The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

It is curious that one of the few stories of Plutarch that come from outside sources should concern this very tract and the punishment of a slave. Gellius heard it from the philosopher Taurus after one of his classes. Plutarch, Taurus said, had a worthless slave and ordered him a flogging. The man loudly protested he had done no wrong, and at last, under the stimulus of the lash, taunted his master with inconsistency – what about the fine book on controlling Anger? he was angry enough now. "Then Plutarch, slowly and gently" asked what signs of anger he showed in voice or colour or word? "My eyes, I think, are not fierce; nor my face flushed; I am not shouting aloud; there is no foam on my lip, no red in my cheek; I am saying nothing to be ashamed of; nothing to regret; I am not excited nor gesticulating. All these, perhaps you are unaware, are the signs of anger."[³¹⁰] Then turning to the man who was flogging the slave, he said, "In the meantime, while I and he are debating, you go on with your business."[³¹¹] The story is generally accepted, and it is certainly characteristic. The philosopher, feeling his pulse, as it were, to make sure that he is not angry, while his slave is being lashed, is an interesting and suggestive picture, which it is well to remember.

How long Plutarch lived we do not know. He refers to events of the year 104 or 105, and in his Solon he speaks of Athens and Plato each having an unfinished masterpiece, so that he cannot have known of the intention of the Emperor Hadrian to finish the temple of Zeus Olympics.[³¹²] All that this need imply is that the Solon was written before 125 A.D. As to his death, it is certainly interesting when we recall how full of dreams and portents his Biographies are, to learn from Artemidorus' great work on the Interpretation of Dreams (written some forty years later) that Plutarch, when ill, dreamed that he was ascending to heaven, supported by Hermes. Next day he was told that this meant great happiness. "Shortly after he died, and this was what his dream and the interpretation meant. For ascent to heaven means destruction to a sick man, and the great happiness is a sign of death."[³¹³] Plutarch might well have accepted this himself.

Such was Plutarch's life – the life of a quiet and simple-minded Greek gentleman, spent amid scenes where the past predominated over the present, —nullum sine nomine saxum, where Antiquity claimed him for her own by every right that it has ever had upon man. The land of his fathers, the literature, the art, the philosophy, the faith, and the reproduction of the good old life in the pleasant household[³¹⁴] – everything conspired to make him what he was. We now come to his significance in the story of the conflict of religions in the Roman Empire.

Plutarch not a philosopher

A good deal has been written about Plutarch's philosophy. His works are full of references to philosophy and philosophers, and he leaves us in no doubt as to his counting himself a disciple of Plato; his commentaries on Platonic doctrines give him a place in the long series of Plato's expositors. But no one would expect a writer of the first century to be a man of one allegiance, and Plutarch modifies the teaching of Plato with elements from elsewhere. It has then been debated whether he should, or should not, be called an Eclectic, but not very profitably. The essential thing to note is that he is not properly a philosopher at all, much as the statement would have astonished him.[³¹⁵] His real interest is elsewhere; and while he, like the Greeks of his day, read and talked Philosophy interminably, as men in later ages have read and talked Theology, it was not with the philosophic spirit. Philosophy is not the mistress – rather, he avows, the servant of something else; and that means that it is not Philosophy. His test of philosophic thought and doctrine was availability for the moral and religious life – a test which may or may not be sound, as it is applied. But Plutarch was an avowed moralist, didactic in every fibre; and everything he wrote betrays the essential failure of the practical man and the moralist – impatience, the short view. From his experience of human life in its manifold relations of love and friendship, he came to the conclusion that "the ancient faith of our fathers suffices." It is also plain that he was afraid of life without religion. So far as a man of his training would – a man familiar with the history of philosophy, but without patience or depth enough to be clear in his own mind, he associated truth with his religion; at all events it was "sufficient," for this he had found in his course through the world. Definite upon this one central point, he approached philosophy, but not with the true philosopher's purpose of examining his experience, in accordance with the Platonic suggestion[³¹⁶]; rather, with the more practical aim of profiting by every serviceable thought or maxim which he could find. And he certainly profited. If he started with preconceptions, which he intended to keep, he enlarged and purified them – in a sense, we may say, he adorned and enriched them. For whereever he found a moving or suggestive idea, a high thought, he adopted it and found it a place in his mind, though without inquiring too closely whether it had any right to be there. In the end, it is very questionable whether the sum of his ideas will hold together at all, if we go beyond the quick test of a rather unexamined experience. We have already seen how he protested against too curious examination. "There is no philosophy possible," wrote John Stuart Mill, "where fear of consequences is a stronger principle than love of truth."

