The times were ripe for a theodicy. Religion of every mood and tone, of every age and clime, was in the air, and philosophy had abandoned speculation and turned to the direction of conduct and spiritual life. The mission of philosophy is to find the one in the many, and never did the religious life of men offer a more bewildering multiplicity and variety, not to say chaos, to the ordering power of philosophy. The scepticism of the Neronian age had almost disappeared. The only rationalists of any distinction in the second century were Lucian and Galen.2034 It was an age of imperious spiritual cravings, alike among the cultivated and the vulgar. But the thin abstractions of the old Latin faith and the brilliant anthropomorphism of Greece had ceased to satisfy even the crowd. It was an age with a longing for a religious system less formal and coldly external, for a religion more satisfying to the deeper emotions, a religion which should offer divine help to human need and misery, divine guidance amid the darkness of time; above all, a divine light in the mystery of death. The glory of classic art had mysteriously closed. It was an age rather of material splendour, and, at first sight, an age of bourgeois ideals of parochial fame and mere enjoyment of the hour. Yet the Antonine age has some claim to spiritual distinction. In the dim, sub-conscious feelings of the masses, as well as in the definite spiritual effort of the higher minds, there was really a great movement towards a ruling principle of conduct and a spiritual vision. Men often, indeed, followed [pg 385]the marsh-light through strange devious paths into wildernesses peopled with the spectres of old-world superstition. But the light of the Holy Grail had at last flashed on the eyes of some loftier minds. From the early years of the second century we can trace that great combined movement of the new Platonism and the revived paganism,2035 which so long retarded the triumph of the Church, and yet, in the Divinely-guided evolution, was destined to prepare men for it.
The old religion had not lost all hold on men’s minds, as it is sometimes said to have done, in rather too sweeping language. The punctilious ritual with which, in the stately narrative of Tacitus, the Capitol was restored by Vespasian, the pious care with which the young Aurelius recited the Salian litany in words no longer understood, the countless victims which he offered to the guardian gods of Rome in evil days of pestilence and doubtful war, these things reveal the strength of the religion of Numa. Two centuries after M. Aurelius was in his grave, the deities which had cradled the Roman state, and watched over its career, were still objects of reverence to the conservative circle of Symmachus. A religion which was intertwined with the whole fabric of government and society, which gave its sanction or benediction to every act and incident in the individual life, which was omnipresent in game and festival, in temple and votive monument, was placed far beyond the influence of changing fashions of devotion. It was a powerful stay of patriotism, a powerful bond of civic and family life; it threw a charm of awe and old-world sanctity around everything it touched. But for the deeper spiritual wants and emotions it furnished little nutriment. To find relief and cleansing from the sense of guilt, cheer and glad exaltation of pious emotion, consolation in the common miseries of life, and hope in the shadow of death, men had to betake themselves to other systems. The oriental religions were pouring in like a flood, and spreading over all the West. One Antonine built a shrine of Mithra,2036 another took the tonsure of Isis.2037 The priests and acolytes of the Egyptian goddess were everywhere, chanting their litanies in solemn processions [pg 386]along the streets, instructing and baptizing their catechumens, and, in the alternating gloom and splendour of their mysteries, bearing the entranced soul to the boundaries of life and death.2038 Mithra, “the Unconquered,” was justifying his name. In every district from the Euxine to the Solway he brought a new message to heathendom. Pure from all grossness of myth, the Persian god of light came as the mediator and comforter, to soothe the poor and broken-hearted, and give the cleansing of the mystic blood. His hierarchy of the initiated, his soothing symbolic sacraments, his gorgeous ritual, and his promise of immortality to those who drank the mystic Haoma, gratified and stimulated religious longings which were to find their full satisfaction in the ministry of the Church.
But the religious imagination was not satisfied with historic and accredited systems. Travel and conquest were adding to the spiritual wealth or burden of the Roman race. In lonely Alpine passes, in the deserts of Africa, or the Yorkshire dales, in every ancient wood or secret spring which he passed in his wanderings or campaigns, the Roman found hosts of new divinities, possible helpers or possible enemies, whose favour it was expedient to win.2039 And, where he knew not their strange outlandish names, he would try to propitiate them all together under no name, or any name that pleased them.2040 And, as if this vague multitude of ghostly powers were not large enough for devotion, the fecundity of imagination created a host of genii, of haunting or guarding spirits, attached to every place or scene, to every group or corporation of men which had a place in Roman life. There were genii of the secret spring or grove, of the camp, the legion, the cohort, of the Roman people, above all, there was the genius of the emperor.2041 Apotheosis went on apace—apotheosis not merely of the emperors, but of a theurgic philosopher like Apollonius, of a minion like Antinous, of a mere impostor like Alexander of Abonoteichos.2042 Old oracles, which had been suppressed or decadent in the reign of Nero, sprang into fresh life and popularity in the reign of Trajan. New sources of oracular [pg 387]inspiration were opened, some of them challenging for the time the ancient fame of Delphi or Dodona.2043 According to Lucian, oracles were pealing from every rock and every altar.2044 Every form of revelation or divination, every avenue of access to the Divine, was eagerly sought for, or welcomed with pious credulity. The study of omens and dreams was reduced to the form of a pseudo-science by a host of writers like Artemidorus. The sacred art of healing through visions of the night found a home in those charming temples of Asclepius, which rose beside so many hallowed springs, with fair prospect and genial air, where the god revealed his remedy in dreams, and a lore half hieratic, half medical, was applied to relieve the sufferer.2045 Miracles and special providences, the most marvellous or the most grotesque, were chronicled with unquestioning faith, not only by fanatics like Aelian, but by learned historians like Tacitus and Suetonius. Tales of witchcraft and weird sorcery are as eagerly believed at Trimalchio’s dinner-table2046 as in lonely villages of Thessaly. On the higher level of the new Pythagorean faith, everything is possible to the pure spirit. To such a soul God will reveal Himself by many voices to which gross human clay is deaf; the future lays bare its secrets; nature yields up her hidden powers. Spiritual detachment triumphs over matter and time; and the Pythagorean apostle predicts a plague at Ephesus, casts out demons, raises the dead, vanishes like a phantom from the clutches of Domitian.2047
