Part 21

II. ‘But there’, said Timon, ‘we shall find a confusion of ideas between what perishes and what does not. Now when we speak of the dead as having “passed away” and being “gone”, there is clearly no suggestion of anything actually harsh, only of a change or transition of some sort. Where that change takes place for those who undergo it, and whether it be for worse or better, let us consider by looking into the other words used. Our actual word for death[253], in the first place, does not appear to point to a movement downward, or beneath the earth, but rather to a mounting upward towards God of that which passes. Thus we may reasonably suppose that the soul darts out and runs upward, as though a bent spring had been released, when the body breathes it out, and itself draws an upward vital breath. Next, look at the opposite of death, which is generation; this word, on the contrary, expresses a tendency downward, an inclination to earth[254] of that which at the time of death again speeds upward. Hence, too, we call our natal day by a name which means a beginning of evils and of great troubles.[255] Perhaps we shall see the same thing even more clearly from another set of words. A man when he dies is said to be “released”, and death called a “release”—if you ask the question “from what?”, a release from body[256]—for body is called dĕmas, because the soul is kept in bondage in it, contrary to nature, nothing being forcibly detained in a place which is natural to it. A further play upon this “bondage” and “force” gives the word “life”, as Homer,[257] I think, uses Hesperus for the feminine “evening”, and so, in contrast to “life”, the dead is said to come to his rest, released from a great and unnatural stress. So with the change and reconstitution of the soul into the Whole; we say that it has perished when it has made its way thither; while here it does not know this unless at the actual approach of death, when it undergoes such an experience as those do who are initiated into great mysteries. Thus death and initiation closely correspond, word to word,[258] and thing to thing. At first there are wanderings, and laborious circuits, and journeyings through the dark, full of misgivings where there is no consummation; then, before the very end, come terrors of every kind, shivers, and trembling, and sweat, and amazement. After this, a wonderful light meets the wanderer; he is admitted into pure meadow lands, where are voices, and dances, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions. Here the newly initiate, all rites completed, is at large; he walks at large like the dedicated victim with a crown on his head, and joins in high revelry; he converses with pure and holy men, and surveys the uninitiate unpurified crowd here below in the dirt and darkness, trampled by its own feet and packed together; through fear of death remaining in its ills, because it does not believe in the blessings which are beyond. For that the conjunction of soul with body, and its imprisonment, are against nature, you may clearly see from this.’

III. ‘From what?’ said Patrocleas. ‘From the fact that of all our experiences sleep is the most agreeable. First, it always extinguishes any perception of pain, because its pleasure is mingled with so much that is familiar, secondly, it overpowers all other appetites, even the most vehement. For even those who are devoted to the body become disinclined for pleasure when sleep comes on, and when they slumber reject loving embraces. Why dwell on this? When sleep takes possession, it excludes even the pleasure which comes from learning, and discussion, and philosophic thought, as though a smooth deep stream swept the soul along. All pleasure, perhaps, is by its essence and nature a respite from pain, but of sleep this is absolutely true. For, though nothing exciting or delightful should approach from without, yet we feel pleasure in a sound sleep; sleep seems to remove a condition of toil and hardness. And that condition is no other than that which binds soul to body. In sleep the soul is separated, and speeds upward, and is gathered unto itself after having been strained to fit the body, and dispersed among the senses. Yet some assert that, on the contrary, sleep immingles soul with body. They are wrong. The body bears its witness the other way, by its lack of sensation, its coldness, and heaviness, and pallor proving that the soul leaves it in death, and shifts its quarters in sleep. This produces the pleasure; it is a release and respite for the soul, as though it laid down a burthen which it must again resume and shoulder. For when it dies it runs away from the body for good; when it is asleep, it plays truant. Therefore death is sometimes accompanied by pains, sleep always by pleasure; in the former case the bond is snapped altogether, in the latter it gives, and is slackened, and becomes easier, as the senses are loosened like parting knots, and the strain which ties soul to body is gone.’

