“So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
And all at once it seem’d at last
His living soul was flashed on mine.And mine in his was wound and whirl’d
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.”
Mystery! We cannot fathom it; we know not the paths of the souls of Pascal and Gordon, of Plotinus and St. Paul. They are wise with a wisdom not of this world, or with a foolishness yet more wise.
In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist, or at least he was at war with pessimism.
“They that love God bear lightly the ways of the world—bear lightly whatsoever befalls them of necessity in the general movement of things.” He believed in a rest that remains for the people of God, “where they speak not one with the other; but, as we understand many things by the eyes only, so does soul read soul in heaven, where the spiritual body is pure, and nothing is hidden, and nothing feigned.” The arguments by which these opinions are buttressed may be called metaphysical, and may be called worthless; the conviction, and the beauty of the language in which it is stated, remain immortal possessions.
Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remained a pagan, while Christianity offered him a sympathetic refuge, who can tell? Probably natural conservatism, in him as in Dr. Johnson—conservatism and taste—caused his adherence to the forms at least of the older creeds. There was much to laugh at in Plotinus, and much to like. But if you read him in hopes of material for strange stories, you will be disappointed. Perhaps Lord Lytton and others who have invoked his name in fiction (like Vivian Grey in Lord Beaconsfield’s tale) knew his name better than his doctrine. His “Enneads,” even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, are not very light subjects of study.
LUCRETIUS
To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford.
Dear Martin,—“How individuals found religious consolation from the creeds of ancient Greece and Rome” is, as you quote C. O. Müller, “a very curious question.” It is odd that while we have countless books on the philosophy and the mythology and the ritual of the classic peoples, we hear about their religion in the modern sense scarcely anything from anybody. We know very well what gods they worshipped, and what sacrifices they offered to the Olympians, and what stories they told about their deities, and about the beginnings of things. We know, too, in a general way, that the gods were interested in morality. They would all punish offences in their own department, at least when it was a case of numine læso, when the god who protected the hearth was offended by breach of hospitality, or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were offended by perjury.
But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods? What hope or what fears did he entertain with regard to the future life? Had he any sense of sin, as more than a thing that could be expiated by purification with the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasing the prayers and “masses,” so to speak, of the mendicant clergy or charlatans, mentioned by Plato in the “Republic”? About these great questions of the religious life—the Future and man’s fortunes in the future, the punishment or reward of justice or iniquity—we really know next to nothing.
That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable to me. The De Rerum Natura was written for no other purpose than to destroy Religion, as Lucretius understood it, to free men’s minds from all dread as to future punishment, all hope of Heaven, all dread or desire for the interference of the gods in this mortal life of ours on earth. For no other reason did Lucretius desire to “know the causes of things,” except that the knowledge would bring “emancipation,” as people call it, from the gods, to whom men had hitherto stood in the relation of the Roman son to the Roman sire, under the patria potestas or in manu patris.