_Plutarch’s Theology—His conception of God not a pure
metaphysical abstraction, his presentment of it not
dogmatic—General acceptance of the attributes recognized
by Greek philosophy as essential to the idea of God—God
as UNITY, ABSOLUTE BEING, ETERNITY—God as INTELLIGENCE:
PERSONALITY of Plutarch’s God intimately associated with
his Intelligence—God’s Intelligence brings him into contact
with humanity: by it he knows the events of the Future and
the secrets of the human heart—From his knowledge springs
his Providence—God as Father and Judge—the DE SERA NUMINIS
VINDICTA—Immortality of the Soul._
It will readily be understood that on no question of Religion is Plutarch
more willing to act as “Arbitrator” than on that concerned with the
Nature and Attributes of the Deity. He knows and, as we have seen,
recognizes to the full the discordant nature of the elements which, by
force of circumstances, have been driven into some kind of cohesion in
the formation of the popular belief, and it must be admitted that his
efforts to harmonize them into a rational consistency are not completely
successful. His own conception of the Divine nature resembles the popular
notion in being a compound of philosophy, myth, and legalized tradition.
From Philosophy he accepts the Unity of God; from popular Mythology he
accepts certain names of deities, and certain traditional expressions,
which he understands, however, in a sense quite different from any
interpretation current in the popular views, while, at the same time,
he never uses these names and expressions without an air and attitude
of the most pious regard. The philosophical part of his teaching on the
nature of God is largely Greek, but by no means entirely so, and neither
is it the teaching of any particular school of Greek philosophy. The
Demiurgus of the Timæus: the One and Absolute of the Pythagoreans: the
Πρῶτον κινοῦν, the νόησις, νοήσεως νόησις of Aristotle; the material
immanent World-Soul—the λόγος ὁ ἐν τῇ ὕλῃ—of the Stoics:—one and all
contribute qualities to the Plutarchic Deity, and show how irresistible
the necessity for unity had become in the spiritual, as in the political,
world. The metaphysical Deity thus created from these diverse elements
is made personal by the direct ethical relation into which He is brought
with mankind (as in the punishment of sin), while the suggestion of
personality is aided by the use of the Greek popular names of the deities
to describe the attributes of the One Supreme God. Thus it has already
been noted that while Plutarch is ostensibly discussing the attributes of
Apollo he is actually defining his position with reference to abstract
Deity. This ill-harmonizing combination of metaphysics and popular belief
is further placed in contact with views originated by Oriental creeds,
with Zoroastrianism, with Manichæism, with “certain slight and obscure
hints of the truth, which are to be found scattered here and there in
Egyptian Mythology,”[172] the whole presenting a strange conglomeration,
which appears to defy any attempt to make a consistent theology of it,
until we see Plutarch’s method conspicuously emerging with its twofold
aim, of proving that all these different views of God are merely
different ways of striving after belief in the same Supreme Power, and
of inculcating a sympathetic and liberal attitude of mind, which is far
more conducive to unity than a detailed agreement on points of minor
importance.[173] This endeavour after unity is supported by a strenuous
and sincere belief in what at first sight appears to be a principle of
diversity—the belief, namely, in Dæmons—but which Plutarch uses to great
effect in his attempts after unity, by assigning, with Pythagoras,[174]
every recognized tradition unworthy of the Highest to these subordinate
beings whose influence is everywhere felt in nature and in human life,
and whose presence, at any rate, interpenetrates and overruns the whole
of Plutarch’s views on religion.[175]
It is no unfitting circumstance in a priest of Apollo that his noblest
utterances respecting the nature of God should be contained in
discourses connected more or less with the temples and traditions of
the god. In the discussion, for instance, on the syllable “E” written
over the narrow entrance of the Amphictyonic Temple at Delphi, Ammonius
is represented as expressing views of the Divine Nature which are
unsurpassed for sublimity in any other part of Plutarch’s writings, or
even in Greek literature generally. We quote them here as embodying
Plutarch’s beliefs on the Unity, Eternity, and Absoluteness of the Divine
Nature. “Not then a number, nor an arrangement, nor a conjunction or
any other part of speech, do I think the inscription signifies. It is
rather a complete and concise form of address, an invocation of the God,
bringing the speaker with the very word, into a conscious recognition
of His power. The God salutes each of us, as we approach His shrine,
with the great text, ‘Know thyself,’ which is His way of saying χαῖρε
to us; and we in our turn, replying to the God, say εἶ—‘Thou art,’ thus
expressing our _belief in His true and pure and incommunicable virtue of
absolute being_.[176]... Now we must admit that God absolutely is; not
that he _is_ with reference to any period of time, but with reference
to an immovable, immutable, timeless eternity, before which there was
nothing, after which there is nothing, in respect to which there is
neither future nor past, than which there is nothing older or younger.