IV. ‘Then how is it’, said Patrocleas, ‘that we do not feel discomfort or pain from being awake?’ ‘How is it’, said Timon, ‘that when the hair is cut, the head feels lightness and relief, yet there was no sense of oppression at all while the hair was long? Or that men released from bonds feel pleasure, yet there is no pain when the chains are on? Or why is there a stir of applause when light is brought suddenly into a banquet, yet its absence did not appear to cause pain or trouble to the eye? There is one cause, my friend, in all these cases; that gradual habituation made the unnatural familiar to the sense, so that it felt absolutely no distress then, but felt pleasure when there was release and a restoration to nature. The strangeness is seen at once when the proper condition comes, the presence of what pained and pressed by contrast with the pleasure. It is exactly so with the soul: during its association with mortal passions, and parts, and organs, that which is unnatural and strange produces no apparent pressure because of that long familiarity; yet when discharged from the activities of the body, it feels ease, and relief, and pleasure. By them it is distressed, and about these it toils, and from these it craves leisure and rest. For all that concerns its own natural activities—observation, reasoning, memory, speculation—it is unwearied and insatiable. Satiety is nothing but a weariness of pleasure, when soul feels with body. To its own pleasures soul never cries “Enough”; but while it is involved in body, it is in the plight of Ulysses.[259] As he clung to the fig-tree, and hugged it, not from love of the tree, but fearing Charybdis down below, so soul clings to body and embraces it, from no goodwill to it or gratitude, but in horror of the uncertainty of death,

_For life the gods conceal from mortal men_,

says the wise Hesiod.[260] They have not strained soul to body by fleshy bonds, one bond they have contrived and one encompassing device, the uncertainty of what comes after death, and our slowness to believe; since, “if the soul were persuaded”, as Heraclitus[261] says, “of all the things which await men when they have died, no force would keep it back.”’

Footnote 251:

Where it is ascribed to Themistius. It was reclaimed for Plutarch by Wyttenbach in the Preface to his edition of the _De Sera Numinum Vindicta_—Leiden 1772.

Footnote 252:

In the Dialogue (_Ne suaviter quidem_, c. 26) in which the Epicureans are attacked, the ‘hope of eternal existence’ or ‘desire to be’, is spoken of as the ‘oldest and greatest of loves’.

Footnote 253:

θάνατος—ἀναθεῖν εἰς θεόν.

Footnote 254:

γένεσις—γῆ, νεῦσις. Cp. p. 210, l. 6.

Footnote 255:

γενέθλιον—γένεσις ἄθλων.

Footnote 256:

Reading ἂν δὲ ἔρῃ, καὶ σώματος for ἂν δὲ ἔρημαι σώματος. See the Lex.-Plat. _s.v._ ἔρομαι.

Footnote 257:

e.g. _Od._ 1, 423.

Footnote 258:

τελευτᾶν—τελεῖσθαι.

Footnote 259:

_Od._ 12, 432 foll.

Footnote 260:

_W. and D._ 42.

Footnote 261:

Fr. 122.

ON SUPERSTITION

INTRODUCTION

The drift of Plutarch’s remarkable Treatise on Superstition is well given in the opening words of Bacon’s famous Essay: ‘It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him. For the one is unbelief, the other is contumely, and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity.’ The word—the same which, in its adjective, St. Paul applies, almost in a good sense, to the Athenians of his day[262]—is correctly defined by Theophrastus, in his ‘character’ of the superstitious man, as timidity with regard to the supernatural, and this timidity at once passes into cowardice. There is in this treatise a fighting spirit and a directness of attack unusual in Plutarch, who mostly speaks with academic balance about conflicting schools of thought. Thus it has been suggested that one or other of his writings against the Epicureans may be intended to supply the required study ‘On Atheism’. There are many passages in the _Lives_ and also in the _Moralia_ where the author is seen to mediate between credulity and scepticism, superstition and atheism; usually showing a tendency to ‘the more benign extreme’; there is more to be lost by an undue hardening of the intellect than by a wise hospitality to beliefs and ideas which lie beyond strict proof. Here the attack is one-sided and uncompromising. At the end of the treatise true piety is exhibited as a middle path between superstition and atheism. This is not to be understood of a quantitative excess or defect. Piety in excess may induce a habit which deserves the name of superstition, such as has been the fair butt of satirists in all ages, and of humorists like Theophrastus. But Plutarch is thinking not of excess, but of perversion, a piety directed to wrong powers, or to powers conceived of in the wrong way. There is a striking instance in the _Life of Pelopidas_ (c. 21), when some of the prophets invited that great soldier to obey the warning of a dream by slaying his daughter, for which there were ancient precedents. ‘But some on the other side urged, that such a barbarous and impious oblation could not be pleasing to any superior beings; that Typhons and Giants did not preside over the world, but the general father of Gods and men; that it was absurd to imagine any Divinities or powers delighted in slaughter or sacrifices of men; or, if there were any such, they were to be neglected, as weak and unable to assist; such unreasonable and cruel desires could only proceed from, and live in, weak and depraved minds.’

