But no disease is so difficult to cope with as Superstition. We must fly from it, but we must so fly from it that we do not run into the other extreme. “Aussi y en a il qui fuyans la Superstition, se vont ruer et precipiter en la rude et pierreuse impieté de l’atheisme, en sautant par dessus la vraye Religion, qui est assise au milieu entre les deux.”
Such is a brief account of the contents of this famous tract. One thing becomes clear from its perusal, the fact that the advantage is altogether regarded as on the side of Atheism. Amyot, from whose translation we have taken its concluding sentence, sounds a note of serious alarm in a prefatory note to his version: “Ce traicté est dangereux à lire, et contient une doctrine fausse: Car il est certain que la Superstition est moins mauvaise, et approche plus pres du milieu de la vraye Religion, que ne fait l’Impieté et Atheisme.” Others have followed Amyot in his view of this “dangerous” treatise; while Plutarch has not been without his champions against those who have thus accused him of irreligion.[341] So far as concerns the views expounded in the treatise, it appears to us that the alarm of Amyot is justified. But Amyot, who knew his Plutarch well, should have observed that there is a note of rhetoric in this work which is totally different from the teacher’s usually quiet and unimpassioned method of argument. There is an emphasis, an exaggeration, of everything that tells against the victim of Superstition, a restraint, a gentleness in minimizing the faults which could have been made into a serious indictment against Atheism. This, as we know, is not Plutarch’s favourite method of discussion. In ordinary circumstances an Epicurean would have attacked Superstition, a Stoic would have inveighed against Atheism, and an Academic friend of Plutarch’s would have taken the judicial mean. As a matter of fact, however, Plutarch—and he connects his own name with the argument in the most emphatic manner—assumes a position in this tract scarcely discrepant from the peculiarly Epicurean attitude. From this point of view, Wyttenbach’s epithet of vere Plutarcheus applied to the tract is incorrect, and even Wyttenbach admits the possibility that Plutarch may have written another tract, “in which the cause of Superstition was defended against Epicurus.”[342] How Plutarch could have accomplished a successful defence without going back on all the arguments in the treatise “on Superstition” will not be clear to a modern reader. It appears to us that Plutarch, having an acute perception of the gross evils inherent in the many superstitious practices of the day, has been disturbed from his usual philosophic pose, and has been carried, by a feeling of almost personal resentment, to draw a picture which was intended to be one-sided, because it was intended to be alarming. Plutarch’s Philosophy, his Religion, here touch the vital interests of life, and come to close combat with a gigantic moral evil. What is lost in philosophic detachment is gained in moral fervour, a change of balance which gives quite other than a theoretical interest to those many short sermons in which Plutarch is aux prises with the sins and vices and follies of his day. The main importance of the “De Superstitione” is its contact with practical affairs, and its translation of philosophic and religious conceptions into terms of everyday life. Philosophy and Religion have displayed to Plutarch the Purity, the Unity, the Benevolence of God; it is a question of Ethics to expose and destroy practices which are repellent to this conception of the Divine Nature. Plutarch’s way of solving that question in one direction is expounded in the tract “De Superstitione.”[343]
While Plutarch, in his anxiety to safeguard the emotional aspects of Religion from the incursions of Superstition, departs in this tract from his ordinary attitude of intellectual moderation, he reverts very markedly to his usual manner in his treatise on the two Egyptian divinities, Isis and Osiris. Knowledge of the Truth is here depicted as the very heart of devotion, and the pursuit of this is regarded as the only means of holding a middle path between the bog of Superstition and the precipice of Atheism. The main object of this treatise is to show how principles of rational inquiry may be applied to religious myths, so that Reason and Piety may both be satisfied with the result. Wyttenbach explains this purpose in a few words of terse Latinity which might safely be quoted as descriptive of Plutarch’s attitude towards Religion in general. “Consilium scriptoris videtur fuisse, ut amicam de horum Ægyptiorum numinum ortu et cultu saniora, quam quæ vulgo ferrentur, doceret, religionemque fabularum deliriis cærimoniarumque ineptiis mirifice deformatam et apud prudentiores homines in contemtum adductam, istis quoad ejus fieri posset sordibus purgaret, omnique literarum et philosophiæ instrumento ad historiæ fidem, naturæ rationem dignamque divinitate speciem reformaret.” But while serving as an example of Plutarch’s general method of inquiry, a particular motive for the choice of this special myth as subject would doubtless be furnished by the great prevalence and popularity of the worship of Isis during the Græco-Roman Empire of this period. Its passionate excitements were hostile to the calm cultivated by the Roman in matters of Religion, and Isis had undergone a prolonged struggle before her temples were allowed to stand erect in Rome. The patrician indignation of Lucan—nos in templa tuam Romana accepimus Isin![344]—expressed, however, rather the sentiment of the Republic than the conviction of the Empire. Juvenal alludes to the Isiacæ sacraria lenæ—the fanum Isidis—the temple of the goddess in the Campus Martius, in terms which, however severe from the moral standpoint, leave no historical doubt as to the established character of the cult and its institutions. In the later romance of Apuleius, the hero Lucius owes his re-transformation into human shape to the power of Isis, and makes a pilgrimage of gratitude to the very temple to which Juvenal makes so scathing an allusion.