But being Unity, the Unity that he is _now_ is the same Unity with which
he occupies eternity; and nothing really exists but that which is
endowed with the same absolute existence as he—neither anything that has
come into existence, nor shall come into existence, nor anything which
had a beginning, or shall have an end. In worshipping him, therefore, we
ought assuredly to salute and address him in a manner corresponding to
this view of him; as, _e.g._, in the phrase already used by some ancient
philosophers, the phrase, ‘Thou art one.’ For the Divine principle is not
many, as we are, each of us compacted of countless different passions,
a mingled and varying conglomerate of assembled atoms. But Being must
necessarily be Unity, and Unity must be Being. It is Diversity—that is,
the principle of discrepancy from Unity—which issues to the production of
non-Being, whence the three names of the God are one and all appropriate.
He is _Apollo_ (ἀ πολύς), because he repudiates and excludes the many
(τὰ πολλὰ); _Ieius_ (ἵος = εἶς) because he is Unity and Solitude; and
_Phœbus_, of course, was the name given by the ancients to anything that
was pure and unsullied.... Now Unity is pure and unsullied; defilement
comes by being mixed with other elements, as Homer says that ivory
dipped in purple dye ‘is defiled,’ and dyers say that colours mixed are
colours ‘corrupted,’ the process being called ‘corruption.’ A pure and
incorruptible substance must therefore be one and whole.”[177]—“The
Inscription εἶ seems to me to be, as it were, at once the antithesis and
the completion of the inscription, ‘Know thyself.’ The one is addressed
in reverence and wonder to the God as eternally existent, the other is a
reminder to mortality of the frail nature that encompasseth it.”[178]
Nowhere is the necessity which Plutarch feels for believing in one
supreme ruler of all the imaginable universe more apparent than in a
passage in which he is seeking a regulating Intelligence for an admitted
plurality of worlds, to account for whose administration a Greek of
almost any period would have been constrained to resort to the hypothesis
of a plurality of gods, supreme as each individual god might be in his
own individual world. The passage in question initiates a discussion on
this subject somewhat episodical to the main argument of the “De Defectu
Oraculorum.” Plutarch himself is the speaker, though he represents
his interlocutors as addressing him by the name of Lamprias.[179] He
is inclined to agree that there may be more worlds than one, though
repudiating an infinity of worlds. “It is more consonant with reason to
assert that God has made more than one world. For He is perfectly good,
and deficient in no virtue whatsoever, least of all in those virtues
that are associated with Justice and Friendship, which are the fairest
of all virtues, and those most appropriate to the divine nature. And as
God is not wanting in any respect, so also He possesses no redundant or
superfluous characteristics. There must exist, therefore, other gods
and other worlds than ours, whose companionship furnishes a sphere for
the exercise of these social virtues. For it is not upon Himself, nor
upon a part of Himself, but upon others, that He discharges the claims
of justice, kindliness, goodness. Hence it is not probable that He is
unneighboured and unfriended, or that this world of ours floats alone in
the emptiness of infinite space.”[180] Plutarch, however, is merely on
tentative ground here; the plurality of worlds was an abstract academic
question no less in those days than in these. Admitting a plurality of
worlds, it does not necessarily follow that each should be under the
dominion of a separate Deity. “What objection,” he asks, in answer to the
Stoics, “what objection is there to our asserting that all the worlds
are beneath the sway of the Fate and Providence of Zeus, and that He
bestows His superintendence and direction among them all, implanting in
them the principles and seeds and ideas of all things that are brought
about therein? Surely it is no more impossible that ten, or fifty, or a
hundred worlds should be animated by the same rule of Reason, or should
be administered in accordance with one and the same principle of action,
than that a public assembly, an army, or a chorus, should obey the same
co-ordinating power. Nay, an arrangement of this kind is in special
harmony with the Divine Character.”[181] Plutarch cannot get away from
his fixed belief in the absolute Unity of God, and with God’s Unity, as
we have already seen, his Eternity and Immutability are involved. But
Plutarch re-asserts this truth in various places and forms. In the tract
“De Stoicorum Repugnantiis,” though chiefly dealing polemically with the
inconsistencies and self-contradictions of Chrysippus and other early
Stoics, he clearly exhibits his own views in several passages. In one
place[182] he asserts that even those who deny the benevolence of God, as
the Jews and the Syrians, do not imagine him as other than eternally and
immutably existent, and quotes with approval a sentence from Antipater of
Tarsus, to the effect that God is universally regarded as uncreate and
eternal. A little later in the development of the argument[183] he adopts
the Stoic position—which Chrysippus is represented as contradicting—that
the idea of God includes the ideas of happiness, blessedness,
self-sufficiency, which qualities are elsewhere shown to exist absolutely
and independently of all conceivable causes of opposition.[184] “They
are wrong who assert that the Divine Nature is eternal because it avoids
and repels anything that might tend to its destruction. Immutability and
Eternity must necessarily exist in the very nature of the Blessed One,
requiring no exertion on his part to preserve and defend them.”
