Memorials and Other Papers — Complete

by Thomas De Quincey

As applied, therefore, to the first problem in the whole question upon Oracles,—When, and under what circumstances, did they cease?— the Dissertatio of Van Dale, and the Histoire des Oracles by Fontenelle, are irresistible, though not written in a proper spirit of gravity, nor making use of that indispensable argument which we have ourselves derived from the analogy of all scriptural precedents.

But the case is far otherwise as concerns the second problem,—How, and by what machinery, did the Oracles, in the days of their prosperity, conduct their elaborate ministrations? To this problem no justice at all is done by the school of Van Dale. A spirit of mockery and banter is ill applied to questions that at any time have been centres of fear, and hope, and mysterious awe, to long trains of human generations. And the coarse assumption of systematic fraud in the Oracles is neither satisfactory to the understanding, as failing to meet many important aspects of the case, nor is it at all countenanced by the kind of evidences that have been hitherto alleged. The fathers had taken the course—vulgar and superstitious—of explaining everything sagacious, everything true, everything that by possibility could seem to argue prophetic functions in the greater Oracles, as the product indeed of inspiration, but of inspiration emanating from an evil spirit. This hypothesis of a diabolic inspiration is rejected by the school of Van Dale. Both the power of at all looking into the future, and the fancied source of that power, are dismissed as contemptible chimeras. Upon the first of these dark pretensions we shall have occasion to speak at another point. Upon the other we agree with Van Dale. Yet, even here, the spirit of triumphant ridicule, applied to questions not wholly within the competence of human resources, is displeasing in grave discussions: grave they are by necessity of their relations, howsoever momentarily disfigured by levity and the unseasonable grimaces of self-sufficient "philosophy." This temper of mind is already advertised from the first to the observing reader of Van Dale by the character of his engraved frontispiece. Men are there exhibited in the act of juggling, and still more odiously as exulting over their juggleries by gestures of the basest collusion, such as protruding the tongue, inflating one cheek by means of the tongue, grinning, and winking obliquely. These vilenesses are so ignoble, that for his own sake a man of honor (whether as a writer or a reader) shrinks from dealing with any case to which they do really adhere; such a case belongs to the province of police courts, not of literature. But, in the ancient apparatus of the Oracles although frauds and espionage did certainly form an occasional resource, the artifices employed were rarely illiberal in their mode, and always ennobled by their motive. As to the mode, the Oracles had fortunately no temptation to descend into any tricks that could look like "thimble-rigging;" and as to the motive, it will be seen that this could never be dissociated from some regard to public or patriotic objects in the first place; to which if any secondary interest were occasionally attached, this could rarely descend so low as even to an ordinary purpose of gossiping curiosity, but never to a base, mercenary purpose of fraud. Our views, however, on this phasis of the question, will speedily speak for themselves.