But to such criticisms a reply is sometimes suggested, which is best made in the well-known words of Pascal – "the heart has its reasons which the reason does not know."[³¹⁷] The experience which led Plutarch to his conclusion was real and sound. There is an evidential value in a good father, in wife and children – even in a telearchy with its tiles and cement – which is apt to be under-estimated. For with such elements in life are linked passions and emotions, which are deeply bound up with human nature, and rule us as instincts – blind reasons of the heart. Like all other things they require study and criticism if they are not to mislead, and those who most follow them are sometimes the worst judges of their real significance. On the other hand the danger of emotion, instinct and intuition as guides to truth is emphasized enough, – it was emphasized by the Stoics; and a contribution is made to human progress, when the value of these guides to truth is re-asserted, even to the extent of obvious exaggeration, by some one, who, like Plutarch, has had a life rich in various human experience. It remains however, in Plutarch's case as in all such cases, the fundamental question, whether the supposed testimony of instinct and intuition is confirmed. If it is not confirmed, it may be taken to have been misunderstood.

Keeping the whole life of this man in view, and realizing its soundness, its sweetness and its worth, we must see what he made of the spiritual environment of man's life in general – laying stress on what in his system, or his attempt at a system, is most significant, and postponing criticism. It should be said once for all that a general statement of Plutarch's views cannot be quite faithful, for he was a man of many and wandering thoughts, and also something of an Academic; and whatever he affirmed was with qualifications, which in a short summary must be understood rather than repeated.

The knowledge of God

Our knowledge of God and of things divine comes to us, according to Plutarch, from various sources. There is the consensus of mankind. "Of all customs first and greatest is belief in gods. Lycurgus, Numa, Ion and Deucalion, alike sanctified men, by prayers and oaths and divinations and oracles bringing them into touch with the divine in their hopes and fears. You might find communities without walls, without letters, without kings, without houses, without money, with no need of coinage, without acquaintance with theatres and gymnasia; but a community without holy rite, without a god, that uses not prayer nor oath, nor divination, nor sacrifice to win good or avert evil – no man ever saw nor will see… This is what holds all society together and is the foundation and buttress of all law."[³¹⁸]

This evidence from the consensus of mankind is brought to a higher point in the body of myth inherited from the past, and in custom and law – and is so far confirmed by reason. But we can go further and appeal to the highest and best minds of antiquity, who in their own highest moments of inspiration confirmed the common view. "In the matter of belief in gods, and in general, our guides and teachers have been the poets and the lawgivers, and, thirdly, the philosophers – all alike laying down that there are gods, though differing among themselves as to the number of the gods and their order, their nature and function. Those of the philosophers are free from pain and death; toil they know not, and are clean escaped the roaring surge of Acheron."[³¹⁹] "It is likely that the word of ancient poets and philosophers is true," he says.[³²⁰] Plutarch was a lover of poetry and of literature, and he attributed to them a value as evidence to truth, which is little intelligible to men who have not the same passion.[³²¹] Still the appeal to the poets in this connexion was very commonly made.

