new universes to replace those that pass away. The Epicureans, on the other hand, believed in the existence of matter only, and regarded mind and soul as the ultimate product of material organization.
In one respect Plutarch transcends Plato, and, so far as I know, all pre-Christian philosophers. Plato’s theism bears a close kindred to pantheism. His God, if I may be permitted the phrase, is only semi-detached. He becomes the creator rather by blending his essence with eternal matter, than by shaping that matter to his will. He is rather in all things than above all things, rather the Soul of the universe than its sovereign Lord. But in Plutarch’s writings the Supreme Being is regarded as existing independently of material things; they, as subject to his will, not as a part of his essence.
Plutarch was, like Plato, a realist. He regarded the ideas or patterns of material things, that is, genera, or kinds of objects, as having an actual existence (where or how it is hard to say), as projected from the Divine Mind, floating somewhere in ethereal spaces between the Deity and the material universe,—the models by which all things in the universe are made.
As to Plutarch’s theology, he was certainly a monotheist. He probably had some vague belief in inferior deities (daemons he would have called them), as holding a place like that filled by angels and by evil spirits in the creed of most Christians;
yet it is entirely conceivable that his occasional references to these deities are due merely to the conventional rhetoric of his age. His priesthood of the Delphian Apollo can hardly be said to have been a religious office. It was rather a post of dignity and honor, which a gentleman of respectable standing, courteous manners, and hospitable habits might creditably fill, even though he had no faith in Apollo. But that Plutarch had a serious, earnest, and efficient faith in the one Supreme God, in the wise and eternal Providence, and in the Divine wisdom, purity, and holiness, we have in his writings an absolute certainty. Nor can we find, even in Christian literature, the record of a firmer belief than his in human immortality, and in a righteous retribution beginning in this world and reaching on into the world beyond death.
But Plutarch was, most of all, an ethical philosopher. Yet here again he cannot be classed as belonging to any school. For Epicureanism he has an intense abhorrence, and regards the doctrines of that sect as theoretically absurd and practically demoralizing. He maintains that the disciples of Epicurus, as such, utterly fail in the quest of pleasure, or what according to their master is still better, painlessness: for the condition of those who, as he says, “swill the mind with the pleasures of the body, as hogherds do their swine,” cannot entirely smother the sense of vacuity and need; nor is it possible by any appliances of luxury to cut off
even sources of bodily disquietude, which are only the more fatal to the happiness of him who seeks bodily well-being alone; while the prospect of annihilation at death deprives those necessarily unhappy in this life of their only solace, and gives those who live happily here the discomfort of anticipating the speedy and entire loss of all that has ministered to their enjoyment.
In Plutarch’s moderation, his avoidance of extreme views, and his just estimate of happiness as an end, though not the supreme end, of being, he is in harmony with the Peripatetics, among whom his Athenian preceptor was the shining light of his age; but his ethical system was much more strict and uncompromising than theirs, and I cannot find that he quotes them or refers to them as a distinct school of philosophy. In matters appertaining to physical science he indeed often cites Aristotle, but not, I think, in a single instance, as to any question in morals.
As regards the Stoics, Plutarch writes against them, but chiefly against dogmas which in his time had become nearly obsolete,—namely, that all acts not in accordance with the absolute right are equally bad; that all virtuous acts are equally good; that there is no intermediate moral condition between that of the wise or perfectly good man and that of the utterly vicious; and that outward circumstances neither enhance nor diminish the happiness of the truly wise man. These extravagances do
not appear in the writings of Seneca, nor in Epictetus as reported by Arrian, and Plutarch in reasoning against them is controverting Zeno rather than his later disciples. He is in full sympathy with the Stoics as to their elevated moral standard, though without the sternness and rigidness which had often characterized their professed beliefs and their public teaching, yet of which there remained few vestiges among his contemporaries. With the utmost mildness and gentleness, he manifests everywhere an inflexibility of principle and a settled conviction as to the rightfulness or wrongfulness of specific acts which might satisfy the most rigid Stoic, and in which he plants himself as firmly on the ground of the eternal Right as if his philosophy had been founded on a distinctively Christian basis.