At a superficial glance, a state of religion such as has been sketched might seem to be a mere bewildering chaos of infinitely divided spiritual interest. Men seem to have adopted the mythologies of every race, and to have superadded a new mythology of positively boundless fecundity. A single votive tablet will contain the names of the great gods of Latium and Greece, of Persia, Commagene, and Egypt, and beside them, strange names of British or Swiss, Celtic, Spanish, or Moorish gods, and the vaguely-designated spirits who now seemed to float in myriads around the scenes of human life.2048 Yet, [pg 388]unperceived by the ordinary devotee, amid all this confused ferment, a certain principle of unity or comprehension was asserting its power. Although the old gods in Lucian’s piece might comically complain that they were being crowded out of Olympus by Mithra and Anubis and their barbarous company,2049 there was really little jealousy or repulsion among the pagan cults. Ancient ritual was losing its precision of outline; the venerable deities of classical myth were putting off the decided individuality which had so long distinguished them in the popular imagination.2050 The provinces and attributes of kindred deities melted into one another and were finally identified; syncretism was in the air. Without the unifying aid of philosophy, ordinary piety was effecting unconsciously a vast process of simplification which tended to ideal unity. In the Sacred Orations of Aristides, Poseidon, Athene, Serapis, Asclepius, are dropping the peculiar powers by which they were so long known, and rising, without any danger of collision, to all-embracing sway. So, the Isis of Apuleius, the “goddess of myriad names,” in her vision to Lucius, boldly claims to be “Queen of the world of shades, first of the inhabitants of Heaven, in whom all gods find their unchanging type.”2051 Of course, to the very end, the common superstitious devotion of the masses was probably little influenced by the great spiritual movement which, in the higher strata, was moulding heathen faith into an approach to monotheism. The simple peasant still clung to his favourite deity, as his Catholic descendant has to-day his favourite saint. But it is in the higher minds that the onward sweep of great spiritual movements can really be discerned. The initiation of Apuleius in all the mysteries, the reverent visits of Apollonius to every temple and oracle from the Ganges to the Guadalquivir, the matins of Alexander Severus in a chapel which enshrined the images of Abraham and Orpheus, of Apollonius and Christ;2052 these, and many other instances of all-embracing devotion, point forward to the goal of that Platonist théodicée which it is the purpose of this chapter to expound.
The spectacle of an immense efflorescence of pure paganism, [pg 389]most of it born of very mundane fears and hopes and desires, to men like Lucian was a sight which might, according to the mood, move to tears or laughter. But the same great impulse which drove the multitude into such wild curiosity of superstition, was awaking loftier conceptions of the Divine, and feelings of purer devotion in the educated. And sometimes the very highest and the very lowest developments of the protean religious instinct may be seen in a single mind. Was there ever such a combination of the sensualist imagination with the ideal of ascetic purity, of the terrors and dark arts of anile superstition with the mystic vision of God, as in the soul of Apuleius? The painter of the foulest scenes in ancient literature seems to have cherished the faith in a heavenly King, First Cause of all nature, Father of all living things,2053 Saviour of spirits, beyond the range of time and change, remote, ineffable. The prayer of thanksgiving to Isis might, mutatis mutandis, be almost offered in a Christian church. The conception of the unity and purity of the Divine One was the priceless conquest of Greek philosophy, and pre-eminently of Plato. It had been brought home to the Roman world by the teaching of Stoicism. But there is a new note in the monotheism of the first and second centuries of the Empire. God is no longer a mere intellectual postulate, the necessary crown and lord of a great cosmic system. He has become a moral necessity. His existence is demanded by the heart as well as by the intellect. Men craved no longer for a God to explain the universe, but to resolve the enigma of their own lives; not a blind force, moving on majestically and mercilessly to “some far-off event,” but an Infinite Father guiding in wisdom, cherishing in mercy, and finally receiving His children to Himself. This is the conception of God which, from Seneca to M. Aurelius, is mastering the best minds, both Stoic and Platonist.2054 Seneca, as we have seen in a former chapter, often speaks in the hard tones of the older Stoicism. Sometimes [pg 390]God, Nature, Fate, Jupiter, are identical terms2055. But the cold, materialistic conception of God is irreconcilable with many passages in his writings. Like Epictetus and M. Aurelius, Seneca is often far more emotional, we may say, far more modern, than his professed creed. The materialistic Anima Mundi, interfused with the universe and the nature of man, becomes the infinitely benign Creator, Providence, and Guardian, the Father, and almost the Friend of men. He is the Author of all good, never of evil: He is gentle and pitiful, and to attribute to Him storm or pestilence or earthquake or the various plagues of human life is an impiety. These things are the result of physical law. To such a God boundless gratitude is due for His goodness, resignation in the wise chastenings of His hand. He chastises whom he loves. In bereavement, He takes only what He has given. He is our ready helper in every moral effort; no goodness is possible without His succour. In return for all His benefits, He asks for no costly material offerings, no blood of victims, no steaming incense, no adulation in prayer. Faith in God is the true worship of Him. If you wish to propitiate Him, imitate His goodness. And for the elect soul the day of death is a birthday of eternity, when the load of corporeal things is shaken off, and the infinite splendour of the immortal life spreads out with no troubling shadow.2056
Hardly less striking is the warmth of devout feeling which suffuses the moral teaching of Epictetus and M. Aurelius. They have not indeed abandoned the old Stoic principle that man’s final good depends on the rectitude of the will. But the Stoic sage is no longer a solitary athlete, conquering by his proud unaided strength, and in his victory rising almost superior to Zeus. Growing moral experience had taught humility, and inspired the sense of dependence on a Higher Power in sympathy with man.2057 No true Stoic, of course, could ever forget the Divine element within each human soul which linked it with the cosmic soul, and through which man might bring himself into harmony with the great polity of [pg 391]gods and men. But, somehow, the Divine Power immanent in the world, from a dim, cold, impalpable law or fate or impersonal force, slowly rounds itself off into a Being, if not apart from man, at any rate his superior, his Creator and Guardian, nay, in the end, his Father, from whom he comes, to whom he returns at death. Some may think this a decline from the lofty plane of the older school. The answer is that the earlier effort to find salvation through pure reason in obedience to the law of the whole, although it may have been magnificent, was