In the time of Plutarch, about one hundred years after our Lord’s nativity, we find the change complete. There was now no principle of belief in men’s minds which could endure either the good or the evil of the ancient system: and a quickened intelligence, as well as the streaming in of rays from Revelation, had made the human intellect more painfully alive to its moral solecisms, without rendering it able to suggest a remedy. Accordingly, Plutarch relieves the Homeric deities from the faults imputed to them by saying, that the Poet has made use of these fictions to excite the fancy[761]: ἐκεῖνα πέπλασται πρὸς ἐκπλῆξιν ἀνθρώπων. Or, again, it was, he says[762], because the name of Τύχη, Fortune or Chance, was not yet in use, that men referred to the gods what they did not know how to account for in any other manner. Alas for mankind! sad is the state of those, who must reckon the invention of that name among their blessings. In the fact, however, that Homer and his age knew nothing of the word or the idea, he discloses to us one of the many points in which infancy is practically wiser than old age. Let us, Plutarch goes on to say, cure these errors by other passages of the Poet in which he gives us the truth, the ὑγιαίνουσαι περὶ θεῶν δόξαι καὶ ἀληθεῖς: but the passages, which he cites with this view, are not passages where the deities are represented as in any active relations of good towards the world: they are simply those which exhibit them as living in a repose undisturbed by care, while they leave for us a destiny of trouble: they are those which relate to the θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες, the αὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν. Stripped of active vice, but yet not adorned with virtue, they become merely cold and selfish, hopeless and inaccessible abstractions.
There is in all this a certain logical sequence. The starting point is that of belief in a moral Governor of the universe, good himself, and enjoining goodness upon others. But his own goodness fails, and his agency among men for the original purpose becomes more and more feeble and equivocal, while the human intellect, sharpened by discussion, and puffed up with knowledge, or with the supposition and phantasm of it, becomes more and more exacting: so that the abstract gods in Cicero are (without doubt) far more elevated than the personal gods of Homer. But they are mere works of art: and, after all, the personal gods of Homer were the only ones that had been really worshipped by men: and when their case becomes so bad that they can no longer be exhibited to the people as rulers of the world, a refuge is found in the Epicurean theory, which relegates them to a heaven of enjoyment and abundance, and on pretence of mental ease denies them any prerogative of intervention in human affairs[763]. The gain of more careful and comprehensive theory is much more than counterbalanced by the practical loss of the personal element, and therefore of the belief in a real Providence, overseeing the affairs of men. So the next onward step is to the doctrine of the Academicians. In the De Naturâ Deorum, where that sect is represented by Cotta in the discussion with the champions of the Epicureans and the Stoics, Cicero himself, and the ruling tendency, if not opinion, of his day, are evidently exhibited to us under Cotta’s name. The transition now made is from gods with a sinecure to no gods at all: and Paganism ends in nullity, just as a moving mass finds its final equilibrium in repose.
Its gloomy view of human destiny.
Even while heroic Greece and its great Poet existed, the deepest problems of our being were far too dark for man to penetrate. The picture which I have rudely drawn, and which is not wholly a joyless picture, was liable to be blackened, even for this world, by many a storm of crime and of calamity; at the very best it was a picture for this world only, for the mortality and not the immortality of man. But that scene has its close: and most touching it is to see that, with all his creative power, with all his imaginative brightness, with all the advantage he derived from living in the youth of the world, before mankind had fully sounded the depth of their own fall, or had begun to accumulate the sad records of their miseries and crimes; even Homer could not solve the enigma of our condition, or disperse the clouds that gathered round our destiny. There are two profoundly memorable passages in the poems, which have set their double seal on this truth. One of them is in the Odyssey: it is a confession from the mouth of that Achilles, in whose mind and person, as they are delineated by Homer, our humanity has been carried perhaps to a higher point of grandeur, than it has ever since attained. ‘Do not, illustrious Ulysses, do not palter with me about death,’ says the mournful shade. ‘Rather would I serve for hire under a master, aye and a needy master, upon the face of earth, than be lord of the whole world of the departed[764]:’
μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ·
βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ
ἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,
ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.
A trail of heavenly light indeed so far played upon the heroic world, that we hear of those few who had already been translated to the skies; and of two more, one a son of Jupiter, already in the peaceful Elysian plains, and the other Menelaus, who, as his daughter’s husband, was likewise to be carried thither on his decease. But it is the mouth of Achilles, the illustrious, the godlike Achilles, which here utters, in tones so deeply mournful, the common voice of the children of Adam.
It was the very same conclusion which, as we find in another place[765], this favoured mortal had formed on earth.