BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY
A great part of the charm of those oriental religions, on the study of
which we are about to enter, lay in the assurance which they seemed to
give of an immortal life. It would, therefore, appear a necessary preface
to such a review to examine some of the conceptions of the state of the
departed which the missionaries of Isis and Mithra found prevalent in the
minds of their future votaries. Immortality, in any worthy sense, is
inseparable from the idea of God. And the conception of continued life
must always be shaped by the character of a people’s beliefs as to the
powers of the unseen world. A pantheon of dim phantasms or abstractions
will not promise more than a numb spectral future to the human shade. The
nectar and ambrosia of Olympian feasts may have their human counterpart in
an “eternal debauch.” The Platonist will find his eternal hope in
emancipation from the prison of the flesh, and in the immediate vision of
that Unity of all beauty, truth, and goodness, which is his highest
conception of God. But not only does religion necessarily colour the
conception of the eternal state: it may also furnish the warrant for a
belief in it. And a religion which can give men a firm ground for that
faith will have an immense advantage over others which are less clear and
confident as to another world. It is generally admitted that the long
array of philosophic arguments for immortality have by themselves little
convincing power. They are not stronger, nor perhaps so strong as the
argument from the wish for continued life, inveterate in the human spirit,
on which Plutarch laid so much stress.(2507) Even amid the triumphant
dialectic of the _Phaedo_, an undertone of doubt in any human proof of
immortality is sometimes heard, along with the call for some “divine
doctrine” as a bark of safety on perilous seas.(2508) The inextinguishable
instinct of humanity craves for a voice of revelation to solve the mystery
of life and death.
The Roman spirit, down to the Antonine age, had been the subject of many
influences which had inspired widely various ideas of the future state.
And the literary and funerary remains from Nero to M. Aurelius are full of
contradictions on the subject. Nor, in the absence of authoritative
revelation on a field so dark to reason, is this surprising. Even
Christian teaching, while it offers a sure promise of a life to come, has
not lifted the veil of the great mystery, and the material imagery of the
Apocalypse, or the shadowed hints of Jesus or S. Paul, have left the
believer of the twentieth century with no clearer vision of the life
beyond the tomb than that which was vouchsafed to Plato, Cicero, Virgil,
or Plutarch. “We know not what we shall be,” is the answer of every seer
of every age. Something will always “seal the lips of the Evangelist,” as
the key of the Eumolpidae closed the lips of those who had seen the vision
of Eleusis.(2509) The pagans of the early Empire were thus, in the absence
of dogma and ecclesiastical teaching, free to express, with perfect
frankness, their unbelief or their varying conceptions of immortality,
according to the many influences that had moulded them. Nor could these
influences be kept apart even in the same mind. Even the poet seer, who
was to be the guide of Dante in the shades, has failed to blend the
immemorial faith of the Latin race with the dreams of future beatitude or
anguish which came to him from Pythagorean or Platonic teaching.(2510) In
the sixth book of the _Aeneid_ the eschatologies of old Rome and Greece
are combined, but not blended, with the doctrines of transmigration and
purgatorial expiation descending from Pythagoras or the Orphic mystics.
Virgil, in fact, mirrors the confusion of beliefs which prevailed in his
own age, and which pre-eminently characterised the age of the Antonines.
Along with other archaic elements of the Latin faith, the cult of the
Manes held its ground, especially in secluded homes of old Italian piety.
The most ancient Indo-European conception of the state after death was
that of a continuance or faint, shadowy reproduction of the life on earth;
it was not that of a vast and mysterious change to a supernatural order.
The departed spirit was believed to linger in a dim existence in the vault
or grave near the familiar homestead.(2511) The tomb is not a temporary
prison, but an everlasting home,(2512) and often provides a chamber where
the living members of the family or clan may gather on solemn days around
the ashes of the dead.(2513) Provision is made for the sustenance of this
spectral life. Vessels for food and drink, the warrior’s arms, the
workman’s tools, the cosmetics of the lady, the child’s playthings, are
buried with them.(2514) Or they are figured on their tombs cheerfully
engaged in their familiar crafts,(2515) not with folded hands, and calm,
expectant faces, like the marble forms which lie in our cathedral aisles
awaiting the Resurrection.
