suddenly vanishes into nothingness.
What scientist ever said that? The soothsayers say so? Are they then,
do you think, to be trusted rather than scientists?[211]
Cicero does not think they are.
Also he shows that the methods of divination are not scientific. He
asks: Why did Calchas deduce from the devoured sparrow that the Trojan
war would last ten years rather than ten weeks or ten months?[212] He
points out that the art is conducted in different places according to
quite different rules of procedure, even to the extent that a favorable
omen in one locality is a sinister warning elsewhere.[213] In short,
whether he got his idea from the Greeks or not, he has come, long before
most men had reached that point, to have a clear idea of the essential
contradiction between science and magic. “Quid igitur,” he asks, “minus
a physicis dici debet quam quidquam certi significari rebus
incertis?”[214]
Besides this sharp separation of divination from science and besides his
rejection of tradition, a third creditable feature of Cicero’s book is
his question: What intimate connection, what bond of natural causality
can there be between the liver or heart or lung of a fat bull and the
divine eternal cause of things which rules the world?[215] He refuses to
believe in any extraordinary bonds of sympathy between things which, in
so far as our daily experience and our knowledge of nature’s workings
can inform us, have absolutely no connection. He appeals to the canons
of common sense. In fact, it is generally true throughout his treatise
that where he cannot disprove, he pooh-poohs superstition.
On the whole Cicero’s attitude probably represents the most enlightened
scepticism to be found in the ancient world. Though some of his
arguments seem weak, he deserves credit for having argued at all.
Against what they were pleased to call magic, men, especially during the
Middle Ages, were apt to rant rather than reason.
But, alas, unless we assume that the famous _Dream of Scipio_ is a
purely imaginative production, that the fantastic beliefs there set
forth (borrowed, no doubt, from Greek thought) are presented for
dramatic purposes alone and do not represent Cicero’s actual views, we
must grant that our sceptical Cicero believed in some magic after all.
For the _Dream_, despite its author’s animadversions against Chaldæan
astrology, speaks of Jupiter as a star wholesome and favorable to the
human race, of Mars as most unfavorable.[216] Also it calls the numbers
seven and eight perfect and speaks of their product as signifying the
fatal year in Scipio’s career.[217]