Plutarch on the Delay of the Divine Justice · Plutarch
INTRODUCTION.[vii:1]
Now, when I remember that in the pre-Christian Greek and Roman world the strongest utterances about immortality had been by Socrates, if Plato reported him aright, when he expressed strong hope of life beyond death, yet warned his friends not to be too confident about a matter so wrapped in uncertainty,—and by Cicero, who, when his daughter died, confessed that his reasonings had left no conviction in his own mind,—I cannot doubt that some Easter morning rays had pierced the dense Boeotian atmosphere, and that the risen Saviour had in that lovely Cheroneian household those whom he designates as “other sheep, not of this fold.” There is among the Moralia another letter of consolation, to Apollonius on the death of his son, longer, more elaborate, and evidently intended as a literary composition, to be preserved with the author’s other works, which breathes the same spirit of submission and trust. Another of the Moralia, which has a special interest as regards the author’s own family, is on the “Training of Children,”—a series of counsels—including the careful heed of the parents to their own moral condition and habits—to which the experience of these intervening centuries has little to add, while it could find nothing to take away.
In one sense, the miscellanies brought together under the name of “Moralia” bear that title not inappropriately; for, as I have intimated, Plutarch could not but be didactic in whatever he wrote, and the ethical feeling, spirit, and purpose are perpetually, yet never ostentatiously or inappropriately, coming to the surface on all kinds of subjects. But there is a great deal in the collection not professedly or directly ethical. There are many scraps of history and biography, and a very large number and variety of characteristic anecdotes, both of well-known personages, and of others who are made known to us almost as vividly by a single trait, deed, or saying as if we had their entire life-record. There is an invaluable series of “Apophthegms”[xxv:1] of kings and great commanders,[xxv:2] and another of “Laconic [or Spartan] Apophthegms,” which are much more than their name implies, some of them being condensed memoirs. There are, also, several papers that give us more definite notions than can be found anywhere else of the science and natural history of the author’s time. Withal, we have here so many references to manners, customs, and habits, such pictures of home with all that could give it the sweetness and grace that belong to it, such views of society, both in city and in country, in ordinary intercourse and on festive occasions, that one can learn more of life in that age in the Roman Empire from these volumes than from any other single author; and the writer of a book like Becker’s “Gallus” might find here almost all the materials that he would need, except for the delineation of the night-side of Roman extravagance, gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, and depravity, which came not within Plutarch’s experience.
The most remarkable of all Plutarch’s writings, the most valuable equally in a philosophical and an ethical point of view, and the most redolent of what we almost involuntarily call Christian sentiment, is that “On the Delay of the Divine Justice,” or, to give a more literal translation of the original title, “Concerning those who are punished slowly by the Divine [Being].”[xxvi:1] It treats of what from the earliest time has been a mystery to serious minds, and has been urged equally by malignant irreligion and by honest scepticism against the supremacy of the Divine justice in the government of the world; namely, the postponement of the penal consequences of guilt, sometimes till there are no witnesses of the crime left to behold the punishment, sometimes till the offender himself has lost the thread between the evil that he did and its retribution, sometimes till the sinner has gone to the grave in peace, and left innocent posterity to suffer for his sins. Plutarch, with his unquestioning faith in immortality, doubts not that guilt, unpunished in this life, will be overtaken by just retribution in the life to come. But, as he says, retribution, though it may be consummated only in the future life, is not delayed till then. It seems late, because it lasts long. The sentence is passed upon the guilt when it is committed; and, however its visible execution may be postponed, the sinner is from that moment a prisoner of the Divine justice, awaiting execution. He may give splendid suppers, and live luxuriously; yet still he is within prison walls from which there is no escape.
This is undoubtedly true, and yet there are many cases, and those of the worst kind, in which it seems to be not true. A moderately bad man, in most instances, feels profoundly the shame and misery that he has brought upon himself. But a thoroughly wicked man takes contentedly a position which we may fitly term sub-human. If we suppose a man possessed of a magnificent house, luxuriously and tastefully furnished, who yet chooses never to ascend a stair, and lives in the basement shabbily and meanly, with the coarsest appliances of physical comfort, we might take him as the type of not a few bad men who seem entirely at their ease. They live in the basement. They have thrown away the key to the upper rooms. They have lost all appreciation of the higher, better modes of human living, and they are contented and satisfied as a well-fed beast is, in the absence of all spiritual cravings and ambitions. But this life, poor and mean as it is at the best, becomes still more narrow and sordid with the lapse of time. Many have looked with envy on prosperous guilt early or midway in its career; none can have witnessed its lengthened age without pity and loathing. Especially is this the case with the several forms of sensual vice. As age advances, the power of enjoyment wanes, while the morbid craving grows, even under the consciousness of added misery with its continued indulgence. The body becomes the soul’s dungeon, and its walls thicken inward and close up the wonted entrances of enjoyment. The senses, deadened on the side of pleasure, no longer avenues of beauty or of harmony, seem to serve only as means of prolonging a death in life, and as open inlets of discomfort and pain.
But the suspense of sentence has in not a few cases, according to Plutarch, a directly merciful purpose. As the most fertile soil may before tillage produce the rankest weeds, so in the soul most capable of good there may be, prior to culture, a noisome crop of evil, and yet God may spare the sinner for the good that is in him, and for the signal service which, when reclaimed, he may render to mankind. Then, too, by the delay of visible judgment God gives men in his own example the lesson of long-suffering, and rebukes their promptness in resentment and revenge. Still further, when penalty appears to fall on the posterity or successors of the guilty, and a race, a people, a city, or a family seems punished for the iniquity of its progenitors, Plutarch brings out very fully and clearly the absolutely essential and necessary solidarity of the family or the community, which can hardly fail so to inherit of its ancestors in disposition and character as to invite upon itself, to merit for itself, or at best to need as preventive or cure, the penal consequences of ancestral guilt. This essay is all the more valuable because not written by a Christian. It shows that the intense stress laid by Christian teaching on a righteous retribution lasting on beyond the death-change is not a mere dogma of the sacred records of our religion, but equally the postulate of the unsophisticated reason and conscience of developed humanity.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.