With such views of the tomb, the perpetual guardianship of it became to
the Roman a matter of supreme moment. It is a chapel or an altar, as well
as a last home.(2516) It is the meeting-place, in faint ghostly communion,
of the society which embraced, by its solemn rites, the members of the
household church in the light or in the shades. All the cautious forms of
Roman law are invoked to keep the sepulchre, with its garden and
enclosure, from passing into alien hands. Its site is exactly described,
with the minutest measurements, and the intruder or the alienator is
threatened with curses or with fines, to be paid into the public
treasury.(2517) Here, among his children and remotest descendants, among
his freedmen and freedwomen, the Roman dreamed of resting for ever
undisturbed.(2518) And many an appeal comes to us from the original slab
not to violate the eternal peace.(2519) What that dim life beneath the
marble or the sod, at least in the later times, was conceived to be, how
far it involved a more or less vivid consciousness of what was passing in
the world above, how far it was a numb repose, almost passing into “the
eternal sleep,” seems to be uncertain. The phrases on the tomb in all ages
are apt to pass into conventional forms, and personal temperament and
imagination must always give varying colour to the picture. Such phrases
as “eternal sleep,” however, did not probably at any time imply complete
unconsciousness. The old Latin faith that the Manes had a real life and
some link of sympathy with the living was still strong and vivid in an age
which was eager to receive or answer voices from the world beyond the
senses. The wish to maintain, in spite of the severance and shock of
death, a bond of communion between the living and the departed was one of
the most imperious instincts of the Latin race. It was not a mere
imagination, projected on far distant years, which craved for the yearly
offering of violets and roses, or the pious _ave_ of the passing
traveller.(2520) The dwellers in the vault still remained members of the
family, to which they are linked for ever by a dim sympathy expressed in
ritual communion. Every year, on the _dies parentales_ in February, there
was a general holiday, cheerfully kept in honour of all those whose
spirits were at peace.(2521) On the eighth day, the festival of _cara
cognatio_, there was a family love-feast, in which quarrels were
forgotten, and the members in the spirit-world joined in the sacred meal.
But besides this public and national commemoration, the birthday of each
departed member was observed with offerings of wine and oil and milk. The
tomb was visited in solemn procession; dead and living shared the sacred
fare; flowers were scattered, and with an _ave_ or a prayer for help and
good fortune, the shade was left to its renewed repose.(2522) Many a slab
makes anxious provision for these communions, and the offering of violets
and roses in their season.(2523)
But the Roman in his tomb longed to be near the sound of busy human life,
and to feel the tread of pious feet, which might turn aside for a moment
to salute even a stranger’s memory. This feeling is expressed in the long
rows of vaults which line so many of the great roads, the Via Appia, or
the way from Pompeii to Nola.(2524) There were many like that Titus
Lollius who had himself laid close to the road into Aquae Sextiae, that
the passers might for ever greet his spirit with an _ave_.(2525) Others
leave a prayer for all good things to those who will stop an instant and
read the legend; “may the earth lie light upon them when they too
depart.”(2526) The horror of the lonely soul, cut off from the kindly
fellowship of the living, and lingering on in a forgotten grave, to which
no loving hand should ever more bring the libation or the violets in
spring, which should one day awake no memory or sympathy in any human
heart, was to the old Roman the worst terror in death. This passion for
continued memory, especially in great benefactors of their kind, is used
by Cicero as an argument for immortality,(2527) and the passion for
enduring life blends indistinguishably with the wish to be long
remembered. Even Epicurus, the apostle of annihilation, made provision in
his last testament for yearly offerings in honour of himself and
Metrodorus his disciple—a curious instance of agnostic conformity.(2528)
The passion for remembrance was responded to by the dutiful devotion of
many generations. The cult of the dead long survived in the cult of
martyrs, and the pagan feasting at their tombs disturbed and perplexed S.