But men are not only dependent on the tradition of their fathers and the inspiration of poets and philosophers, much as they should, and do, love and honour these. The gods make themselves felt in many ways. There was abundant evidence of this in many established cases of theolepsy, enthusiasm (éntheos) and possession. Again there were the oracles, in which it was clear that gods communicated with men and revealed truths not otherwise to be gained – a clear demonstration of the spiritual. Men were "in anguish and fear lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years," but Delphi has not failed; for "the language of the Pythian priestess, like the right line of the Mathematicians – the shortest between two points, makes neither declension nor winding, has neither double meaning nor ambiguity, but goes straight to the truth. Though hard to believe and much tested, she has never up to now been convicted of error, – on the contrary she has filled the shrine with offerings and gifts from barbarians and Greeks, and adorned it with the beautiful buildings of the Amphictyons."[³²²] The revival of Delphi in Plutarch's day, "in so short a time," was not man's doing – but "the God came here and inspired the oracle with his divinity." And Delphi was not the only oracle. The Stoics perhaps had pointed the way here with their teaching on divination, but as it stands the argument (such as it is) is said to be Plutarch's own.[³²³] Lastly in this connexion, the mysteries offered evidence, but here he is reticent. "As to the mysteries, in which we may receive the greatest manifestations and illuminations of the truth concerning dæmons – like Herodotus, I say, 'Be it unspoken.'"[³²⁴]

Absolute being

Philosophy, poetry, tradition, oracles and mysteries[³²⁵] bring Plutarch to belief in gods. "There are not Greek gods and barbarian, southern or northern; but just as sun, moon, sky, earth and sea are common to all men and have many names, so likewise it is one Reason that makes all these things a cosmos; it is one Providence that cares for them, with ancillary powers appointed to all things; while in different people, different honours and names are given to them as customs vary. Some use hallowed symbols that are faint, others symbols more clear, as they guide their thought to the divine."[³²⁶] This one ultimate Reason is described by Plutarch in terms borrowed from all the great teachers who had spoken to the Greeks of God. The Demiurge, the One and Absolute, the World-Soul and the rest all contribute features.[³²⁷]

"We," he says, "have really no share in Being, but every mortal nature, set between becoming and perishing, offers but a show and a seeming of itself, dim and insecure"; and he quotes the famous saying of Heraclitus that it is impossible to descend into the same river twice, and develops the idea of change in the individual. "No one remains, nor is he one, but we become many as matter now gathers and now slips away about one phantasm and a common form (or impress)… Sense through ignorance of Being is deceived into thinking that the appearance is. What then indeed is Being? The eternal, free from becoming, free from perishing, for which no time brings change… It is even impious to say 'Was' or 'Will be' of Being; for these are the varyings and passings and changings of that which by nature cannot abide in Being. But God is, we must say, and that not in time, but in the æon that knows no motion, time or variation, where is neither former nor latter, future nor past, older nor younger; but God is one, and with one Now he has filled Always, and is alone therein the one that Is."[³²⁸]

The symbol E at Delphi affords him a text here. It is one of "the kind Apollo's" riddles to stimulate thought. Plutarch read it as Epsilon and translates it "Thou Art," and from this as from the very name of Apollo he draws a lesson as to the nature of real Being. The name A-poll-ô means of itself the "Not-Many," and the symbol E is the soul's address to God – God is, and God is one. Not every one understands the nature of the divine; men confuse God with his manifestations. "Those who suppose Apollo and the sun to be one and the same, we should welcome and love for their pious speech, because they attach the idea (epínoia) of God to that thing which they honour most of all they know and crave for," but we should point them higher, "bid them go upward and see the truth of their dream, the real Being (tèn ousían)." They may still honour the image – the visible sun. But that a god should do the work of the sun, that there should be changes and progressions in a god, that he should project fire from himself and extend himself into land, sea, winds and animals, and into all the strange experiences of animals and plants (as the Stoics taught) – it is not holy even to hear such things mentioned. No, God is not like Homer's child playing on the sand, making and unmaking; all this belongs to another god, or rather dæmon, set over nature with its becomings and perishings.[³²⁹] To confuse gods and dæmons is to make disorder of everything.

