Part 22

VII. Now look with me at the atheist, first when things cross his wishes, and consider his attitude. If he is a decent, quiet person, he takes what comes in silence, and provides his own means of succour and consolation. If he be impatient and querulous, he directs all his complainings against Fortune, and [Sidenote: 168] the way things happen; he cries out that nothing goes by justice or as Providence ordains, all is confused and jumbled up; the tangled web of human life is unpicked. Not so the superstitious: if the ill which has befallen him be the veriest trifle, still he sits down and builds on to his annoyance a pile of troubles, grievous and great and inextricable, heaping up for himself fears, dreads, suspicions, worries, a victim to every sort of groaning and lamentation; for he blames not man, nor fortune, nor [Sidenote: B] occasion, nor himself, but for all the God. From that quarter comes pouring upon him, he says, a Heaven-sent stream of woe; he is punished thus by the Gods not because he is unfortunate, but because he is specially hated by them, all that he suffers is his own proper deserts. Then the atheist, when he is sick, reckons up his own surfeitings, carouses, irregularities in diet, or over-fatigues, or unaccustomed changes of climate or place. Or, again, if he have met with political reverses, become unpopular or discredited in high quarters, he seeks for the cause in himself or his party.

_Where my transgression? or what have I done? what duty omitted?_[278]

But to the superstitious every infirmity of his body, every [Sidenote: C] loss of money, any death of a child, foul weather and failures in politics, are reckoned for blows from the God and assaults of the fiend. Hence he does not even take courage to help himself, to get rid of the trouble, or to remedy it, or make resistance, lest he should seem to be fighting the Gods, and resisting when punished. So the doctor is thrust out of the sick man’s chamber, and the mourner’s door is closed against the sage who comes to comfort and advise. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘let me take my punishment, as the miscreant that I am, an accursed [Sidenote: D] object of hate to Gods and daemons.’ It is open to a man who has no conviction that there are Gods, when suffering from some great grief and trouble, to wipe away a tear, to cut his hair, to put off his mourning. How are you going to address the superstitious in like case, wherein to bring him help? He sits outside, clothed in sackcloth, or with filthy rags hanging about him, as often as not rolling naked in the mud, while he recites errors and misdoings of his own, how he ate this, or drank that, or walked on a road which the spirit did not allow. At the very best, if he have taken superstition in a mild form, he sits in the house fumigating and purifying himself. The old women ‘make a peg of him’, as Bion says, and on it they hang—whatever [Sidenote: E] they choose to bring!

VIII. They say that Tiribazus, when arrested by the Persians, drew his scimitar, being a powerful man, and fought for his life; then, when they loudly protested that the arrest was by the king’s orders, at once dropped his point, and held out his hands to be tied. Is not this just what happens in the case before us? Other men make a fight against mischances and thrust all aside, that they may devise ways of escape and evade what is unwelcome to themselves. But the superstitious man listens to nobody, and addresses himself thus: ‘Poor wretch, [Sidenote: F] thy sufferings come from Providence, and by the order of the God.’ So he flings away all hope, gives himself up, flies, obstructs those who try to help him. Many tolerable troubles are made deadly by various superstitions. Midas[279] of old, as we are to believe, dispirited and distressed by certain dreams, was so miserable that he sought a voluntary death by drinking bulls’ blood. Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, during the war with the Lacedaemonians, when dogs were howling like wolves, and rye grass sprouting around his ancestral hearth, in utter despair at the extinction of all his hopes, cut his own throat. Perhaps it would have been better for Nicias[280], the Athenian [Sidenote: 169] general, to find the same release from superstition as Midas or Aristodemus, and not, in his terror of the shadow when the moon was eclipsed, to sit still under blockade, and afterwards, when forty thousand had been slaughtered or taken alive, to be taken prisoner and die ingloriously. For there is nothing so terrible when the earth blocks the way, or when its shadow meets the moon in due cycle of revolutions; what is terrible is that a man should plunge[281] into the darkness of superstition, [Sidenote: B] and that its dark shadow should confound a man’s reason and make it blind in matters where reason is most needed.