The detailed description given by Apuleius of the ceremonies connected with the worship of the goddess in so important a place as Cenchreæ, the port of Corinth, bears emphatic witness to the established popularity of her rites.[345] Even in Plutarch’s tract the fact is everywhere indirectly evident. Clea, to whom it is addressed, was officially and intimately associated with the worship of Dionysus at Delphi, but she had also been instructed from her childhood in the rites appertaining to the worship of Isis and Osiris.[346] It is only in accordance with Plutarch’s well-known character that he should be anxious to explain anything in the Isiac ceremonies and traditions, the misunderstanding of which was likely to generate superstitious and licentious practices and lead indirectly to Atheism. And if, by explaining absurdities, excising crudities, refuting false interpretations, he could at the same time demonstrate the unity of God, the identity of religious basis lying beneath these various beliefs of other peoples, we can recognize in the task one eminently suited to the character and aims of Plutarch. In the “Isis and Osiris” Plutarch has, therefore, a twofold object. He endeavours to explain, from a rationalistic point of view, the meaning of Isiac and Osirian ceremonies and legends; and he develops his theories on these matters into an exposition of his attitude towards Myth in general, showing that the various beliefs of other nations are not, when rightly understood, mutually destructive and opposite, but simply different ways of envisaging the same essential and eternal truth. We proceed to explain these assertions by an examination of the treatise.
Plutarch gives early indication of his point of view. “The philosophy of the Egyptian priests was generally concealed in myths and narratives containing dim hints and suggestions of truth.” It was to indicate this “enigmatic” character of their theological wisdom that they erected Sphinxes before their temples; that, too, is the meaning of their inscription on the shrine of Athene-Isis at Sais, “I am all that was, and all that is, and all that shall be, and my veil hath yet no mortal raised.”[347] It follows from this that we must on no account attach a literal significance to their narratives.[348] Thus they represent the sun as a newborn child sitting on a lotus flower, but this is an enigma teaching the derivation of the solar heat from moisture.[349] “It is in this way,” says he, clearly indicating the twofold object he has in view throughout this work, “it is in this way that you are to hear and accept traditions of the gods, taking their meaning from such as interpret them in a spirit at once pious and philosophic. This spirit of reverent inquiry must be accompanied by a constant observance of the recognized forms of worship, and by a conviction that no religious or other action is more grateful to the gods than the acceptance of true opinions concerning them. This harmonious co-operation of Piety and Philosophy saves equally from Atheism and its cognate evil, Superstition.”[350]
It is in this spirit—the spirit in which every Religion justly claims that it should be approached—that Plutarch gives an account of the Egyptian myth “in the briefest possible terms, denuded of such particulars as are quite useless and superfluous”; denuded also, as we are told later, “of its most blasphemous features,”[351] “such as the dismemberment of Horus and the decapitation of Isis.” Piety absolutely rejects these tales concerning beings who participate “in that blessed and eternal nature which marks our conception of the Divine”; although Philosophy will not be equally severe on these legends, regarding them not solely as unsubstantial tales and empty fictions spun, like spiders’ webs, by poets and romancers out of their own imagination, but also as indirectly reflecting the pure light of some ancient narrative whose meaning has now been utterly broken up as are the sun’s rays when reproduced in the multitudinous hues of the rainbow.[352] Plutarch clearly regards it as a pious duty to accept the Osirian legend as containing a substratum of truth, embodying the religious lore of the Egyptian priesthood, but he reserves to himself the right of interpreting the expression of this truth in the light of his own philosophy. His attitude is identical with that assumed by the authors of the various explanations of the myth which he reports as current in antiquity. “These interpretations,” in the lively expression of Mr. Andrew Lang, “are the interpretations of civilized men, whose method is to ask themselves: ‘Now, if I had told such a tale as this, or invented such a mystery play of divine misadventures, what meaning could I have intended to convey in what is apparently blasphemous nonsense?’”[353] It will be seen that Plutarch does not himself finally adopt any special interpretation, although he emphatically rejects those which are not pious as well as philosophic. He is desirous rather of showing in what way the investigation of such questions should be approached, than of imposing any definite conclusion on the understanding; of cultivating an aptitude for rational and reverent inquiry, than of establishing a final and inflexible dogma.
