Cicero (Collins 1871)/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
CICERO'S RELIGION.
It is difficult to separate Cicero's religion from his philosophy. In both he was a sceptic, but in the better sense of the word. His search after truth was in no sneering or incredulous spirit, but in that of a reverent inquirer. We must remember, in justice to him, that an earnest-minded man in his day could hardly take higher ground than that of the sceptic. The old polytheism was dying out in everything but in name, and there was nothing to take its place.
His religious belief, so far as we can gather it, was rather negative than positive. In the speculative treatise which he has left us, 'On the Nature of the Gods,' he examines all the current creeds of the day, but leaves his own quite undefined.
The treatise takes the form, like the rest, of an imaginary conversation. This is supposed to have taken place at the house of Aurelius Cotta, then Pontifex Maximus—an office which answered nearly to that of Minister of religion. The other speakers are Balbus, Velleius, and Cicero himself,—who acts, however, rather in the character of moderator than of disputant. The debate is still, as in the more strictly philosophical dialogues, between the different schools. Velleius first sets forth the doctrine of his master Epicurus; speaking about the gods, says one of his opponents, with as much apparent intimate knowledge "as if he had just come straight down from heaven." All the speculations of previous philosophers—which he reviews one after the other—are, he assures the company, palpable errors. The popular mythology is a mere collection of fables. Plato and the Stoics, with their Soul of the world and their pervading Providence, are entirely wrong; the disciples of Epicurus alone are right. There are gods; that much, the universal belief of mankind in all ages sufficiently establishes. But that they should be the laborious beings which the common systems of theology would make them,—that they should employ themselves in the manufacture of worlds,—is manifestly absurd. Some of this argument is ingenious. "What should induce the Deity to perform the functions of an Ædile, to light up and decorate the world? If it was to supply better accommodation for himself, then he must have dwelt of choice, up to that time, in the darkness of a dungeon. If such improvements gave him pleasure, why should he have chosen to be without them so long?"
No—the gods are immortal and happy beings; and these very attributes imply that they should be wholly free from the cares of business—exempt from labour, as from pain and death. They are in human form, but of an ethereal and subtile essence, incapable of our passions or desires. Happy in their own perfect wisdom and virtue, they
Cotta—speaking in behalf of the New Academy—controverts these views. Be these your gods, Epicurus? as well say there are no gods at all. What reverence, what love, or what fear can men have of beings who neither wish them, nor can work them, good or ill? Is idleness the divinest life? "Why, 'tis the very heaven of schoolboys; yet the schoolboys, on their holiday, employ themselves in games." Nay, he concludes, what the Stoic Posidonius said of your master Epicurus is true—"He believed there were no gods, and what he said about their nature he said only to avoid popular odium." He could not believe that the Deity has the outward shape of a man, without any solid essence; that he has all the members of a man, without the power to use them; that he is a shadowy transparent being, who shows no favour and confers no benefits on any, cares for nothing and does nothing; this is to allow his existence of the gods in word, but to deny it in fact.
Velleius compliments his opponent on his clever argument, but desires that Balbus would state his views upon the question. The Stoic consents; and, at some length, proceeds to prove (what neither disputant has at all denied) the existence of Divine beings of some kind. Universal belief, well-authenticated instances of their appearance to men, and of the fulfilment of prophecies and omens, are all evidences of their existence. He dwells much, too, on the argument from design, of which so much use has been made by modern theologians. He furnishes Paley with the idea for his well-known illustration of the man who finds a watch; "when we see a dial or a water-clock, we believe that the hour is shown thereon by art, and not by chance."[1] He gives also an illustration from the poet Attius, which from a poetical imagination has since become an historical incident; the shepherds who see the ship Argo approaching take the new monster for a thing of life, as the Mexicans regarded the ships of Cortes. Much more, he argues, does the harmonious order of the world bespeak an intelligence within. But his conclusion is that the Universe itself is the Deity; or that the Deity is the animating Spirit of the Universe; and that the popular mythology, which gives one god to the Earth, one to the Sea, one to Fire, and so on, is in fact a distorted version of this truth. The very form of the universe—the sphere—is the most perfect of all forms, and therefore suited to embody the Divine.