Augustine and S. Paulinus of Nola.(2529)
The old Roman thought of his departed friends as a company of good and
kindly spirits, who watched over the family on earth. But there was
another conception of spirits in the other world, whether derived from the
gloomy superstition of Etruria, or descending from days anterior to
orderly devotion to the dead.(2530) The Lemures were a name of fear. They
were dark, malevolent spirits who craved for blood, as they had departed
this life by a violent end. Their festival, the Lemuria in May, was quite
distinct from the festival of the Manes, and the household ritual for
laying the ghosts by the spitting of black beans and a ninefold form of
exorcism savours of a far-gone age. These maleficent powers were
propitiated by blood—especially by the blood of men in the combats of the
arena.
The visitations of these beings, whether as guardian, ministering spirits
or as evil powers, were expected and believed in for many ages by all
classes of Roman minds. The ancient Latin faith as to the state of the
dead was, according to Cicero, confirmed by many tales of spiritual
apparition. There are pathetic memorials which end with an appeal in which
the lonely wife entreats the lost one sometimes to return in dream or
vision.(2531) One vivacious inscription challenges the sceptic to lay his
wager and make the experiment of a summons from the unseen world.(2532)
The spread of cremation instead of burial gradually led to a new
conception of the spirit as having a separate existence from the body, now
reduced to a handful of grey ashes.(2533) And spirits no longer clung to
the body in the family vault, but were gathered in a dim region near the
centre of the earth, where, according to gloomy Etrurian fancy, they were
under the cruel care of the conductor of the dead, a brutal figure, with
wings and long, matted beard, and armed with a hammer, who for ages
appeared in human form to close the last ghastly scene in the gladiatorial
combats.(2534) From this limbo of the departed a sort of gateway was
provided in every Latin town in the _Mundus_, a deep trench intended to
represent an inverted heaven, which was dug before the _pomoerium_ was
traced. Its lower aperture was closed by the stone of the Manes, which on
three solemn days, in August, October, and November, was lifted to permit
the spirits from the deep to pass for a time into the upper world. Thus a
public sanction was given to the belief in the commerce between this life
and the next.(2535)
Cicero had said that the faith in immortality was sustained by the fact of
spirits returning to the world of sense. In the first and second centuries
there was no lack of such aids to faith. Apparitions became the commonest
facts of life, and only the hardiest minds remained incredulous about
them. Philosophers of all schools, except the Epicurean, were swept into
the current. The _Philopseudes_ of Lucian is a brilliant effort to
ridicule the superstition of the age, but the attack would have been
discredited if it had not had a foundation of fact. There, around the
sick-bed of Eucrates, himself saturated with philosophy, are gathered a
Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a trained
physician.(2536) And they regale one another with the most weird and
exciting tales of the marvellous. Ion, the Platonic student, has seen the
exorcism of a black and smoky daemon.(2537) Eucrates has seen such spirits
a thousand times, and, from long habit, has lost all fear of them. At
vintage time, he once saw a gigantic Gorgon figure in the woods in broad
daylight, and by the turning of a magic ring had revealed to him the gulf
of Tartarus, the infernal rivers, and been even able to recognise some of
the ghosts below.(2538) On another day, as he lay upon his bed reading the
_Phaedo_, his “sainted wife,” who had recently died, appeared and
reproached him because, among all the finery which had been burnt upon her
pyre, a single gold-spangled shoe, which slipped under the wardrobe, had
been forgotten.(2539) Plutarch reports, apparently with perfect faith, the
appearance of such spectral visitors at Chaeronea.(2540) The younger Pliny
consulted his friend Sura as to the reality of such apparitions, and
reveals his faith in the gruesome tale of a haunted house at Athens, where
a restless ghost, who had often disturbed the quiet of night with the
clank of chains, was tracked to the mystery of a hidden grave.(2541)
Suetonius, of course, welcomes tales of this kind from every quarter.
