CHAPTER V.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 asUnity,Absolute Being,Eternity—God asIntelligence:Personalityof 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—theDe Sera Numinis Vindicta—Immortality of the Soul.
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 asUnity,Absolute Being,Eternity—God asIntelligence:Personalityof 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—theDe 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 ofGod; 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 hereand 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 beingswhose 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 ofGod 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 ourbelief in His true and pure and incommunicable virtue of absolute being.[176]... Now we must admit that God absolutely is; not that heiswith 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 isnowis the same Unity with which he occupies eternity; and nothingreally 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 isApollo(ἀ πολύς), because he repudiates and excludes the many (τὰ πολλὰ);Ieius(ἵος = εἶς) because he is Unity and Solitude; andPhœbus, 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 reverenceand 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 thesesocial 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 variousplaces 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 tonote 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 ofBeing, inasmuch as itis called the Ision (εἰς—ἰὼν), indicating that we shall knowBeingif weenterwith piety and intelligence into the sacred rites of the goddess.”[186]
The passage just quoted shows the intimate connexion betweenBeingandIntelligence—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 formedAnd one soil bred, but Jupiter precedence took in birthAnd had more knowledge’[187]
‘Yet both one goddess formedAnd one soil bred, but Jupiter precedence took in birthAnd had more knowledge’[187]
‘Yet both one goddess formedAnd one soil bred, but Jupiter precedence took in birthAnd had more knowledge’[187]
‘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 fordignity 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 longerlife, but mereduration.”[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 Divinenous, 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 createthis 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 theirsedes quietæis 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 outthat 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 distinguishpredilections 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 phenomenaretained 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 mankindfrom 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]EvenWyttenbach, 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”
“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”
“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”
“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 practicalAtheism 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 afortune-telling old crone, and asa 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 legitimateopportunity 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 deprivesit 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—thatHe[212]knows best the propertime 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 forbearancewith 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 ἐκολάσθησανἀλλ’ 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]Plutarchcan 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 aremuch 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 theforced 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 checkstheir 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 ofunspeakable 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 satisfiedwith 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 thecondition 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]