Next: his doctrines found a ready soil in Magna Graecia which was already impregnated with certain vague notions akin to those he introduced. And then—he permitted and even encouraged the emotional sex to participate in the mysteries; the same tactics that later on materially helped the triumph of Christianity over the more exclusive and rational cult of Mithra. Lastly, he came with a “message,” like the Apostle of the Gentiles; and in those times a preaching reformer was a novelty. That added a zest.
We know them a little better, nowadays.
He enjoyed the specious and short-lived success that has attended, elsewhere, such efforts to cultivate the ego at the expense of its environment. “A type of aspiring humanity,” says Gissing, echoing the sentiments of many of us, “a sweet and noble figure, moving as a dim radiance through legendary Hellas.” I fancy that the mist of centuries of undiscriminating admiration has magnified this figure out of all proportion and contrived, furthermore, to fix an iridescent nimbus of sanctity about its head. Such things have been known to happen, in foggy weather.
Was Greece so very legendary, in those times? Why, on the contrary, it was full of real personages, of true sages to whom it seemed as if no secrets of heaven or earth were past fathoming; far from being legendary, the country had never attained a higher plane of intellectual curiosity than when Pythagoras made his appearance. And it cannot be gainsaid that he and his disciples gave the impetus away from these wise and beneficial researches into the arid regions of metaphysics. It is so much more gentlemanly (and so much easier) to talk bland balderdash about soul-migrations than to calculate an eclipse of the moon or bother about the circulation of the blood.
That a man of his speculative vigour, knowing so many extra-Hellenic races, should have hit upon one or two good things adventitiously is only to be expected. But they were mere by-products. One might as well praise John Knox for creating the commons of Scotland with a view to the future prosperity of that country—a consummation which his black fanaticism assuredly never foresaw.
The chief practical doctrine of Pythagoras, that mankind are to be governed on the principle of a community of eastern monks, makes for the disintegration of rational civic life.
And his chief theoretical doctrines, of metempsychosis and the reduction of everything to a system of numbers[[1]]—these are sheer lunacy.
[1] Vincenzo Dorsa, an Albanian, has written two pamphlets on the survival of Greco-Roman traditions in Calabria. They are difficult to procure, but whoever is lucky enough to find them will be much helped in his understanding of the common people. In one place, he speaks of the charm-formula of Otto-Nave! (Eight-Nine) It is considered meet and proper, in the presence of a suckling infant, to spit thrice and then call out, three times, Otto-Nove! This brings luck; and the practice, he thinks, is an echo of the number-system of Pythagoras.
Was it not something of a relapse, after the rigorous mental discipline of old, to have a man gravely assuring his fellows that he is the son of Hermes and the divinely appointed messenger of Apollo; treating diseases, like an Eskimo Angekok, by incantation; recording veracious incidents of his experiences during a previous life in Hell, which he seems to have explored almost as thoroughly as Swedenborg; dabbling in magic, and consulting dreams, birds and the smoke of incense as oracles? And in the exotic conglomerate of his teachings are to be found the prima stamina of much that is worse: the theory of the pious fraud which has infected Latin countries to this day; the Jesuitical maxim of the end justifying the means; the insanity of preferring deductions to facts which has degraded philosophy up to the days of Kant; mysticism, demon-worship and much else of pernicious mettle—they are all there, embryonically embedded in Pythagoras.
We are told much of his charity; indeed, an English author has written a learned work to prove that Pythagoreanism has close affinities with Christianity. Charity has now been tried on an ample scale, and has proved a dismal failure. To give, they say, is more blessed than to receive. It is certainly far easier, for the most part, to give than to refrain from giving. We are at last shaking off the form, of self-indulgence called charity; we realize that if mankind is to profit, sterner conceptions must prevail. The apotheosis of the god-favoured loafer is drawing to a close.