But whatever may have been the views explicitly maintained by Plutarch in this connexion, it is his constant practice to shift on to the shoulders of the Dæmons the responsibility for all those legends, ceremonies, and practices, which, however appropriate and necessary parts of the national faith they may be, are yet inconsistent with the qualities rightly attributable to Deity.[261] We have already noticed his unwillingness to impugn the immutability of the Creator by regarding His essence as capable of metamorphosis into the phenomena of the created world.[262] “It is,” says Ammonius, “the function of some other god to do and suffer these changes—or, rather, of some Dæmon appointed to direct Nature in the processes of generation and destruction.” This relationship of the Dæmons to the supreme power as conceived by philosophy is more completely stated in the short tract, “De Fato,”[263] where we are told that (1) there is a first and supreme Providence which is the intelligence of the First Deity, or, as one may regard it, His benevolent will towards all creatures, in accordance with which all divine things universally received the most admirable and perfect order; (2) the second Providence is that of the second gods, who move through the sky, by which human affairs are duly ordered, including those relating to the permanence and preservation of the various species; (3) the third Providence may properly be regarded as the superintendence of the Dæmons who are situated near the earth, observing and directing the actions of men. But, as we have already noted, this formal distinction between (2) and (3) is not maintained in practice. Cleombrotus, who knows more about these things than most people, insists that it is not possible that the gods could have been pleased with festivals and sacrifices, “at which there are banquets of raw flesh and victims torn in pieces, as well as fastings and loud lamentations, and often ‘foul language, mad shrieks, and tossing of dishevelled hair,’” but that all such dread observances must have had the object of pacifying the anger of the mischievous Dæmons.[264] It was not to the gods that human sacrifices were welcome; it was not Artemis who demanded the slaughter of Iphigenia;[265] these were the deeds of “fierce and violent Dæmons,” who also perpetrated those many rapes, and inflicted those pestilences and famines which are anciently attributed to the gods. “All the rapes here, and the wanderings there, that are celebrated in legends and sacred hymns, all the hidings and flights and servitudes, do not belong to the gods, but represent the chances and changes incident to the careers of Dæmons.” It was not “holy Apollo” who was banished from Heaven to serve Admetus;—but here the speech comes to an end with a rapid change of subject, as if Cleombrotus shrinks from the assertion that a Dæmon was the real hero of an episode with which so many beautiful and famous legends of the “hereditary Faith” were connected. When some of the most celebrated national myths concerning the gods are assigned to Dæmons, we are not far away from the identification of the former with the latter, and the consequent degradation of the gods to the lower rank. It is true that the various speakers on the subject do not, in so many words, identify the Dæmons with the gods of the Mythology.[266] They deprive the gods of many of their attributes, and give them to the Dæmons; they deprive them of others, and give them to the One Eternal Deity. It is difficult to see how the Gods could maintain their existence under this twofold tendency of deprivation, supported as they might be by formal classifications which assigned them a superior place. Even the Father of Gods and Men—the Zeus of Homer—turns his eyes “no very great way ahead from Troy to Thrace and the nomads of the Danube, but the true Zeus gazes upon beauteous and becoming transformations in many worlds.”[267] To contrast the Zeus “of Homer” with the “true” Zeus is to do little else than to place the former in that subordinate rank proper not to the Divine, but to the Dæmonic character. Plutarch is perfectly consistent in applying this method of interpretation to the gods of other nations no less than to the gods of Greece. In the “Isis and Osiris,” he inclines to the belief that these great Egyptian Deities are themselves only Dæmons, although he refuses to dogmatize on the point, and gives a series of more or less recognized explanations of the Egyptian myth. He cannot refrain, however, from using so appropriate an occasion of denouncing the absurdity of the Greeks in imputing so many terrible actions and qualities to their gods—“For the legends of Giants and Titans, handed down among the Greeks, the monstrous deeds of Cronus, the battle between Pytho and Apollo, the flight of Dionysus, the wanderings of Demeter, fall not behind the stories told of Osiris and Typhon, and other legends that one may hear recounted by mythologists without restraint.”[268]
Such, then, is the relation in which the Dæmons stand to the Divine nature: they are made the scapegoat for everything obscene, cruel, selfish, traditionally imputed to the gods; and the Supreme Deity rises more conspicuously lofty for its freedom from everything that can tend to drag it down to the baseness of human passions. For Plutarch makes it very clear that it is the human element in these mixed natures that originates their disorderly appetites. Although the Dæmons “exceed mankind in strength and capacity, yet the divine element in their composition is not pure and unalloyed, inasmuch as it participates in the faculties of the soul and the sensations of the body, is liable to pleasure and pain, and to such other conditions as are involved in these vicissitudes of feeling, and bring disturbance upon all in a greater or less degree.”[269] It is by virtue of this participation in the “disturbing” elements of human nature that they are fitted to play that part between God and man which Plutarch, after Plato, calls the “interpretative” and the “communicative.”[270] This enables the Dæmons to play a loftier part than that hitherto assigned them; to respond, in fact, to that universal craving of humanity for some mediator between their weakness and the eternal splendour and perfection of the Highest. The whole question of inspiration and revelation, both oracular and personal, is bound up with the Dæmonic function, and to both these spheres of its operation, the public and the private, Plutarch gives the fullest and most earnest consideration. Previous, therefore, to discussing this aspect of the Dæmonic character and influence, it will be necessary to ascertain what were Plutarch’s views on the subject of inspiration and prophecy, and what was his attitude to that question of Divination which exercised so great a fascination on the mind of antiquity.