The intermingling of the doctrines of various philosophic sects is
interestingly conspicuous throughout these discussions on the nature
of God; and not less than elsewhere in the noble observations of the
Platonist Ammonius, which have been quoted from the “De Ε apud Delphos.”
It is equally interesting to note that all the speakers in that
dialogue, while looking with their mind’s eye far beyond any individual
member of the Olympian Pantheon to that divine power whose functions
correspond with the essential requirements of the loftiest monotheism,
yet use the name of Apollo as the professed nucleus of their religious
beliefs, and thus bring themselves into formal harmony with the demands
of the “ancient and hereditary Faith.” The same tendency, at once
orthodox and unifying, is visible in the philosophic import attached,
in accordance with the Stoic practice, to the popular names for the god
in his various functions. In other tracts and essays the same aim is
conspicuous, the same method of treatment is applied. In his fascinating
account of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris—which will be dealt with
later from the material which it furnishes for investigating Plutarch’s
attempts to identify foreign gods with the gods of Greece—he uses both
these divine names as a means of approach to the Divine Nature, that One
Eternal, Absolute Being, which is the real object of the philosopher’s
clarified insight—πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μία.[185] The true object of the
service of Isis, for example, is “the knowledge of that First and Supreme
Power which is compact of Intelligence; that Power whom the goddess
(Isis) bids her servants seek, since He abides by her side and is united
with her. The very name of her temple expressly promises the knowledge
and the understanding of _Being_, inasmuch as it is called the Ision
(εἰς—ἰὼν), indicating that we shall know _Being_ if we _enter_ with piety
and intelligence into the sacred rites of the goddess.”[186]
The passage just quoted shows the intimate connexion between _Being_ and
_Intelligence_—the “Supreme Power is compact of Intelligence;” and we are
left in little doubt respecting Plutarch’s views on this second aspect
of the Divine Nature. The conception of the Deity as νοῦς, an ancient
abstraction in Greek philosophy, is at once strengthened and brought
nearer to the intelligence of humanity by Plutarch’s simple treatment of
it, and by his connecting it, wherever possible, with the traditions of
the popular creed. God is not only Intelligence, but intelligent. “The
Divine Nature,” says he, “is not blessed in the possession of silver
and gold, nor mighty through the wielding of thunders and thunderbolts,
but in the enjoyment of knowledge and understanding; and of all the
things that Homer has said concerning the gods, this is his finest
pronouncement:—
‘Yet both one goddess formed
And one soil bred, but Jupiter precedence took in birth
_And had more knowledge_’[187]
—a pronouncement in which he gives the palm for dignity and honour to
the sovereignty of Jove, inasmuch as he is older in knowledge and wisdom.
