Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
...of ignorance and unawareness about the gods, which from the very start has split into two streams: the one, as it were in hard and resistant soils, has produced atheism in unyielding characters; the other, as it were in soft and moist soils, has produced superstition. Now every judgment that is false is bad, especially when it concerns matters such as these, but it is worst of all when emotion attaches itself to it as well. For every emotion seems to be an inflamed wound,
and just as dislocations of the joints accompanied by injury are worse than ordinary ones, so too are the distortions of the soul that come with emotion worse than those without it. Someone supposes that atoms and void are the first principles of all things; this is a false belief, but it produces no ulcer, no throbbing, no disturbing pain. Someone else assumes that wealth is the greatest good: this falsehood has venom in it, it gnaws at the soul, drives it out of itself, does not let it
sleep, fills it with frenzied longing, pushes it over cliffs, chokes it, robs it of its freedom of speech. Again, some think that virtue and vice are bodies. That is perhaps a shameful misconception, but not one worth lamenting and wailing over. But whatever judgments and suppositions are of this sort — "O wretched Virtue, you were nothing but a word, yet I cultivated you as though you were a real thing" — abandoning the injustice that produces wealth and the
licentiousness that breeds every pleasure — these are worthy both of pity and of indignation, because they beget in the soul, like maggots and worms, many diseases and passions by their very presence. So then, with regard to the subject of our discourse: atheism, being a base judgment that nothing is blessed and imperishable, seems through disbelief in the divine to bring about a certain freedom from emotion, and its end is
simply not fearing what one does not believe exists. Superstition, however — as its very name indicates — is an emotional opinion, one productive of dread, a supposition that abases and crushes a person, since he thinks there are gods, but that they are painful and harmful. For the atheist seems to be unmoved with regard to the divine, while the superstitious man is moved in a way that is not fitting, and is thereby distorted. For ignorance
has produced in the one a disbelief in what benefits him, while in the other it has added the further belief that it harms him. Hence atheism is a mistaken judgment, whereas superstition is an emotion engendered from that false judgment. Now all diseases and passions of the soul are shameful, yet in some of them there is nonetheless a kind of vaunting loftiness and elevation arising from their very shallowness, and they are not, so to speak, deprived of any vigorous impulse to action.
But this is the common charge brought against every passion: that, forced on by its practical impulses, it hurries and strains the reasoning faculty. Fear alone, being no less lacking in boldness than in reason, keeps its irrationality inactive, helpless, and at a loss. Indeed dread and terror are named from this very binding and disturbing of the soul together. Of all fears,
the most inactive and most helpless is that of superstition. The man who does not sail does not fear the sea, nor does the man who is not a soldier fear war, nor the man who stays at home fear robbers, nor the poor man fear the false accuser, nor the private citizen fear envy, nor the man in Gaul fear an earthquake, nor the man among the Ethiopians fear a thunderbolt; but the man who fears the gods fears everything — earth, sea, air, sky, darkness, light, a chance remark, silence,
a dream. Slaves forget their masters when they sleep; sleep lightens the fetter for those in chains; inflammations around wounds and savage ulcerations of the flesh and their attendant agonies subside while men sleep. "O sleep, dear charm, healer of sickness, how sweetly you have come to me in my hour of need" — this is what superstition alone does not allow one to say. For it alone makes no truce with sleep, and never at all
does it allow the soul to breathe freely and take heart by casting off its bitter and heavy opinions about god; rather, as though in the domain of the impious, it rouses in the sleep of the superstitious frightful phantoms and monstrous apparitions and certain avenging punishments, and whirls the wretched soul about, driving it with dreams out of its sleep, scourging it and punishing it by itself as though by another, and making it receive terrible
and outlandish commands. Then, upon rising, such people neither show contempt nor laugh it off, nor do they realize that none of the things that disturbed them was real; instead, fleeing a shadow of deception that contains no real harm, they deceive, exhaust, and disturb themselves while wide awake, falling into the hands of charlatans and sorcerers who say: "But if a dream-apparition frightens you, and you have received the visitation of chthonic Hecate's revel, summon the old woman who purifies, and dip yourself in
the sea, and sit on the ground and spend the whole day there." O the barbarous evils that the Greeks have devised for superstition — smearings with mud, wallowings in filth, ritual immersions, prostrations on the face, shameful squattings, outlandish acts of worship. It was with good reason that those who claim to preserve the traditional standards of music used to bid the citharodes sing with a mouth held straight; yet we consider it right to pray to the gods with a mouth held upright and just, and not to examine
