CHAPTER VI.Plutarch’s Dæmonology—Dæmonology as a means of reconciliation between the traditional Polytheism and philosophic Monotheism—Dæmonlore in Greek philosophers and in the popular faith—Growth of a natural tendency to identify the gods of the polytheistic tradition with the Dæmons—Emphasis thus given to the philosophic conception of the Deity—Dæmons responsible for all the crude and cruel superstitions attaching to the popular gods—Function of the Dæmons as mediators between God and man.
Plutarch’s Dæmonology—Dæmonology as a means of reconciliation between the traditional Polytheism and philosophic Monotheism—Dæmonlore in Greek philosophers and in the popular faith—Growth of a natural tendency to identify the gods of the polytheistic tradition with the Dæmons—Emphasis thus given to the philosophic conception of the Deity—Dæmons responsible for all the crude and cruel superstitions attaching to the popular gods—Function of the Dæmons as mediators between God and man.
How, then, does Plutarch reconcile this lofty conception of a Deity who is Unity, Eternity, and Supreme Intelligence, with the multitude of individual deities which form so essential a part of the “hereditary Faith” of Græco-Roman civilization, and which are universally admitted as displaying qualities discrepant from even a far lower notion of God than that which Plutarch actually maintained? Further, since the Empire includes other nationalities than the Greeks, and the Roman Pantheon is not the exclusive habitation of native-born deities, how shall he find a place in his theological scheme for the gods of other peoples, so that there may be that Catholic Unity in faith which shall correspond to the one political dominion under which the world dwells in so great a peace and concord?
The difficulty of reconciling Polytheism with philosophic Monotheism was, of course, not new. In earlier days it had been necessary for philosophers to secure their monotheistic speculations from the charge of Atheism by finding in their systems a dignified position for the popular gods. And even those philosophers who sincerely believed in the existence of beings corresponding to the popular conceptions felt the need of accounting, in some more or less specious way, for the ill deeds that were traditionally attributed to so many of them. The ancient doctrine of Dæmons, emanating from some obscure source in Antiquity,[233]had beenadopted by the Pythagoreans in the latter sense,[234]while Plato, who believed in none of these things, had, on one or two occasions, by the use of philosophic “myth” replete with more than Socratic irony, described these beings as playing a part between God and man which might be tolerantly regarded as not greatly dissimilar from that popularly assigned to the lesser deities of the Hellenic Olympus.[235]In the “Statesman,” the creation-myth, to which the Stranger invites theyounger Socrates to give his entire attention, “like a child to a story,” describes how the Deity himself tended men and was their protector, while Dæmons had a share, after the manner of shepherds, in the superintendence of animals according to genera and herds.[236]Another story which Socrates, in the “Banquet,” says that he heard from Diotima, that wonderful person who postponed the Athenian plague for ten years, tells how Eros is a great Dæmon; how Dæmons are intermediate between gods and mortals; how the race of Dæmons interpret and transmit to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and interpret and transmit to men the answers and commands of the gods.[237]For God, we are told, is not directly associated with man; but it is through the mediation of the Dæmons, who are many and various, that all communion and converse take place between the human and the Divine.
But apart altogether from the philosophic use of Dæmonology, there are evidences that the belief in Dæmons was held in some sort of loose combination with the popular polytheistic faith. The Hesiodic poems were a compendium of early Hellenic theology,[238]and Hesiod, according to Plutarch himself, was the first to indicate with clearness and distinctness the existence of four species of rational beings—gods,dæmons, heroes, and men.[239]In the passage of Hesiodreferred to (Works and Days, 109 sqq.) two kinds of Dæmons are described. The dwellers in the Golden Age are transformed, after their sleep-like death on earth, into Terrestrial Dæmons:—
“When earth’s dark breast had closed this race around,Great Jove as demons raised them from the ground;Earth-hovering spirits, they their charge began,The ministers of good, and guards of man.Mantled with mist of darkling air they glide,And compass earth and pass on every side;And mark, with earnest vigilance of eyes,Where just deeds live, or crookèd wrongs arise.”[240]
“When earth’s dark breast had closed this race around,Great Jove as demons raised them from the ground;Earth-hovering spirits, they their charge began,The ministers of good, and guards of man.Mantled with mist of darkling air they glide,And compass earth and pass on every side;And mark, with earnest vigilance of eyes,Where just deeds live, or crookèd wrongs arise.”[240]
“When earth’s dark breast had closed this race around,Great Jove as demons raised them from the ground;Earth-hovering spirits, they their charge began,The ministers of good, and guards of man.Mantled with mist of darkling air they glide,And compass earth and pass on every side;And mark, with earnest vigilance of eyes,Where just deeds live, or crookèd wrongs arise.”[240]
“When earth’s dark breast had closed this race around,
Great Jove as demons raised them from the ground;
Earth-hovering spirits, they their charge began,
The ministers of good, and guards of man.