Before Caligula’s half-burnt remains were borne stealthily to a
dishonoured burial, the keepers of the Lamian Gardens had been disturbed
each night by ghostly terrors.(2542) The pages of Dion Cassius abound in
similar wonders. When Nero attempted to cut through the Isthmus of
Corinth, the dead arose in numbers from their graves.(2543) In such an age
the baleful art of “evocation” acquired a weird attraction and importance.
By spells and incantations Hecate was invoked to send up spirits, often
for evil ends.(2544) And there were dark rumours of the spell being
fortified by the blood of children. Many of the emperors from Tiberius to
Caracalla had dabbled in this witchcraft.(2545) When Nero was haunted by
the Furies of his murdered mother, he is said to have offered a magic
sacrifice to evoke and appease her spirit.(2546) The early Neo-Platonists
were, of course, eager to admit the reality of such visits from the unseen
world. In anxious quest of any link of sympathy between this world and the
next, Maximus tries to fortify his doctrine of daemons by stories of
apparitions.(2547) Hector has been often seen darting across the Troad in
shining armour. At the mouth of the Borysthenes, Achilles has been espied
by mariners, who were sailing past his isle, careering along with his
yellow locks and arms of gold, and singing his paean of battle.
In enlarging its rather blank and poor conception of the future state, the
Latin race, as in other fields, was content to borrow rather than invent.
The Sixth Book of the Aeneid was an effort not only to glorify the
legendary heroes of Rome, but to appease a new or revived longing for the
hope of immortality, after the desolating nihilism of the Epicurean
philosophy had run its course.(2548) Virgil has some touches of old Roman
faith about the dead, but the scenery of his Inferno is mainly derived
from Greek poetry inspired by Orphism, and the vision is moralised, and
also confused, by elements drawn from Pythagoras or Plato.(2549) The scene
of Aeneas’s descent to the underworld is laid by the lake of Avernus,
where, buried amid gloomy woods, was the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. Cumae
was the oldest Greek colony in the West. Its foundation was placed long
before the days of Romulus. Rich, prosperous, and cultivated, at a time
when the Romans were a band of rude warriors, it must have early
transmitted Greek ideas of religion to the rising power on the
Tiber.(2550) The Etrurians also, who affected so profoundly the tone of
Roman religion, had come under Greek influences. The spectral ferryman of
the dead was a familiar figure in Etruscan art. Thus, both on the south
and north, Latium had points of contact with the world of Hellenic legend.
And from the early days of the Republic, the worship of Greek gods—Apollo,
Asclepius, or the Dioscuri—became naturalised at Rome. Probably of even
earlier date was the influence of the oracular lore of Greece through
Delphi and the oracle of Cumae.(2551)
On the threshold of the underworld Aeneas and the Sibyl are confronted by
the monstrous forms of Hellenic legend—Centaurs and Scyllas, Harpies and
Gorgons, the fire-armed Chimaera, and the hissing hydra of Lerna.(2552)
They have to pass the ninefold barrier of the Styx in Charon’s steel-grey
bark. The grisly ferryman of the infernal stream, foul and unkempt, with
fixed eyes of flame, is surrounded by a motley crowd, thick as autumnal
leaves, all straining and eager for the further shore. Landed on a waste
expanse of mud and sedge,(2553) they pass the kennel of triple-headed
Cerberus, and on to the judgment seat, where Minos assigns to each soul
its several doom, according to the deeds done in the body. Thence they
traverse the “mourning fields,”(2554) where are those sad queens of
Grecian tragedy whose wild loves have been their undoing, and among them
Phoenician Dido, who, with stony silence and averted gaze, plunges into
the darkness of the wood.(2555) As the dawn is breaking, they find
themselves before the prison-house of the damned, rising amid the folds of
the river of fire, with walls of iron and adamant, its portals watched by
a sleepless Fury in blood-red robe.(2556) From within are heard the cries
of anguish and the clank of chains, as the great rebels and malefactors of
old-world story—Ixion, Salmoneus, and the Titans—are tortured by lash and
wheel and vulture.(2557) And with them, sharing the same agony, are those
who have violated the great laws on which the Roman character was
built.(2558) Through other dusky ways and Cyclopean portals they at last
reach the home of the blessed, as it was pictured long before in the
apocalypse of Pindar—the meads and happy groves of Elysium, under another
sun and other stars than ours, and bathed in the splendour of an ampler
air.(2559) Here is the eternal home of the heroic souls of a nobler age,
men who have died for fatherland, holy priests and bards and founders of
the arts which soften and embellish the life of men. But though their home
is radiant with a splendour not of earth, they are, in old Roman and Greek
fashion, occupied with the toils or pleasures of their earthly life.
