The religion of Plutarch

by John Oakesmith

This “extravagance du christianisme”[25] is, of course, utterly at variance with the general character of the efforts by which either a Greek or a Roman directed his steps in the ways of goodness. Neither Aristotle nor Horace, neither Plato nor Seneca, would have admitted many of the most lauded virtues of modern ethical systems to be virtues at all. Least of all would they have hailed as a virtue that passionate excess of enthusiasm which makes Virtue independent of Reason, and greets intellectual impossibilities as the trials and tests of the “virtue” of Belief.[26] Speaking in a general sense, and with a tacit recognition of certain exceptions to be noticed in their proper place, it may be premised that Pagan goodness of character found its inspiration, not in any kind of emotional enthusiasm, but in methods of thought and action selected and controlled by the operation of reason and intelligence.[27] Horace’s opinion respecting the viciousness of the man who indulges in a too excessive love of virtue is the opinion, if not of a Greek, at any rate of a Roman who is saturated with Greek philosophy;[28] but the early character of the poet’s countrymen, as evinced not less in their Religion than in their general outlook on life, is as little disposed to extravagance as the strongest advocate of aurea mediocritas could well desire. Roman Religion, influenced to some extent as it was by the gloomy terrors of Etruscan superstition, found its value and its meaning, from the gods of the Indigitamenta downwards, in the fact that it was an appeal to the intelligence of the citizen. That this appeal operated in a narrow sphere of duties and was not unaffected by mean and sordid considerations does not militate against its general character as an address to the reason rather than an invocation to the passions. Ancient critics found for the word “Religio” a derivation which pointed to carefulness and regularity as qualities inherent in its essential meaning;[29] and that avoidance of disordered excess, which tends to compromise, was as conspicuous in early Roman religious practice as it was in the sternest of Greek philosophies when transplanted to Roman soil, and interpenetrated with the Roman character.[30] This spirit of compromise was based upon a recognition that the actual demands of practical life were of greater importance than the maintenance of a rigid conformity to the letter of religious precepts. Virgil, who was a participant in the work of religious reform inaugurated by Augustus, and who everywhere breathes a spirit of the most careful reverence towards the ancient traditions of the national faith, gives emphatic expression to this view of the dominant claims of practical life, and of the tolerant attitude which Religion assumes with regard to them:—

“Quippe etiam festis quædam exercere diebus

Fas et jura sinunt; rivos deducere nulla

Relligio vetuit, segeti prætendere sæpem,

Insidias avibus moliri, incendere vepres,

Balantumque gregem fluvio mersare salubri.”[31]

This recognition of the principle that Duty has claims which even Religion must concede is prominently written on every page of Roman History. It indicates the operation, in one direction, of that influence of Reason on Religion which, in another direction, leads to the admission of a real divinity in the gods adored by foreign peoples. The famous formula of Roman Religion, which appealed to the protecting gods of Carthage and its people to leave that city to its fate, is an early anticipation of that hospitable tolerance, so strange to modern sects, which welcomed Greek and barbarian deities to the Roman Pantheon, and never persecuted from religious motives.[32] This spirit had its apotheosis in the endeavours of the reformers of the age of Plutarch to establish the triumph of Reason in a general recognition of the Unity of God beneath the different names which expressed Him to different peoples.[33]

Although we cannot accept as actual history the particulars given by Dionysius Halicarnassensis respecting the manner in which Romulus established the principles of Roman religious and political administration, considerable value may be conceded to such an account, because it is calculated to explain, from the writer’s point of view, the existence of certain actual characteristics of Roman civic and sacred polity.[34] Romulus is recorded as subjecting Religion to the selective power of reason and good taste. Reason decides what it is becoming for the Divine Nature to be, and everything inconsistent with this salutary notion is rigidly excluded from the State Religion. Romulus teaches the Romans that the gods are good, and that their goodness is the cause of man’s happiness and progress; he instructs them in Temperance and Justice, as the bases of civic concord, and of the advantages resulting therefrom; he inculcates military Fortitude as the best means of securing the undisturbed practice of the other virtues, and the social blessings springing from such practice; and he concludes that Virtue is not a matter of chance, or the result of supernatural inspirations, but the product of reasonable laws when zealously and faithfully carried into practice by the citizens. Reason is here clearly represented as the lawgiver of Religion, and the cause and origin of the practical virtues. Dionysius may, as we have suggested, be endeavouring to explain, by an ex post facto piece of history, the existence of certain characteristics of the Roman constitution as exhibited in its later developments, but these features are not the less evident and essential parts of the system because we cannot accept any particular account of the time and manner in which they were incorporated with it.

Further, the Roman administrative authority deliberately repressed the exhibition of religious enthusiasm as dangerous to the stability of the Republic; the State could brook no rival in her affections: the devotion of Regulus[35] and the suppression of the Bacchanalia bear equal witness to a firm insistence on the control of personal emotion as a cardinal principle of Roman administration.[36] The apparently paradoxical and casuistical position assigned in the “De Natura Deorum” to Cotta, who believes in the national religion as a Roman while denying it as a philosopher, is sufficiently lucid and rational when regarded in the light of the religious administration of Rome, which had never claimed to enslave the intelligences of men, so long as that elaborate ritual, with which the safety of the State was involved, received due and reverential attention.[37]