Apuleius and his initiation
Between these two judgments we may find Apuleius. He is a man of letters, but he has a taste for religion. Ceremony, mystery, ritual, sacraments, appeal to him, and there he stands with his contemporaries. But a man, in whose pages bandit and old woman, ass and Isis, all talk in one Euphuistic strain, was possibly not so pious as men of simpler speech. Yet his giving such a conclusion to such a tale is significant, and there is not an absurdity among all the many, in which he so gaily revels, but corresponded with something that men believed.
In conclusion, we may ask what Lucian of Samosata and Diogenes of Oinoanda had to offer to Aristides and Pausanias and Apuleius; and what they in turn could suggest to men whose concern in religion goes deeper than the cure of physical disease, trance and self-conscious revelling in ceremony. Some spiritual value still clung about the old religion, or it could not have found supporters in a Plotinus and a Porphyry, but (to quote again a most helpful question) "how much else?"
Chapter VII Footnotes:
[[1]] On the other hand see a very interesting passage in Tertullian, de Anima, 30, on the progress of the world in civilization, and population outstripping Nature, while plague, famine, war, etc., are looked on as tonsura insolescentis generis humani.
[[2]] Marcus Aurelius was born about 121 A.D. and died in 180. The other two were born in or about 125.
[[3]] e.g. viii, 17.
[[4]] The one passage is in xi, 3.
[[5]] Or, the English equivalent, Utopia.