Of Profiting by our Enemies he speaks of the forgiveness of enemies as a thing not rarely to be met with:—
To forbear to be revenged of an enemy if opportunity and occasion is offered, and to let him go when he is in thy hands, is a point of great humanity and courtesy; but him that hath compassion of him when he is fallen into adversity, succoureth him in distress, at his request is ready to show goodwill to his children, and an affection to sustain the state of his house and family being in affliction, who doth not love for this kindness, nor praise the goodness of his nature? (Holland’s translation.)
Had that passage appeared in a Gospel, how would not our Doctors of Divinity have exclaimed over the moral superiority of Christian ethic, demonstrating that it alone appealed to the heart! In actual fact we find them denying that such passages exist. The most disgraceful instance known to me appears to implicate an Austrian theologian. In the “Editor’s Forewords” to the Early English Text Society’s volume of Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings there is a note on Plutarch’s De Curiositate, àpropos of Elizabeth’s translation of that essay:—
In De Curiositate, as well as in his other writings, Plutarch proves himself to be a true Stoic philosopher, to possess first-rate moral principles and great fear of God. … His religious views sometimes remind us, like those of Seneca, of Christian teaching; but here there is always one important omission—viz., the commendation of charity or brotherly love; of this Christian virtue the stoic, so virtuous in his own relations, knows absolutely nothing.
At the close of the “Forewords” the Editor, Miss Caroline Pemberton, mentions that “The comments on the writings of Boethius and Plutarch are by Dr. J. Schenk, of Meran, Tyrol.” To Dr. Schenk, then, must apparently be credited the high-water mark in Christian false-witness against paganism. Either he did or he did not know that Plutarch in other writings had given full expression to the ethic of brotherly love. If he did not know, he was not only framing a wanton libel in sheer ignorance but giving a particularly deadly proof of his own destitution of the very virtue he was so unctuously denying to the pagan. A man devoid not merely of charity but of decent concern for simple justice poses as a moral teacher in virtue of his Christianism; even as the professional encomiasts of the parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrate their own blindness to its meaning, playing the Levite to the Pagan.
Plutarch, so much better a man than his Christian critic, was in turn no innovator in ethics. As every student knows, such doctrines as those above cited from him are far older than the Christian religion. Five centuries before the Christian era Confucius put the law of reciprocity in the sane form of the precept that we should not do unto others what we would not that they should do unto us. Are we to suppose that the rule had been left to Confucius to invent? Christians who cannot conform to it are not ashamed to disparage the precept of Confucius as a “negative” teaching, implying that there is a higher moral strain in their formula which prescribes the doing to others what we would wish them to do to us. There, if any difference of code be really intended, we are urged to confer benefits in order to have them returned. If no difference is intended, the disparagement is mere deceit. In the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahâbhârata, it is declared that “The Gods regard with delight the man who … when struck does not strike again,” and that “The good, when they promote the welfare of others, expect no reciprocity.” How long are we to listen to the childish claim that moral maxims which in India were delivered millenniums ago by forgotten men were framable in Seneca’s day only in Syria, and there only by one “unique and effulgent” personality, whose mere teaching lifted humanity to new heights? Had no nameless man or woman in Greece ever urged the beauty of non-retaliation before Plato?
If clerics cannot rise above the old disingenuous sectarian spirit, it is time at least that laymen should. The more historic comprehension a man has of the ancient world, of Plutarch’s world, with all its sins and delusions, the less can he harbour the notion of the moral miracle involved in the thesis of the unique teacher, suddenly revealing to an amazed humanity heights of moral aspiration before undreamt of. And any considerate scrutiny of the logia of the Gospels will inevitably force the open-minded student to recognize multiplicity of thought and ideal, and compel him to seek some explanation. An effort to detach a possible personality by the elimination of impossible adjuncts is the next natural step.
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