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| That the Suggestions of Philosophers are Precluded from Having Any Moral Effect, Because They Have Not the Authority Which Belongs to Divine Instruction, and Because Man’s Natural Bias to Evil Induces Him Rather to Follow the Examples of the Gods Than to Obey the Precepts of Men.
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Chapter 7.—That the Suggestions
of Philosophers are Precluded from Having Any Moral Effect, Because
They Have Not the Authority Which Belongs to Divine Instruction,
and Because Man’s Natural Bias to Evil Induces Him Rather to
Follow the Examples of the Gods Than to Obey the Precepts of
Men.
But will they perhaps remind us of
the schools of the philosophers, and their disputations? In the
first place, these belong not to Rome, but to Greece; and even if
we yield to them that they are now Roman, because Greece itself has
become a Roman province, still the teachings of the philosophers
are not the commandments of the gods, but the discoveries of men,
who, at the prompting of their own speculative ability, made
efforts to discover the hidden laws of nature, and the right and
wrong in ethics, and in dialectic what was consequent according to
the rules of logic, and what was inconsequent and erroneous. And
some of them, by God’s help, made great discoveries; but when
left to themselves they were betrayed by human infirmity, and fell
into mistakes. And this was ordered by divine providence, that
their pride might be restrained, and that by their example it might
be pointed out that it is humility which has access to the highest
regions. But of this we shall have more to say, if the Lord God
of truth permit, in its own place.97
| 97
See below, books viii.-xii. | However, if the philosophers have
made any discoveries which are sufficient to guide men to virtue
and blessedness, would it not have been greater justice to vote
divine honors to them? Were it not more accordant with every
virtuous sentiment to read Plato’s writings in a “Temple of
Plato,” than to be present in the temples of devils to witness
the priests of Cybele98
| 98
“Galli,”
the castrated priests of Cybele, who were named after the river
Gallus, in Phrygia, the water of which was supposed to intoxicate
or madden those who drank it. According to Vitruvius (viii. 3),
there was a similar fountain in Paphlagonia. Apuleius (Golden
Ass, viii.) gives a graphic and humorous description of the
dress, dancing and imposture of these priests; mentioning, among
other things, that they lashed themselves with whips and cut
themselves with knives till the ground was wet with
blood. |
mutilating themselves, the effeminate being consecrated, the raving
fanatics cutting themselves, and whatever other cruel or shameful,
or shamefully cruel or cruelly shameful, ceremony is enjoined by
the ritual of such gods as these? Were it not a more
suitable
education, and more likely to prompt the youth to virtue, if they
heard public recitals of the laws of the gods, instead of the vain
laudation of the customs and laws of their ancestors? Certainly
all the worshippers of the Roman gods, when once they are possessed
by what Persius calls “the burning poison of lust,”99
| 99
Persius, Sat. iii. 37. | prefer to witness the deeds of
Jupiter rather than to hear what Plato taught or Cato censured.
Hence the young profligate in Terence, when he sees on the wall a
fresco representing the fabled descent of Jupiter into the lap of
Danaë in the form of a golden shower, accepts this as
authoritative precedent for his own licentiousness, and boasts that
he is an imitator of God. “And what God?” he says. “He
who with His thunder shakes the loftiest temples. And was I, a
poor creature compared to Him, to make bones of it? No; I did it,
and with all my heart.”100
| 100 Ter. Eun. iii. 5. 36; and
cf. the similar allusion in Aristoph. Clouds, 1033–4. It
may be added that the argument of this chapter was largely used by
the wiser of the heathen themselves. Dionysius Hal. (ii. 20) and
Seneca (De Brev Vit. c. xvi.) make the very same complaint;
and it will be remembered that his adoption of this reasoning was
one of the grounds on which Euripides was suspected of
atheism. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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