It is here that the real interest of Plutarch's theology begins; for, as Christian apologists were quick to point out, all the philosophers were in the last resort monotheists. But the ultimate One God is by common consent far from all direct contact with this or any other universe of becoming and perishing. For it was questioned how many universes (kósmoi) there might be[³³⁰] – some conjecturing there would be one hundred and eighty-three – and if there were more than one, the Stoics asked what became of Fate and Destiny, and would there not be many "Zeuses or Zênes"? Why should there be? asked Plutarch; why not in each universe a guide and ruler with mind and reason, such as he who in our universe is called lord and father of all? What hinders that they should all be subjects of the Fate and Destiny that Zeus controls; that he should appoint to each several one of them his own realm, and the seeds and reasons of everything achieved in it; that he should survey them, and they be responsible to him? That in the whole scheme of things there should be ten universes, or fifty, or a hundred, all governed by one Reason, all subordinate to one rule, is not impossible. The Ultimate God rules through deputies.[³³¹]

The deputies of the supreme

These deputies are Plutarch's chief concern in theology. The Stoics and he were at one about the Supreme and Ultimate God, waiving the matter of personality, which he asserted and which they left open. But when the Stoics turned the deputy gods into natural forces, which we might call laws of nature, or, still worse, into natural objects like wine and grain,[³³²] Plutarch grew angry and denounced such teaching as atheism. "We must not as it were turn them into queen-bees who can never go out, nor keep them shut up in the prison of matter, or rather packed up, as they (the Stoics) do, when they turn the gods into conditions of the atmosphere and mingled forces of water and fire, and thus beget them with the universe and again burn them up with it; they do not leave the gods at liberty and free to move, as if they were charioteers or steersmen; no! like images they are nailed down, even fused to their bases, when they are thus shut up into the material, yes, and riveted to it, by being made partakers with it in destruction and resolution and change."[³³³] This is one of many assertions of the existence of ancillary gods, who are not metaphors, nor natural laws, but personal rulers of provinces, which may very well be each a universe, free and independent. "The true Zeus" has a far wider survey than "the Homeric Zeus" who looked away from Troy to Thrace and the Danube, nor does he contemplate a vacant infinite without, nor yet (as some say) himself and nothing else. To judge from the motions of the heavens, the divine really enjoys variety, and is glad to survey movement, the actions of gods and men, the periods of the stars.[³³⁴]

Dæmons

Thus under the Supreme is a hierarchy of heavenly powers or gods, and again between them and men is another order of beings, the dæmons.[³³⁵] These, unlike the gods, are of mixed nature, for while the gods are emanations or Logoi of the Supreme, the dæmons have something of the perishable. "Plato and Pythagoras and Xenocrates and Chrysippus, following the ancient theologians, say that dæmons are stronger than men and far excel us in their natural endowment; but the divine element in them is not unmixed nor undiluted, but partakes of the soul's nature and the body's sense-perception, and is susceptive of pleasure and pain, while the passions which attend these mutations affect them, some of them more and others less. For there are among dæmons, as among men, differences of virtue and wickedness."[³³⁶] "It can be proved on the testimony of wise and ancient witnesses that there are natures, as it were on the frontiers of gods and men, that admit mortal passions and inevitable changes, whom we may rightly, after the custom of our fathers, consider to be dæmons, and so calling them, worship them."[³³⁷] If the atmosphere were abolished between the earth and the moon (for beyond air and moon it was generally supposed that the gods lived[³³⁸]), the void would destroy the unity of the universe; and in precisely the same way "those who do not leave us the race of dæmons, destroy all intercourse and contact between gods and men, by abolishing what Plato called the interpretive and ancillary nature, or else they compel us to make confusion and disorder of everything, by bringing God in among mortal passions and mortal affairs, fetching him down for our needs, as they say the witches in Thessaly do with the moon."[³³⁹] And "he, who involves God in human needs, does not spare his majesty, nor does he maintain the dignity and greatness of God's excellence."[³⁴⁰] The Stoic teaching that men are "parts of God" makes God responsible for every human act of wickedness and sin – the common weakness of every pantheistic system.[³⁴¹]

Thus the dæmons serve two purposes in religious philosophy. They safeguard the Absolute and the higher gods from contact with matter, and they relieve the Author of Good from responsibility for evil. At the same time they supply the means of that relation to the divine which is essential for man's higher life – "passing on the prayers and supplications of men thitherward, and thence bringing oracles and gifts of blessing."[³⁴²] "They say well, who say that when Plato discovered the element underlying qualities that are begotten – what nowadays they call matter and nature – he set philosophers free from many great difficulties; but to me they seem to solve more difficulties and greater ones, who set the race of dæmons between gods and men and discovered that in some such way it made a community of us and brought us together, whether the theory belongs to the Magians who follow Zoroaster, or is Thracian and comes from Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or Phrygian."[³⁴³] Homer, he adds, still uses the terms "gods" and "dæmons" alike; "it was Hesiod who first clearly and distinctly set forth the four classes of beings endowed with reason, gods, dæmons, heroes and finally men."