whether the tongue that comes from our entrails is pure and straight, while distorting and polluting our own tongue with outlandish names and barbaric words, thereby disgracing and transgressing against the divine and ancestral dignity of piety. But the comic poet, not unpleasantly, once said, addressing those who overlay their couches with gold and silver-plate everything, concerning the one thing the gods have given us for free — sleep: "Why do you make this
so expensive for yourself?" One might also say to the superstitious man: since the gods have given us sleep as an oblivion of troubles and a rest, why do you make of it for yourself a persistent and painful place of torment, since your wretched soul is unable to flee into some other sleep? Heraclitus says that for those who are awake there is one common world, while each of those who are asleep turns aside into
a private one of his own. But for the superstitious man there is neither a common nor a private world: for when awake he does not use his reasoning faculty, and when asleep he is not released from what disturbs him; rather, his reason lies dreaming while his fear is forever awake, and there is no escape and no change of place for him. Polycrates was a fearsome tyrant in Samos, and Periander in Corinth, but no one feared them any longer once he had moved to a free and
democratically governed city. But the man who fears the rule of the gods as though it were a grim and inexorable tyranny — where can he move, where can he flee, what godless land can he find, what sea? Into what part of the world can you sink and hide yourself, poor wretch, and believe that you have escaped god? There is even a law for slaves who have despaired of freedom, allowing them to demand to be sold and to exchange their master for a more reasonable one; but superstition
grants no exchange of gods, nor is it possible to find a god that the man who fears his ancestral and native gods will not also fear — the man who shudders even at the Saviors and trembles and cowers before the Gracious Ones, from whom we ask for wealth, prosperity, peace, concord, and the successful outcome of our best words and deeds. Then these same people consider slavery a misfortune, and say it is a terrible calamity for a man or woman to become
slaves and to get harsh masters. Yet how much more terrible, do you suppose, is it for them to suffer under masters from whom there is no escaping, no running away, no withstanding? A slave has an altar to flee to; even for robbers there are many sanctuaries that remain inviolable; and enemies, if they lay hold of a statue or a temple in their flight, take courage. But the superstitious man shudders and fears and dreads precisely those things in which those who fear the most terrible dangers place their
hopes. Do not drag the superstitious man away from the sanctuaries: it is there that he is punished and tormented. Why go on at length? "Death is the limit of life for all mankind" — but not even death is the limit for superstition; it oversteps its bounds and reaches beyond life itself, making the fear last longer than life and attaching to death the notion of undying evils, and just when troubles cease, it seems to begin
anew, as though they had not ceased. Certain deep gates of Hades are thrown open, and rivers of fire mingle together with torrents breaking off from the Styx, and the darkness is filled with a swarm of many phantom shapes bringing grim visions and piteous cries, and judges and tormentors and chasms and recesses teeming with countless evils. Thus ill-starred superstition, through its excessive caution before everything that seems dreadful, unwittingly subjects itself to every sort of
terror. None of this attaches to atheism; rather, ignorance is a harsh thing, and overlooking and being blind to matters so momentous is a great misfortune of the soul — as though the brightest and most sovereign of its many eyes, the perception of god, had been extinguished. But to this same failing is attached, as has been said, the emotional element — the ulcerous, disturbing, and enslaving quality — in the case of superstitious belief. Plato says that music was given to men by the gods, as a craftsman of measure and
good rhythm, not for the sake of luxury or for tickling the ear, but so that the turbulent and errant element in the soul's revolutions and harmonies, embodied and running wild in many directions through lack of the Muse and of grace, through licentiousness and discord, might be brought back into order by unwinding and guiding it fittingly once more. "But whatever Zeus has not loved," says Pindar, "is thrown into panic when it hears the cry of the
Muses": for it grows savage and enraged, and they say that tigers, when drummed at all around, go into a frenzy, are thrown into confusion, and in the end tear themselves apart. It is a lesser evil, then, for those who through deafness and impairment of hearing experience insensibility and lack of feeling toward music. Tiresias made use of his misfortune by not seeing his children or those he knew; but Athamas suffered a greater one, and so did Agave, for they saw them
as lions and deer; and surely for Heracles, when he went mad, it would have profited him neither to see nor to perceive his sons as present, nor to treat his dearest ones as enemies. What then? Does it not seem to you that the passion of the atheists differs from that of the superstitious in just such a way? The former do not see the gods at all, while the latter believe them to exist but to be evil; the former overlook them, while the latter
suppose their benevolence to be dreadful, their paternal care tyrannical, their solicitude harmful, and their aloofness savage and beastlike. Yet then, these same people trust bronze-workers and stone-carvers and wax-modelers, who fashion the forms of the gods in human shape, and they mold and fabricate and worship such images; but they despise philosophers and statesmen who demonstrate that the majesty of god is accompanied by goodness, magnanimity,