And I am of opinion that the blessedness of that eternal life which
belongs to God consists in the knowledge which gives Him cognizance of
all events; for take away knowledge of things, and the understanding of
them, and immortality is no longer _life_, but mere _duration_.”[188]
The free, unfettered exercise of intelligence is therefore a function
of the Divine Nature; but although Plutarch is clearly thinking of the
νοῦς of Anaxagoras as embodied by Plato in his conception of the Chief
Good, yet he succeeds in bringing the Divine Nature, by the exercise of
intelligence, into an intimate relation with humanity which the Platonic
Demiurgus never attains. The true successors of Plato in the realm of
Idealism were the neo-Platonists, who maintained that “the sum total of
the Ideas exists in the Divine _nous_, not outside of it, ‘like golden
statues,’ which God must search and look up to before He can think. It
is not to be supposed that He must needs run about in search of notions,
perhaps not finding them at all, perhaps not recognizing them when
found. This is the lot of man, whose life is spent often in the search,
sometimes in the vain search, after truth. But to the Deity all knowledge
is always equally present.”[189] The vicious weakness of Platonism,
whether Old or New, lies in the fact that no real reason exists why God
should ever leave the contemplation of “worlds not realized” to create
this world after an eternally existing pattern, in the intellectual
contemplation of which he was already happy.[190] The “absence of envy”
is not a philosophic reason: it is a Platonic leap over an unbridged
chasm. The aloofness of the Epicurean gods in their _sedes quietæ_ is the
logical outcome of this aspect of Platonism. Plutarch gives the Divine
Intelligence an interest in the beings He has created. Apollo (here again
the popular name is used for the Divine Being) knows all the difficulties
that trouble the public and private lives of humanity, and he knows their
solutions also. “In private matters we inquire of Apollo as a seer, in
public matters we pray to him as a god. In the philosophic nature of
the soul he is the author and inspirer of intellectual difficulties and
problems, thus creating therein that craving which has its satisfaction
in the discovery of Truth;”[191] _e.g._, “when the oracle was given out
_that the altar of Delos should be doubled_, the god, as Plato says,
not only conveyed a particular command, but also indicated his desire
that the Greeks should study geometry; the task assigned involving an
operation of the most advanced geometrical character.”[192] In another
place this paternal interest in the doings of mankind is attributed to
the Deity direct without the intrusion of any traditional name for a
particular god. “It is not, as Hesiod supposes,[193] the work of human
wisdom, but of God’s, to discriminate and distinguish predilections and
antipathies in character before they become conspicuous to the world by
breaking out into gross evil-doing under the influence of the passions.
_For God is assuredly cognizant of the natural disposition of every
individual man_, being, by His nature, more fitted to perceive soul than
body: nor does He await the outbreak of actual sin before He punishes
violence, profanity, obscenity.”[194] Thus, although Plutarch accepts
the philosophic phrasing current respecting the nature of the Deity,
his ardent, sympathetic temperament brings down the philosophers’ Deity
from its majestic isolation, and makes it “meet halfway” the gods of the
popular faith, so that both may be of service to humanity, the latter
being purified and elevated, the other actualized and humanized. We
discern with sympathy Plutarch’s attempt to satisfy the eternal craving
of men for a mediator between themselves and the unapproachableness of
the Highest; and we are prepared for his exposition of the doctrines
of Dæmonology. This tendency to give warmth and life to philosophic
abstractions is occasionally visible in an unconscious attempt to
assimilate the qualities possessed by the Deity to those displayed in
a less degree by mankind. Thus, he implicitly accepts the Platonic
position that Eternity is all present to God,[195] a position which is
also accepted by modern European Theology: but he elsewhere regards the
Deity (formally using the name of Apollo) as a scientific observer, with
infallibly acute reasoning powers directed upon phenomena retained in
an unshakable memory. His predictions of events are, therefore, really
predictions, not statements of present facts; and the “rigorous certainty
and universality” which they possess are the certainty and universality
attaching to the human discoveries of the laws of geometry and the law
of causation, and not to a divine insight which is omniscience because
it is always regarding events as present, whether they are actually
past, present, or to come. “Apollo is a prophet, and prophecy is the art
of ascertaining the future from the present or the past. Now nothing
exists without a cause, and prediction, therefore, depends upon reason.
The present springs inevitably from the past, the future from the
present. The one follows naturally upon the other by a succession which
is unbroken from beginning to end, and, accordingly, he who knows the
natural causes of past, present, and future events, and can connect their
mutual relationships, can predict the future, knowing, in the words of
Homer, ‘things that are now, things that shall be, and things that are
over.’ The whole art of Dialectics consists in the knowledge of the
Consequent.”[196]
Already in these passages, which represent philosophers as discussing
God in the terms familiar in Greek philosophy, we can discern a gradual
breaking down of that metaphysical exclusiveness which had hitherto
marked the philosophic conception of the Deity. We see God again becoming
personal, and reverting to that interest in the affairs of mankind from
which the philosophers, starting with Xenophanes, had, in their revulsion
from the anthropomorphic realisms of the Epic traditions, excluded him.