The dæmons, then, are the agents of Providence, of the One Reason, which orders the universe; they are the ministers of the divine care for man. And here perhaps their mediation is helped by the fact that the border lines between themselves and the gods above on the one hand, and men below on the other, are not fixed and final. Some dæmons, such as Isis, Osiris, Herakles and Dionysos, have by their virtue risen to be gods,[³⁴⁴] while their own numbers have been recruited from the souls of good men.[³⁴⁵] "Souls which are delivered from becoming (geneseôs) and thenceforth have rest from the body, as being utterly set free, are the dæmons that care for men, as Hesiod says";[³⁴⁶] and, just as old athletes enjoy watching and encouraging young ones, "so the dæmons, who through worth of soul are done with the conflicts of life," do not despise what they have left behind, but are kindly minded to such as strive for the same goal, – especially when they see them close upon their hope, struggling and all but touching it. As in the case of a shipwreck those on shore will run out into the waves to lend a hand to the sailors they can reach (though if they are out on the sea, to watch in silence is all that can be done), so the dæmons help us "while the affairs of life break over us (baptixoménous hypò tôn pragmatôn) and we take one body after another as it were carriages." Above all they help us if we strive of our own virtue to be saved and reach the haven.[³⁴⁷]

But this is not all, for in his letter written to console Apollonios Plutarch carries us further. There was, he says, a man who lost his only son – he was afraid, by poison. It perhaps adds confidence to the story that Plutarch gives his name and home; he was Elysios of Terina in Southern Italy. The precision is characteristic. Elysios accordingly went to a psychomanteion, a shrine where the souls of the dead might be consulted.[³⁴⁸] He duly sacrificed and went to sleep in the temple. He saw in a dream his own father with a youth strikingly like the dead son, and he was told that this was "the son's dæmon,"[³⁴⁹] and that the death had been natural, and right for the lad and for his parents. Elsewhere Plutarch quotes the lines of Menander —

 
By each man standeth, from his natal hour,
A dæmon, his kind mystagogue through life – [³⁵⁰]
 

but he prefers the view of Empedocles that there are two such beings in attendance on each of us.[³⁵¹] The classical instance of a guardian spirit was the "daimonion" of Socrates, on which both Plutarch and Apuleius wrote books.[³⁵²] Plutarch discusses many theories that had been given of it, but hardly convinces the reader that he really knew what Socrates meant.

In a later generation it was held that if proper means were taken the guardian spirit would come visibly before a man's eyes. So Apuleius held, and Porphyry records that when an Egyptian priest called on the dæmon of Plotinus to manifest himself in the temple of Isis (the only "pure" spot the Egyptian could find in Rome), there came not a dæmon but a god; so great a being was Plotinus.[³⁵³] Plutarch discusses the question of such bodily appearances in connexion with the legend of Numa and Egeria. He can believe that God would not disdain the society of a specially good and holy man, but as for the idea that god or dæmon would have anything to do with a human body – "that would indeed require some persuasion." "Yet the Egyptians plausibly say that it is not impossible for the spirit of a god to have intercourse with a woman and beget some beginnings of life," though Plutarch finds a difficulty in such a union of unequals.[³⁵⁴]

Plutarch has comparatively little to say of visible appearances of tutelary or other dæmons. To what lengths of credulity men went in this direction will be shown in a later chapter. Yet a guardian who does not communicate in some way with the person he guards, and a series of dæmonic and divine powers content to be inert and silent, would be futile; and in fact there was, Plutarch held, abundance of communication between men and the powers above them. It was indeed one of the main factors of his religion that man's life is intimately related to the divine.