benevolence, and solicitous care. So the outcome for the one group is insensibility and disbelief in what benefits them, and for the other, disturbance and fear in the face of what benefits them. And in general, atheism is a freedom from emotion toward the divine that fails to conceive of the good, while superstition is an excess of emotion that supposes the good to be evil. Superstitious people fear the gods and yet take refuge with the gods, they flatter them and revile them,
they pray to them and reproach them. It is common to all human beings not to have unbroken good fortune: "For those men are free from sickness and old age and untried by toils, having escaped the deep-roaring strait of Acheron," as Pindar says — but human sufferings and affairs are mingled with circumstances that flow now one way, now another. Come, then, first consider the atheist in the face of unwanted events, and observe his disposition: if he is otherwise moderate, he bears his present circumstances in silence
and procures for himself help and consolation; but if he is distressed and overwhelmed with passion, he lays all his complaints and cries at the feet of fortune and chance, shouting that nothing happens according to justice or providence, but that all human affairs are carried along and thrown into confusion at random and without judgment. The superstitious man's manner is not like this; rather, even if the smallest
misfortune has befallen him, he sits and builds upon his grief other harsh and great and hard-to-shake-off passions, heaping upon himself terrors and fears and suspicions and disturbances, assailing himself with every lament and every groan. For he blames neither man nor fortune nor circumstance nor himself, but god for everything, and he says that from that source a divine stream of ruin has come upon him and swept him along,
and he believes that he is not simply unfortunate but a man hated by god, being punished and paying a penalty and suffering everything he deserves because of himself. The atheist, when he falls ill, reasons it out and recalls his own overindulgences and bouts of drunkenness and irregularities of diet, or excessive exertions, or unaccustomed changes of climate and place; and then, if he has run into trouble in public affairs and fallen into disrepute
with the crowd or into slander before a ruler, he looks within himself for the cause and among the circumstances around him: "Where did I go wrong? What did I do? What duty of mine was left unfulfilled?" But for the superstitious man, every bodily illness and every loss of money and every death of children and every misfortune and failure in public affairs are called blows of god and assaults of a divine power. Hence he does not dare to help himself, nor
to undo what has befallen him, nor to treat it, nor to resist it, for fear of seeming to fight against god and to struggle against his punishment; instead, the doctor is thrust away from the man who is sick, and the philosopher who would admonish and console is shut out from the man who is mourning. "Let me," he says, "O man, pay my penalty — I, the impious one, the accursed one, the one hated by gods and spirits." It belongs to a man who does not believe the gods exist, but is simply grieving,
to have his tears wiped away, his hair cut in mourning, his cloak taken from him while he is overwhelmed with passion; but how could you even address the superstitious man, or where could you help him? He sits outside wearing sackcloth, girded about with filthy rags, and often, naked, rolling in the mud, he confesses certain sins and transgressions of his own — that he ate this, or drank that, or walked some road that the divine power forbade him. And if he is doing quite well
and keeps company with a mild form of superstition, he sits at home smeared all over with sulfur and being purified, while the old women, as Bion says, "hang on him whatever object they happen to bring, as though he were a peg." They say that Tiribazus, when he was being arrested by the Persians, drew his scimitar, being a strong man, and fought back; but when they cried out and called witnesses that they were arresting him on the king's own order, at once he cast down his sword
and offered his two hands to be bound. Is not, then, what happens in this case similar? Other men struggle against their misfortunes and push back against events, contriving for themselves escapes and diversions from what they do not wish; but the superstitious man, listening to no one, says to himself, "You are suffering this, wretched man, by providence and at god's command," casts away all hope, gives himself up, flees, and repels those who would help him.
Superstitions turn many moderate evils into fatal ones. Midas of old, it seems, becoming despondent and disturbed because of certain dreams, fell into so bad a state of soul that he willingly killed himself by drinking bull's blood. And Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, in the war against the Spartans, when dogs howled like wolves and grass sprang up around his ancestral hearth, and
...of the seers fearing the signs, he lost heart, and with his hopes extinguished he cut his own throat. Perhaps it would have been best for Nicias too, the Athenian general, to be rid of his superstition in the way of Midas or Aristodemus, rather than, frightened by the shadow cast when the moon was eclipsed, to sit penned in by the enemy's siege-works, and then, when forty thousand men had been slaughtered or taken alive, to fall into their hands himself and die ingloriously.