_Glaucus, see! the waves already from the depth of ocean stirred, And a cloud is piling upwards, right above the Gyrean point, Certain presage of foul weather._[282]

When the helmsman sees this, he prays that he may escape out of the peril, and calls on the Gods that save; but, while he prays, his hand is on the tiller, and he lowers the yard-arm,

_Furls his mainsail, and from billows black as Erebus he flees._[283]

Hesiod[284] tells the farmer to pray to Zeus below the earth and holy Artemis before he ploughs or sows, but to hold on to [Sidenote: C] the plough-handle as he prays. Homer[285] tells us that Ajax, before meeting Hector in single combat, commanded the Greeks to pray for him to the Gods; then, while they were praying, he was arming. Agamemnon, when he had given orders to the fighters:

_Let each his spear set, and prepare his shield_,

then begs of Zeus:

_Grant that this hand make Priam’s halls a heap._[286]

For God is the hope of valour, not the subterfuge of cowardice. The Jews, on the other hand, because it was a sabbath, sat on in uncleansed clothes, while their enemies planted their ladders and took the walls, never rising to their feet, as though entangled in the one vast draw-net of their superstition.[287]

IX. Such then is superstition in disagreeable matters and on [Sidenote: D] what we call critical occasions, but it has no advantage, even in what is more pleasant, over atheism. Nothing is more pleasant to men than feasts, temple banquets, initiations, orgies, prayers to the Gods, and solemn supplications. See the atheist there, laughing in a wild sardonic peal at the proceedings, probably with a quiet aside to his intimates, that those who think this all done for the Gods are crazed and possessed; but that is the worst that can be said of him. The superstitious man wants to be cheerful and enjoy himself, but he cannot.

_Rife too the city is with heavy reek Of victims slain, and rife with divers cries, The wail for healing and the moan for death._[288]

[Sidenote: E] So is the soul of the superstitious. With the crown on his head he grows pale; while he sacrifices he shudders; he prays with a quivering voice and offers incense with hands that shake; he shows all through that Pythagoras[289] talks nonsense when he says: ‘We reach our best when we draw near to the Gods.’ For it is then that the superstitious are at their miserable worst; the halls and temples of the Gods which they approach are for them dens of bears, lairs of serpents, caverns of monsters of the sea!

X. Hence it comes upon me as a surprise when men say that [Sidenote: F] atheism is impiety, but that superstition is not. Yet Anaxagoras had to answer a charge of impiety for saying that the sun is a stone, whereas no one has called the Cimmerians impious for thinking that there is no sun at all. What do you say? Is the man who recognizes no Gods a profane person, and does not he, who takes them for such beings as the superstitious think, hold a far more profane creed? I know that I would rather men said about me that there is not, and never has come [Sidenote: 170] into existence, a Plutarch, than that there is a man Plutarch unstable, shifty, readily provoked, revengeful over accidents, aggrieved at trifles; who, if you leave him out of your supper party, if you are busy and do not come to the door, if you pass him without a greeting, will cling to your flesh like a leech and gnaw it, or will catch your child, and thrash him to pieces, or will turn some beast, if he keep one, into your crops, and ruin the harvest. When Timotheus was singing of Artemis at Athens in the words:

_Wanderer, frenzied one, wild and inebriate!_

[Sidenote: B] Cinesias the composer rose from his place with ‘Such a daughter be thine!’ Yet the like of this, and worse things too, do the superstitious hold about Artemis:

_She would burn a hanging woman, She a mother in her pangs; She would bring pollution to you From the chamber of a corpse. In the crossways swoop upon you, Fix on you a murderer’s shame._[290]

Nor will their views about Apollo, or Hera, or Aphrodite be a whit more decent, they fear and tremble at them all. Yet what was there in Niobe’s blasphemy about Latona, compared to what [Sidenote: C] superstition has persuaded fools to believe about that goddess, how she felt herself insulted and actually shot down the poor woman’s

_Six daughters, beauteous all, six blooming sons_,[291]

so greedy of calamities for another woman, so implacable! For if the Goddess had really been full of wrath and resentment of wickedness, and felt aggrieved at insults to herself, disposed to resent, rather than to smile at human folly and ignorance, why then she ought to have shot down those who lyingly imputed to her such savage bitterness, in speech or books. Certainly we denounce the bitterness of Hecuba as savage and beastly: [Sidenote: D]

_In whose mid-liver I my teeth would set, And cling and gnaw._[292]

But of the Syrian Goddess superstitious men believe that if one eats sprats or anchovies, she munches his shins, fills his body with sores, and rots his liver.[293]