Meantime, pausing for one moment to glance at the hypothesis of the fathers, we confess ourselves to be scandalized by its unnecessary plunge into the ignoble. Many sincere Christian believers have doubted altogether of any evil spirits, as existences, warranted by Scripture, that is, as beings whose principle was evil ["evil, be thou my good:" P. L.]; others, again, believing in the possibility that spiritual beings had been (in ways unintelligible to us) seduced from their state of perfection by temptations analogous to those which had seduced man, acquiesced in the notion of spirits tainted with evil, but not therefore (any more than man himself) essentially or causelessly malignant. Now, it is well known, and, amongst others, Eichhorn _(Einletung in das alte Testament) has noticed the fact, which will be obvious, on a little reflection, to any even unlearned student of the Scriptures who can throw his memory back through a real familiarity with those records, that the Jews derived their obstinate notions of fiends and demoniacal possessions (as accounting even for bodily affections) entirely from their Chaldean captivity. Not before that great event in Jewish history, and, therefore, in consequence of that event, were the Jews inoculated with this Babylonian, Persian, and Median superstition. Now, if Eichhorn and others are right, it follows that the elder Scriptures, as they ascend more and more into the purer atmosphere of untainted Hebrew creeds, ought to exhibit an increasing freedom from all these modes of demoniacal agency. And accordingly so we find it. Messengers of God are often concerned in the early records of Moses; but it is not until we come down to Post-Mosaical records, Job, for example (though that book is doubtful as to its chronology), and the chronicles of the Jewish kings (Judaic or Israelitish), that we first find any allusion to malignant spirits. As against Eichhorn, however, though readily conceding that the agency is not often recognized, we would beg leave to notice, that there is a three- fold agency of evil, relatively to man, ascribed to certain spirits in the elder Scriptures, namely: 1, of misleading (as in the case of the Israelitish king seduced into a fatal battle by a falsehood originating with a spiritual being); 2, of temptation; 3, of calumnious accusation directed against absent parties. It is not absolutely an untenable hypothesis, that these functions of malignity to man, as at first sight they appear, may be in fact reconcilable with the general functions of a being not malignant, and not evil in any sense, but simply obedient to superior commands: for none of us supposes, of course, that a "destroying angel" must be an evil spirit, though sometimes appearing in a dreadful relation of hostility to all parties (as in the case of David's punishment). But, waiving all these speculations, one thing is apparent, that the negative allowance, the toleration granted to these later Jewish modes of belief by our Saviour, can no more be urged as arguing any positive sanction to such existences (to demons in the bad sense), than his toleration of Jewish errors and conceits in questions of science. Once for all, it was no purpose of his mission to expose errors in matters of pure curiosity, and in speculations not moral, but exclusively intellectual. And, besides the ordinary argument for rejecting such topics of teaching, as not necessarily belonging to any known purpose of the Christian revelation (which argument is merely negative, and still leaves it open to have regarded such communications as a possible extra condescension, as a lucro ponatur, not absolutely to have been expected, but if granted as all the more meritorious in Christianity), we privately are aware of an argument, far more rigorous and coërcive, which will place this question upon quite another basis. This argument, which, in a proper situation, and with ampler disposable space, we shall expose in its strength, will show that it was not that neutral possibility which men have supposed, for the founder of our faith to have granted light, casually or indirectly, upon questions of curiosity. One sole revelation was made by Him, as to the nature of the intercourse and the relations in another world; but that was for the purpose of forestalling a vile, unspiritual notion, already current amongst the childish Jews, and sure to propagate itself even to our own days, unless an utter averruncatio were applied to it. This was its purpose, and not any purpose of gratification to unhallowed curiosity; we speak of the question about the reversionary rights of marriage in a future state. This memorable case, by the way, sufficiently exposes the gross, infantine sensualism of the Jewish mind at that period, and throws an indirect light on their creed as to demons. With this one exception, standing by itself and self-explained, there never was a gleam of revelation granted by any authorized prophet to speculative curiosity, whether pointing to science, or to the mysteries of the spiritual world. And the true argument on this subject would show that this abstinence was not accidental; was not merely on a motive of convenience, as evading any needless extension of labors in teaching, which is the furthest point attained by any existing argument; but, on the contrary, that there was an obligation of consistency, stern, absolute, insurmountable, which made it essential to withhold such revelations; and that had but one such condescension, even to a harmless curiosity, been conceded, there would have arisen instantly a rent—a fracture—a schism—in another vast and collateral purpose of Providence.

From all considerations of the Jewish condition at the era of Christianity, the fathers might have seen the license for doubt as to the notions of a diabolic inspiration. Why must the prompting spirits, if really assumed to be the efficient agency behind the Oracles, be figured as holding any relation at all to moral good or moral evil? Why not allow of demoniac powers, excelling man in beauty, power, prescience, but otherwise neutral as to all purposes of man's moral nature? Or, if revolting angels were assumed, why degrade their agency in so vulgar and unnecessary a way, by adopting the vilest relation to man which can be imputed to a demon—his function of secret calumnious accusation; from which idea, lowering the Miltonic "archangel ruined" into the assessor of thieves, as a private slanderer (diabolos), proceeds, through the intermediate Italian diavolo, our own grotesque vulgarism of the devil; [Footnote: But, says an unlearned man, Christ uses the word devil. Not so. The word used is diabolos. Translate v. g. "The accuser and his angels.">[ an idea which must ever be injurious, in common with all base conceptions, to a grand and spiritual religion. If the Oracles were supported by mysterious agencies of spiritual beings, it was still open to have distinguished between mere modes of power or of intelligence, and modes of illimitable evil. The results of the Oracles were beneficent: that was all which the fathers had any right to know: and their unwarranted introduction of wicked or rebel angels was as much a surreptitious fraud upon their audiences, as their neglect to distinguish between the conditions of an extinct superstition and a superstition dormant or decaying.