He deals first with the Euhemerists, or “Exanthropizers.” Euhemerus of Tegea, or, as Plutarch here calls him, Euhemerus[354] of Messene, first treated with scientific precision that tendency to regard the gods as kings and rulers whose surpassing greatness and merit had been rewarded by an imaginary apotheosis. He had embodied the result of his researches, which he claims to have made during an expedition sent by Cassander to the Red Sea, in a work called the “Sacred Record.” He asserted, according to Lactantius, that he had seen in the Island of Panchaia (Plutarch calls it Panchon) a column of gold with an inscription indicating its erection by Zeus himself, in qua columna gesta sua perscripsit ut monimentum esset posteris rerum suarum. This “humanizing” of Zeus was extended to other deities; and Plutarch, who sarcastically denies that these inscriptions had ever been seen by anybody else, whether Greek or Barbarian, asserts that the principles of Euhemerus had been applied to the explanation of the tombs and other monuments commemorating in Egypt the events embodied in the Osirian myth. Although it has been asserted that Euhemerus admitted the existence of the elemental deities, such as the sun and the heavens, the atheistical tendency of his theory is evident, and the author of the tract “De Placitis Philosophorum,” whose bias is distinctly Epicurean and atheistic, says that Euhemerus absolutely denied the existence of the gods, associating him in this connexion with Diagoras the Melian, and Theodorus of Cyrene.[355] Plutarch himself has no doubts as to the tendency of Euhemerism. Those who have recourse to these theories,“transferring great names from heaven to earth, almost entirely uproot and destroy the reverence and faith implanted in all of us at our birth, and open wide the temple doors to the profane and atheistical mob.”[356]—“They bring divinity to the level of humanity, and fair occasion of unfettered speech to the impostures of Euhemerus, who scattered Atheism the wide world over, degrading all the recognized deities alike to the names of generals, admirals, kings of a pretended eld.” Good and great kings are rewarded with the gratitude of posterity, while disgrace and obloquy have been the portion of those whose insolence has led them to assume the titles and temples of gods.[357]
The hypothesis of Dæmonic natures, next applied by Plutarch to the explanation of the legend, we have already examined. Naturally he expresses a preference for this theory over that of the Euhemerists, but will still proceed to discuss with philosophic detachment the hypotheses of other schools, taking, as he says, the simplest first.[358] These are the Physical Allegorists. “Just as the Greeks assert that Cronus is an allegorical symbol for Time, Hera for Air, the birth of Hephaistos for the transformation of Air into Fire, so also among the Egyptians there are those who maintain that Osiris symbolizes the Nile, Isis the Earth, fecundated in his embrace, Typhon the Sea, into which the Nile falls to disappear and be scattered, except such part of him as has been abstracted by the Earth to make her fruitful.”[359] He shows how this identification of Typhon with the sea explains certain sayings, beliefs, and practices of the Egyptians, but he regards it as rather crude and superficial,[360] and passes on to an explanation given by the more learned priests, who, with a more philosophic application of the principles of allegorical interpretation, identify Osiris with the Moist Principle of the Universe, and Typhon with the Dry Principle, the former being the cause of Generation, the latter being hostile to it.[361] The similarity of these views to early Greek speculation is pointed out by a statement that the Egyptians held that Homer, like Thales, had learnt from them that Water is the generative principle of all things, Homer’s Ocean being Osiris, and his Tethys, Isis. This ancient theory is fully discussed by Plutarch, showing how the Egyptians applied it to the myth, but also indicating similarities of detail and identities of principle between the Egyptian and Greek mythologies.[362] “Those who combine with these physical explanations certain points borrowed from astronomical speculation,” are next dealt with. These Astronomical Allegorists maintained that Osiris is the Lunar World and Typhon the Solar: the Moon’s light being regarded as favourable to the reproductiveness of plants and animals, from its greater moistening tendency, while the light of the Sun is parching, and so hostile to life and vegetation that “a considerable portion of the earth is rendered by his heat totally uninhabitable.”[363] After a brief description of another class of astronomical Allegorists who regard the myth as an enigmatical description of Eclipses,[364] he puts the whole of these particular explanations of the Physical and Astronomical Allegorists in their proper place as merely partial and distorted expressions of the ancient and universal belief in the existence of two opposing principles, two mutually hostile influences which operate throughout the universe, giving Nature its mixed and uncertain and fluctuating character.