Mantled with mist of darkling air they glide,
And compass earth and pass on every side;
And mark, with earnest vigilance of eyes,
Where just deeds live, or crookèd wrongs arise.”[240]
They are virtuous, holy beings, endowed with immortality—“Jove’s immortal guardians over mortal men.”[241]The races of the Silver Age become Subterranean powers, blessed beings, but inferior in honour to the former class, and distinctly described as mortal.[242]Hesiod says nothing about Evil Dæmons, although the disappearance of the Brazen Race furnished an opportunity for their introduction into his scheme of supernatural beings. But once the existence of beings inferior to the gods in the celestial hierarchy obtained a recognition in popular tradition, however vague the recognition might be, the conception would tend to gather strength and definiteness from the necessity,first expressed by the philosophers, but doubtless widely spread among the people, of safeguarding the sanctity of the gods, while at the same time recognizing the substantial validity of tradition. This tendency would be also probably aided by the fact that in Homer, as Plutarch points out, and in the dramatists and prose writers generally, as is well known, the designations of “gods” and “dæmons” were mutually interchanged.[243]Plutarch, at all events, who boldly uses the Dæmons to perform such functions, and to bear the blame for such actions, as were inappropriate to the divine character, is enabled to make one of hisdramatis personæ—Cleombrotus, the traveller, who was specially devoted to the study of such matters—assert that “it can be demonstrated by unexceptionable testimony from antiquity that there do exist beings of a nature intermediate between that of God and man, beings subject to mortal passions and liable to inevitable changes, but whom we must,in accordance with the established custom of our fathers, regard and invoke as Dæmons, giving them all due reverence.”[244]It is natural, therefore, in the light of these indications, to believe that, side by side with the popular gods, there existed, in the popular imagination, subordinate beings of two kinds, both described as Dæmons: the first class comprising the good and benevolent Dæmonsof Hesiod, the second including Dæmons of an evil character and disposition, the belief in which had developed naturally out of the Hesiodic conception, from the necessity of fixing the responsibility of evil deeds on supernatural beings different in nature from the purity and goodness of Deity.[245]Such a classification of supernatural beings—gods, Dæmons, and evil Dæmons—could not, of course, be rigidly maintained; the more the good Dæmons were discriminated from their evil brethren, the more they would tend to become identified with the gods of the popular tradition, and the line of demarcation between the divine and the dæmonic nature would be broken down,[246]Dæmons and gods would be identified, and the splendour and purity of the Supreme God of all would shine out more fully when contrasted with those other gods, who, after all, were only Dæmons. Such, at least, is the processwhich appears to be taking place in the numerous contributions which Plutarch makes to the subject of Dæmonology. He is evidently a sincere believer in the existence of Dæmons, not a believer in the Platonic sense, and not a believer merely because he wishes to come to terms with popular ideas. But the final result, so it appears to us, is that the popular gods become identified with Dæmons, and are prepared, even in Pagan times, to take that position which was assigned to them with such whole-hearted sincerity by the early Christian Fathers;[247]to become the fiends and devils and sprites of another dispensation; to aid Saladin in excluding the Crusaders from the Holy Land; to “drink beer instead of nectar” as day labourers in German forests; or to shine with a sinister splendour on the lives of monks and peasants in the rural districts of France.[248]
Plutarch gives emphatic indications of his own attitude on the subject by drawing attention to such expressions of the earlier philosophers as pointed to the recognition of two opposite descriptions of Dæmons—thevirtuous and the vicious. In one place, as we have seen, he admits that Homer does not distinguish between the terms “Gods” and “Dæmons,” and in his historicalrésuméof Dæmonology in the “Isis and Osiris,”[249]he is compelled to make a parallel admission that the Homeric epithet derived from Dæmons is indiscriminately applied to good and bad actions. He makes this admission, however, the basis of a subtle conclusion to the effect that Homer wished to imply that the Dæmons had a confused and ill-defined character, involving the existence of both good and bad specimens of the race. Nothing definitely distinguishing between the two sorts of Dæmons is to be obtained from Plato,[250]and Plutarch accordingly dwells with special emphasis upon the views of Empedocles and Xenocrates, who maintained, the one, that Dæmons who had been guilty of sins of commission or omission were driven about between earth and sky and sea and sun, until this purifying chastisement restored them to their natural position in the dæmonic hierarchy;[251]theother, that certain disgraceful and ill-omened sacrificial observances “are not properly connected with the worship of thegods or of good Dæmons,[252]but that there are surrounding us certain beings, great and potent, but malignant too, and hateful, who rejoice in such repulsive ceremonies, and are thereby restrained from the perpetration of greater evils.” Democritus and Chrysippus are elsewhere quoted as supporters of the same view.[253]
Plutarch, accordingly, faithful to his principle of making Philosophy Mystagogue to Religion, has obtained from the philosophers a conviction that there are two kinds of dæmonic beings, two sets of supernatural characters with attributes inferior to those of the Divine Nature, and yet superior to those displayed by the human family. It has already been shown how naturally the good Dæmons would tend to become identified with the gods: a passage has just been quoted in which we can see this process of identification taking place. But Plutarch furnishes still more emphatic testimony to the necessity of such a consummation.