We can already note that Plutarch believes in the “goodness” of God in
a sense quite distinct from the “absence of envy” distinguishing the
Platonic Creator, or even from the sense involved in Plato’s admission
that the gods love the just, since one always loves that which is made
in one’s own image.[197] We can see him going further, indeed, than
Aristotle, who compares the love of men for the gods to the love of
children for their parents, a love which is based upon a recognition of
their goodness and superiority, and of their having been the authors
of the greatest benefits to humanity.[198] But we are not left without
many explicit texts asserting the goodness of God to mankind in emphatic
phrases. Plutarch agrees with those statesmen and philosophers who
assert that the majesty of the Divine Nature is accompanied by goodness,
magnanimity, graciousness and benignity in its attitude towards
mankind.[199] We have already seen that Justice and Love are regarded
by Plutarch as the most beautiful of all virtues, and those most in
harmony with the Divine Nature,[200] and many isolated sentences could
be quoted to demonstrate how firmly the belief in God’s goodness to man
was fixed in Plutarch’s mind. We are fortunate, however, in possessing a
special tract in which the personal character of the Divine Goodness is
so clearly exhibited that a modern translator of the tract, writing from
a “Theological Institution,” is able to say, “I am not aware, indeed,
that even Christian writers who have attempted to defend the same truth
within the same limits of natural theology, have been able to do anything
better than to reaffirm his position, and perhaps amplify and illustrate
his argument.”[201] The tract referred to is, of course, the famous
production known as the “De Sera Numinis Vindicta.” It is a bold and
beautiful attempt to reconcile the existence of an actively benevolent
Deity with the long-continued, often permanent, impunity of wickedness
in this world; an endeavour to solve the question raised, especially by
Epicureans, but not unfraught with solicitude for philosophers of other
schools, respecting the patent fact that human virtue and human vice have
no natural and necessary connexion with human happiness on the one hand
and human misery on the other. Christian translators of the piece, from
Amyot down to the writers just quoted, have hailed it as an effective
vindication of the ways of God to man, and Comte Joseph de Maistre, whose
paraphrase is designed, as he says, to please “ladies and foreigners,”
is quite convinced that such a justification could not possibly have
been written by one who was not a Christian.[202] Even Wyttenbach, whom
de Maistre attacks for repudiating this view, is willing, with all his
scholarly caution, to admit that Plutarch, in this tract, touches the
excellences of the Christian faith.[203]
The position which Plutarch sets himself to overthrow is that which is
expressed most concisely in the famous verses of Ennius:—
“Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam cœlitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus;
Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest”
—a sentiment in exact harmony with the Epicurean view of the matter.[204]
While, however, establishing the providence and goodness of God as
against the practical Atheism of the Epicureans, it will be seen that he
is equally temperate, and equally consistent with himself, in avoiding
the exaggerated zeal of those Stoics who, in their eager desire to do
something for the honour of Providence, had subjected the minutest
and commonest actions of life to the jealous watching of an arbitrary
omniscience, so that, as Wyttenbach puts it, “that most gracious name
of Providence was exposed to ridicule and contempt, being alternately
regarded as a _fortune-telling old crone_, and as _a dreadful spectre to
alarm and terrify mankind_.”
Let us see in what way Plutarch establishes the providential benevolence
of God without detracting from his majesty.
A company of philosophic students, Plutarch himself; Patrocleas, his
son-in-law;[205] Timon, his brother; and Olympichos, a friend;[206] are
found, at the opening of the dialogue, regarding each other in silence
beneath a Portico of the Delphic Temple, in wonder at the discourtesy
of an Epicurean who has suddenly disappeared from the party, after
expounding the doctrines of his school in the manner, doubtless, of
Velleius in the “De Natura Deorum,” though with a more limited scope
as expressed by the famous line of Ennius already quoted. According to
Plutarch, he had “gathered together, from various sources, an undigested
mass of confused observations, and had then scattered them in one
contemptuous stream of spleen and anger upon Providence.” The company,
deprived of their legitimate opportunity for reply, determined to
discuss the question of Providence as if the departed opponent were
still present, although it cannot be doubted that his absence, and the
consequent want of direct necessity to “score off” him, lead to a more
thorough and impartial discussion of the topic. Patrocleas, at any rate,
states the difficulty with almost Epicurean boldness. “The delay of the
Deity in punishing the wicked seems to me to be a strange and mysterious
thing. The wicked are so eager and active in their wickedness, that
they, least of all, ought to be the object of inactivity on the part of
God. Thucydides rightly said that the advantage of delay was on the side
of evil-doers.[207] Present immunity from the punishment due to crime
encourages the criminal, and depresses the innocent sufferer. Bias knew
that a certain reprobate of his days would be punished, but feared that
he would not live to see it. Those whom Aristocrates betrayed at the
Battle of Taphrus were all dead when his treachery was punished twenty
years after. So with Lyciscus and the Orchomenians.[208] This delay
encourages the wicked. The fruit of injustice ripens early and is easily
plucked, but punishment matures long after the fruit of evil has been
enjoyed.” This demand of the natural man to see their deserts meted out
to the wicked is reinforced in a more philosophical manner by Olympichos,
who maintains that delay in the punishment of sin deprives it of that
salutary effect which its immediate infliction would have upon the
sinner, who regards it as accidental, and not necessarily connected with
his crimes. The fault of a horse is corrected if bit and lash be applied
at once; but all the beating and backing and shouting in the world at a
later time will only injure his physique without improving his character.