XI. How then? Is it impious to say bad things about the Gods, but not impious to think them? Or is it the thought of the blasphemer which makes his voice amiss? We men scout abusive language as the outward sign of ill-feeling. We reckon for enemies those who speak ill of us because we think that they also think ill. Now you see the sort of things which the superstitious think about the Gods; they take them to be capricious, [Sidenote: E] faithless, shifty, revengeful, cruel, vexed about trifles, all reasons why the superstitious must perforce hate and fear the Gods. Of course he does, when he thinks that they have been, and will be again, authors of his greatest ills. But if he hates and fears the Gods, he is their enemy. Yet he worships, and sacrifices, and sits before their shrines. And no wonder; men salute tyrants also, and court them, and set up their figures in gold. But ‘in silence’ they hate them, ‘wagging the head’.[294] Hermolaus remained Alexander’s courtier, Pausanias served on Philip’s [Sidenote: F] bodyguard, Chaereas on that of Caligula; but each of them would say while he attended on his master

_Sure thou shouldst rue it if my arm were strong._[295]

The atheist thinks there are no Gods, the superstitious wishes that there were none; he believes against his will, for he fears to disbelieve. And yet, as Tantalus would gladly slip from beneath the stone swinging over his head, so is it with the superstitious and his fear, a pressure no less sore. He would reckon the atheist’s mood a blessed one, for there is freedom in it. As things are, the atheist is quite clear of superstition; the superstitious is at heart an atheist, only too weak to believe what he wishes to believe about the Gods.

[Sidenote: 171] XII. Again, the atheist is in no sense responsible for superstition, whereas superstition provides atheism with a principle which brings it into being, and then an apology for its existence which is neither true nor honest, but is in a sense colourable. For it is not because they find anything to blame in sky, or stars, or seasons, or cycles of the moon, or movements of the sun around the earth, ‘those artificers of day and night’,[296] or espy confusion and disorder in the breeding of animals or the increase of fruits, that they condemn the universe to godlessness. No! Superstition and its ridiculous doings and emotions, words, [Sidenote: B] gestures, juggleries, sorceries, coursings around and beatings of cymbals, purifications which are impure, and cleansings which are filthy, weird illegal punishments and degradations at temples—these give certain persons a pretext for saying that better no Gods than Gods, if Gods accept such things and take pleasure in them, Gods so violent, so petty, so sore about trifles.

XIII. Were it not better then for those Gauls[297] and Scythians to have had no notion at all about Gods, neither imagination nor record of them, than to think that there are Gods who take [Sidenote: C] pleasure in the blood of slaughtered men and who accept that as the supreme form of solemn sacrifice? What? Were it not an advantage to the Carthaginians to have had a Critias or a Diagoras for their first lawgiver and to recognize neither God nor daemon, than to offer such sacrifices as they did offer to Cronus?[298] It was not the case which Empedocles puts against those who sacrifice animals:

_Father, uplifting his son, not marking the change of the body, Prays as he takes the dear life, poor fool._

Knowing and recognizing their own children, they used to sacrifice them—nay, the childless would buy children from poor parents and cut their throats as though they were lambs or chickens—, and the mother would stand by dry-eyed and with [Sidenote: D] never a groan. If she should groan or weep, she would have to lose the merit, and the child was sacrificed all the same, while the whole space in front of the shrine was filled with the rattle of drums and the din of fifes, in order that the sound of the wailing might be drowned. Suppose that Typhons, say, or Giants, had turned out the Gods and were our rulers, in what sacrifices but these would they delight, or what other solemnities would they require? Amestris,[299] wife of Xerxes, buried twelve men alive, as her own offering to Hades, who, as Plato[300] tells us, is [Sidenote: E] kind and wise and detains souls by persuasion and reason, and so has been named ‘Hades’. Xenophanes,[301] the natural philosopher, when he saw the Egyptians beating their breasts and wailing at their feasts, gave them a home lesson: ‘If these are Gods, do not mourn them; if men, why sacrifice to them?

XIV. There is no sort of disease so capricious and so varied in emotions, such a medley of opposite, or rather conflicting, opinions, as is that of superstition. We must flee from it then, but as safety and advantage point, not like men who run for their lives from robbers or beasts or fire, never looking round or using their heads, and plunge into pathless wastes with pits and [Sidenote: F] precipices. For that is how some flee from superstition and plunge into a rough and flinty atheism, overleaping Piety seated in the middle space.

Footnote 262:

Polybius (6, 56) points to ‘Deisidaimonia’ as the force which has held the Roman Commonwealth together, and kept the Romans honest.