CHAPTER VII.
Necessity for a Mediator between God and Man partly met by Oracular Inspiration—General failure of Oracles in the age of Plutarch—Plutarch’s “Delphian Essays”—The De Pythiæ Oraculis: nature of Inspiration: oracles not verbally inspired—The De Defectu Oraculorum—Various explanations of Inspiration—Plutarch inclines to accept that which assumes an original Divine afflatus placed under the superintendence of Dæmons, whose activities are subject to the operation of natural causes.
An age which attempts to reinvigorate its own ethical life by draughts of inspiration from springs hallowed by their duration from an immemorial antiquity, will naturally regret that currents, which once ran full, now flow no longer in their early strength, but have dwindled to insignificant rills, or are dried up altogether in their courses. And there is no source of religious inspiration so greatly held in honour as that which comes from the communication of mankind with the Divine Being.[271] Visions, dreams, incantations, inspired writings, omens, and prophecies have been valued as means of bringing man into communication with God, and as furnishing an unerring way of indicating the Divine will to humanity. But it would be difficult to mention any institution or practice having this ostensible aim which has had such absolute sway over the minds of those who came within reach of its influence, as the group of oracles which were celebrated in the ancient Hellenic world. It is no wonder, therefore, that in the age of Plutarch the present silence of the oracles was a common topic of speculation, of anxious alarm to the pious, of ribald sarcasm to the profane. Juvenal[272] satirically describes the meaner methods which the cessation of the Oracle at Delphi has imposed upon those who yet wish to peer through the gloom that hides the future. Lucan laments the loss which his degenerate time suffers from this cause: “non ullo secula dono Nostra carent majore Deum, quam Delphica sedes Quod siluit;”[273] and speculates as to the probable reason for the failure of the ancient inspiration.[274] That Plutarch should have shown solicitude on this aspect of the ancient faith is natural, and one cannot but be grateful that the chances of time have preserved the exhaustive tracts in which he and his friends are represented as discussing various questions connected with the inspiration of the Delphic Oracle, and the manner in which this inspiration was conveyed to humanity. No extant work gives us so intelligible and natural an explanation of the significance which oracular institutions possessed for the ancient world, nor so close an insight into the workings of the minds of educated men at one of the most important periods of human history, in face of one of the most interesting and, perhaps, most appalling of human problems. We have already made copious quotations from the two tracts in question; we now propose to use them mainly for the light which they cast on the question of oracular inspiration. We refer to the tracts known as the “De Pythiæ Oraculis” and the “De Defectu Oraculorum.” These two tracts (together with the one entitled the “De Ε apud Delphos”)[275] purport to be reports of conversations held by philosophical friends and acquaintances of Plutarch at the shrine of Apollo at Delphi.