“So that I am quite unable to see what good is done by those Mills of
God[209] which are said to grind so late, since their delay brings
justice to naught, and thus deprives vice of its restraining fear.”[210]
Plutarch, before replying to these weighty arguments, preaches a short
and eloquent sermon on the text, “God moves in a mysterious way.” His
thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor His ways our ways. We must imitate
the philosophic caution of the Academy. Men who never saw a battle may
talk of military affairs, or discuss music who never played a note; “but
it is a different thing for mere men like ourselves to peer too closely
into matters that concern Divine Natures; just as if unskilled laymen
were to try to penetrate the intention of an artist, the meaning of a
physician’s treatment, the inner significance of a legal enactment, by
fanciful guesses and surmises.... It is easier[211] for a mortal to
make no definite assertion about the gods, but just this—that _He_[212]
knows best the proper time to apply His treatment to wickedness. He
can truly discriminate in the character of the punishment required by
each offence.” These preliminary observations are in the proper Academic
style; they are designed to indicate that the end of a discourse on such
intricate matters can only be the modification of doubt by probability,
not its settlement by absolute logical certainty.[213] The assumption
of the Platonic attitude is appropriately followed by a Plutarchic
reading of the teaching of Plato, who is understood as asserting that
God, when he made Himself the universal pattern for all beautiful and
noble things, granted human virtue to those who are able to follow Him,
in order that they might thus in somewise grow like unto Him.[214]
Further, as Plato says,[215] the universal nature took on order and
arrangement by assimilation to and participation in the Idea and in the
Virtue of the Divine Nature. Again, according to Plato, Nature gave us
eyes that our soul might behold the order and harmony of the heavenly
bodies, and become harmonious and ordered herself, free from flighty
passions and roving propensities.[216] Becoming like God in this way,
we shall emulate the mildness and forbearance with which He treats the
wicked; shall eradicate from our minds the brutish passion for revenge;
and shall wait to inflict our punishments until long consideration has
excluded every possibility that we may repent after the deed is done. The
purport of this argument, and of the examples which Plutarch, always rich
in illustration, furnishes in support of it, is clearer than the need
of attaching it to the Platonic scheme of creation. Plutarch believes
that “God is slow to anger”; because gentleness and patience are part
of His nature, and because by speedy punishment, He would save a few,
but by delaying His justice He gives help and admonition to many. God,
moreover, knows how much virtue He originally implanted in the heart of
every man. He knows the character and inclination of every guilty soul;
and His punishments are, therefore, different from human penalties, in
that the latter regard the law of retaliation only, while the former
are based on a knowledge of character which does not quench the smoking
flax, but gives time and opportunity for a repentant return to the path
of virtue.[217] The world, too, would have been deprived of many a
virtuous character, lost the advantage of many a noble deed, had prompt
punishment for early sins been inflicted. There is, moreover, a soul of
good in things evil; the careers of great tyrants have been prolonged,
and the world has been the better for the movements which their tyranny
compelled. Evil is a “dispensation of Providence” in Plutarch’s eyes, as
in those of many modern Christians. “As the gall of the hyæna, and the
rennet of the seal, both disgusting animals in other respects, possess
qualities useful for medicinal purposes, so upon certain peoples who need
severe correction God inflicts the implacable harshness of a tyrant or
the intolerable severity of a magistrate, and does not take away their
trouble and distress until they are purified of their sins.” Sometimes,
too, the Deity delays His vengeance in order that it may take effect in a
more strikingly appropriate manner.[218]
But these external punishments are not the most terrible that can be
inflicted on the sinner. It would be difficult, even in Christian
literature, to find so striking a tribute to the power of conscience
in inflicting its immaterial tortures on the criminal who has escaped
material recompense. Plutarch bases his observations on this head on a
repudiation of Plato’s statement[219] “that punishment is a state that
follows upon injustice,” asserting, as he finds in Hesiod, that the two
are contemporaneous and spring up from the same soil and root; a view
which he supports by many conspicuous and terrible examples from history,
the force of which may be summarized in the fine and truthful phrase—the
antithetical effect of which would be destroyed by translation—οὐδὲ
γηράσαντες ἐκολάσθησαν ἀλλ’ ἐγήρασαν κολαζόμενοι.[220] The conclusion
which Plutarch arrives at by considering this aspect of the case is that
“there is no necessity for any god, or any man, to inflict punishment
on evildoers, but it is sufficient that their whole life is tormented
and destroyed by their sense of their impiety;” and that the time cannot
