The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)
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Universe, under the name of Destiny or Fatality, they had seen it balanced by the Power of the Will, and subject to the Providential Cause whence all emanates.
The disciples of Plato would also have evaded many errors, if they had clearly understood this concatenation of the two opposed principles, from which results universal equilibrium; but following certain false interpretations of the doctrine of their master regarding the soul of matter, they had imagined that this soul was no other than Necessity by which it is ruled"; so that, according to them, this soul being inherent in matter, and bad in itself, gave to Evil a necessary existence: a dogma quite formidable, since it makes the world to be considered as the theatre of a struggle without beginning or end, between Providence, principle of Good, and the soul of matter, principle of Evil.
The greatest mistake of the Platonists, exactly contrary to that of the Stoics, was in having confused the free power of the Will with the divine Providence, in having instituted it for the principle of good and thus being put in position of maintaining that there are two souls in the world, a beneficent one, God, and a malefic one. Matter.
This system, approved of by many celebrated men of antiquity and which Beausobre assures was the most widely received,* offers, as I have observed, the very great disadvantage of giving to Evil a necessary existence, that is to say, an independent and eternal existence.
Now, Bayle has very well proved, by attacking this system through that of Manes, that two opposed Principles cannot exist equally eternal and independent of one another, because the clearest ideas of order teach us that a Being which exists by itself, which is necessary, which is eternal, must be unique, infinite, all-powerful, and endowed with all manner of perfections.'
But it is not at all certain that Plato may have had the
" Chalcidius, in Tim., not. 295, p. 387.
* Hist, du Manick., t. ii., 1. v., ch. 6, p. 250.
<: Diet, crit., Manicheens, rem. D.
148 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras idea that his disciples have attributed to him, since far from considering matter as an independent and necessary being, animated by a soul essentially bad, he seems even to doubt its existence, going so far as to regard it as pure nothingness, and calls the bodies which are formed of it, equivocal beings holding the medium between what is always existing and what does not exist at all"; he affirms sometimes that matter has been created and sometimes that it has not been*; and thus falls into contradictions of which his enemies have taken advantage.
Plutarch, who has clearly seen it, excuses them by saying that this great philosopher has fallen into these contradictions designedly, in order to conceal some mystery; a mind constructed like his not being made to affirm two opposites in the same sense/ The mystery that Plato wished to conceal, as he makes it sufficiently understood,'' was the origin of Evil.
He himself declares that he has never revealed and that he never will reveal, in writing, his real sentiments in this respect. Thus what Chalcidius and after him Andre Dacier have given concerning the doctrine of Plato are only conjectures or very remote inferences drawn from certain of his dogmas.
One has often made use of this means, with regard to celebrated men whose writings one comments upon and particularly when one has certain reasons for presenting one's ideas sous un cotS which outlines or which favours an opinion either favourable or unfavourable.
It is this which happened more to Manes than to any other; his doctrine concerning the two Principles has been greatly calumniated, and without knowing just what he meant by them, one hastened to condemn him without investigating what he had said; adopting as axioms that he had laid down, inferences the most bizarre and most
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