The group of philosophers gathered together at Delphi to discuss the cessation of the oracles have falleninto an argument on the nature of Dæmons, and certain considerations have been introduced which indicate a liability to vice and death as inherent in their nature. This conclusion shocks one of the speakers, but the pious Cleombrotus wants to know in what respect Dæmons will differ from gods if they are endowed with immortality and immunity from sin.[254]It is most significant, however, that the famous and beautiful story which Cleombrotus tells in support of his belief in the mortality of Dæmons, the story of the death of “the great Pan,” is actually concerned with an announcement of the death of one whom the popular faith accepted as a deity.[255]Demetrius, who had just come from Britain, near which were many scattered desert islands, some of them named after Dæmons and heroes, gives an authentic account of the death of a Dæmon in the island of Anglesea.[256]Cleombrotus then shows howa belief in the nativity and mortality of the Dæmons is not unknown in Greek philosophy, “for the Stoics,” says he, “maintain this view,not only with regard to the Dæmons but also with regard to the gods—holding one for the Eternal and Immutable, while regarding the remainder to have been born, and to be subject to death.”[257]The whole course of the argument, even though the speakers are represented as unconscious of the fact, leads to the identification of the popular deities with the Dæmons. This strain of thought elsewhere loses the unconscious quality, and becomes as definitely dogmatic as Plutarch’s Academic bent of mind would allow. In the “Isis and Osiris,” for example, he argues for the probability of the view which assigns the legends of these two deities not to gods or men, but to Dæmons;[258]and proceeds still further to breach the partition wall between the two natures by introducing into his Dæmonology such legends as have raised Osiris and Isis, on account of their virtue, from the rank of good Dæmons to that of the gods,[259]and describes them as receiving everywhere the combined honours of gods and Dæmons; and he appropriates the argument to Greek religion by comparing this promotion to those of Herakles and Dionysus; by identifying Isis with Proserpine, and subsequently Osiris with Dionysus.[260]
But whatever may have been the views explicitly maintained by Plutarch in this connexion, it is his constant practice to shift on to the shoulders of the Dæmons the responsibility for all those legends, ceremonies, and practices, which, however appropriate and necessary parts of the national faith they may be, are yet inconsistent with the qualities rightly attributable to Deity.[261]We have already noticed his unwillingness to impugn the immutability of the Creator by regarding His essence as capable of metamorphosis into the phenomena of the created world.[262]“It is,” says Ammonius, “the function of some other god to do and suffer these changes—or, rather, of some Dæmon appointed to direct Nature in the processes of generation and destruction.” This relationship of the Dæmons to the supreme power as conceived by philosophy is more completely stated in the short tract, “De Fato,”[263]where we are told that (1) there is a first and supreme Providence which is the intelligence of the First Deity, or,as one may regard it, His benevolent will towards all creatures, in accordance with which alldivinethings universally received the most admirable and perfect order; (2) the second Providence is that of the second gods, who move through the sky, by whichhumanaffairs are duly ordered, including those relating to the permanence and preservation of the various species; (3) the third Providence may properly be regarded as the superintendence of the Dæmons who are situated near the earth, observing and directing the actions of men. But, as we have already noted, this formal distinction between (2) and (3) is not maintained in practice. Cleombrotus, who knows more about these things than most people, insists that it is not possible that the gods could have been pleased with festivals and sacrifices, “at which there are banquets of raw flesh and victims torn in pieces, as well as fastings and loud lamentations, and often ‘foul language, mad shrieks, and tossing of dishevelled hair,’” but that all such dread observances must have had the object of pacifying the anger of the mischievous Dæmons.