INTRODUCTION. HEAD IV. OF THE STOICS AND THE ALEXANDRIANS.

×It were premature, in an Introduction which is designed to indicate the theses rather than to prove them, to attempt more under the present head than to examine, with such brevity as the matter admits, the manner in which the Stoics, and those who in later times adopted their method, supposed themselves to have found, beneath the letter of the fables, a signification which the letter did not declare; and to show, in the first place, that in perceiving that the fables signify they were not mistaken, and, in the second, that in determining what it was that they signify, and in supposing that they had themselves been the first to determine it, they were mistaken in a manner which has been of the greatest consequence to the opinions of the moderns.¹ I shall begin with the testimony of the Stoic speaker in Cicero, which is the most complete of those that have come down to us, and proceed from it to the Greek writer Cornutus, to the report of Plutarch, to Chrysippus as Origen relates him, and so to the Alexandrians, whom I take to have applied to the sacred text what the Stoics had applied to the fables; reserving the consideration of what is to be put in the place of their interpretation to the heads in which the several modes of corruption are treated. NB-15-011

×The Stoic speaker, then, in the second book of the De Natura Deorum (concerning the nature of the gods), derives the multitude of the gods from a physical reasoning; and he affirms that the gods who were so derived, being "clothed in human form," furnished the poets with fables, and filled the life of men with superstition.² The school which handled the topic he names with some exactness: it was handled by Zeno, and afterwards unfolded at greater length by Cleanthes and Chrysippus.³ He proceeds to the instance of an old belief which had filled Greece, that Caelus was mutilated by his son Saturn, and Saturn himself put in bonds by his son Jupiter; and he pronounces that "a physical account, and not an inelegant one, is shut up in these impious fables." The heavenly nature, which is the fiery, and which of itself begets all things, is represented as wanting that part of the body which would need the union of another in order to procreate; and Saturn is made to be he who holds together the course and revolution of spaces and seasons, the Greek name being, as the speaker observes, the same with that of time.⁴ NB-15-011 NB-17-005

×In this I perceive two things which ought to be distinguished with a care which the moderns have not always bestowed upon them. The first is an admission, and a valuable one: that the fables are impious, that a meaning is shut up in them, and that an old belief had filled Greece before the school had touched it; from which it follows, upon the testimony of the school itself, that the wiser heathen never supposed the fables to mean what they say, and that the fables were before the interpretation. The second is a claim, and the claim is of another kind: that the meaning so shut up is a physical one, and that the course of time and the doctrine of the ethereal fire are what the mutilation of Heaven was intended to convey.⁵ The first, I think, may be received; the second is not shewn, and cannot be shewn, by any reasoning which begins, as this does, from the supposition that what is to be explained was constructed in order to express the explanation. It is to look for physics where history should have been looked for; and the speaker, who affirms that an old opinion had filled Greece, has not inquired whence it came. NB-17-005 NB-15-011

×That the claim is not one upon which the masters of the school were agreed will appear when the reading of Cicero's speaker is set beside that of Cornutus. Cornutus relates the fable of Saturn as it was told, that Rhea, when Jupiter was born to her, brought Saturn a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes in his place, saying that she had borne this; that Saturn was swallowed by him; and that Jupiter, reared in secret, became king of the world.⁶ But he takes the swallowing, which he has just before connected with the consuming of what comes to be in time, "in another way," as touching the beginning of the world; whereas to the speaker in Cicero it is the mutilation, and not the swallowing, which is the matter, and the time of Saturn is the course and revolution of the seasons. Two interpreters of one school, therefore, lay two meanings upon one fable, and neither inquires which of the two the first tellers intended; so that the method, which is admitted by its own professors to yield more than one answer for the same relation, has not been shewn to yield the right one for any. NB-18-003 NB-17-005

×It is the more necessary to keep apart the physical account, which rests upon the thing signified, and the derivation of names, which rests upon the sound of them; for the latter was exposed by Cotta, in the third book of the same work, in a manner to which I know no reply.⁷ He sets down the Stoic derivations, Saturn because he sates himself with years, Mavors because he overturns great things, "Minerva, because she diminishes or because she threatens," Venus because she comes to all things, and Ceres from bearing; and the fault is evidently in the rule and not in any one instance, since a name which may be resolved by its sound into one verb may with equal ease be resolved into another, as Minerva is made to diminish or to threaten, and a rule which gives two answers for one name has not been shewn to give the right one for any. I make no use of the derivations; and I observe only that whatever the Stoics found in the fables they did not find it by this road, and that the physical account, which is not a matter of names, is to be judged upon its own ground. NB-17-012 NB-15-011

×The method is seen at its furthest from any history in the instance which Origen reports of Chrysippus, who explained a picture at Samos in which Juno was represented as committing, with Jupiter, what Origen calls unspeakable abominations.⁸ The philosopher, as Origen relates, says in his treatises that matter receives the spermatic words of the god, and retains them within herself in order to ornament the universe; for in the picture Juno represents matter, and Jupiter god. I copy the interpretation, as Origen gives it, only for the sake of what it discovers: that the picture was older than the interpretation, and was taken as it stood, together with the conduct which it was supposed to represent; that the meaning was carried to it from the school; and that no person is left in the scene, since Juno is matter, and Jupiter is god. What the painter intended, or the people of Samos, is not asked. NB-18-014

