Sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus;
Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest”
—a sentiment in exact harmony with the Epicurean view of the matter.[204] While, however, establishing the providence and goodness of God as against the practical Atheism of the Epicureans, it will be seen that he is equally temperate, and equally consistent with himself, in avoiding the exaggerated zeal of those Stoics who, in their eager desire to do something for the honour of Providence, had subjected the minutest and commonest actions of life to the jealous watching of an arbitrary omniscience, so that, as Wyttenbach puts it, “that most gracious name of Providence was exposed to ridicule and contempt, being alternately regarded as a fortune-telling old crone, and as a dreadful spectre to alarm and terrify mankind.”
Let us see in what way Plutarch establishes the providential benevolence of God without detracting from his majesty.
A company of philosophic students, Plutarch himself; Patrocleas, his son-in-law;[205] Timon, his brother; and Olympichos, a friend;[206] are found, at the opening of the dialogue, regarding each other in silence beneath a Portico of the Delphic Temple, in wonder at the discourtesy of an Epicurean who has suddenly disappeared from the party, after expounding the doctrines of his school in the manner, doubtless, of Velleius in the “De Natura Deorum,” though with a more limited scope as expressed by the famous line of Ennius already quoted. According to Plutarch, he had “gathered together, from various sources, an undigested mass of confused observations, and had then scattered them in one contemptuous stream of spleen and anger upon Providence.” The company, deprived of their legitimate opportunity for reply, determined to discuss the question of Providence as if the departed opponent were still present, although it cannot be doubted that his absence, and the consequent want of direct necessity to “score off” him, lead to a more thorough and impartial discussion of the topic. Patrocleas, at any rate, states the difficulty with almost Epicurean boldness. “The delay of the Deity in punishing the wicked seems to me to be a strange and mysterious thing. The wicked are so eager and active in their wickedness, that they, least of all, ought to be the object of inactivity on the part of God. Thucydides rightly said that the advantage of delay was on the side of evil-doers.[207] Present immunity from the punishment due to crime encourages the criminal, and depresses the innocent sufferer. Bias knew that a certain reprobate of his days would be punished, but feared that he would not live to see it. Those whom Aristocrates betrayed at the Battle of Taphrus were all dead when his treachery was punished twenty years after. So with Lyciscus and the Orchomenians.[208] This delay encourages the wicked. The fruit of injustice ripens early and is easily plucked, but punishment matures long after the fruit of evil has been enjoyed.” This demand of the natural man to see their deserts meted out to the wicked is reinforced in a more philosophical manner by Olympichos, who maintains that delay in the punishment of sin deprives it of that salutary effect which its immediate infliction would have upon the sinner, who regards it as accidental, and not necessarily connected with his crimes. The fault of a horse is corrected if bit and lash be applied at once; but all the beating and backing and shouting in the world at a later time will only injure his physique without improving his character. “So that I am quite unable to see what good is done by those Mills of God[209] which are said to grind so late, since their delay brings justice to naught, and thus deprives vice of its restraining fear.”[210]
Plutarch, before replying to these weighty arguments, preaches a short and eloquent sermon on the text, “God moves in a mysterious way.” His thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor His ways our ways. We must imitate the philosophic caution of the Academy. Men who never saw a battle may talk of military affairs, or discuss music who never played a note; “but it is a different thing for mere men like ourselves to peer too closely into matters that concern Divine Natures; just as if unskilled laymen were to try to penetrate the intention of an artist, the meaning of a physician’s treatment, the inner significance of a legal enactment, by fanciful guesses and surmises.... It is easier[211] for a mortal to make no definite assertion about the gods, but just this—that He[212] knows best the proper time to apply His treatment to wickedness. He can truly discriminate in the character of the punishment required by each offence.” These preliminary observations are in the proper Academic style; they are designed to indicate that the end of a discourse on such intricate matters can only be the modification of doubt by probability, not its settlement by absolute logical certainty.[213] The assumption of the Platonic attitude is appropriately followed by a Plutarchic reading of the teaching of Plato, who is understood as asserting that God, when he made Himself the universal pattern for all beautiful and noble things, granted human virtue to those who are able to follow Him, in order that they might thus in somewise grow like unto Him.[214] Further, as Plato says,[215] the universal nature took on order and arrangement by assimilation to and participation in the Idea and in the Virtue of the Divine Nature. Again, according to Plato, Nature gave us eyes that our soul might behold the order and harmony of the heavenly bodies, and become harmonious and ordered herself, free from flighty passions and roving propensities.[216] Becoming like God in this way, we shall emulate the mildness and forbearance with which He treats the wicked; shall eradicate from our minds the brutish passion for revenge; and shall wait to inflict our punishments until long consideration has excluded every possibility that we may repent after the deed is done. The purport of this argument, and of the examples which Plutarch, always rich in illustration, furnishes in support of it, is clearer than the need of attaching it to the Platonic scheme of creation. Plutarch believes that “God is slow to anger”; because gentleness and patience are part of His nature, and because by speedy punishment, He would save a few, but by delaying His justice He gives help and admonition to many. God, moreover, knows how much virtue He originally implanted in the heart of every man. He knows the character and inclination of every guilty soul; and His punishments are, therefore, different from human penalties, in that the latter regard the law of retaliation only, while the former are based on a knowledge of character which does not quench the smoking flax, but gives time and opportunity for a repentant return to the path of virtue.[217] The world, too, would have been deprived of many a virtuous character, lost the advantage of many a noble deed, had prompt punishment for early sins been inflicted. There is, moreover, a soul of good in things evil; the careers of great tyrants have been prolonged, and the world has been the better for the movements which their tyranny compelled. Evil is a “dispensation of Providence” in Plutarch’s eyes, as in those of many modern Christians. “As the gall of the hyæna, and the rennet of the seal, both disgusting animals in other respects, possess qualities useful for medicinal purposes, so upon certain peoples who need severe correction God inflicts the implacable harshness of a tyrant or the intolerable severity of a magistrate, and does not take away their trouble and distress until they are purified of their sins.” Sometimes, too, the Deity delays His vengeance in order that it may take effect in a more strikingly appropriate manner.[218]