For it is not the interposition of the earth coming between sun and moon that is fearsome, nor is the encounter of earth's shadow with the moon at the appointed time of its revolutions a terrible thing; terrible is only the darkness of superstition, which, once it has fallen upon a man, confounds and blinds his reasoning in matters that most need reasoning. "Look, Glaucus — already the deep sea is stirred by waves, and around the headland of the Gyrae a cloud stands straight up, a sign of storm." Seeing this,
the helmsman prays to escape it and calls upon the gods as saviors, but even as he prays he swings the tiller round, lowers the yardarm, and flees, his great sail taken in, from the murky sea. Hesiod bids the farmer, before ploughing and sowing, to pray to Zeus of the Earth and holy Demeter while gripping the plough-handle; and Homer says that Ajax, about to meet Hector in single combat, bade the Greeks pray to the gods on his behalf,
and only then, once they had prayed, arm themselves. And Agamemnon, when he ordered the fighters, "let one sharpen well his spear, and set well his shield," then asked of Zeus, "grant that I may cast headlong the palace of Priam"; for the god is a hope of excellence, not a pretext for cowardice. But the Jews, since it was the Sabbath, sat there unmoved in their unwashed garments while the enemy set their ladders against the walls
and were taking the fortifications, and did not rise up but remained bound together, as if in a single net, by their superstition. Such, then, is superstition in what are called unwelcome and critical circumstances and occasions; but it is no better even in the more pleasant ones than atheism is. Most pleasant to human beings are festivals and banquets at the shrines, initiations, revels, prayers to the gods, and acts of prostration.
Here, then, observe the atheist laughing a mad, sardonic laugh at what is being done, and perhaps murmuring quietly to his familiars that those who suppose such things are done for the gods are addled and possessed by demons — yet having no other harm in him. The superstitious man, by contrast, wishes to rejoice but cannot, nor can he take pleasure; the city all around him is full of incense, full of hymns of praise, and yet
the soul of the superstitious man is full of groans. Garlanded, he turns pale; he sacrifices and is afraid; he prays with a trembling voice and burns incense with shaking hands, and altogether proves foolish the saying of Pythagoras, that we become our best selves as we draw near to the gods; for it is precisely then that the superstitious fare most wretchedly and worst — approaching the shrines and sanctuaries of the gods as if they were bears' dens, serpents' lairs, or the caves of sea-monsters.
Hence it occurs to me to wonder at those who say that atheism is impiety, but do not say the same of superstition. And yet Anaxagoras was prosecuted for impiety for saying that the sun is a stone, while no one has called the Cimmerians impious for believing that the sun does not exist at all. What do you say — is the man who does not believe in gods unholy? And
is not the man who believes in gods of the sort the superstitious believe in involved in far more unholy opinions than he? I, for my part, would rather people said of me that Plutarch never existed at all and does not exist, than say that Plutarch is a man unreliable, fickle, quick to anger, vindictive over trifles, petty — the sort of man who, if you invite others to dinner and leave him out, or if, being occupied elsewhere,
you fail to come to his door or fail to greet him, will fasten himself upon your body and seize hold of you, or will catch your child and beat it to death, or will let loose some beast upon your crops and ruin your harvest. When Timotheus was singing of Artemis at Athens, calling her "raving one, prophetic one, maenad, frenzied one," Cinesias the lyric poet stood up from among the audience and said, "May you have just such a daughter!" And indeed,
things similar to these, and worse, are what the superstitious suppose about Artemis — that she darts forth from hanging nooses, that she gnaws and defiles, that she comes on in confusion from tripods entwined with purifying rites, joined to the avenging spirit of bloodguilt. They think no more temperately of Apollo, or of Hera, or of Aphrodite: all of these they tremble and quake before. And yet how great a thing, in comparison,
was the blasphemy that Niobe spoke against Leto, compared with what superstition has persuaded the foolish to believe of the goddess — that, being reviled, she shot down with arrows six daughters and six grown sons of that wretched woman? So insatiable and implacable was she, they suppose, toward others' misfortunes. For if the goddess truly had gall in her and hated wickedness, and was pained at being spoken ill of, and did not laugh at
human folly and ignorance but was angered by it, then it is those who falsely charge her with such cruelty and bitterness, and who say and write such things, that ought to have been shot down by her. We, for instance, condemn Hecuba's bitterness as barbarous and savage when she says, "would that I might fasten on his liver and devour it raw, clinging fast" — yet the superstitious believe that the Syrian goddess, if a person eats a sprat or an anchovy, gnaws through his shins,
