The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

by T. R. Glover

This then in bare outline is a scheme of Plutarch's religion, though, as already noted, the scheme is not of his own making, but is put together from incidental utterances, all liable to qualification. It is not the religion of a philosopher; and the qualifications, which look like concessions to philosophic hesitation, mean less than they suggest. They are entrenchments thrown up against philosophy. He is an educated Greek who has read the philosophers, but he is at heart an apologist—a defender of myth, ritual, mystery and polytheism. He has compromised where Plato challenged. His front (to carry out the military metaphor) extends over a very long line—a line in places very weakly supported, and the dæmons form its centre. It is the dæmons who link men to the gods, and through them to the Supreme, making the universe a unity; who keep the gods immune from contact with matter and from the suggestion of evil; and what is more, they enable Plutarch to defend the myths of Greek and Egyptian tradition from the attack of philosopher and unbeliever. And this defence of myth was probably more to him than the unity of the universe. Every kind of myth was finding a home in the eventual Greek religion, many of them obscene, bestial and cruel—revolting to the purity and the tenderness developing more and more in the better minds of Greece. They could not well be detached from the religion, so they had to be defended.

There are, for example, many elements in the myth of Isis and Osiris that are disgusting. Plutarch recommends us first of all, by means of the preconceptions supplied by Greek philosophy upon the nature of God, to rule out what is objectionable as unworthy of God, but not to do this too harshly. Myth after all is a sort of rainbow to the sun of reason,[[115]] and should be received "in a holy and philosophic spirit."[[116]] We must not suppose that this or the other story "happened so and was actually done." Many things told of Isis and Osiris, if they were supposed to have truly befallen "the blessed and incorruptible nature" of the gods, would be "lawless and barbarous fancy" which, as Æschylus says—

You must spit out and purify your mouth.[[117]]

But, all the same, myth must be handled tenderly and not in too rationalistic a spirit—for that might be opening the doors to "the atheist people." Euhemerus, by recklessly turning all the gods into generals and admirals and kings of ancient days, has covered the whole world with atheism,[[118]] and the Stoics, as we have seen, are not much better, who turn the gods into their own gifts. No, we may handle myth far too freely—"ah! yet consider it again!" There are so many possibilities of acceptance. And "in the rites of Isis there is nothing unreasonable, nothing fictitious, nor anything introduced by superstition, but some things have an ethical value, others a historical or physical suggestion."[[119]]

Evil dæmons

In the second place, if nothing can be done for the myth or the rite—if it is really an extreme case—Plutarch falls back upon the dæmons. There are differences among them as there are among men, and the elements of passion and unreason are strong in some of them; and traces of these are to be found in rites and initiations and myths here and there. Rituals in which there is the eating of raw flesh, or the rending asunder of animals, fasting or beating of the breast, or again the narration of obscene legends, are to be attributed to no god but to evil dæmons. How many such rituals survived, Plutarch does not say and perhaps he did not know; but the Christian apologists were less reticent, and Clement of Alexandria and Firmicus Maternus and the rest have abundant evidence about them. Some of these rites, Plutarch says, must have been practised to avert the attention of the dæmons. "The human sacrifices that used to be performed," could not have been welcome to the gods, nor would kings and generals have been willing to sacrifice their own children unless they had been appeasing the anger of ugly, ill-tempered, and vengeful spirits, who would bring pestilence and war upon a people till they obtained what they sought. "Moreover as for all they say and sing in myth and hymn, of rapes and wanderings of the gods, of their hiding, of their exile and of their servitude, these are not the experiences of gods but of dæmons." It is not right to say that Apollo fought a dragon for the Delphic shrine.[[120]]

But some such tales were to be found in the finest literature of the Greeks, and they were there told of the gods.[[121]] In reply to this, one of Plutarch's characters quotes the narrative of a hermit by the Red Sea.[[122]] This holy man conversed with men once a year, and the rest of the time he consorted with wandering nymphs and dæmons—"the most beautiful man I ever saw, and quite free from all disease." He lived on a bitter fruit which he ate once a month. This sage declared that the legends told of Dionysus and the rites performed in his honour at Delphi really pertained to a dæmon. "If we call some dæmons by the names that belong to gods,—no wonder," said this stranger, "for a dæmon is constantly called after the god, to whom he is assigned, and from whom he has his honour and his power"—just as men are called Athenæus or Dionysius—and many of them have no sort of title to the gods' names they bear.[[123]]

Superstition

With Philosophy so ready to be our mystagogue and to lead us into the true knowledge of divine goodness, and with so helpful a theory to explain away all that is offensive in traditional religion, faith ought to be as easy as it is happy and wholesome. But there is another danger beside Atheism—its exact opposite, superstition; and here—apart from philosophical questions—lay the practical difficulty of Plutarch's religion. He accepted almost every cult and mythology which the ancient world had handed down; Polytheism knows no false gods. But to guide one's course aright, between the true myth and the depraved, to distinguish between the true and good god and the pseudonymous dæmon, was no easy task. The strange mass of Egyptian misunderstandings was a testimony to this—some in their ignorance thought the gods underwent the actual experience of the grain they gave men to sow, just as untaught Greeks identified the gods with their images; and some Egyptians worshipped the animals sacred to the gods; and so religion was brought into contempt, while "the weak and harmless" fell into unbounded superstition, and the shrewder and bolder into "beastly and atheistic reflections."[[124]] And yet on second thoughts Plutarch has a kindly apology for animal-worship.[[125]]

Plutarch himself wrote a tract on superstition in which some have found a note of rhetoric or special pleading, for he decidedly gives the atheist the superiority over the superstitious, a view which Amyot, his great translator, called dangerous, for "it is certain that Superstition comes nearer the mean of true Religion than does Atheism."[[126]] Perhaps it did in the sixteenth century, but in Plutarch's day superstition was the real enemy to be crushed. Nearly every superstitious practice he cites appears in other writers.