THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 295
The Descent of Paganism into Daemonology
20.3. The Descent of Paganism into Daemonology
This silence on a topic which must have touched all the characters to whom Macrobius lends utterance is equally felt when we pass to fact from fiction. Symmachus in the whole collection of his private letters refers but rarely to religion and never once to Christianity. Claudian, the poet courtier of Christian emperors, has only one passage which betrays a clear consciousness of the new faith, and that is in a lampoon upon a bibulous soldier. It is the same with the panegyrists, the same with allegorist and dramatist Martianus Capella, whose manual of the arts, entitled The Nuptials of Mercury and Philology, represents the best culture of the epoch and enjoyed an almost unexampled popularity during the Middle Ages, passes over Christianity without a word. The anonymous Querolus, an agreeable comedy written for the entertainment of a great Gallican household and obviously reflecting the serious thought of its audience, is entirely dominated by the Stoical and heathen notion of Fate. This general silence cannot be due to ignorance. Rather it is due to Roman etiquette. The great conservative nobles, the writers who catered for their instruction and amusement, would seem to have agreed to ignore the new religion.
We must now consider in some detail the character of this persistent paganism, especially as it is presented to us by Macrobius, either in the Saturnalia or in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, to which last we owe our knowledge of the treatise of Cicero bearing that title.
The philosophy or religion of these two works is pure Neoplatonism, drawn straight from Plotinus. Macrobius seems to have known the Greek original; he gives actual citations from the Enneads in several places, and one passage (Comment, i. 14) contains as good a summary of the Plotinian Trinity as was possible in Latin.
The universe is the temple of God, eternal like Him and filled with His presence. He, the first cause, is the source and origin of all that is and all that seems to be. By the overflowing fertility of His majesty He created from himself Mind. Mind retains the image of its author so long as it looks towards him; when it looks backward it creates soul. Soul in its turn keeps the likeness of mind while it looks towards mind, but when its turns away its gaze it degenerates insensibly, and, although itself incorporeal, gives rise to bodies celestial (the stars) and terrestrial (men, beasts, vegetables). Between man and the stars there is real kinship, as there is between man and God.
Thus all things from the highest to the lowest are held together in an intimate and unbroken connexion, which is what Homer meant when he spoke of a golden chain let down by God from heaven to earth.
Then Macrobius describes the soul's descent. Tempted by the desire for a body, it falls from where it dwelt on high with the stars its brethren. It passes through the seven spheres that separate heaven from earth, and in its passage acquires the several qualities which go to make up the composite nature of man. As it descends it gradually in a sort of intoxication sheds its attributes and forgets its heavenly home, though not in all cases to the same extent. This descent into the body is a kind of temporary death, for the body is also the tomb, a tomb from which the soul can rise at the body's death. Man is indeed immortal, the real man is the soul which dominates the things of sense. But although the body's death means life to the soul, the soul may not anticipate its bliss by voluntary act, but must purify itself and wait, for "we must not hasten the end of life while there is still possibility of improvement." Heaven is shut against all but those who win purity, and the body is not only a tomb; it is a hell. Cicero promised heaven to all true patriots; Macrobius knows a higher virtue than patriotism, viz. contemplation of the divine, for the earth is but a point in the universe and glory but a transient thing. The wise man is he who does his duty upon earth with his eyes fixed upon heaven.
If beside this pure and lofty idealism, grafted upon Roman patriotic feeling, we set the somewhat crude syncretism of the Saturnalia, we have a true reflection of all the higher thought of fourth century Paganism — except daemonology and its lower accompaniment, magic. Of the former we have no direct indication beyond a doubtful etymology.
The latter is present, but only in its least objectionable form, viz. divination. The omission is the more remarkable since daemonology was a salient feature of the Neoplatonic system, and magic was its inevitable outcome. For the god of Neoplatonism was a metaphysical abstraction, yet a cause, and therefore bound to act, since a cause must have an effect Being above action Himself, there must be a secondary cause or causes. And the Platonic philosophy provided a host of intermediary beings who bridged the chasm between earth and God, and who interpreted and conveyed on high the prayers of men. The ranks of these divine agents were largely supplied by the old heroes and daemons, who in the popular imagination were omnipotent, watching over human affairs.
All daemons however were not equally beneficent. At the bottom of the scale of nature lurked evil daemons, powers of darkness ceaselessly scheming man's destruction. It was to these supernatural beings, good and bad, that his mind turned in hope or fear. He dreaded the evil daemons and sought to charm them; he loved the good and addressed to them his prayers and worship. Plotinus indeed forbade but could not prevent the worship of daemons, for he admitted their real existence. With Porphyry (d. c. 305) the tendency towards daemonological rites is clearly marked; with Proclus the habit is established.
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