×It is not to be supposed that the method was confined to Greece. Plutarch reports of certain interpreters, whom he has named in the preceding place and does not name again, that as the Greeks are used to allegorise Saturn into time, Juno into air, and the generation of Vulcan into the change of air into fire, so among the Egyptians Osiris is the river Nile, Isis the earth with which he accompanies, and Typhon the sea into which the Nile, falling, is destroyed and scattered.⁹ The testimony is Plutarch's report of a practice, and not his own doctrine; but it is sufficient to show that the same key was turned in both countries, and that it yielded in both a natural history in the place of a human one. Whether Osiris was a river is a question which the method does not put to itself; nor whether he was anything else. NB-16-015

×Of the manner in which the same school dealt with a rite, as distinguished from a fable, the chapter of Cornutus upon Rhea affords an instance which is not without its use. He says that Rhea seems also to be the Atargatis among the Syrians, whom they honour by abstaining from dove and fish.¹⁰ The identification, it is to be observed, is the Greek's; the abstinence is the Syrians' own; and it is the second only that can be called testimony to the Syrian practice. The clause which follows in the text, in which the abstinence would be said to signify something, is doubtful in the reading, and I do not copy it; and the fish, which is here entered as a detail of the rite, is not to be dismissed as a detail, but to be considered in its place among the waters, where the Greek reading of it will be set beside the Syrian.¹¹ NB-16-004 NB-15-011

×I come now to the Alexandrians, and to Philo in particular, in whom the method of the Stoics may be seen applied, with the same confidence and with a consequence which its author did not foresee, to the sacred narrative. Philo divides the account of the serpent and the woman from the fables of the poets and the sophists, and pronounces that it is not a fabulous invention, but a type shadowing forth some allegorical truth; and so far as the division goes I follow him, since the narrative of Moses is not of the family of the poets' tales.¹² But the interpretation which he draws out of it is of his own finding: the serpent is made the symbol of pleasure because it is destitute of feet, a reason which would serve equally for any creature that has none. In the place concerning the paradise he goes further, and denies that any trees of life or of knowledge have ever appeared upon the earth, or are likely to appear hereafter, and conceives that Moses was speaking in an allegorical spirit, intending by his paradise to intimate the dominant character of the soul.¹³ NB-19-002 NB-18-020

×That this is the method of the Stoics, applied to a new matter, is stated by Philo himself in the place which treats of the first and second man, where it is said that all this is spoken allegorically, in accordance with the principles of natural philosophy.¹⁴ The principle named is natural philosophy; the Alexandrian allegory is therefore of the Stoic kind, which puts physics for history, and differs only in its matter, which is the sacred text. The two cases are not, however, equal, for the relations of the poets are the tradition of the heathen, corrupted in the carrying, and the history in Genesis is the original from which the corruption is to be measured; and to take from the original its letter, as Philo does in the instance of the trees, is to give up the fixed point, so that the Alexandrian has no longer any standard by which the heathen may be corrected. I say not what he intended by it, but only what the method, so applied, leaves standing. NB-19-008 NB-18-020

×It is in this light that the argument of Origen against Celsus is to be read, in which the consistency of an adversary is put to the proof.¹⁵ Origen complains that if the Egyptians relate fables of the kind which he has in view, they are believed to convey a philosophical meaning by their enigmas and mysteries, but that if Moses composes and leaves behind him histories and laws for an entire nation, they are to be considered as empty fables.¹⁶ The argument is good so far as it goes, and is an argument of consistency; but it does not settle which of the two is the history and which the fable, since Origen assumes that the relations of Egypt have a philosophical meaning, and I enter that as his assumption and not as the testimony of the Egyptians. The remainder of his sentence, in which he asserts an allegorical meaning for Moses, I do not copy; it is of the same kind with what has been said of Philo. NB-19-013 NB-19-002

×The view which I propose, as at present sketched, is that the Stoics and the Alexandrians rightly perceived that the fables signify, but mistook the thing signified; and that what the fables signify is not the course of nature, nor the dominant character of the soul, but the history of the first families of mankind, and of the great occurrences which they witnessed. The method itself, it is to be observed, has masters who are named, and a school which is named; and a method which has masters has a beginning, and is therefore later than the matter upon which it is employed. It is from this circumstance, and not from any peculiar force in the Stoic reasoning, that the moderns have derived both their contempt for the literal fable and their confidence in the physical interpretation of it; and it is by shewing, from the testimony of the Stoics themselves, that the fables were before the interpretation, that I propose to open the way to the historical.¹⁷ The proof of the historical interpretation is to be sought under the several Books; I assert here only the priority of the matter to the method. NB-15-011 NB-17-005 NB-19-013 NB-18-020

×It may be objected, in the first place, that if the Stoics and Alexandrians were wrong in the thing signified, they were nevertheless right in the sign, and that a method which is right in the sign is not to be wholly set aside; to which I answer that I set aside nothing which they have rightly perceived, and that it is precisely because I admit that the fables signify that I cannot admit that they signify what the school has found in them. It may be objected, in the second place, that the order which I have claimed, the fable first and the physical reading after, rests upon the admission of a single speaker, and that a Stoic is not to be taken as a witness against his own school; to which I answer that the admission is not against the school, since it is made in the course of an argument in which the school is defended, and that it is the more to be relied upon on that account.¹⁸ It may be objected, in the third place, that the readings of Cornutus and of the speaker in Cicero, being two, may be both of them true, and that the fable may be capable of several meanings at once; to which I answer that this is to give up the question, since a fable which means everything cannot be said to have been made to mean anything in particular. And it may be objected, lastly, that Origen, who in the place before us is engaged in defence of Moses, is not to be reckoned with the Alexandrians, being engaged in a different cause; to which I answer that the cause, though different, is not different in the method, and that I shall consider the point, with others which may be urged with less force, under the head which follows.¹⁹ NB-17-005 NB-18-003 NB-19-013 NB-17-012