not a working religion for man as he is constituted. The eternal involution of spirit and matter in the old Stoic creed, the cold, impersonal, unknowable power, which, under whatever name, Law, Reason, Fate, Necessity, permeates the universe, necessarily exclude the idea of design, of providence, of moral care for humanity. The unknown Power which claims an absolute obedience, has no aid or recognition for his worshipper. The monism of the old Stoics breaks down. The human spirit, in striving to realise its unity with the Universal Spirit, realises with more and more intensity the perpetual opposition of matter and spirit, while it receives no aid in the conflict from the power which ordains it; it “finds itself alone in an alien world.” The true Stoic has no real object of worship. If he addresses the impassive centre and soul of his universe, sometimes in the rapturous tones of loving devotion, it is only a pathetic illusion born of the faiths of the past, or inspired by a dim forecast of the faiths of the coming time. How could the complex of blind forces arouse any devotion? It demanded implicit submission and self-sacrifice, but it gave no help, save the name of a Divine element in the human soul; it furnished no inspiring example to the sage in the conflicts of passion, under obloquy, obstruction, and persecution. Meanwhile, in this forlorn struggle, the human character was through stress and storm developing new powers and virtues, lofty courage in the face of lawless power, pious resignation to the blows of fortune, gentle consideration and mercy even for slaves and the outcasts of society, ideals of purity unknown to the ancient world in its prime. The sage might, according to orthodox theory, rest in a placid content of rounded perfection. But human nature is not so constituted. In proportion to spiritual progress is the force of spiritual longings; beati [pg 392]mundo corde, ipsi Deum videbunt. The fruitful part of Stoicism as a religion was the doctrine that the human reason is a part of the soul of the world, a spark of the Divine mind. At first this was only conceived in the fashion of a materialistic pantheism.2058 The kindred between the individual and the general soul was little more than a physical doctrine. But it developed in minds like Epictetus and Seneca a profound spiritual meaning; it tapped the source of all real religion. Pure reason can never solve the religious problem. The history of religions shows that a conception of God which is to act effectually on composite human nature is never reached by the speculative intellect. What reason cannot do is effected by the “sub-conscious self,”2059 which is the dim seat of the deeper intuitions, haunted by vague memories, hereditary pieties, and emotional associations, the spring of strange genius, of heroic sacrifice, of infinite aspiration. There throbs the tide “which drew from out the boundless deep.” Thus the Stoic of the later time became a mystic, in the sense that “by love and emotion he solved the dualism of the world.”2060 God is no longer a mere physical law or force, however subtilised, sweeping on in pitiless impetus or monotony of cyclic change. God is within the human soul, not as a spark of empyreal fire, but as the voice of conscience, the spiritual monitor and comforter, the “Holy Spirit,”2061 prompting, guarding, consoling in life and death. God is no longer found so much in the ordered movement of the spheres and the recurring processes or the cataclysms of the material universe. He is heard in the still small voice. It is thus that the later Stoicism melts into the revived Platonism.
Probably Seneca and Epictetus, had they been interrogated, would have loyally resolved their most rapturous and devout language into the cold terms of Stoic orthodoxy. But the emotional tone is a really new element in their teaching, and the language of spiritual abandonment, joyful resignation to a Higher Will, free and cheerful obedience to it in the confidence of love, would be absurdly incongruous if addressed to an [pg 393]abstract law or physical necessity.2062 The fatherhood of God and the kinship of all men as His sons is the fundamental principle of the new creed, binding us to do nothing unworthy of such an ancestry.2063 At other times we are soldiers of God in a war with evil, bound to military obedience, awaiting calmly the last signal to retreat from the scene of struggle.2064 The infinite benevolence of God is asserted in the face of all appearances to the contrary. This of course is all the easier to one trained in the doctrine that the external fortune of life has nothing to do with man’s real happiness. The fear of God is banished by the sense of His perfect love. The all-seeing eye, the all-embracing providence, leave no room for care or foreboding. The Stoic optimism is now grounded on a personal trust in a loving and righteous will: “I am Thine, do with me what Thou wilt.” “For all things work together for good to them who love Him.” The external sufferings and apparent wrongs of the obedient sons of God are no stumbling-blocks to faith.2065 The great heroic example, Heracles, the son of Zeus, was sorely tried by superhuman tasks, and won his crown of immortality through toil and battle. “Whom He loves He chastens.” Even apparent injustice is only an education through suffering. These things are “only light afflictions” to him who sees the due proportions of things and knows Zeus as his father. Even to the poor, the lame, the blind, if they have the divine love, the universe is a great temple, full of mystery and joy, and each passing day a festival. In the common things of life, in ploughing, digging, eating, we should sing hymns to God. “What else can I do,” says Epictetus, “a lame old man, than sing His praise, and exhort all men to join in the same song?”2066 Who shall say what depth of religious emotion, veiled under old-world phrase, there was in that outburst of M. Aurelius: “All harmonises with me which is in harmony with thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late which is in due season for thee.... For thee are all things, in thee are all things, [pg 394]to thee all things return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt not thou say, Dear City of Zeus?”2067
The attitude of such souls to external worship in every age may be easily divined without the evidence of their words. If God is good and wishes only the good of His creatures, then to seek to appease His wrath and avert His capricious judgments becomes an impiety. If men’s final good lies in the moral sphere, in justice, gentleness, temperance, obedience to the higher order, then prayer for external goods, for mere indulgences of sense or ambition, shows a hopeless misconception as to the nature of God and the supreme destiny of man.2068 On the other hand, without giving up the doctrine that the highest good depends on the virtuous will, the later Stoics and Platonists have begun to feel that man needs support and inspiration in his moral struggles from a higher Power, a Power without him and beyond him, yet who is allied to him in nature and sympathy. Prayer is no longer a means of winning temporal good things “for which the worthy need not pray, and which the unworthy will not obtain.” It is a fortifying communion with the Highest, an act of thanksgiving for blessings already received, an inspiration for a fuller and diviner life.2069 It is an effort of gratitude and adoration to draw from the Divine source of all moral strength.