The situation is saved by the good sense of the augur Theocritus, the same who plays a quaint and gallant part in the enterprise described in _The Genius of Socrates_; and a chestnut colt takes the place of the daughter. And there is no doubt on which side of the argument Plutarch’s sympathies lie.

An admirable running commentary on Plutarch’s treatise is supplied by the _Discourse on Superstition_ of John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist (1618-52), here printed as an Appendix to it. Like Bacon, John Smith has written also a _Discourse on Atheism_, from which it may be sufficient for the present purpose to quote the words of the Son of Sirach appended as his conclusion:

‘O Lord, Father and God of my life, give me not a proud look, but turn away from thy servants a Giant-like minde’ (Ecclus. 23, 4).

See, for this whole treatise, Dr. Oakesmith’s Chapter IX, pp. 179 foll.

ON SUPERSTITION

[Sidenote: 164 E] The stream of ignorance and of misconception about the Gods passed, from the very first, into two channels; one branch flowed, as it were, over stony places, and has produced atheism in hard characters, the other over moist ground, and this has produced superstition in the tender ones. Now any error of judgement, especially on such matters, is a vicious thing, but if passion be added it is more vicious. For all passion is ‘deceit accompanied by inflammation’; and as dislocations are more [Sidenote: F] serious when there is also a wound, so are distortions of the soul when there is passion. A man thinks that atoms and a void are the first principles of the universe; the conception is a false one, but does not produce ulceration or spasm, or tormenting pain. Another conceives of wealth as the greatest [Sidenote: 165] good; this falsity has poison in it, preys on his soul, deranges it, allows him no sleep, fills him with stinging torments, thrusts him down steep places, strangles him, takes away all confidence of speech. Again, some think that virtue is a corporeal thing, and vice also; this is a gross piece of ignorance perhaps, but not worthy of lament or groans. But where there are such judgements and conceptions as these:

_Alas, poor Virtue! so thou art but words, And as a thing I was pursuing thee_[263]—

dropping, he means, the injustice which makes money, and the intemperance which is parent of all pleasure—, these it is worth our while to pity and to resent also, because their presence [Sidenote: B] in the soul breeds diseases and passions in numbers, very worms and vermin.

II. And so it is with the subjects of our present discourse. Atheism, which is a faulty judgement that there is nothing blessed or imperishable, seems to work round through disbelief in the Divine to actual apathy; its object in not acknowledging Gods is that it may not fear them. Superstition is shown by its very name to be a state of opinion charged with emotion and productive of such fear as debases and crushes the man; he thinks that there are Gods, but that they are [Sidenote: C] grievous and hurtful. The atheist appears to be unmoved at the mention of the Divine; the superstitious is moved, but in a wrong and perverted sense. Ignorance has produced in the one disbelief of the power which is helping him, in the other a superadded idea that it is hurting. Hence atheism is theory gone wrong, superstition is ingrained feeling, the outcome of false theory.