Then Cotta—who though, as Pontifex, he is a national priest by vocation, is of that sect in philosophy which makes doubt its creed—resumes his objections. He is no better satisfied with the tenets of the Stoics than with those of the Epicureans. He believes that there are gods; but, coming to the discussion as a dispassionate and philosophical observer, he finds such proofs as are offered of their existence insufficient. But this third book is fragmentary, and the continuity of Cotta's argument is broken by considerable gaps in all the manuscripts. There is a curious tradition, that these portions were carefully torn out by the early Christians, because they might prove too formidable weapons in the hands of unbelievers. Cotta professes throughout only to raise his objections in the hope that they may be refuted; but his whole reasoning is destructive of any belief in an overruling Providence. He confesses himself puzzled by that insoluble mystery—the existence of Evil in a world created and ruled by a beneficent Power. The gods have given man reason, it is said; but man abuses the gift to evil ends. "This is the fault," you say, "of men, not of the gods. As though the physician should complain of the virulence of the disease, or the pilot of the fury of the tempest! Though these are but mortal men, even in them it would seem ridiculous. Who would have asked your help, we should answer, if these difficulties had not arisen? May we not argue still more strongly in the case of the gods? The fault, you say, lies in the vices of men. But you should have given men such a rational faculty as would exclude the possibility of such crimes." He sees, as David did, "the ungodly in prosperity." The laws of Heaven are mocked, crimes are committed, and "the thunders of Olympian Jove are silent." He quotes, as it would always be easy to quote, examples of this from all history: the most telling and original, perhaps, is the retort of Diagoras, who was called the Atheist, when they showed him in the temple at Samothrace the votive tablets (as they may be seen in some foreign churches now) offered by those shipwrecked seamen who had been saved from drowning. "Lo, thou that deniest a Providence, behold here how many have been saved by prayer to the gods!" "Yea," was his reply; "but where are those commemorated who were drowned?"
The Dialogue ends with no resolution of the difficulties, and no conclusion as to the points in question. Cicero, who is the narrator of the imaginary conference, gives it as his opinion that the arguments of the Stoic seemed to him to have "the greater probability." It was the great tenet of the school which he most affected, that probability was the nearest approach that man could make to speculative truth. "We are not among those," he says, "to whom there seems to be no such thing as truth; but we say that all truths have some falsehoods attached to them which have so strong a resemblance to truth, that in such cases there is no certain note of distinction which can determine our judgment and assent. The consequence of which is that there are many things probable; and although they are not subjects of actual perception to our senses, yet they have so grand and glorious an aspect that a wise man governs his life thereby."[2] It remained for one of our ablest and most philosophical Christian writers to prove that in such matters probability was practically equivalent to demonstration.[3] Cicero's own form of scepticism in religious matters is perhaps very nearly expressed in the striking anecdote which he puts, in this dialogue, into the mouth of the Epicurean.
"If you ask me what the Deity is, or what his nature and attributes are, I should follow the example of Simonides, who, when the tyrant Hiero proposed to him the same question, asked a day to consider of it. When the king, on the next day, required from him the answer, Simonides requested two days more; and when he went on continually asking double the time, instead of giving any answer, Hiero in amazement demanded of him the reason. 'Because,' replied he, 'the longer I meditate on the question, the more obscure does it appear.'"[4]
The position of Cicero as a statesman, and also as a member of the College of Augurs, no doubt checked any strong expression of opinion on his part as to the forms of popular worship and many particulars of popular belief. In the treatise which he intended as in some sort a sequel to this Dialogue on the 'Nature of the Gods'—that upon 'Divination'—he states the arguments for and against the national belief in omens, auguries, dreams, and such intimations of the Divine will.[5] He puts the defence of the system in the mouth of his brother Quintus, and takes himself the destructive side of the argument: but whether this was meant to give his own real views on the subject, we cannot be so certain. The course of argument employed on both sides would rather lead to the conclusion that the writer's opinion was very much that which Johnson delivered as to the reality of ghosts—"All argument is against it, but all belief is for it."