It must always remain to moderns an enigma how souls living in such a spiritual world refused to break with heathen idolatry. Seneca, indeed, poured contempt on the grossness of myth in a lost treatise on superstition;2070 and he had no liking for the external rites of worship. But in some strange way M. Aurelius reconciled punctilious devotion to the popular gods with an austere pantheism or monotheism. It is in Platonists such as Dion or Maximus of Tyre that we meet with an attempted apology for anthropomorphic symbolism of the Divine.2071 The justification lies in the vast gulf which separates the remote, ineffable, and inconceivable purity of God from the feebleness and grossness of man. Few [pg 395]are they who can gaze in unaided thought on the Divine splendour unveiled. Images, rites, and sacred myth have been invented by the wisdom of the past, to aid the memory and the imagination of weak ordinary souls. The symbols have varied with the endless variety of races. Animals or trees, mountain or river, rude unhewn stones, or the miracles of Pheidias in gold and ivory, are simply the sign or picture by which the soul is pointed to the Infinite Essence which has never been seen by mortal eye or imaged in human phantasy. The symbol which appeals to one race may be poor and contemptible in the eyes of another. The animal worship of Egypt gave a shock to minds which were lifted heavenwards by the winning majesty of the Virgin Goddess or of the Zeus of Olympia. The human form, as the chosen tabernacle of an effluence of the Divine Spirit, might well seem to Dion and Maximus the noblest and most fitting symbol of religious worship. Yet, in the end, they are all ready to tolerate any aberration of religious fancy which is justified by its use.2072 The most perfect symbol is only a faint adumbration of “the Father and Creator of all, Who is older than the sun and heavens, stronger than time and the ages and the fleeting world of change, unnamed by any lawgiver, Whom tongue cannot express nor eye see. Helpless to grasp His real essence, we seek a stay in names or images, in beast or plant, in river or mountain, in lustrous forms of gold and silver and ivory. Whatever we have of fairest we call by His name. And for love of Him, we cling, as lovers are wont, to anything which recalls Him. I quarrel not with divers imagery, if we seek to know, to love, to remember Him.”2073 This is the outburst of a tolerant and eclectic Platonism, ready to condone everything in the crudest religious imagery. But a more conscientious scrutiny even of Grecian legend demanded, as we shall see, a deeper solution to account for dark rites and legends which cast a shadow on the Infinite Purity.
The Stoic theology, which resolved the gods of legend into thin abstractions, various potencies of the Infinite Spirit interfused with the universe,2074 was in some respects congenial [pg 396]to the Roman mind, and reflected the spirit of old Roman religion. That religion of arid abstractions, to which no myth, no haunting charm of poetic imagination attached,2075 easily lent itself to a system which explained the gods by allegory or physical rationalism. That was not an eirenicon for the second century, at least among thoughtful, pious men. The philosophic effort of so many centuries had ended in an eclecticism for purely moral culture, and a profound scepticism as to the attainment of higher truth by unaided reason.2076 Mere intellectual curiosity, the desire of knowledge for its own sake, and the hope of attaining it, are strangely absent from the loftiest minds, from Seneca, Epictetus, and M. Aurelius.2077 Men like Lucian, sometimes in half melancholy, half scornful derision, amused themselves with ridiculing the chaotic results of the intellectual ambition of the past.2078 They equally recognised the immense force of that spiritual movement which was trying every avenue of accredited religious system or novel superstition, that might perchance lead the devotee to some glimpse of the divine world. And side by side with the recrudescence of old-world superstitions, there were spreading, from whatever source, loftier and more ethical conceptions of God, a dim sense of sin and human weakness, a need of cleansing and support from a Divine hand. Stoicism, with all its austere grandeur, had failed in its interpretation both of man and of God. Popular theology, however soothing to old associations and unregenerate feelings, often gave a shock to the quickened moral sense and the higher spiritual intuitions. Yet the venerable charm of time-honoured ritual, glad or stately, the emotional effects and dim promise of revelation in the mysteries of many shrines, the seductive allurements of new cults, with a strange blending of the sensuous and the mystic, all wove around the human soul such an enchanted maze of spiritual fascination that escape was impossible, even if it were desired. But it was no longer desired even by the highest intellects. The efforts of pure reason to solve the mystery of God and of man’s destiny had failed. Yet men were ever “feeling after God, if haply they might find Him.” And the [pg 397]God whom they sought for was one on whom they might hang, in whom they might have rest. Where was the revelation to come from? Where was the mediator to be sought to reconcile the ancient faiths or fables with a purified conception of the Deity and the aspiration for a higher moral life?