III. Now all diseases and affections of the soul are discreditable, but there is in some of them a gaiety, a loftiness, a distinction, which come of a light heart; we may say that none of these is wanting in a strong active impulse. Only there is this common charge to be laid against every such affection, that by stress of the active impulse it forces and [Sidenote: D] constrains the reason. Fear alone, as deficient in daring as it is in reason, keeps the irrational part inoperative, without resource or shift. Hence it has been called by two names, ‘Deima’ and ‘Tarbos’,[264] because it at once constricts and vexes the soul. But of all fears that which comes of superstition is most inoperative, and most resourceless. The man who never sails fears not the sea, nor the non-combatant, war; the home-keeping man fears no robbers, the poor no informers, the plain citizen no envy, the dweller among the Gauls[265] no earthquake, among the Ethiopians no thunder. The man who fears the Gods fears everything, land, sea; air, sky; darkness, light; sound, silence; to dream, to wake. Slaves forget [Sidenote: E] their masters while they sleep, sleep eases the prisoner’s chain; angry wounds, ulcers that raven and prey upon the flesh, and agonizing pains, all stand aloof from men that sleep:

_Dear soothing sleep, that com’st to succour pains, How sweet is thy approach in this my need._[266]

Superstition does not allow a man to say this; she alone has no truce with sleep, and suffers not the soul to breathe awhile, and [Sidenote: F] take courage, and thrust away its bitter heavy thoughts about the God. The sleep of the superstitious is a land of the ungodly, where blood-curdling visions, and monstrous whirling phantoms, and sure penalties are awake; the unhappy soul is hunted by dreams out of every spell of sleep it has, lashed and punished by itself, as though by some other, and receives injunctions horrible and revolting. Then when they have risen out of sleep, they do not scorn it all, or laugh it down, or perceive that none of the things which vexed them was real, but, escaped from the shadow of an illusion with no harm in it, they fall upon a vision of the day and deceive themselves outright, and spend [Sidenote: 166] money to vex their souls, meeting with quacks and charlatans who tell them:

_If nightly vision fright thy sleep, Or hags their hellish revel keep_,[267]

call in the wise woman, and take a dip into the sea, then sit on the ground, and remain so a whole day.

_Ah! Greeks, what ills outlandish have ye found_,[268]

namely, by superstition—dabbling in mud, plunges into filth, keepings of Sabbaths, falling on the face, foul attitudes, weird prostrations. Those who were concerned to keep music regular used to enjoin on singers to the harp to sing ‘with [Sidenote: B] mouth aright’. But we require that men should pray to the gods with mouth aright and just; not to consider whether the tongue of the victim be clean and correct, while they distort their own and foul it with absurd outlandish words and phrases, and transgress against the divine rule of piety as our fathers knew it. The man in the comedy has a passage which puts it happily to those who plate their bedsteads with gold and silver:

_The one free gift of gods to mortals, sleep, Why make it for thyself a costly boon?_[269]

[Sidenote: C] So we may say to the superstitious man, that the Gods gave sleep for oblivion of troubles and a respite from them; why make it for thyself a cell of punishment, a chamber of abiding torment, whence the miserable soul cannot run away unto any other sleep? Heraclitus[270] says that ‘waking men have one world common to all, but in sleep each betakes him to a world of his own.’ The superstitious has no world, no, not a common world, since neither while he is awake does he enjoy his reason, nor when he sleeps is he set free from his tormentor; reason ever drowses, and fear is ever awake; there is no escape, nor change of place.

IV. Polycrates was a terrible tyrant in Samos, Periander [Sidenote: D] at Corinth, yet no one continued to fear them when he had removed to a free and democratic state. But when a man fears the sovereignty of the Gods as a grim inexorable tyranny, whither shall he migrate, where find exile, what sort of land can he find where no Gods are, or of sea? Into what portion of the world wilt thou creep and hide thyself, and believe, thou miserable creature, that thou hast escaped from God? There is a law which allows even slaves, if they have despaired of liberty, to petition to be sold, and so change to a milder master. Superstition allows no exchange of Gods, nor is it possible to find a God who shall not be terrible to him who fears those of his country and his clan, who shivers at the ‘Preservers’ and trembles in alarm before the beneficent beings from whom we ask wealth, plenty, peace, concord, a successful [Sidenote: E] issue for our best of words and works. And then these men reckon slavery a misfortune, and say:

