Nowhere is the necessity which Plutarch feels for believing in one supreme ruler of all the imaginable universe more apparent than in a passage in which he is seeking a regulating Intelligence for an admitted plurality of worlds, to account for whose administration a Greek of almost any period would have been constrained to resort to the hypothesis of a plurality of gods, supreme as each individual god might be in his own individual world. The passage in question initiates a discussion on this subject somewhat episodical to the main argument of the “De Defectu Oraculorum.” Plutarch himself is the speaker, though he represents his interlocutors as addressing him by the name of Lamprias.[179] He is inclined to agree that there may be more worlds than one, though repudiating an infinity of worlds. “It is more consonant with reason to assert that God has made more than one world. For He is perfectly good, and deficient in no virtue whatsoever, least of all in those virtues that are associated with Justice and Friendship, which are the fairest of all virtues, and those most appropriate to the divine nature. And as God is not wanting in any respect, so also He possesses no redundant or superfluous characteristics. There must exist, therefore, other gods and other worlds than ours, whose companionship furnishes a sphere for the exercise of these social virtues. For it is not upon Himself, nor upon a part of Himself, but upon others, that He discharges the claims of justice, kindliness, goodness. Hence it is not probable that He is unneighboured and unfriended, or that this world of ours floats alone in the emptiness of infinite space.”[180] Plutarch, however, is merely on tentative ground here; the plurality of worlds was an abstract academic question no less in those days than in these. Admitting a plurality of worlds, it does not necessarily follow that each should be under the dominion of a separate Deity. “What objection,” he asks, in answer to the Stoics, “what objection is there to our asserting that all the worlds are beneath the sway of the Fate and Providence of Zeus, and that He bestows His superintendence and direction among them all, implanting in them the principles and seeds and ideas of all things that are brought about therein? Surely it is no more impossible that ten, or fifty, or a hundred worlds should be animated by the same rule of Reason, or should be administered in accordance with one and the same principle of action, than that a public assembly, an army, or a chorus, should obey the same co-ordinating power. Nay, an arrangement of this kind is in special harmony with the Divine Character.”[181] Plutarch cannot get away from his fixed belief in the absolute Unity of God, and with God’s Unity, as we have already seen, his Eternity and Immutability are involved. But Plutarch re-asserts this truth in various places and forms. In the tract “De Stoicorum Repugnantiis,” though chiefly dealing polemically with the inconsistencies and self-contradictions of Chrysippus and other early Stoics, he clearly exhibits his own views in several passages. In one place[182] he asserts that even those who deny the benevolence of God, as the Jews and the Syrians, do not imagine him as other than eternally and immutably existent, and quotes with approval a sentence from Antipater of Tarsus, to the effect that God is universally regarded as uncreate and eternal. A little later in the development of the argument[183] he adopts the Stoic position—which Chrysippus is represented as contradicting—that the idea of God includes the ideas of happiness, blessedness, self-sufficiency, which qualities are elsewhere shown to exist absolutely and independently of all conceivable causes of opposition.[184] “They are wrong who assert that the Divine Nature is eternal because it avoids and repels anything that might tend to its destruction. Immutability and Eternity must necessarily exist in the very nature of the Blessed One, requiring no exertion on his part to preserve and defend them.”