The revived Pythagorean and Platonist philosophy which girded itself to attempt the solution was really part of a great spiritual movement, with its focus at Alexandria.2079 In that meeting-point of the East and West, of all systems of thought and worship, syncretism blended all faiths. Hadrian, in his letter to Servianus, cynically observes that the same men were ready to worship impartially Serapis or Christ.2080 Philosophy became more and more a religion; its first and highest aim is a right knowledge of God. And philosophy, having failed to find help in the life according to nature, or the divine element in individual consciousness, had now to seek support in a God transcending nature and consciousness, a God such as the mysticism of the East or the systems of Pythagoras and Plato had foreshadowed. But such a God, transcending nature and consciousness, remote, ineffable, only, in some rare moment of supreme exaltation, dimly apprehensible by the human spirit,2081 could not call forth fully the loving trust and fervent reverence which men longed to offer. Heaven being so far from earth, and earth so darkened by the mists of sense, any gleam of revelation must be welcomed from whatever quarter it might break. And thus an all-embracing syncretism, while it gratified ancestral piety, and the natural instinct of all religion to root itself in the past, offered the hope of illumination from converging lights. Or rather, any religion which has won the reverence of men may transmit a ray from the central Sun. The believer in God, who longs for communion with Him, for help at His hands, might by reverent selection win from all religions something to satisfy his needs. A revelation was the imperious demand. Where should men be so likely to find it as in the reverent study of great historic efforts of humanity to pierce the veil?
[pg 398]The philosophy which was to attempt the revival of paganism in the second century, and which was to fight its last battles in the fourth and fifth, traced itself to Pythagoras and Plato. Plato’s affinity with the older mystic is well known. And the reader of the Phaedo or the Republic will not be surprised to find the followers of the two masters of Greek thought who believed most in a spiritual vision and in an ordered moral life, united in an effort which extended to the close of the Western Empire,2082 to combine a lofty mysticism with ancestral faith. The two systems had much in common, and yet each contributed a peculiar element to the great movement. Pythagoreanism, although its origin is veiled in mystery, was always full of the mysticism of the East. Platonism was essentially the philosophy of Greek culture. The movement in which their forces were combined was one in which the new Hellenism of Hadrian’s reign reinforced itself for the reconstruction of western paganism with those purer and loftier ideas of God of which the East is the original home. The effort of paganism to rehabilitate itself in the second century drew no small part of its inspiration from the regions which were the cradle of the Christian faith.2083
Seneca seems to regard Pythagoreanism as extinct.2084 Yet one of his own teachers, Sotion, practised its asceticism,2085 and in the first century B.C., the traces of at least ninety treatises by members of the school have been recovered by antiquarian care, many of them forgeries foisted on ancient names.2086 As a didactic system, indeed, the school had long disappeared, but the Pythagorean askesis seems never to have lost its continuity. It drew down the ridicule of the New Comedy. It may have had a share in forming the Essene and Therapeutic discipline.2087 In the first century B.C. it had a distinguished adherent in P. Nigidius Figulus, and a learned expositor in Alexander Polyhistor. Its enduring power as a spiritual creed congenial to paganism is shown by the fact that Iamblichus, one of the latest Neo-Platonists, and one of the ardent devotees of superstition, expounded the Pythagorean system in many treatises and composed an imaginative biography [pg 399]of the great founder.2088 To the modern it is best known through the romantic life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus, which was composed at the instance of Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus, who combined with a doubtful virtue a love for the mysticism of her native East.2089 Apollonius is surrounded by his biographer with an atmosphere of mystery and miracle. But although the critical historian must reject much of the narrative, the faith of the Pythagorean missionary of the reign of Domitian stands out in clear outline. Apollonius is a true representative of the new spiritual movement. His mother had a vision before his birth. His early training at Aegae was eclectic, like the spirit of the age, and he heard the teaching of doctors of all the schools, not even excluding the Epicurean.2090 But he early devoted himself to the severe asceticism of the Pythagorean sect, wore pure linen, abstained from wine and flesh, observed the five years of silence, and made the temple his home. The worship of Asclepius, which was then gaining an extraordinary vogue, had a special attraction for him, with its atmosphere of serenity and ritual purity and its dream oracles of beneficent healing. Apollonius combines in a strange fashion, like Plutarch and the eclectic Platonists, a decided monotheism with a conservative devotion to the ancient gods. He looks to the East, to the sages of the Ganges, for the highest inspiration. He worships the sun every day.2091 Yet he has a profound interest in the popular religion of the many lands through which he travelled. He frequented the temples of all the gods, discoursed with the priests on the ancient lore of their shrines, and corrected or restored, with an authority which seems to have never been challenged, their ritual where it had been forgotten or mutilated in the lapse of ages.2092 He sought initiation in all the mysteries. He wrote a book on Sacrifices which dealt with the most minute details of worship.2093 He had a profound interest in ancient legend, and the fame of the great Hellenic heroes, and, having spent a weird night with the shade of Achilles in the Troad, he constrained the Thessalians [pg 400]to restore his fallen honours.2094 The temples recognised in him at once a champion and a reformer. The oracular seats of Ionia showed an unenvious admiration of his gift of prophecy, and hailed him as a true son of Apollo.2095 His visit to Rome in the darkest hour of the Neronian terror seems to have aroused a strange religious fervour; the temples were thronged with worshippers; it was a heathen revival.2096