But these external punishments are not the most terrible that can be inflicted on the sinner. It would be difficult, even in Christian literature, to find so striking a tribute to the power of conscience in inflicting its immaterial tortures on the criminal who has escaped material recompense. Plutarch bases his observations on this head on a repudiation of Plato’s statement[219] “that punishment is a state that follows upon injustice,” asserting, as he finds in Hesiod, that the two are contemporaneous and spring up from the same soil and root; a view which he supports by many conspicuous and terrible examples from history, the force of which may be summarized in the fine and truthful phrase—the antithetical effect of which would be destroyed by translation—οὐδὲ γηράσαντες ἐκολάσθησαν ἀλλ’ ἐγήρασαν κολαζόμενοι.[220] The conclusion which Plutarch arrives at by considering this aspect of the case is that “there is no necessity for any god, or any man, to inflict punishment on evildoers, but it is sufficient that their whole life is tormented and destroyed by their sense of their impiety;” and that the time cannot but come when the glamour and the tinselled glory of successful crime will be torn away, and nothing shall remain but the base and dreadful memory to torture awakening conscience with the pangs of an unquenchable remorse.[221]
A fresh perplexity as to the goodness and justice of God is here raised by Timon, who cannot see that it is in harmony with these divine qualities that the sins of the fathers should, as Euripides complained, be visited upon the children.[222] The punishment of the innocent is no compensation for the escape of the guilty. God, in this case, would be like Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, who ravaged Corcyra because the Homeric Corcyreans had given a welcome to Odysseus, and retorted the blinding of the mythical Cyclops upon the Ithacensians when they complained that his soldiers had looted their sheepfolds. “Where, indeed,” asks Timon, “is the reason and justice of this?”[223] Plutarch can only reply that, if the descendants of Hercules and Pindar are held in honour on account of the deeds of their progenitors, there is nothing illogical in the descendants of a wicked stock being punished. But he knows that he is on difficult ground, and repeats the Academic caution against too much dogmatism in these intricate matters. He falls back upon natural causes here, as if seeking to exonerate the Deity from direct responsibility for a striking injustice. An hereditary tendency to physical disease is possible, and may be transmitted from ancestors who lived far back in antiquity. Why should we marvel more at a cause operating through a long interval of time, than through a long interval of space? If Pericles died, and Thucydides fell sick, of a plague that originated in Arabia, why is it strange that the Delphians and Sybarites should be punished for the offences of their ancestors?[224] Moreover, a city is a continuous entity with an abiding personality; just as child, and boy, and man are not different persons, but are unified by the consciousness of identity;—nay, less marked changes take place in a city than in an individual. A man would know Athens again after thirty years of absence, but a far shorter period serves to obliterate the likenesses of our personal acquaintance. A city rejoices in the glory and splendour of its ancient days; it must also bear the burden of its ancient ignominies. And if a city has this enduring personality which makes it a responsible agent throughout its existence, the members of the same family are much more intimately connected. There would, therefore, have been less injustice inflicted had the posterity of Dionysius been punished by the Syracusans than was perpetrated by their ejection of his dead body from their territories. For the soul of Dionysius had left his body, but the sons of wicked fathers are often dominated by a good deal of their parents’ spirit.[225]
We are conscious of some artificial straining of the argument in this place, and shortly perceive that the mention of the soul of Dionysius is intended to prepare the way for a discussion on the immortality of the soul. Plutarch cannot believe that the gods would show so much protective care for man—would give so many oracles, enjoin so many sacrifices and honours for the dead—if they knew that the souls of the dead perished straightway, leaving the body like a wreath of mist or smoke, as the Epicureans believed.[226] He shrinks from the thought that the Deity would take so much account of us, if our souls were as brief in their bloom as the forced and delicate plants that women grow in their fragile flower-pots, their short-lived Gardens of Adonis. He is convinced that the belief in the after-existence of the soul stands or falls with the belief in the Providence of God.[227] If there is a Providence, there is existence after death; and if there is existence after death, then there is stronger reason for supposing that every soul receives its due reward or punishment for its life on Earth. But here Plutarch, after just touching one of the cardinal principles of Christian teaching, the dogma of Heaven and Hell, starts away from the consequence which almost seems inevitable, and which Christianity accepted to the full—the belief that our life here should be modelled in relation to the joys and penalties that await us in the other world. He clearly believed that their ethical effect upon life is small.[228] The rewards and punishments of the soul hereafter are nothing to us here. Perhaps we do not believe them, and in any case we cannot be certain that they will come. This is the position at which Plutarch arrives in the course of rational argument, and he at once returns to the sphere of our present life to find surer sanctions for goodness. Such punishments as are inflicted in this world on the descendants of an evil race are conspicuous to all that come hereafter, and deter many from wickedness. Besides, God does not punish indiscriminately. He has a watchful care even over the children of those who have been notorious for evildoing, and instead of delaying the punishment in their case, early checks their hereditary disposition to vice by appropriate restraints born of His intimate knowledge of the character and inclination of the human heart. But if, in spite of this, a man persists in the sinful courses of his ancestors, it is right that he should inherit their punishment as he has inherited their crimes.