To leave the fathers, and to state our own views on the final question argued by Van Dale—"What was the essential machinery by which the Oracles moved?"—we shall inquire,

1. What was the relation of the Oracles (and we would wish to be understood as speaking particularly of the Delphic Oracle) to the credulity of Greece?

2. What was the relation of that same Oracle to the absolute truth?

3. What was its relation to the public welfare of Greece?

Into this trisection we shall decompose the coarse unity of the question presented by Van Dale and his Vandals, as though the one sole "issue," that could be sent down for trial before a jury, were the likelihoods of fraud and gross swindling. It is not with the deceptions or collusions of the Oracles, as mere matters of fact, that we in this age are primarily concerned, but with those deceptions as they affected the contemporary people of Greece. It is important to know whether the general faith of Greece in the mysterious pretensions of Oracles were unsettled or disturbed by the several agencies at work that naturally tended to rouse suspicion; such, for instance, as these four which follow:—1. Eminent instances of scepticism with regard to the oracular powers, from time to time circulating through Greece in the shape of bon mots; or, 2, which silently amounted to the same virtual expression of distrust, Refusals (often more speciously wearing the name of neglects) to consult the proper Oracle on some hazardous enterprize of general notoriety and interest; 3. Cases of direct failure in the event, as understood to have been predicted by the Oracle, not unfrequently accompanied by tragical catastrophes to the parties misled by this erroneous construction of the Oracle; 4. (which is, perhaps, the climax of the exposures possible under the superstitions of Paganism), A public detection of known oracular temples doing business on a considerable scale, as accomplices with felons.

Modern appraisers of the oracular establishments are too commonly in all moral senses anachronists. We hear it alleged with some plausibility against Southey's portrait of Don Roderick, though otherwise conceived in a spirit proper for bringing out the whole sentiment of his pathetic situation, that the king is too Protestant, and too evangelical, after the model of 1800, in his modes of penitential piety. The poet, in short, reflected back upon one who was too certain in the eighth century to have been the victim of dark popish superstitions, his own pure and enlightened faith. But the anachronistic spirit in which modern sceptics react upon the Pagan Oracles is not so elevating as the English poet's. Southey reflected his own superiority upon the Gothic prince of Spain. But the sceptics reflect their own vulgar habits of mechanic and compendious office business upon the large institutions of the ancient Oracles. To satisfy them, the Oracle should resemble a modern coach-office—where undoubtedly you would suspect fraud, if the question "How far to Derby?" were answered evasively, or if the grounds of choice between two roads were expressed enigmatically. But the to loxon, or mysterious indirectness of the Oracle, was calculated far more to support the imaginative grandeur of the unseen God, and was designed to do so, than to relieve the individual suitor in a perplexity seldom of any capital importance. In this way every oracular answer operated upon the local Grecian neighborhood in which it circulated as one of the impulses which, from time to time, renewed the sense of a mysterious involution in the invisible powers, as though they were incapable of direct correspondence or parallelism with the monotony and slight compass of human ideas. As the symbolic dancers of the ancients, who narrated an elaborate story, Saltando Hecubam, or Saltando Loadamiam, interwove the passion of the advancing incidents into the intricacies of the figure—something in the same way, it was understood by all men, that the Oracle did not so much evade the difficulty by a dark form of words, as he revealed his own hieroglyphic nature. All prophets, the true equally with the false, have felt the instinct for surrounding themselves with the majesty of darkness. And in a religion like the Pagan, so deplorably meagre and starved as to most of the draperies connected with the mysterious and sublime, we must not seek to diminish its already scanty wardrobe. But let us pass from speculation to illustrative anecdotes. We have imagined several cases which might seem fitted for giving a shock to the general Pagan confidence in Oracles. Let us review them.