The Religious Experience of the Roman People / From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus

by W. Warde Fowler

LECTURE XVIII

RELIGIOUS FEELING IN THE POEMS OF VIRGIL

My justification for devoting a whole lecture to Virgil must be that this great poet, more warmly and sympathetically than any other Latin author, gives expression to the best religious feeling of the Roman mind. And this is so not only in regard to the tendencies of religion in his own day; he stands apart from all his literary contemporaries in that he sums up the past of Roman religious experience, reflects that of his own time, and also looks forward into the future. No other poet, no historian, not even Livy, who sprang from the same region and in his tone and spirit in some ways resembles Virgil, has the same broad outlook, the same tender interest in religious antiquity, the same all-embracing sympathy for the Roman world he knew, and the same confident and cheerful hope for its future. Each of the Augustan poets—Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus—has his own peculiar gift and charm; but those who know Virgil through and through will at once acknowledge the difference between these and the man possessed of spiritual insight. They are helpful in various ways to the student of Roman religion, and Tibullus especially has a simple reverence for the old religion which has inspired a few exquisite descriptions of this aspect of Italian life. But, if I may use the word, they had no mission; they were true poets, yet not poets of the prophetic order; they had not thought deeply and reached conviction, like Lucretius and Virgil. A few words from the conclusion of an Edinburgh professor's admirable work on Virgil will sufficiently express what I mean. "His religious belief," says Sellar, "like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in the religions of antiquity, and in its deepest intuitions it seems to look forward to the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later."[869] In fact, Virgil gathers up what was valuable in the past of Rome and adds to it a new element, a new source of life and hope. It was this that made it possible for a great French critic to assert that for those who have read Virgil there is nothing astonishing in Christianity.[870] Let us try and realise what these writers mean. The Scotsman is sober and earnest, the Frenchman epigrammatically exaggerating; but the feeling that underlies both utterances is a true one.

We have traced the gradual paralysis of the secularised State religion. We have glanced at the two types of philosophical thought which took the place of that religion in the minds of the cultivated section of Roman society, neither of which could adequately supply the Roman and Italian mind with an expression of its own natural feeling, never wholly extinct, of its relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. Stoicism came near to doing what was needed, by rehabilitating itself on Italian soil and indulging Roman preconceptions of the divine; but it could not greatly affect the mass of men, and its appeal was not to feeling, but to reason. Epicurism, though perhaps more popular, was in reality more in conflict with what was best in the Italian nature, and the passionate appeal of Lucretius to look for comfort to a scientific knowledge of the rerum natura had no enduring power to cheer. Lastly, we have examined the tendency of the same age towards mysticism and Cicero's doubting and embarrassed expression of it, and we found that this tendency rather illustrates a sense of something wanting than hopefully satisfies it. We may well feel ourselves, now we have arrived at the close of the Republican era, just as the best men of that day felt, that there is something wanting. In their minds this feeling almost amounted to despair; in ours, as we read the story of the troublous time after the death of Caesar, it is pity and wonder. There was, in fact, more than a sense of weariness and discomfort, moral and material, in the Roman mind of that generation—there was also what we may almost call a sense of sin, such a feeling, though doubtless less real and intense, as that which their prophets, from time to time, awoke in the Jewish people, and one not unknown in the history of Hellas. It was essentially a feeling of neglected duty—of neglected duty to the Power and of goodwill wanting towards men. Lucretius had been unconsciously a powerful witness to this feeling, but had not found the remedy. In the early Augustan age it is again expressed by Horace, by Sallust, and more deeply and truly in the beautiful preface to Livy's History.[871] Livy there says that he devoted himself to the early annals of Rome that he might shut his eyes to the evils of his own time—"tempora quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus."

This something wanting was then a feeling, a religio, if we can venture to use the old word once more in the sense which I have so often attributed to it. Not an unreasonable or ungovernable feeling, not a superstitio, but a feeling of happy dependence on a higher Power, and a desire to conform to His will in all the relations of human life. This is the kind of feeling that had always lain at the root of the Roman pietas, the sense of duty to family and State, and to the deities who protected them. In the jarring of factions, the cruelty and bloodshed of tyrants, and the luxurious self-indulgence of the last two generations, the voice of pietas had been silenced, the better instincts of humanity had gone down. We have to see what was done by our poet to awake that voice again and to put fresh life into those instincts. Only let us remember that more permanent good is done in this world by a beautiful nature giving itself its natural expression, than by precept or denunciation; and beware of attributing to Virgil more direct consciousness of his mission than he really felt. It is the nature of the man that is of value to us in our studies, as it was to the Romans in their despair, a nature ruled by sweet, calm feeling, full of sympathy and full of hope.

The something wanting in others which we find in Virgil only, or in him more convincingly felt and more resonantly expressed, is a kindly and hopeful outlook on the world, with a deep and real sympathy for all sorrow and pain. It is not the result of any definite religious conviction; it is in the nature of the man, and is of the very fibre of his being; but it made him a better religious teacher than the rest, just because real religion is not a matter of reason only, or of convention, or of art, but of feeling. This was the true antidote to despair or depression—a sympathy with man in all he does or suffers, not an indignant cry of remonstrance like that of Lucretius. Virgil's sympathetic outlook includes not only Man, but the animal world, and there can be no better proof that his feeling was genuine. The nightingale robbed of her young,[872]

quem durus arator observans nido implumes detraxit: at illa flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen integrat et maestis late loca questibus implet;

the cattle smitten by the plague,[873] the migrating birds coming in from the sea,[874] and many another tender touch, all show us the feeling of which I am speaking; for he who could so feel towards animals must needs have a soul of pity for man. So, too, with the inanimate nature of Italy; the land in which Virgil's shepherds and husbandmen live and work is one full of such detailed loveliness as might suggest a beneficent Power presiding over it all, inviting man to lift up his heart in gratitude or prayer. As Sellar has well remarked,[875] the sense of natural beauty is in the Georgics intertwined with the toil of man, raising, as it were, the toiler to a higher level of humanity as he lifts his eyes from his work. And this natural beauty is made real for the reader by the life and force that everywhere pervades it; all nature is alive and full of feeling; the fruit trees, for example, in the second Georgic seem instinct with an almost human life.[876] The moment this comes home to us we see how it harmonises with all we have learnt of the old Italian conception of the divine, of the forceful numina working for man's benefit if properly propitiated. And even when Virgil is using the language of the Stoics to explain the life of nature, we feel that behind the philosophical theory there lies this feeling of the Italian:

deum namque ire per omnes terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum: hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum.[877]

This is the religious spirit of the Georgics; the divine forces are everywhere, and a man must submit himself to them and seek their aid. He finds his true resource rather in prayer than in philosophy, his part in the world is "laborare et orare." The hard lot of the Hesiodic labourer is not that of the agricola of the Georgics, who carries on his campaign of toil with a cheerful heart and a clear conscience, for he is in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the life around him.