What time the Muses’ voice they hear.
Yes, they grow savage and rebellious, as the tigers, they say, are maddened and troubled at the sound of the drum, and at last tear themselves to pieces. A lesser evil then it is for those who, through deafness and a dulled ear, are apathetic and insensible to music. Tiresias was unfortunate that he could not see his children and familiar friends, but far worse was the |D| case of Athamas and of Agave, who saw them as lions and stags. Better, I think, it was for Hercules in his madness not to see his sons, or feel their presence, than to treat his dearest ones as enemies.
VI. What then? Comparing the feeling of the atheists with that of the superstitious, do we not find a similar difference? The former see no Gods at all, the latter think that they exist as evil beings. The former neglect them, the latter imagine that to be terrible which is kind, that tyrannical which is fatherly, loving care to be injury, the ‘unapproachable’[[276]] to be savage and brutal. Then, trusting to coppersmiths, or marble workers, or modellers in wax, they fashion the forms of the Gods in human shape, and these they mould and frame and worship; while |E| they despise philosophers and men who know life, if they point them to the majesty of God consisting with goodness, and magnanimity, and patience, and solicitude. Thus in the former the result is insensibility and want of belief in all that is fair and helpful, in the latter confusion and fear in the presence of help. In a word, atheism is an apathy for the Divine which fails to perceive the good, superstition is an excess of feeling which suspects that the good is evil. They fear the Gods, and they flee to the Gods for refuge; they flatter and they revile them; they invoke and they censure them. It is man’s common lot not to succeed always or in all. |F|
They, from sickness free and age,
Quit of toils, the deep-voiced rage
Of Acheron for ay have left behind,
as Pindar[[277]] says; but human sufferings and doings flow in a mingled stream of vicissitude, now this way, now that.
VII. Now look with me at the atheist, first when things cross his wishes, and consider his attitude. If he is a decent, quiet person, he takes what comes in silence, and provides his own means of succour and consolation. If he be impatient and querulous, he directs all his complainings against Fortune, and |168| the way things happen; he cries out that nothing goes by justice or as Providence ordains, all is confused and jumbled up; the tangled web of human life is unpicked. Not so the superstitious: if the ill which has befallen him be the veriest trifle, still he sits down and builds on to his annoyance a pile of troubles, grievous and great and inextricable, heaping up for himself fears, dreads, suspicions, worries, a victim to every sort of groaning and lamentation; for he blames not man, nor fortune, nor |B| occasion, nor himself, but for all the God. From that quarter comes pouring upon him, he says, a Heaven-sent stream of woe; he is punished thus by the Gods not because he is unfortunate, but because he is specially hated by them, all that he suffers is his own proper deserts. Then the atheist, when he is sick, reckons up his own surfeitings, carouses, irregularities in diet, or over-fatigues, or unaccustomed changes of climate or place. Or, again, if he have met with political reverses, become unpopular or discredited in high quarters, he seeks for the cause in himself or his party.
Where my transgression? or what have I done? what duty omitted?[[278]]
But to the superstitious every infirmity of his body, every |C| loss of money, any death of a child, foul weather and failures in politics, are reckoned for blows from the God and assaults of the fiend. Hence he does not even take courage to help himself, to get rid of the trouble, or to remedy it, or make resistance, lest he should seem to be fighting the Gods, and resisting when punished. So the doctor is thrust out of the sick man’s chamber, and the mourner’s door is closed against the sage who comes to comfort and advise. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘let me take my punishment, as the miscreant that I am, an accursed |D| object of hate to Gods and daemons.’ It is open to a man who has no conviction that there are Gods, when suffering from some great grief and trouble, to wipe away a tear, to cut his hair, to put off his mourning. How are you going to address the superstitious in like case, wherein to bring him help? He sits outside, clothed in sackcloth, or with filthy rags hanging about him, as often as not rolling naked in the mud, while he recites errors and misdoings of his own, how he ate this, or drank that, or walked on a road which the spirit did not allow. At the very best, if he have taken superstition in a mild form, he sits in the house fumigating and purifying himself. The old women ‘make a peg of him’, as Bion says, and on it they hang—whatever |E| they choose to bring!