[264]It was not to the gods that human sacrifices were welcome; it was not Artemis who demanded the slaughter of Iphigenia;[265]these were the deeds of “fierce and violent Dæmons,” who also perpetrated those many rapes, and inflicted those pestilences and famines which are anciently attributed to the gods. “All the rapes here, and the wanderings there, that are celebrated in legendsand sacred hymns, all the hidings and flights and servitudes,do not belong to the gods, but represent the chances and changes incident to the careers of Dæmons.” It was not “holy Apollo” who was banished from Heaven to serve Admetus;—but here the speech comes to an end with a rapid change of subject, as if Cleombrotus shrinks from the assertion that a Dæmon was the real hero of an episode with which so many beautiful and famous legends of the “hereditary Faith” were connected. When some of the most celebrated national myths concerning the gods are assigned to Dæmons, we are not far away from the identification of the former with the latter, and the consequent degradation of the gods to the lower rank. It is true that the various speakers on the subject do not, in so many words, identify the Dæmons with the gods of the Mythology.[266]They deprive the gods of many of their attributes, and give them to the Dæmons; they deprive them of others, and give them to the One Eternal Deity.It is difficult to see how the Gods could maintain their existence under this twofold tendency of deprivation, supported as they might be by formal classifications which assigned them a superior place. Even the Father of Gods and Men—the Zeus of Homer—turns his eyes “no very great way aheadfrom Troy to Thrace and the nomads of the Danube, but the true Zeus gazes upon beauteous and becoming transformations in many worlds.”[267]To contrast the Zeus “of Homer” with the “true” Zeus is to do little else than to place the former in that subordinate rank proper not to the Divine, but to the Dæmonic character. Plutarch is perfectly consistent in applying this method of interpretation to the gods of other nations no less than to the gods of Greece. In the “Isis and Osiris,” he inclines to the belief that these great Egyptian Deities are themselves only Dæmons, although he refuses to dogmatize on the point, and gives a series of more or less recognized explanations of the Egyptian myth. He cannot refrain, however, from using so appropriate an occasion of denouncing the absurdity of theGreeksin imputing so many terrible actions and qualities to their gods—“For the legends of Giants and Titans, handed down among the Greeks, the monstrous deeds of Cronus, the battle between Pytho and Apollo, the flight of Dionysus, the wanderings of Demeter, fall not behind the stories told of Osiris and Typhon, and other legends that one may hear recounted by mythologists without restraint.”[268]
Such, then, is the relation in which the Dæmons stand to the Divine nature: they are made the scapegoat for everything obscene, cruel, selfish, traditionally imputed to the gods; and the Supreme Deity rises more conspicuously lofty for its freedom from everything that can tend to drag it down to the baseness of human passions. For Plutarch makes it very clear that it is the human element in these mixed natures that originates their disorderly appetites. Although the Dæmons “exceed mankind in strength and capacity, yet the divine element in their composition is not pure and unalloyed, inasmuch as it participates in the faculties of the soul and the sensations of the body, is liable to pleasure and pain, and to such other conditions as are involved in these vicissitudes of feeling, and bring disturbance upon all in a greater or less degree.”[269]It is by virtue of this participation in the “disturbing” elements of human nature that they are fitted to play that part between God and man which Plutarch, after Plato, calls the “interpretative” and the “communicative.”[270]This enables the Dæmons to play a loftier part than that hitherto assigned them; to respond, in fact, to that universal craving of humanity for some mediator between their weakness and the eternal splendour and perfection of the Highest. The whole question of inspiration and revelation, both oracular and personal, is bound up with the Dæmonic function, and to both these spheres of its operation, the publicand the private, Plutarch gives the fullest and most earnest consideration. Previous, therefore, to discussing this aspect of the Dæmonic character and influence, it will be necessary to ascertain what were Plutarch’s views on the subject of inspiration and prophecy, and what was his attitude to that question of Divination which exercised so great a fascination on the mind of antiquity.