The intermingling of the doctrines of various philosophic sects is interestingly conspicuous throughout these discussions on the nature of God; and not less than elsewhere in the noble observations of the Platonist Ammonius, which have been quoted from the “De Ε apud Delphos.” It is equally interesting to note that all the speakers in that dialogue, while looking with their mind’s eye far beyond any individual member of the Olympian Pantheon to that divine power whose functions correspond with the essential requirements of the loftiest monotheism, yet use the name of Apollo as the professed nucleus of their religious beliefs, and thus bring themselves into formal harmony with the demands of the “ancient and hereditary Faith.” The same tendency, at once orthodox and unifying, is visible in the philosophic import attached, in accordance with the Stoic practice, to the popular names for the god in his various functions. In other tracts and essays the same aim is conspicuous, the same method of treatment is applied. In his fascinating account of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris—which will be dealt with later from the material which it furnishes for investigating Plutarch’s attempts to identify foreign gods with the gods of Greece—he uses both these divine names as a means of approach to the Divine Nature, that One Eternal, Absolute Being, which is the real object of the philosopher’s clarified insight—πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μία.[185] The true object of the service of Isis, for example, is “the knowledge of that First and Supreme Power which is compact of Intelligence; that Power whom the goddess (Isis) bids her servants seek, since He abides by her side and is united with her. The very name of her temple expressly promises the knowledge and the understanding of Being, inasmuch as it is called the Ision (εἰς—ἰὼν), indicating that we shall know Being if we enter with piety and intelligence into the sacred rites of the goddess.”[186]
The passage just quoted shows the intimate connexion between Being and Intelligence—the “Supreme Power is compact of Intelligence;” and we are left in little doubt respecting Plutarch’s views on this second aspect of the Divine Nature. The conception of the Deity as νοῦς, an ancient abstraction in Greek philosophy, is at once strengthened and brought nearer to the intelligence of humanity by Plutarch’s simple treatment of it, and by his connecting it, wherever possible, with the traditions of the popular creed. God is not only Intelligence, but intelligent. “The Divine Nature,” says he, “is not blessed in the possession of silver and gold, nor mighty through the wielding of thunders and thunderbolts, but in the enjoyment of knowledge and understanding; and of all the things that Homer has said concerning the gods, this is his finest pronouncement:—
‘Yet both one goddess formed
And one soil bred, but Jupiter precedence took in birth
And had more knowledge’[187]
—a pronouncement in which he gives the palm for dignity and honour to the sovereignty of Jove, inasmuch as he is older in knowledge and wisdom. And I am of opinion that the blessedness of that eternal life which belongs to God consists in the knowledge which gives Him cognizance of all events; for take away knowledge of things, and the understanding of them, and immortality is no longer life, but mere duration.”[188] The free, unfettered exercise of intelligence is therefore a function of the Divine Nature; but although Plutarch is clearly thinking of the νοῦς of Anaxagoras as embodied by Plato in his conception of the Chief Good, yet he succeeds in bringing the Divine Nature, by the exercise of intelligence, into an intimate relation with humanity which the Platonic Demiurgus never attains. The true successors of Plato in the realm of Idealism were the neo-Platonists, who maintained that “the sum total of the Ideas exists in the Divine nous, not outside of it, ‘like golden statues,’ which God must search and look up to before He can think. It is not to be supposed that He must needs run about in search of notions, perhaps not finding them at all, perhaps not recognizing them when found. This is the lot of man, whose life is spent often in the search, sometimes in the vain search, after truth. But to the Deity all knowledge is always equally present.”[189] The vicious weakness of Platonism, whether Old or New, lies in the fact that no real reason exists why God should ever leave the contemplation of “worlds not realized” to create this world after an eternally existing pattern, in the intellectual contemplation of which he was already happy.[190] The “absence of envy” is not a philosophic reason: it is a Platonic leap over an unbridged chasm. The aloofness of the Epicurean gods in their sedes quietæ is the logical outcome of this aspect of Platonism. Plutarch gives the Divine Intelligence an interest in the beings He has created. Apollo (here again the popular name is used for the Divine Being) knows all the difficulties that trouble the public and private lives of humanity, and he knows their solutions also. “In private matters we inquire of Apollo as a seer, in public matters we pray to him as a god. In the philosophic nature of the soul he is the author and inspirer of intellectual difficulties and problems, thus creating therein that craving which has its satisfaction in the discovery of Truth;”[191] e.g., “when the oracle was given out that the altar of Delos should be doubled, the god, as Plato says, not only conveyed a particular command, but also indicated his desire that the Greeks should study geometry; the task assigned involving an operation of the most advanced geometrical character.”[192] In another place this paternal interest in the doings of mankind is attributed to the Deity direct without the intrusion of any traditional name for a particular god. “It is not, as Hesiod supposes,[193] the work of human wisdom, but of God’s, to discriminate and distinguish predilections and antipathies in character before they become conspicuous to the world by breaking out into gross evil-doing under the influence of the passions. For God is assuredly cognizant of the natural disposition of every individual man, being, by His nature, more fitted to perceive soul than body: nor does He await the outbreak of actual sin before He punishes violence, profanity, obscenity.”