covers his body with festering sores, and wastes away his liver. Is it, then, unholy to speak ill of the gods, but not unholy to believe such things of them? Or does belief make the blasphemer's very words seem strange? We ourselves object to blasphemy precisely because it is a sign of ill will, and we count those who speak evil of us as enemies, on the ground that they also think evil of us. You see, then,
what sort of things the superstitious think about the gods — supposing them fickle, faithless, changeable, vindictive, cruel, and petty over trifles — from which it necessarily follows that the superstitious man both hates and fears the gods. How could he not, believing as he does that the greatest of his misfortunes have come upon him because of them, and will come again? And hating the gods while fearing them, he is their enemy. And yet he prostrates himself and sacrifices and
sits before their shrines — and this is nothing to wonder at, for men also pay court to tyrants, attend upon them, set up golden statues to them, and yet hate them in silence, "shaking their heads." Hermolaus paid court to Alexander, Pausanias served as bodyguard to Philip, Chaerea to Gaius — yet each of these men, as he followed behind, would say to himself, "How I would take vengeance on you, if only the power were mine!" The atheist does not believe gods exist; the superstitious man does not wish them to exist, but believes against his will,
for he is afraid to disbelieve. And yet, just as Tantalus would gladly slip out from under the stone hanging over him, so this man too, pressed no less hard by his fear, would gladly be free of it, and would count the atheist's condition blessed as one of freedom. As things stand, however, the atheist has no share at all in superstition, while the superstitious man, though an atheist by inclination, is too weak to hold
the opinion about the gods that he actually wishes to hold. And indeed the atheist is in no way a cause of superstition, whereas superstition has both given atheism its very origin and, once atheism has come to be, supplies it with a defense — not a true or honorable one, but not entirely without some pretext. For it was not by observing anything blameworthy in the heavens, or in the stars, or in the seasons or revolutions of the moon, or the motions of the sun about the earth, "craftsmen of day
and night," or any irregularity or disorder in the nourishment of animals or the generation of crops, that men condemned the universe as godless; rather, it is the absurd doings and experiences of superstition — its words and gestures, its sorceries and spells, its frantic runnings-about and beatings of drums, its impure acts of purification and squalid rites of holiness, its barbarous and lawless punishments and public humiliations performed at the shrines — that lead
some to say it is better there be no gods at all than that there be gods who accept such things and delight in them, so given to insolence and pettiness. Would it not, then, have been better for those Gauls and Scythians to have had no notion, no conception, no account of gods whatsoever, than to believe that gods exist who delight in the blood of slaughtered human beings and count this the most perfect sacrifice and offering?
What of it? Would it not have profited the Carthaginians to take Critias or Diagoras as their lawgiver, believing from the start in neither divinity nor god at all, rather than to offer such sacrifices as they offered to Cronus? Not as Empedocles describes it, rebuking those who sacrifice animals — "the father, having changed his son's shape, lifts him up and slaughters him while praying, great fool that he is" — no, but knowingly and consciously they consecrated their own children,
and those without children bought infants from the poor and slaughtered them like lambs or chicks, while the mother stood by without a tear, without a groan. And if she should groan or weep, she was to forfeit the honor due her, and the child was sacrificed all the same; the whole place was filled with the din of flutes and drums played before the image, so that the cry of the wailing should not be heard outside. But if
some Typhons or Giants were ruling over us, having cast out the gods, with what sacrifices would they take delight, or what other rites would they demand? Amestris, the wife of Xerxes, buried twelve men alive on her own behalf as an offering to Hades — whom Plato says was named Hades because, kindly toward men and wise and rich, he holds souls fast by persuasion and reason. Xenophanes the natural philosopher, seeing
the Egyptians beating their breasts and wailing at their festivals, reminded them fittingly: "These beings," he said, "if they are gods, do not mourn them; and if they are men, do not sacrifice to them." But no disease is so full of wandering symptoms and suffering, so mixed with opinions that clash and contradict one another, as that of superstition. It must therefore be fled from safely and advantageously, not as those who flee
the onslaught of robbers, or of wild beasts, or of fire, carelessly and unreasoningly, and so blunder into pathless places full of pits and cliffs. For that is how some, in fleeing superstition, tumble into a harsh and unyielding atheism, having leapt clean over piety, which lies between the two.