[365] One of the most conspicuous features in Plutarch’s Theology, as already examined in these pages, is his anxiety to avoid any kind of Dualism in his conception of Deity; and it is a necessary corollary of his religious and philosophical conviction on this point that there should be no place in the constitution of the world for a Being regarded as a coequal rival to the One Supreme Omnipotence. As Plutarch, however, himself points out, if nothing can be conceived as originating without a cause, and Good cannot be regarded as furnishing the cause of Evil, it follows that Evil as well as Good must have an originating principle of its own.[366] But neither on the religious nor on the purely philosophic side does he carry this admission to the extent of accepting an Evil personality or principle equivalent in power to the Deity. On the one hand, he accepts the doctrine of subordinate Dæmons, whose evil propensities are ultimately under the control of the Omnipotent Author of Good, inasmuch as they are liable to pains and penances for their infraction of the laws He has imposed upon them; and on the other, he has learned from Greek philosophy the conception of τὸ ἄπειρον, that infinite, formless “Matter,” out of which the Demiurgus, making it the nurse and receptacle of the ideas, had created the Universe. He insists, indeed, that the two conceptions are familiar to Greek philosophers: Empedocles opposed φιλότητα καὶ φιλίαν to νεῖκος οὐλόμενον; the Pythagoreans had two well-known lists of contrary expressions.[367] Anaxagoras expressed the antithesis by νοῦς and ἄπειρον; Aristotle by εἶδος and στέρησις. In all these philosophical distinctions the inferiority of the second term is implied, and Plutarch asserts this inferiority in unmistakable terms. “The creation and formation of this world arose out of opposing, but not equal, Principles, the supreme sway being the portion of the Better.”[368]
It is clear from these considerations that Plutarch’s own mind is made up on the subject; but he cannot refrain from giving sympathetic consideration to so ancient, widespread, and respectable a belief as that involved in the myth of Osiris and Typhon, of Ormuzd and Ahriman; and he devotes considerable space, and displays considerable ingenuity, in connecting the Egyptian and Zoroastrian beliefs with the legends of Greek Mythology and the principles of Greek Philosophy.[369] But his object, even when he makes indulgent concessions to an opposite view, is never lost sight of, and towards the conclusion of his search for parallelisms and similarities, he expresses his aim in unmistakable and peculiarly Plutarchean language. After passing severe criticism on the impiety of those who give the names of gods to the productions of Nature, asserting that Dionysus is Wine, and Hephaistos Flame (which, says he, is like identifying sail and cable and anchor with the pilot, the thread with the weaver, or the draught with the physician), he adds, “God is not lifeless, unintelligent, subject to man, as these things are. But it is from these blessings that we conclude that those who bestow them upon us for our use, and give us a constant and never-failing supply thereof, are gods, not different gods among different peoples, not Barbarian gods, nor Greek gods, not gods of the south nor gods of the north; but just as the sun, the moon, the earth, the sky, and the sea are common to all, but receive different names among different peoples, so likewise are different honours assigned and different invocations addressed to the gods in different places according to the customs there established. Yet is it one Reason which admonishes, and one Providence which directs, while subordinate powers have been appointed over all things. Certain peoples make use of sacred symbols which, with greater or less clearness, direct the understanding to divine knowledge, and yet not without danger, since some in their desire to shun the swamp of Superstition have unconsciously slipped over the precipice of Atheism.”[370] Here we have, combined in one sentence, Plutarch’s belief in the Unity of God, his acceptance of the theory of Dæmons, his recognition of the truth of foreign creeds, his desire, so frequently expressed, and so consistently acted upon, to follow the guidance of a reverent yet inquiring philosophy on a path which is equally distant from the two great moral evils which loom so large in his mental vision. Hence this tract is organically connected with the treatise on Superstition; the former aims at securing by purely intellectual and rational processes what the latter attempts by appealing to the Intellect through the medium of the Imagination.[371]