The dialogue concludes with a myth of the type of Er the Armenian, in which, after the manner of Plato, Plutarch embodies views on the state of the soul after death, for which no place could be found in the rational argumentation of mere prose. Thespesius of Soli, an abandoned profligate, has an accident which plunges him into unconsciousness for three days. In this period his soul visits the interstellar spaces, where the souls of the dead are borne along in various motion; some wailing and terror-struck; others joyous and delighted; some like the full moon for brightness; others with faint blemishes or black spots like snakes. Here, in the highest place, was Adrastea, the daughter of Zeus and Ananke, from whom no criminal could hope ever to escape. Three kinds of justice are her instruments. Poena is swift to punish, chastising those whose sin can be expiated while they are still on earth. Those whose wickedness demands severer penalties are reserved for Justice in the afterworld. The third class of sinners, the irretrievably bad, are cast by Justice into the hands of Erinnys, “the third and most terrible of the servants of Adrastea,” who pursues them as they wander hither and thither in reckless flight, and finally thrusts them all with pitiless severity into a place of unspeakable darkness.[229] In these acts of immortal justice the soul is bared utterly, and her sins and crimes are relentlessly exposed. All this is explained to Thespesius by a kinsman who recognizes him. He is then shown various wonders of the afterworld: the place of Oblivion, a deep chasm by which Dionysus and Semele had ascended into heaven, above which the souls hovered in rapture and mirth, caused by the fragrance of the odours which were breathed by a soft and gentle air that issued from the “pleasing verdure of various herbs and plants” which adorned the sides of this wonderful chasm. He sees the light of the Tripod of the Delphic oracle, or would have seen it had he not been dazzled with the excess of its brightness; and hears the voice of the Pythia uttering various oracles. Then follow Dantesque scenes of the punishments allotted to various kinds of wickedness, among which it is interesting to note that hypocrisy is tortured with greater severity than open vice. A lake of boiling gold, a lake of frozen lead, a lake of iron, with attendant Dæmons to perform the usual functions, are allotted to the punishment of avarice.[230] But the most terrible fate is that of those whose punishment never ends, who are constantly retaken into the hands of Justice; and these, it is important to note, in the light of the argument which preceded the story, are those whose posterity have been punished for their transgressions. We can see how little Plutarch is satisfied with his own reasonings on this point; they are, as Wyttenbach says, acutius quam verius dicta: the punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers clearly leaves the advantage, so far as concerns this world, on the side of the transgressors. Plutarch, with his firmly pious belief in the justice and goodness of God, feels driven to assert that the balance must be redressed somewhere, and he invokes the aid of Myth to carry him, in this case, whither Reason refuses to go; and taking the myth as a whole, and in relation to the tract in which it is embodied, we cannot doubt that its object is to enforce that doctrine of rewards and punishments in the Hereafter, from which Plutarch, as we have seen, shrinks when an occasion arises for pressing it from the standpoint of Reason. The punishments which Thespesius has witnessed in his visit to the Afterworld have the effect of turning him into a righteous man in this world, and Plutarch clearly hopes that the story will likewise convince those who are not convinced by his reasons. We may gather, however, that inclined as he was to believe that the providence of God extended into the Afterworld, his attitude, as fixed by reason and probability, is summed up in the words already referred to—“Such rewards or punishments as the soul receives for the actions of its previous career are nothing to us who are yet alive, being disregarded or disbelieved.”[231] But whatever may be the condition of the soul after death, and its relation to the Deity in that condition, Plutarch has made it quite certain that he believes in the goodness of God as safeguarding the interests of humanity in this world. It is clear in every part of this interesting dialogue that the God whom Plutarch believes in is a personal deity, a deity full of tender care for mankind, supreme, indeed, by virtue of his omnipotence and justice, but supreme also by virtue of his infinite patience and mercy.[232]