With regard to the great questions of the soul's immortality, and a state of future rewards and punishments, it would be quite possible to gather from Cicero's writings passages expressive of entirely contradictory views. The bent of his mind, as has been sufficiently shown, was towards doubt, and still more towards discussion ; and possibly his opinions were not so entirely in a state of flux as the remains of his writings seem to show. In a future state of some kind he must certainly have believed that is, with such belief as he would have considered the subject-matter to admit of—as a strong probability. In a speculative fragment which has come down to us, known as 'Scipio's Dream,' we seem to have the creed of the man rather than the speculations of the philosopher. Scipio Africanus the elder appears in a dream to the younger who bore his name (his grandson by adoption). He shows him at vision of heaven; bids him listen to the music of the spheres, which, as they move in their order, "by a modulation of high and low sounds," give forth that harmony which men have in some poor sort reduced to notation. He bids him look down upon the earth, contracted to a mere speck in the distance, and draws a lesson of the poverty of all mere earthly fame and glory. "For all those who have preserved, or aided, or benefited their country, there is a fixed and definite place in heaven, where they shall be happy in the enjoyment of everlasting life." But "the souls of those who have given themselves up to the pleasures of sense, and made themselves, as it were, the servants of these, who at the bidding of the lusts which wait upon pleasure have violated the laws of gods and men,—they, when they escape from the body, flit still around the earth, and never attain to these abodes but after many ages of wandering." We may gather that his creed admitted a Valhalla for the hero and the patriot, and a long process of expiation for the wicked.
There is a curious passage preserved by St Augustin from that one of Cicero's works which he most admired—the lost treatise on 'Glory'[6]—which seems to show that so far from being a materialist, he held the body to be a sort of purgatory for the soul.
"The mistakes and the sufferings of human life make me think sometimes that those ancient seers, or interpreters of the secrets of heaven and the counsels of the Divine mind, had some glimpse of the truth, when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for some sins committed in a former life; and that the idea is true which we find in Aristotle, that we are suffering some such punishment as theirs of old, who fell into the hands of those Etruscan bandits, and were put to death with a studied cruelty; their living bodies being tied to dead bodies, face to face, in closest possible conjunction: that so our souls are coupled to our bodies, united like the living with the dead."
But whatever might have been the theological side, if one may so express it, of Cicero's religion, the moral aphorisms which meet us here and there in his works have often in them a teaching which comes near the tone of Christian ethics. The words of Petrarch are hardly too strong—"You would fancy sometimes it was not a Pagan philosopher but a Christian apostle who was speaking"[7] These are but a few out of many which might be quoted:—"Strive ever for the truth, and so reckon as that not thou art mortal, but only this thy body; for thou art not that which this outward form of thine shows forth, but each man's mind, that is the real man—not the shape which can be traced with the finger."[8] "Yea, rather, they live who have escaped from the bonds of their flesh as from a prison-house." "Follow after justice and duty; such a life is the path to heaven, and into yon assembly of those who have once lived, and now, released from the body, dwell in that place." Where, in any other heathen writer, shall we find such noble words as those which close the apostrophe in the Tusculans?—"One single day well spent, and in accordance with thy precepts, were better to be chosen than an immortality of sin!"[9] He is addressing himself, it is true, to Philosophy; but his Philosophy is here little less than the Wisdom of Scripture: and the spiritual aspiration is the same-only uttered under greater difficulties—as that of the Psalmist when he exclaims, "One day in thy courts is better than a thousand!" We may or may not adopt Erasmus's view of his inspiration—or rather, inspiration is a word which has more than one definition, and this would depend upon which definition we take; but we may well sympathise with the old scholar when he says—"I feel a better man for reading Cicero."
END OF CICERO.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
- ↑ De Nat. Deor. ii. 34. Paley's Nat. Theol. ch. i.
- ↑ De Nat. Deor. i. 5.
- ↑ "To us, probability is the very guide of life."—Introd. to Butler's Analogy.
- ↑ De Nat. Deor. i. 22.
- ↑ There is a third treatise, 'De Fato,' apparently a continuation of the series, of which only a portion has reached us. It is a discussion of the difficult questions of Fate and Free-will.
- ↑ See p.29.
- ↑ "Interdum non Paganum philosophum, sed apostolum loqui putes."
- ↑ 'The Dream of Scipio.'
- ↑ Tusc., v. 2.