Yet this strange missionary held principles which ought to have been fatal to heathen worship. He drew his central principle from Eastern pantheism, which might seem irreconcilable with the anthropomorphism of the West. It is true that under the Infinite Spirit, as in the Platonist théodicée, the gods of heathen devotion find a place as His ministers and viceroys.2097 But the eternal antithesis of spirit and matter, and the contempt for the body as a degrading prison of the divine element in man,2098 the ascetic theory that by crucifying the flesh and attenuating its powers, the spirit might lay itself open to heavenly influences, these are doctrines which might appear utterly hostile to a gross materialist ritual. And as a matter of fact, Apollonius to some extent obeyed his principles. He scorned the popular conception of divination and magic.2099 The only legitimate power of foreseeing the future or influencing the material world is given to the soul which is pure from all fleshly taint and therefore near to God. He feels profoundly that the myths propagated by the poets have lowered the ideal of God and the character of man, and he greatly prefers the fables of Aesop, which use the falsehoods of the fancy for a definite moral end.2100 The mutilation of a father, the storming of Olympus by the Giants, incest and adultery among the gods, must be reprobated, however they have been glorified by poetry. Apollonius poured contempt on the animal worship of Egypt, even when defended by the dialectic subtlety of Greece.2101 He was repelled by the grossness of bloody sacrifices, however consecrated by immemorial use. For the nobler symbolism of [pg 401]Hellenic art he had a certain sympathy, like Dion, but only as symbolism. Any sensible image of the Supreme, which does not carry the soul beyond the bounds of sense, defeats its purpose and is degrading to pure religion. Pictured or sculptured forms are only aids to that mystic imagination through which alone we can see God. Finally, his idea of prayer is intensely spiritual or ethical. “Grant me, ye gods, what is my due” is the highest prayer of Apollonius.2102 Yet, as we have already seen, the religion of Apollonius is thoroughly practical. He was a great preacher. He addressed vast crowds from the temple steps at Ephesus or Olympia, rebuking their luxury and effeminacy, their feuds and mean civic ambition, their love of frivolous sports or the bloody strife of the arena.2103 Next to the knowledge of God, he preached the importance of self-knowledge, and of lending an attentive ear to the voice of conscience. He crowned his life by asserting fearlessly the cause of righteousness in the awful presence-chamber of Domitian.
About the very time when Apollonius was bearding the last of the Flavians, and preaching a pagan revival in the porticoes of the Roman temples, it is probable that Plutarch, in some respects a kindred spirit, was making his appearance as a lecturer at Rome.2104 The greatest of biographers has had no authentic biography himself.2105 The few certain facts about his life must be gleaned from his own writings. He was the descendant of an ancient family of Chaeronea, famous as the scene of three historic battles, “the War-God’s dancing-place,” and his great-grandfather had tales of the great conflict at Actium.2106 In the year 66 A.D., when Nero was distinguishing or disgracing himself as a competitor at the Greek festivals, Plutarch was a young student at the university of Athens, under Ammonius,2107 who, if he inspired him with admiration for Plato, also taught him to draw freely from all the treasures of Greek thought. Plutarch, before he finally settled down at Chaeronea, saw something of the great Roman world. He had visited Alex[pg 402]andria and some part of Asia Minor.2108 He was at an early age employed to represent his native town on public business,2109 and he had thus visited Rome, probably in the reign of Vespasian, and again, in the reign of Domitian.2110 It was a time when original genius in Roman literature was showing signs of failure, but when minute antiquarian learning was becoming a passion.2111 It was also the age of the new sophist. Hellenism was in the air, and the lecture theatres were thronged to hear the philosophic orator or the professional artist in words.2112 Although Plutarch is never mentioned beside men like Euphrates, in Pliny’s letters, he found an audience at Rome, and the famous Arulenus Rusticus was once among his hearers.2113 While he was ransacking the imperial libraries, he also formed the acquaintance, at pleasant social parties, of many men of academic and official fame, some of whom belonged to the circle of Pliny and Tacitus.2114
But his native Greece, with its great memories, and his native Chaeronea, to which he was linked by ancestral piety, had for a man like Plutarch far stronger charms than the capital of the world. With our love of excitement and personal prominence, it is hard to conceive how a man of immense culture and brilliant literary power could endure the monotony of bourgeois society in depopulated and decaying Greece.2115 Yet Plutarch seems to have found it easy, and even pleasant. He was too great to allow his own scheme of life to be crossed and disturbed by vulgar opinion or ephemeral ambition. His family relations were sweet and happy. His married life realised the highest ideals of happy wedlock.2116 He had the respectful affection of his brothers and older kinsmen. The petty magistracies, in which he made it a duty to serve [pg 403]his native town, were dignified in his eyes by the thought that Epameinondas had once been charged with the cleansing of the streets of Thebes.2117 His priesthood of Apollo at Delphi was probably far more attractive than the imperial honours which, according to legend, were offered to him by Trajan and Hadrian.2118 To his historic and religious imagination the ancient shrine which looked down on the gulf from the foot of the “Shining Rocks,” was sacred as no other spot on earth. Although in Plutarch’s day Delphi had declined in splendour and fame,2119 it was still surrounded with the glamour of immemorial sanctity and power. It was still the spot from which divine voices of warning or counsel had issued to the kings of Lydia, to chiefs of wild hordes upon the Strymon, to the envoys of the Roman Tarquins, to every city of Hellenic name from the Euxine to the Atlantic. We can still almost make the round of its antiquarian treasures under his genial guidance. Probably Plutarch’s happiest hours were spent in accompanying a party of visitors,—a professor on his way home from Britain to Tarsus, a Spartan traveller just returned from far Indian seas,—around those sacred scenes; we can hear the debate on the doubtful quality of Delphic verse or the sources of its inspiration: we can watch them pause to recall the story of mouldering bronze or marble, and wake the echoes of a thousand years.2120