_A dire mishap it is, for man or maid, To pass to service of some ill-starred lord._[271]

Yet how much more dire is it, think you, for them to pass to lords from whom is no flight, or running away, no shifting. The slave has an altar to flee unto, even for robbers many temples are inviolable, and fugitives in war, if they lay hold of shrine or temple, take courage. The superstitious shudders in alarm at those very things beyond all others, wherein those who fear the worst find hope. Never drag the superstitious man from temples; within them is punishment and retribution [Sidenote: F] for him. Why more words? ‘Death is the limit of life to all mankind.’[272] Yes, but even death is no limit to superstition; superstition crosses the boundaries to the other side, and makes fear endure longer than life. It attaches to death the apprehension of undying ills, and when it ceases from troubles, it [Sidenote: 167] thinks to enter upon troubles which never cease. Gates are opened for it into a very depth of Hades, rivers of fire and streams which flow out of Styx mingle their floods; darkness itself is spread with phantoms manifold, obtruding cruel visions and pitiful voices; there are judges and tormentors, and chasms and abysses which teem with myriad evil things. Thus has superstition, that God-banned fear of Gods, made that inevitable to itself by anticipation, of which it had escaped the suffering in act.[273]

V. None of these horrors attaches to atheism. Yet its ignorance is distressing; it is a great misfortune to a soul [Sidenote: B] to see so wrong and grope so blindly about such great matters, because the light is extinguished of the brightest and most availing out of many eyes when the perception of God is lost. But to the opinion now before us there does attach from the very first, as we have already said, an emotional element, cankering, perturbing, and slavish. Plato[274] says that music, whose work it is to make men’s lives harmonious and rhythmical, was given to them by Gods, not for wanton tickling of the ears, but to clear the revolutions and harmonies of the soul from the disturbing impulses which rove within the body, such as most often run riot, where the Muse is not or the Grace, [Sidenote: C] and do violence and mar the tune; to bring them to order, to roll them smooth, to lead them aright, and settle them.

_But they whom Zeus not loves_ (says Pindar)[275] _Turn to the sound a dim disdainful ear What time the Muses’ voice they hear._

Yes, they grow savage and rebellious, as the tigers, they say, are maddened and troubled at the sound of the drum, and at last tear themselves to pieces. A lesser evil then it is for those who, through deafness and a dulled ear, are apathetic and insensible to music. Tiresias was unfortunate that he could not see his children and familiar friends, but far worse was the [Sidenote: D] case of Athamas and of Agave, who saw them as lions and stags. Better, I think, it was for Hercules in his madness not to see his sons, or feel their presence, than to treat his dearest ones as enemies.

VI. What then? Comparing the feeling of the atheists with that of the superstitious, do we not find a similar difference? The former see no Gods at all, the latter think that they exist as evil beings. The former neglect them, the latter imagine that to be terrible which is kind, that tyrannical which is fatherly, loving care to be injury, the ‘unapproachable’[276] to be savage and brutal. Then, trusting to coppersmiths, or marble workers, or modellers in wax, they fashion the forms of the Gods in human shape, and these they mould and frame and worship; while [Sidenote: E] they despise philosophers and men who know life, if they point them to the majesty of God consisting with goodness, and magnanimity, and patience, and solicitude. Thus in the former the result is insensibility and want of belief in all that is fair and helpful, in the latter confusion and fear in the presence of help. In a word, atheism is an apathy for the Divine which fails to perceive the good, superstition is an excess of feeling which suspects that the good is evil. They fear the Gods, and they flee to the Gods for refuge; they flatter and they revile them; they invoke and they censure them. It is man’s common lot not to succeed always or in all. [Sidenote: F]

_They, from sickness free and age, Quit of toils, the deep-voiced rage Of Acheron for ay have left behind_,

as Pindar[277] says; but human sufferings and doings flow in a mingled stream of vicissitude, now this way, now that.