The dialogue, briefly called “On the Pythian Responses,” deals, as the Greek title indicates, with the fact that the Pythia at Delphi no longer uses verse as the instrument of her inspired utterances. It takes the form of a conversation in the Delphic temple, between Philinus, Diogenianus, Theon, Serapion, and Boethus—the first of whom reports the conversation to his friend Basilocles, who has grown quite weary of waiting while the rest of the party conduct Diogenianus, a visitor, on a tour of inspection among the sacred offerings in the Temple.[276] Philinus[277] tells how “after the Ciceroni (οἱ περιηγηταὶ) had gone through their wonted programme, disregarding our requests that they would cut short their formal narratives and their explanations of most of the inscriptions,” the conversation had turned by a series of natural gradations from the interesting objects, that so strongly attracted the attention of visitors, to the medium through which the oracles of the God had been conveyed to humanity.[278] Diogenianus had noted that “the majority of the oracular utterances were crowded with faults of inelegance and incorrectness, both of composition and metre.” Serapion, to whom previous reference has been made, and who is here described as “the poet from Athens,” will not admit the correctness of this impious indictment.[279] “You are of opinion, then,” said he, “that, believing these verses to be the work of the god, we may assert that they are inferior to those of Homer and Hesiod? Shall we not rather regard them as being the best and most beautiful of all compositions, and reconstitute, by the standard which they supply, our own taste and judgment, so long corrupted by an evil tradition?” Boethus, “the geometrician,” who has lately joined the Epicureans, uses a neat form of the argumentum ad hominem in refutation of Serapion, paying him a polished compliment at the same time.[280] “Your own poems,” says he, “grave, indeed, and philosophic in matter, are, in power and grace and finish, much more after the model of Homer and Hesiod than of the Pythia;” and he gives concise expression to the two opposing mental attitudes in which questions of this kind are universally approached. “Some will maintain that the oracles are fine poems because they are the god’s, others that they cannot be the god’s because they are not fine poems.” Serapion emphatically re-asserts the former of these two views, maintaining that “our eyes and our ears are diseased. We have become accustomed, by long indulgence in luxury and effeminacy, to regard sweetness as identical with beauty.”[281] Theon[282] is the exponent of a compromise not unknown in modern discussions on the “Inspiration of the Scriptures”—“Since these verses are inferior to those of Homer, it cannot be maintained that the god is their author. He supplies the primary inspiration to the prophetess, who gives expression thereto in accordance with her natural aptitude and capacity. He only suggests the images, and makes the light of the future shine in her soul.” The conversation then turns upon certain events which had accompanied, or been preceded by, portents and wonders happening to statues and other gifts consecrated in the Temple. On this subject Philinus asserts his firm belief that “all the sacred offerings at Delphi are specially moved by divine forethought to the indication of futurity, and that no fragment of them is dead and irresponsive, but all are filled with divine power.” Boethus, as a newly converted Epicurean, makes a mock of this view, this “identification of Apollo with brass and stone, as if chance were not quite competent to account for such coincidences,” and he subsequently enlarges his view as follows:—“What possible condition of temporal affairs, my friend, cannot be assigned to natural causes? What strange and unexpected event, occurring by sea or by land, to cities or to individual men, could one predict without some chance of hitting the mark?[283] Yet you would hardly call this prediction; it would be merely assertion, or, rather, the dissemination at random, into the abyss of infinity, of bare words without any guiding principle leading them to a particular end, words which, as they wander about, are sometimes met by chance events which correspond with them.” And Boethus continues to insist that, though some predictions may have by accident come true, the original assertions were not the less false on that account. Serapion admits that this may be true about vague predictions, but maintains that such detailed prophecies as those he proceeds to quote from history do not owe their accomplishment to chance.[284]
The attention of the disputants—if these calm and dignified colloquies can be called disputes—is here again attracted to the objects of artistic and historical interest surrounding them, among which the guide takes occasion to point out the place where formerly had reposed the iron spits dedicated by the courtezan Rhodopis under the circumstances detailed by Herodotus.[285] Diogenianus warmly protests against such offerings having ever been admitted into the Temple, but Serapion draws his attention to the golden statue of the more notorious Phryne, “that trophy of Greek incontinence,”—as Crates had called it—and condemns the inconsistency of these objections in people who see, without a protest, the temple crowded with offerings made by the Greek cities for victories in their internecine warfare. “It were fitting,” exclaims he, “that kings and magistrates should consecrate to the god offerings of justice, temperance, and magnanimity, and not tributes of a golden and luxurious wealth, which the most evil livers often abound in.”[286]