Plutarch must have been a swift and indefatigable worker, for his production is almost on the scale of Varro, Cicero, or the elder Pliny. Yet he found time for pleasant visits to every part of Greece which had tales or treasures for the antiquary. He enjoyed the friendship of the brightest intellects of the day, of Herodes Atticus, the millionaire rhetorician,2121 of Favorinus, the great sophist of Gaul, the intimate friend of Herodes and the counsellor of the Emperor Hadrian, of Ammonius, who was Plutarch’s tutor; of many others, noted in their time, but who are mere shadows to us. They met in a convivial way in many places, at Chaeronea, at Hyampolis, at Eleusis after the Mysteries, at Patrae, at Corinth during [pg 404]the Isthmian games, at Thermopylae, and Athens in the house of Ammonius, or at Aedepsus, the Baden of Euboea, where in the springtime people found pleasant lodgings and brisk intercourse to relieve the monotony of attendance at the baths.2122 Plutarch had a large circle of relatives,—his grandfather Lamprias, who had tales from an actual witness of the revels of Antony at Alexandria;2123 Lamprias his elder brother, a true Boeotian in his love of good fare, a war-dance, and a jest;2124 his younger brother Timon, to whom Plutarch was devotedly attached.2125 His ordinary society, not very distinguished socially, was composed of grammarians, rhetoricians, country doctors, the best that the district could afford.2126 The talk is often on the most trivial or absurd subjects, though not more absurdly trivial than those on which the polished sophist displayed his graces in the lecture-hall.2127 Yet graver and more serious themes are not excluded,2128 and the table-talk of Greece in the end of the first century is invaluable to the student of society. In such scenes Plutarch not only cultivated friendship, the great art of life, not only watched the play of intellect and character; he also found relief from the austere labours which have made his fame. It is surely not the least of his titles to greatness that, in an environment which to most men of talent would have been infinitely depressing, with the irrepressible vitality of genius he contrived to idealise the society of decaying Greece by linking it with the past.
And, with such a power of reviving the past, even the dulness of the little Boeotian town was easily tolerable. We can imagine Plutarch looking down the quiet street in the still vacant noontide, as he sat trying to revive the ancient glories of his race, and to match them with their conquerors, while he reminded the lords of the world, who, in Plutarch’s [pg 405]early youth, seemed to be wildly squandering their heritage, of the stern, simple virtue by which it had been won. For in the Lives of great Greeks and Romans, the moral interest is the most prominent. It is biography, not history, which Plutarch is writing.2129 Setting and scenery of course there must be; but Plutarch’s chief object is to paint the character of the great actors on the stage. Hence he may slur over or omit historic facts of wider interest, while he records apparently trivial incidents or sayings which light up a character. But Plutarch has a fine eye both for lively social scenes and the great crises of history. The description of the feverish activity of swarming industry in the great days of Pheidias at Athens, once read, can never be forgotten.2130 Equally indelible are the pictures of the younger Cato’s last morning, as he finished the Phaedo, and the birds began to twitter,2131 of the flight and murder of Pompey, of the suicide of Otho on the ghastly field of Bedriacum, which seemed to atone for an evil life. Nor can we forget his description of one of the saddest of all scenes in Greek history, which moved even Thucydides to a restrained pathos,—the retreat of the Athenians from the walls of Syracuse.
Plutarch was before all else a moralist, with a genius for religion. His ethical treatises deserve to be thoroughly explored, and as sympathetically expounded, for the light which they throw on the moral aspirations of the age, as Dr. Mahaffy has skilfully used them for pictures of its social life. He must be a very unimaginative person who cannot feel the charm of their revelation. But the man of purely speculative interest will probably be disappointed. Plutarch is not an original thinker in morals or religion. He has no new gospel to expound. He does not go to the roots of conduct or faith. Possessing a very wide knowledge of past speculation, he might have written an invaluable history of ancient philosophy. But he has not done it. And, as a man of genius, with a strong practical purpose to do moral good to his fellows, his choice of his vocation must be accepted without cavil. He was the greatest Hellenist of his day, when Hellenism was capturing [pg 406]the Roman world. He was also a man of high moral ideals, sincere piety, and absorbing interest in the fate of human character. With all that wealth of learning, philosophic or historical, with all that knowledge of human nature, what nobler task could a man set himself than to attempt to give some practical guidance to a generation conscious of moral weakness, and distracted between new spiritual ideals and the mythologies of the past? The urgent need for moral culture and reform of character, for a guiding force in conduct, was profoundly felt by all the great serious minds of the Flavian age, by Pliny and Tacitus, by Juvenal and Quintilian. But Plutarch probably felt it more acutely than any, and took endless pains to satisfy it. It was an age when the philosophic director and the philosophic preacher were, as we have seen, to be met with everywhere. And Plutarch took his full share in the movement, and influenced a wide circle.2132 If he did not elaborate an original ethical system, he had studied closely the art of moral reform, and Christian homilists, from Basil to Jeremy Taylor, have drawn freely from the storehouse of his precept and observation. In many tracts he has analysed prevailing vices and faults of his time,—flattery, vain curiosity, irritable temper, or false modesty,—and given rules for curing or avoiding them. In these homilies, the fundamental principle is that of Musonius, perhaps adapted from an oracle to the people of Cirrha “to wage war with vice day and night, and never to relax your guard.”2133 The call to reform sounded all the louder in Plutarch’s ears because of the high ideal which he had conceived of what life might be made if, no longer left to the play of passion and random influences, character were moulded from early youth to a temperate harmony. To such a soul each passing day might be a glad festival, the universe an august temple full of its Maker’s glories, and life an initiation into the joy of its holy mysteries.2134