but come when the glamour and the tinselled glory of successful crime
will be torn away, and nothing shall remain but the base and dreadful
memory to torture awakening conscience with the pangs of an unquenchable
remorse.[221]
A fresh perplexity as to the goodness and justice of God is here raised
by Timon, who cannot see that it is in harmony with these divine
qualities that the sins of the fathers should, as Euripides complained,
be visited upon the children.[222] The punishment of the innocent is no
compensation for the escape of the guilty. God, in this case, would be
like Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, who ravaged Corcyra because
the Homeric Corcyreans had given a welcome to Odysseus, and retorted
the blinding of the mythical Cyclops upon the Ithacensians when they
complained that his soldiers had looted their sheepfolds. “Where,
indeed,” asks Timon, “is the reason and justice of this?”[223] Plutarch
can only reply that, if the descendants of Hercules and Pindar are held
in honour on account of the deeds of their progenitors, there is nothing
illogical in the descendants of a wicked stock being punished. But he
knows that he is on difficult ground, and repeats the Academic caution
against too much dogmatism in these intricate matters. He falls back
upon natural causes here, as if seeking to exonerate the Deity from
direct responsibility for a striking injustice. An hereditary tendency
to physical disease is possible, and may be transmitted from ancestors
who lived far back in antiquity. Why should we marvel more at a cause
operating through a long interval of time, than through a long interval
of space? If Pericles died, and Thucydides fell sick, of a plague that
originated in Arabia, why is it strange that the Delphians and Sybarites
should be punished for the offences of their ancestors?[224] Moreover,
a city is a continuous entity with an abiding personality; just as
child, and boy, and man are not different persons, but are unified by
the consciousness of identity;—nay, less marked changes take place in a
city than in an individual. A man would know Athens again after thirty
years of absence, but a far shorter period serves to obliterate the
likenesses of our personal acquaintance. A city rejoices in the glory
and splendour of its ancient days; it must also bear the burden of its
ancient ignominies. And if a city has this enduring personality which
makes it a responsible agent throughout its existence, the members of the
same family are much more intimately connected. There would, therefore,
have been less injustice inflicted had the posterity of Dionysius been
punished by the Syracusans than was perpetrated by their ejection of his
dead body from their territories. For the soul of Dionysius had left his
body, but the sons of wicked fathers are often dominated by a good deal
of their parents’ spirit.[225]
We are conscious of some artificial straining of the argument in this
place, and shortly perceive that the mention of the soul of Dionysius is
intended to prepare the way for a discussion on the immortality of the
soul. Plutarch cannot believe that the gods would show so much protective
care for man—would give so many oracles, enjoin so many sacrifices and
honours for the dead—if they knew that the souls of the dead perished
straightway, leaving the body like a wreath of mist or smoke, as the
Epicureans believed.[226] He shrinks from the thought that the Deity
would take so much account of us, if our souls were as brief in their
bloom as the forced and delicate plants that women grow in their fragile
flower-pots, their short-lived Gardens of Adonis. He is convinced that
the belief in the after-existence of the soul stands or falls with the
belief in the Providence of God.[227] If there is a Providence, there
is existence after death; and if there is existence after death, then
there is stronger reason for supposing that every soul receives its due
reward or punishment for its life on Earth. But here Plutarch, after
just touching one of the cardinal principles of Christian teaching,
the dogma of Heaven and Hell, starts away from the consequence which
almost seems inevitable, and which Christianity accepted to the full—the
belief that our life here should be modelled in relation to the joys and
penalties that await us in the other world. He clearly believed that
their ethical effect upon life is small.[228] The rewards and punishments
of the soul hereafter are nothing to us here. Perhaps we do not believe
them, and in any case we cannot be certain that they will come. This
is the position at which Plutarch arrives in the course of rational
argument, and he at once returns to the sphere of our present life to
find surer sanctions for goodness. Such punishments as are inflicted in
this world on the descendants of an evil race are conspicuous to all that
come hereafter, and deter many from wickedness. Besides, God does not
punish indiscriminately. He has a watchful care even over the children
of those who have been notorious for evildoing, and instead of delaying
the punishment in their case, early checks their hereditary disposition
to vice by appropriate restraints born of His intimate knowledge of the
character and inclination of the human heart. But if, in spite of this, a
man persists in the sinful courses of his ancestors, it is right that he
should inherit their punishment as he has inherited their crimes.
