American Presbyterian Review

THE

AMERICAN

PRESBYTERIAN REVIEW.

JANUARY, 1871.

THIRD SERIES.-NUMBER 9.

ART. I.-THE ANCIENT ORACLES, OR THE PRIMITIVE GREEK RELIGION.

By Prof. TAYLER LEWIS, LL.D., Union College, N. Y.

ONE OF the most interesting tracts of Cicero is entitled De Divinatione.* The skillful and profound argumentation there employed by the character who defends the affirmative is enough to convince any thoughtful reader that, whatever may be its absolute ground of truth, the belief in some mode or art of presaging lies deep in our human nature. The feeling, true or false, is justly treated as one of the fundamental differences between man and the brutes. It is a question whether the latter have any idea of a future at all. There may be in their sensorium a faint image of something coming, a shadowy projection of the present, even as Hamilton defines human memory to be a present feeling of the yet lingering past; but this is far from that notion of future being which makes it a subject of thought or calculation, and still farther from any hope or purpose of discovering the

* It is a kind of supplement to Cicero's greater work, De Natura Deorum, and consists of two books. This, and another treatise, De Fato, closely connected with it, show a wonderful acuteness on the part of the Roman philosopher and statesman. The ideas of causation, certainty, contingency, identity, etc., are discussed with a sharpness of reasoning, and even a theological comprehensiveness, we may say, unsurpassed by Butler, Paley, or Edwards.

secrets it may conceal. With man such a passion has ever been strong. Ages of baffled inquiry have been unable wholly to suppress it. In weakening it, however, two causes have had influence: that more enlarged experience which we call science has shown the fallibility of methods employed; Christianity has repressed the strong desire, by disposing to contentment with that general revelation of the divine will which is given to us in Nature, in History, and the Scriptures. In the ancient world the hope was vivid, the belief universal. Though unscientific it was not irrational. There are acknowledged exercises of the soul that a priori, or in themselves, are as mysterious as this would be. Sensation, the only source of all knowledge, as some maintain, belongs solely to the present. We can feel only in the present. How, then, should it give us the past any more than the future? Experience is only repetition; how can it give us a knowledge, or an idea, that is no more in the second than it was in the first term of the series. The words "habit" and "association" are convenient, but they utterly fail to reveal to us the links of such association, or that innate connecting knowledge which accompanies the sense experience, though strictly forming no part of it. In a word, how do we get that thought of present, past and future, or that idea of time which seems waked up by the sensation, as though it had been there before all experience, or belonged to the original birth-furniture of the soul? It was this that led Augustine to exclaim: "O the mystery of memory!" Instead of being the creator it is the offspring of these elder-born ideas of time and relation, without which memory could have no existence. In the animal there is something that may be called association, a present feeling of a still lingering past. A condition of the sensorium produced by an old danger arouses fear when the cause is again before the eye, but there is no idea of time or causality. In man there is strictly memory, an identifying consciousness, something more than a mere conception or imaging, a certain knowledge of a personal existence as something that has been, is now, and is ever passing into the future, or as a future into which we are ever passing. Why might not the coming state, too, have its

signs, its slumbering ideas, its waking vaticinations? It was
the same question, whether asked by the philosophic reason,
or by that strong human desire which stood in the place of
reasoning. We may say the same, too, in relation to the
attempted methods of verifying this thought, or of satisfying
this feeling: They may have been unscientific but they were
not irrational. Cicero even claims for them a mode of proof
which was not unlike that Baconian induction about which
there is now kept up such an everlasting din. These meth-
ods presented everywhere a strong resemblance.
formed a system that had its rules and processes. It took
to itself the name of a science. So Prometheus calls it in
that wondrous drama of Eschylus, in which he figures as
the benefactor of mankind. It was one of the earliest branches
of knowledge reduced to method by the Great Civilizer, as
we give it in a free, yet faithful, version of Prom. Vinct. 484:
"The various modes of the divining art

I first revealed;-the dream, its waking issue,
And omens hard to be interpreted;

The way-side symbols, flight of taloned birds
I clearly taught,—all those propitious deemed,
And those of dire portent,-their several ways,
Their enmities and loves.

The very depths of life,
The omens in the victims' hidden parts,

Their smoothness, color,-how they all make known
The will of Heaven, favoring or adverse.

The flamed-faced signals of the sacrifice,

The wondrous forms that from the altar rose;
How in their parti-colored fires there shone

A surer light than that to sense revealed;

All this to scientific rules I brought.

Then to the mines, the treasures deeply hid
Beneath the earth, I showed the way."

They

We smile at the thought of its being called a science, but such it truly was, if rules, and classifications, and strict definitions, and regular inductions, entitle to the name.* Rome,

*Cic. De Div. I, 25: Est enim ab omni æternitate repetita, in qua quum pæne innumerabiliter res eodem modo evenirent, iisdem signis antegressis ars est effecta, eadem sæpe animadvertendo ac notando . . . 126: Ita fit ut observatione notari possit quæ res quamque causam consequatur. This seems good

as is well known, had its divining College, with its professors, its regulated ceremonies, its strict traditional observances, dating away back to that most religious king, Numa Pompilius. It was known and practiced as an art by the most ancient Egyptians; it formed an important part of their boasted wisdom; Joseph is not censured as impious or profane in the use he professes to make of it. So we learn from the Scriptures. It differed in its methods from those of Greece and Rome-oneirology, or dream-interpreting, holding a principal place-but it arose from the same strong desire, the same psychological ideas, and, when reverent in its attempt to learn the unknown; does not seem to have been condemned by the sacred historian.

It was called Divination from the idea of its having a divine sanction, or as coming from the benevolence of the Deity, according to the argument which Cicero puts into the mouth of his brother Quintus (De Divinatione, Lib. I, 82): "The Gods love us, they are beneficent, they understand the nature and constitution of things, they know that we are interested in this knowledge, and that we will be more careful and reverent from having some of it imparted to us.”*

Chief among the ways of obtaining divine communications, were oracles, omens, inspection of sacrifices, the flight of birds, and a peculiar class of seemingly casual occurrences-évodio тε σúμßolor, or "way-side symbols," as ἐνόδιοι τε σύμβολοι,

Baconianism, and in perfect harmory with the fundamental idea of the Positive School, that there is nothing in the universe but sequences. Again, Sec. 127: Qui etsi causas ipsas non cernant, signa tamen causarum et notas cernant, ad quas exhibita memoria et diligentia, efficitur ea divinatio quæ artificiosa dicitur. It need only be kept in mind that the ancient writers often use the word art (ars or texvn) where we would say science, or scientific.

*The argument of the speaker Quintus here is, that a belief in the existence of divine beings is closely connected with a belief in some kind of divination. If there are deities they would not leave us in such total ignorance of things we so long to know, and have such a deep interest in knowing: "Si sunt dei, neque ante declarant hominibus quæ futura sunt, aut non diligunt homines, aut quid eventurum sit ignorant, aut existimant nihil interesse hominum." But they do take an interest in men, he argues; and so he sums up his reasoning (which is the same with that of Chrysippus) in the concise conclusion: "Sunt autem Dii; significant ergo." It certainly is an admirable argument for a revelation generally, even though it may fail in respect to the kinds of divination to which it is here applied. Heaven loves us, and can not, therefore, regard with indifference our profound ignorance of the highest things connected with the human destiny.

« Eelmine Jätka »

Books