In the work of moral and religious reconstruction Plutarch and his contemporaries could only rely on philosophy as their guide. Philosophy to Plutarch, Apollonius, or M. Aurelius, had a very different meaning from what it bore to the great [pg 407]thinkers of Ionia and Magna Graecia. Not only had it deserted the field of metaphysical speculation; it had lost interest even in the mere theory of morals. It had become the art rather than the science of life. The teacher of an art cannot indeed entirely divorce it from all scientific theory. The relative importance of practical precept and ethical theory was often debated in that age. But the tendency was undoubtedly to subordinate dogma to edification.2135 And where dogma was needed for practical effect, it might be drawn from the most opposite quarters. Seneca delights in rounding off a letter by a quotation from Epicurus. M. Aurelius appeals both to the example of Epicurus and the teaching of Plato.2136 Man might toy with cosmic speculation; the Timaeus had many commentators in the first and second centuries.2137 But, for Plutarch and his contemporaries, the great task of philosophy was to bring some sort of order into the moral and religious chaos. It was not original thought or discovery which was needed, but the application of reason, cultivated by the study of the past, to the moral and religious problems of the present. The philosopher sometimes, to our eyes, seems to trifle with the smallest details of exterior deportment or idiom or dress; he gives precepts about the rearing of children; he occupies himself with curious questions of ritual and antiquarian interest.2138 These seeming degradations of a great mission, after all, only emphasise the fact that philosophy was now concerned with human life rather than with the problems of speculation. It had in fact become an all-embracing religion. It supplied the medicine for moral disease; it furnished the rational criterion by which all myth and ritual must be judged or explained.2139
Plutarch was an eclectic in the sense that, knowing all the moral systems of the past, he was ready to borrow from any of these principles which might give support to character. Whether, if he had been born four or five hundred years earlier, he might have created or developed an original theory himself, is a question which may be variously answered. One may reasonably hesitate to assent to the common opinion that [pg 408]Plutarch had no genius for original speculation. Had he come under the influence of Socrates, it is not so certain that he might not have composed dialogues with a certain charm of fresh dialectic and picturesque dramatic power. It is a little unhistorical to decry a man of genius as wanting in speculative originality, who was born into an age when speculation had run dry, and thought was only subsidiary to conduct. When the dissonant schools forsook the heights of metaphysic and cosmology to devote themselves to moral culture, an inevitable tendency to eclecticism, to a harmony of moral theory, set in. The practical interest prevailed over the infinitely divisive forces of the speculative reason. Antiochus, the teacher of Cicero,2140 while he strove to re-establish Platonism, maintained the essential agreement of the great schools on the all-important questions, and freely adopted the doctrines of Zeno and Aristotle.2141 Panaetius, the chief representative of Roman Stoicism in the second century B.C., had a warm admiration for Plato and Aristotle, and in some essential points forsook the older teaching of the Porch.2142 Seneca, as we have seen, often seems to cling to the most hard and repellent tenets of the ancient creed. Yet a sense of practical difficulties has led him to soften and modify many of them—the identity of reason and passion, the indifference of so-called “goods,” the necessity of instantaneous conversion, the unapproachable and unassailable perfection of the wise man. Plutarch’s own ethical system, so far as he has a system, is a compound of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, with a certain tincture of Stoicism.2143 Platonism, which had shaken off its sceptical tendencies in the first century B.C., had few adherents at Rome in the first century of the Empire.2144 The Stoic and Epicurean systems divided the allegiance of thinking people till the energetic revival of Hellenism set in. Epictetus indeed speaks of women who were attracted by the supposed freedom of sexual relations in Plato’s Utopia.2145 Seneca often refers to Plato, and was undoubtedly influenced by his spirit. [pg 409]But in the second century, the sympathetic union of Platonic and Pythagorean ideas with a vigorous religious revival became a real power, with momentous effects on the future of philosophy and religion for three centuries. Plutarch’s reverence for the founder of the Academy, even in little things, was unbounded.2146 It became with him almost a kind of cult. And he paid the most sincere reverence to his idol by imitating, in some of his treatises, the mythical colouring by which the author of the Phaedo and the Republic had sought to give body and reality to the unseen world.2147 Plutarch condemned in very strong language the coarse and sophistical modes of controversy with which the rival schools assailed one another’s tenets.2148 Yet he can hardly be acquitted of some harshness in his polemic against the Stoics and Epicureans. Archbishop Trench, in his fascinating and sympathetic treatment of Plutarch, laments that he did not give a more generous recognition to that noblest and most truly Roman school which was the last refuge and citadel of freedom.2149 We may join the archbishop in wishing that Plutarch, without compromising principle, had been more tolerant to a system with which he had so much in common, and which, in his day, had put off much of its old hardness. But he was essentially a practical man, with a definite moral aim. He took from any quarter principles which seemed to him to be true to human nature, and which furnished a hopeful basis for the efforts of the moral teacher. But he felt equally bound to reject a system which absorbed and annihilated the emotional nature in the reason,2150 which cut at the roots of moral freedom, which recognised no degrees in virtue or in vice, which discouraged and contemned the first faint struggles of weak humanity after a higher life, and froze it into hopeless impotence by the remote ideal of a cold, flawless perfection, suddenly and miraculously raised to a divine independence of all the minor blessings and helps to virtue.2151 [pg 410]Such an ideal may be magnificent, but it is not life. For man, constituted as he is, and placed in such an environment, it is a dangerous mental habit to train the soul to regard all things as a fleeting and monotonous show, to cultivate the taedium vitae, or a calm resignation to the littleness of man placed for a brief space between the two eternities.2152 The philosophic sufferer may brace himself to endure the round of human duties, and to live for the commonwealth of man; he may he generous to the ungrateful and tolerant to the vulgar and the frivolous; he may make his life a perpetual sacrifice to duty and the higher law, but it is all the while really a pathetic protest against the pitiless Power which has made man so little and so great, doomed to the life of the leaves and the insects, yet tortured with the longing for an infinite future.