Footnote 263:

See Nauck, p. 910 (Hercules speaks).

Footnote 264:

δεῖμα—δέω: τάρβος—ταράσσω.

Footnote 265:

Cf. Aristot. _Eth. Nic._ 3, 7.

Footnote 266:

Eur. _Or._ 211-12.

Footnote 267:

Nauck, p. 910, Fragm. 375 (probably from Aeschylus).

Footnote 268:

Eur. _Tro._ 759.

Footnote 269:

Meineke 4, p. 670.

Footnote 270:

Fr. 95.

Footnote 271:

Nauck, Fragm. adespota, 376.

Footnote 272:

Dem. _de Cor._, s. 97.

Footnote 273:

A difficult passage. I follow W.’s suggested restoration.

Footnote 274:

_Tim._ 47 C, &c.

Footnote 275:

_Pyth._ 1, 25.

Footnote 276:

Or perhaps ‘that which knows no wrath’.

Footnote 277:

Fr. 143, quoted twice elsewhere by Plutarch.

Footnote 278:

Pythag. _Carm. Aur._ 42.

Footnote 279:

See _Life of T. Q. Flamin._ c. 20.

Footnote 280:

_Life of Nicias_, c. 23. Thuc. 7, 50, 86.

Footnote 281:

i.e. as the moon plunges into the shadow of the earth. See p. 269.

Footnote 282:

Archilochus, Fr. 54, Bergk.

Footnote 283:

Nauck, Fragm. adespota, 377.

Footnote 284:

_W. and D._ 465 foll.

Footnote 285:

_Il._ 7, 193 foll.

Footnote 286:

_Il._ 2, 382, 414.

Footnote 287:

1 Maccab. 2, 32 foll.

Footnote 288:

Soph. _O. T._ 4.

Footnote 289:

See p. 123.

Footnote 290:

In the main from Wyttenbach’s reconstruction of this desperate passage.

Footnote 291:

_Il._ 24, 604.

Footnote 292:

_Il._ 24, 212.

Footnote 293:

Cp. Menander, Fragm. of _Demiurgus_, Meineke 4, p. 102.

Footnote 294:

Soph. _Ant._ 291.

Footnote 295:

_Il._ 22, 20.

Footnote 296:

Plat. _Tim._ 40 E.

Footnote 297:

See Strabo, 4, c. 4.

Footnote 298:

Cp. p. 183.

Footnote 299:

Herod. 7, 114.

Footnote 300:

_Crat._ 403 A, 404 B.

Footnote 301:

Cp. Arist. _Rhet._ 2, 23, 27, 1400 b 5, where the Eleatae are named.

APPENDIX A SHORT DISCOURSE OF SUPERSTITION

By JOHN SMITH

THE CONTENTS OF THE ENSUING DISCOURSE

_The true Notion_ of Superstition _well express’d by_ Δεισιδαιμονία, i.e. _an over-timorous and dreadful apprehension of the Deity._

_A false opinion of the Deity the true cause and rise of_ Superstition.

Superstition _is most incident to such as Converse not with the Goodness of God, or are conscious to themselves of their own unlikeness to him._

_Right apprehensions of God beget in man a Nobleness and Freedome of Soul._

Superstition, _though it looks upon God as an angry Deity, yet it counts him easily pleas’d with flattering Worship._

_Apprehensions of a Deity and Guilt meeting together are apt to excite Fear._

_Hypocrites to spare their Sins seek out waies to compound with God._

_Servile and Superstitious Fear is encreased by Ignorance of the certain Causes of Terrible Effects in Nature, &c., as also by frightful Apparitions of Ghosts and Spectres._

_A further Consideration of_ Superstition _as a Composition of Fear and Flattery._

_A fuller Definition of_ Superstition, _according to the Sense of the Ancients._

Superstition _doth not alwaies appear in the same Form, but passes from one Form to another, and sometimes shrouds it self under Forms seemingly Spiritual and more refined._

Of Superstition

Having now done with what we propounded as a _Preface_ to our following _Discourses_, we should now come to treat of the _main Heads and Principles of Religion_. But before we doe that, perhaps it may not be amiss to enquire into some of those _Anti-Deities_ that are set up against it, the chief whereof are ATHEISM and SUPERSTITION; which indeed may seeme to comprehend in them all kind of Apostasy and Praevarication from Religion. We shall not be over-curious to pry into such foule and rotten carkasses as these are too narrowly, or to make any subtile anatomy of them; but rather enquire a litle into the Original and Immediate Causes of them; because it may be they may be nearer of kin then we ordinarily are aware of, while we see their Complexions to be so vastly different the one from the other.