Plutarch, of course, could know nothing of the language in use to-day, but it is clear that he was familiar with some or all of the phænomena, which in our times have received a vocabulary of their own, for the moment very impressive. Psychopathic, auto-suggestion, telepathy, the subliminal self – the words may tell us something; whether what they tell us is verifiable, remains to be seen. Plutarch's account of the facts, for the description of which this language has been invented, seems even more fantastic to a modern reader, but it must be remembered that he and his contemporaries were led to it at once by observation of psychical phænomena, still to be observed, and by philosophic speculation on the transcendence of God. As a body of theories, the ancient system holds together as well as most systems in the abstract. It was not in theory that it broke down. Plutarch as usual presents it with reservations.

The mantic art

The dæmons are not slow to speak; it is we who are slow to hear. "In truth we men recognize one another's thoughts, as it were feeling after them in the dark by means of the voice. But the thoughts of the dæmons are luminous and shine for those who can see; and they need no words or names, such as men use among themselves as symbols to see images and pictures of what is thought, while, as for the things actually thought, those they only know who have some peculiar and dæmonic light. The words of the dæmons are borne through all things, but they sound only for those who have the untroubled nature and the still soul – those, in fact, whom we call holy and happy (daimoníous)."[³⁵⁵] Most people think the dæmon only comes to men when they are asleep, but this is due to their want of harmony. "The divine communicates immediately (di autoû) with few and but rarely; to most men it gives signs, from which rises the so-called Mantic art"[³⁵⁶] – prophecy or soothsaying. All souls have the "mantic" faculty – the capacity for receiving impressions from dæmons – though not in an equal degree. A dæmon after all is, from one point of view, merely a disembodied soul, and it may meet a soul incorporated in a body; and thus, soul meeting soul, there are produced "impressions of the future,"[³⁵⁷] for a voice is not needed to convey thought.

But if a disembodied soul can foresee the future, why should not a soul in a body also be able? In point of fact, the soul has this power, but it is dulled by the body. Memory is a parallel gift. Some souls only shake off the influence of the body in dreams, some at the approach of death.[³⁵⁸] The mantic element is receptive of impressions and of anticipations by means of feelings, and without reasoning process (asyllogistôs) it touches the future when it can get clear of the present. The state, in which this occurs, is called "enthusiasm," god-possession – and into this the body will sometimes fall of itself, and sometimes it is cast into it by some vapour or exhalation sent up by the earth. This vapour or whatever it is (tò mantikòn theûma kaì pneûma) pervades the body, and produces in the soul a disposition, or combination (krâsin), unfamiliar and strange, hard to describe, but from what is said it may be divined. "Probably by heat and diffusion it opens pores [or channels] whereby impressions of the future may be received."[³⁵⁹] Such a vapour was found to issue from the ground at Delphi – the accidental discovery of a shepherd, Coretas by name, who spoke "words with God in them" (phônàs enthousiódeis) under its influence; and it was not till his words proved true that attention was paid to the place and the vapour. There is the same sort of relation between the soul and the mantic vapour as between the eye and light.

But does not this vapour theory do away with the other theory that divination is mediated to us by the gods through the dæmons? Plutarch cites Plato's objection to Anaxagoras who was "entangled in natural causes" and lost sight of better causes and principles beyond them. There are double causes for everything. The ancients said that all things come from Zeus; those who came later, natural philosophers (physidoì), on the contrary "wandered away from the fair and divine principle," and made everything depend on bodies, impacts, changes and combinations (krâsis); and both miss something of the truth. "We do not make Mantic either godless or void of reason, when we give it the soul of man as its material, and the enthusiastic spirit and exhalation as its tool or plectron. For, first, the earth that produces these exhalations – and the sun, who gives the earth the power of combination (krâsis) and change, is by the tradition of our fathers a god; and then we leave dæmons installed as lords and warders and guards of this combination (krâseôs), now loosening and now tightening (as if it were a harmony), taking away excessive ecstasy and confusion, and gently and painlessly blending the motive power for those who use it. So we shall not seem guilty of anything unreasonable or impossible."[³⁶⁰]