[194] Thus, although Plutarch accepts the philosophic phrasing current respecting the nature of the Deity, his ardent, sympathetic temperament brings down the philosophers’ Deity from its majestic isolation, and makes it “meet halfway” the gods of the popular faith, so that both may be of service to humanity, the latter being purified and elevated, the other actualized and humanized. We discern with sympathy Plutarch’s attempt to satisfy the eternal craving of men for a mediator between themselves and the unapproachableness of the Highest; and we are prepared for his exposition of the doctrines of Dæmonology. This tendency to give warmth and life to philosophic abstractions is occasionally visible in an unconscious attempt to assimilate the qualities possessed by the Deity to those displayed in a less degree by mankind. Thus, he implicitly accepts the Platonic position that Eternity is all present to God,[195] a position which is also accepted by modern European Theology: but he elsewhere regards the Deity (formally using the name of Apollo) as a scientific observer, with infallibly acute reasoning powers directed upon phenomena retained in an unshakable memory. His predictions of events are, therefore, really predictions, not statements of present facts; and the “rigorous certainty and universality” which they possess are the certainty and universality attaching to the human discoveries of the laws of geometry and the law of causation, and not to a divine insight which is omniscience because it is always regarding events as present, whether they are actually past, present, or to come. “Apollo is a prophet, and prophecy is the art of ascertaining the future from the present or the past. Now nothing exists without a cause, and prediction, therefore, depends upon reason. The present springs inevitably from the past, the future from the present. The one follows naturally upon the other by a succession which is unbroken from beginning to end, and, accordingly, he who knows the natural causes of past, present, and future events, and can connect their mutual relationships, can predict the future, knowing, in the words of Homer, ‘things that are now, things that shall be, and things that are over.’ The whole art of Dialectics consists in the knowledge of the Consequent.”[196]
Already in these passages, which represent philosophers as discussing God in the terms familiar in Greek philosophy, we can discern a gradual breaking down of that metaphysical exclusiveness which had hitherto marked the philosophic conception of the Deity. We see God again becoming personal, and reverting to that interest in the affairs of mankind from which the philosophers, starting with Xenophanes, had, in their revulsion from the anthropomorphic realisms of the Epic traditions, excluded him. We can already note that Plutarch believes in the “goodness” of God in a sense quite distinct from the “absence of envy” distinguishing the Platonic Creator, or even from the sense involved in Plato’s admission that the gods love the just, since one always loves that which is made in one’s own image.[197] We can see him going further, indeed, than Aristotle, who compares the love of men for the gods to the love of children for their parents, a love which is based upon a recognition of their goodness and superiority, and of their having been the authors of the greatest benefits to humanity.[198] But we are not left without many explicit texts asserting the goodness of God to mankind in emphatic phrases. Plutarch agrees with those statesmen and philosophers who assert that the majesty of the Divine Nature is accompanied by goodness, magnanimity, graciousness and benignity in its attitude towards mankind.[199] We have already seen that Justice and Love are regarded by Plutarch as the most beautiful of all virtues, and those most in harmony with the Divine Nature,[200] and many isolated sentences could be quoted to demonstrate how firmly the belief in God’s goodness to man was fixed in Plutarch’s mind. We are fortunate, however, in possessing a special tract in which the personal character of the Divine Goodness is so clearly exhibited that a modern translator of the tract, writing from a “Theological Institution,” is able to say, “I am not aware, indeed, that even Christian writers who have attempted to defend the same truth within the same limits of natural theology, have been able to do anything better than to reaffirm his position, and perhaps amplify and illustrate his argument.”[201] The tract referred to is, of course, the famous production known as the “De Sera Numinis Vindicta.” It is a bold and beautiful attempt to reconcile the existence of an actively benevolent Deity with the long-continued, often permanent, impunity of wickedness in this world; an endeavour to solve the question raised, especially by Epicureans, but not unfraught with solicitude for philosophers of other schools, respecting the patent fact that human virtue and human vice have no natural and necessary connexion with human happiness on the one hand and human misery on the other. Christian translators of the piece, from Amyot down to the writers just quoted, have hailed it as an effective vindication of the ways of God to man, and Comte Joseph de Maistre, whose paraphrase is designed, as he says, to please “ladies and foreigners,” is quite convinced that such a justification could not possibly have been written by one who was not a Christian.[202] Even Wyttenbach, whom de Maistre attacks for repudiating this view, is willing, with all his scholarly caution, to admit that Plutarch, in this tract, touches the excellences of the Christian faith.[203]
The position which Plutarch sets himself to overthrow is that which is expressed most concisely in the famous verses of Ennius:—
“Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam cœlitum,