Plutarchian Piety

He said of himself that his neighbors often laughed at him when they saw him watching, for instance, while stone and mortar were measured out, but he would only say, "This is not done for myself, but for my country." That was the way he spent his life, "centered in the sphere of little things," but never despising them and never pitying himself. There is something here, some feeling, some ideal, which was not in Periclean Athens. Suffering may teach a profound lesson, and the mighty Greek spirit which had suffered so much had not lost its power to learn and to perceive new forms of excellence. When Plutarch declared that he who is faithful in that which is least may be fulfilling life's highest demands, he was Greece's far-sighted spokesman for a change that was beginning in the moral atmosphere of the world...

That was what turned Plutarch into a writer. He could not be an Aristides to lift Greece up by great statesmanship, or an Alexander to make her the mistress of the world. The time was long since over when a Greek could lead states or armies. But the time was never over for trying to help men to a loftier view of what it means to be a man...

The deep seriousness which he brought to his work was founded on his religion, or, as he would have put it, on his philosophy. His profoundest conviction was that we needs must love the highest when we see it--but who can see it if there are none to show it, first, of course, in their lives, but, second only to that, in their words? The one he raised to a pedestal was the man who made it easy for people to believe in goodness and greatness, in heroic courage and warm generosity and lofty magnanimity. In humble virtues, too, patience that never wearies; readiness to forgive; kindness to an erring servant, to an animal...

He stood at the beginning of a new era in religion and he felt that it was so and that he was part of it, but he did not let go of the old, of what he calls, "the ancient and hereditary faith." The different gods were merely different views of the one God, perfect in goodness, or perhaps they were different ways of trying to find Him. The myths he said were "to be tenderly treated," interpreted in "a spirit at once pious and philosophic." They are, he writes, the reflection of truth like "the rainbow which the mathematicians tell us is nothing else but an image of the sun, a reflection of his beams upon the clouds." Nevertheless he knew that the framework which always encloses religion was falling apart and a new frame had to be constructed...

A man who thought like this could not be superstitious. Plutarch had no tolerance for that particular form of human weakness. To him a superstition was not a mistaken belief, a kind of religious stupidity; it was an unmitigated evil, far worse than absolute disbelief. Atheism, he says, denies God, but superstition wrongs Him...

His religious creed was not complicated. A contemporary of his, the younger Pliny, wrote, "For man to help man is God," and to Plutarch that was certainly a clause in the definition. The life according to God was accepting an unconditional obligation to make things better for others wherever one was. But there was more than that. In an essay he wrote upon the delay of God in punishing the wicked he faced with candor and with courage the basic problem of religion, the problem of evil. He did not propose a solution...

The Greek was instinctively Socratic. He must reason and try to understand, always remembering that every conclusion was forever open to question and re-examination. Plutarch wanted men, he said, "to borrow reason from philosophy and make it the guide to religion."

The Greek trinity was goodness, truth, beauty...[The Romans, by comparison] gave little thought to the [first] two, but beauty in especial was unimportant, a mere decoration to the very serious and difficult business of life. To Plutarch it was a revelation of God...

He really was that rare person, a man of perfect tolerance with deep religious convictions...The terrible odium theologicum which for hundreds and hundreds of years would distract and disgrace Christendom had not yet been born [in his day], but it would never find a home in Greece, and it would have been unimaginable to Plutarch.

What would it not have meant to the religion of Christ if Christians could have been learners as well as teachers of Greece! There would have been another criterion of truth, not only creeds and ipse dixits, authoritatively promulgated and obediently accepted, but Plutarch's criterion--If we live here as we ought, we shall see things as they are, the Greek version of, The pure in heart shall see God.

~ Edith Hamilton, 1951.