The dialogue concludes with a myth of the type of Er the Armenian, in
which, after the manner of Plato, Plutarch embodies views on the state
of the soul after death, for which no place could be found in the
rational argumentation of mere prose. Thespesius of Soli, an abandoned
profligate, has an accident which plunges him into unconsciousness for
three days. In this period his soul visits the interstellar spaces, where
the souls of the dead are borne along in various motion; some wailing
and terror-struck; others joyous and delighted; some like the full moon
for brightness; others with faint blemishes or black spots like snakes.
Here, in the highest place, was Adrastea, the daughter of Zeus and
Ananke, from whom no criminal could hope ever to escape. Three kinds of
justice are her instruments. Poena is swift to punish, chastising those
whose sin can be expiated while they are still on earth. Those whose
wickedness demands severer penalties are reserved for Justice in the
afterworld. The third class of sinners, the irretrievably bad, are cast
by Justice into the hands of Erinnys, “the third and most terrible of
the servants of Adrastea,” who pursues them as they wander hither and
thither in reckless flight, and finally thrusts them all with pitiless
severity into a place of unspeakable darkness.[229] In these acts of
immortal justice the soul is bared utterly, and her sins and crimes are
relentlessly exposed. All this is explained to Thespesius by a kinsman
who recognizes him. He is then shown various wonders of the afterworld:
the place of Oblivion, a deep chasm by which Dionysus and Semele had
ascended into heaven, above which the souls hovered in rapture and mirth,
caused by the fragrance of the odours which were breathed by a soft and
gentle air that issued from the “pleasing verdure of various herbs and
plants” which adorned the sides of this wonderful chasm. He sees the
light of the Tripod of the Delphic oracle, or would have seen it had he
not been dazzled with the excess of its brightness; and hears the voice
of the Pythia uttering various oracles. Then follow Dantesque scenes of
the punishments allotted to various kinds of wickedness, among which it
is interesting to note that hypocrisy is tortured with greater severity
than open vice. A lake of boiling gold, a lake of frozen lead, a lake of
iron, with attendant Dæmons to perform the usual functions, are allotted
to the punishment of avarice.[230] But the most terrible fate is that of
those whose punishment never ends, who are constantly retaken into the
hands of Justice; and these, it is important to note, in the light of
the argument which preceded the story, are those whose posterity have
been punished for their transgressions. We can see how little Plutarch is
satisfied with his own reasonings on this point; they are, as Wyttenbach
says, _acutius quam verius dicta_: the punishment of the children for
the sins of the fathers clearly leaves the advantage, so far as concerns
this world, on the side of the transgressors. Plutarch, with his firmly
pious belief in the justice and goodness of God, feels driven to assert
that the balance must be redressed somewhere, and he invokes the aid
of Myth to carry him, in this case, whither Reason refuses to go; and
taking the myth as a whole, and in relation to the tract in which it is
embodied, we cannot doubt that its object is to enforce that doctrine
of rewards and punishments in the Hereafter, from which Plutarch, as
we have seen, shrinks when an occasion arises for pressing it from the
standpoint of Reason. The punishments which Thespesius has witnessed
in his visit to the Afterworld have the effect of turning him into a
righteous man in this world, and Plutarch clearly hopes that the story
will likewise convince those who are not convinced by his reasons. We may
gather, however, that inclined as he was to believe that the providence
of God extended into the Afterworld, his attitude, as fixed by reason
and probability, is summed up in the words already referred to—“Such
rewards or punishments as the soul receives for the actions of its
previous career are nothing to us who are yet alive, being disregarded or
disbelieved.”[231] But whatever may be the condition of the soul after
death, and its relation to the Deity in that condition, Plutarch has made
it quite certain that he believes in the goodness of God as safeguarding
the interests of humanity in this world. It is clear in every part of
this interesting dialogue that the God whom Plutarch believes in is
a personal deity, a deity full of tender care for mankind, supreme,
indeed, by virtue of his omnipotence and justice, but supreme also by
virtue of his infinite patience and mercy.[232]