And first of all for SUPERSTITION (to lay aside our Vulgar notion of it which much mistakes it) it is the same with that Temper of Mind which the Greeks call Δεισιδαιμονία, (for so Tully frequently translates that word, though not so fitly and emphatically as he hath done some others:) It imports _an overtimorous and dreadfull apprehension of the Deity_; and therefore with _Hesychius_ Δεισιδαιμονία and Φοβοθεΐα are all one, and Δεισιδαίμων is by him expounded ὁ εἰδωλολάτρης, ὁ εὐσεβής, καὶ δειλὸς παρὰ θεοῖς, _an Idolater, and also one that is very prompt to worship the Gods, but withall fearfull of them_. And therefore _the true Cause and Rise of Superstition_ is indeed nothing else but _a false opinion_ of the Deity, that renders him dreadfull and terrible, as being rigorous and imperious; that which represents him as austere and apt to be angry, but yet impotent, and easy to be appeased again by some _flattering devotions_, especially if performed with sanctimonious shewes and a solemn sadness of Mind. And I wish that that Picture of God which some Christians have drawn of him, wherein Sowreness and Arbitrariness appear so much, doth not too much resemble it. According to this sense, Plutarch hath well defined it in his book περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας in this manner, δόξαν ἐμπαθῆ καὶ δέους ποιητικὴν ὑπόληψιν οὖσαν ἐκταπεινοῦντος καὶ συντρίβοντος τὸν ἄνθρωπον, οἰόμενον τε εἶναι θεοὺς εἶναι δὲ λυπηροὺς καὶ βλαβερούς, _a strong passionate Opinion, and such a Supposition as is productive of a fear debasing and terrifying a man with the representation of the Gods as grievous and hurtfull to Mankind_.

Such men as these converse not with the _Goodness_ of God, and therefore they are apt to attribute their impotent passions and peevishness of Spirit to him. Or it may be because some secret advertisements of their Consciences tell them how _unlike_ they themselves are _to God_, and how they have provoked him; they are apt to be as much displeased with him as too troublesome to them, as they think he is displeased with them. They are apt to count this Divine Supremacy as but a piece of tyranny that by its Soveraign Will makes too great encroachments upon their Liberties, and that which will eat up all their Right and Property; and therefore are lavishly afraid of him, τὴν τῶν θεῶν ἀρχὴν ὡς τυραννίδα φοβούμενοι σκυθρωπὴν καὶ ἀπαραίτητον, _fearing Heaven’s Monarchy as a severe and churlish Tyranny from which they cannot absolve themselves_, as the same Author speaks: and therefore he thus discloseth the private whisperings of their minds, ᾅδου τινες ἀνοίγονται πύλαι βαθείαι, καὶ ποταμοῖ πυρὸς ὁμοῦ καὶ στυγὸς ἀπορρῶγες ἀναπετάννυνται, &c., _the broad gates of hell are opened, the rivers of fire and Stygian inundations run down as a swelling flood, there is thick darkness crowded together, dreadfull and gastly Sights of Ghosts screeching and howling, Judges and tormentors, deep gulfes and Abysses full of infinite miseries_. Thus he. The Prophet _Esay_ gives us this Epitome of their thoughts, chap. 33: _The Sinners in Zion_ are afraid, fearfulness hath surprized the hypocrites: who shall dwell with the devouring fire? who shall dwell with everlasting burnings? Though I should not dislike these dreadful and astonishing thoughts of future torment, which I doubt even good men may have cause to press home upon their own spirits, while they find Ingenuity less active, the more to restrain sinne; yet I think it little commends God, and as little benefits us, to fetch all this horror and astonishment from the Contemplations of a Deity, which should alwayes be the most serene and lovely: our apprehensions of the Deity should be such as might _ennoble_ our Spirits, and not _debase_ them. A right knowledge of God would beget a _freedome_ and _Liberty_ of Soul within us, and not _servility_; ἀρετῆς γὰρ ἐλπὶς ὁ Θεός εστιν οὐ δουλείας πρόφασις, as Plutarch hath well observ’d; our thoughts of a Deity should breed in us hopes of Vertue, and not gender to a spirit of bondage.