Youthful forms are straining their sinews in the wrestling-ground as of
old. The ancient warriors of Troy have their shadowy chariots beside them,
their lances planted in the sward, their chargers grazing in the meadow.
Others are singing old lays or dancing, and the bard of Thrace himself is
sweeping the lyre, as in the days when he sped the Argo through the
“Clashing Rocks” in the quest of the fleece of gold.(2560)
The vision closes with a scene which criticism has long recognised as
irreconcilable with the eschatology of Greek legend hitherto followed by
the poet, but which is drawn from a philosophy destined to govern men’s
thoughts of immortality for many ages. In a wooded vale, far withdrawn,
through which Lethe glided peacefully, countless multitudes are gathered
drinking the “water of carelessness and oblivion.” These are they, as
Anchises expounds to his son, who, having passed the thousand purgatorial
years, to cleanse away the stains of flesh in a former life, and, having
effaced the memory of it, now await the call of Destiny to a new life on
earth.(2561) This theory of life and death, coming down from Pythagoras,
and popularised by Platonism, with some Stoic elements, had gained immense
vogue among educated men of the last period of the Republic. Varro had
adopted it as a fundamental tenet of his theology, and Cicero had embalmed
it in his dream of Scipio, which furnished a text for Neo-Platonist
homilies in the last days of the Western Empire.(2562) A fiery spirit
animates the material universe, from the farthest star in ether down to
the lowest form of animal life. The souls of men are sparks or emanations
from this general soul which have descended into the prison of the body,
and during the period of their bondage have suffered contamination.(2563)
And the prison walls hide from their eyes for a time the heaven from which
they come. Nor when death releases them do they shake off the engrained
corruption. For a thousand years they must suffer cleansing by punishment
till the stains are washed away, the deeply festering taint burnt out as
by fire. Then only may the pure residue of ethereal spirit seek to enter
on another life on earth.
Virgil, in his Nekuia, mirrored the confusion of beliefs as to the future
state prevailing in his time. For his poetic sensibility, the old Roman
faith of the Manes, the Greek legends of Tartarus and Elysium, the
Pythagorean or Orphic doctrine of successive lives and purgatorial
atonement, had each their charm, and a certain truth. On a subject so dim
and uncertain as the future life, the keenest minds may have wavering
conceptions, and in different moods may clothe them in various guise. This
is the field of the protean poetic imagination inspired by religious
intuition, not of the rigorous dogmatist. But a great poet like Virgil not
only expresses an age to itself: he elevates and glorifies what he
expresses. He gives clear-cut form to what is vague, he spreads the warmth
and richness of colour over what is dim and blank, and he imparts to the
abstract teaching of philosophy a glow and penetrating power which may
touch even the unthinking mass of men. The vision of the Sixth Book,
moreover, like the Aeneid as a whole, has a high note of patriotism.
Beside the water of Lethe are gathered, waiting for their call to earthly
life, all the great souls from the Alban Silvius to the great Julius, all
the Scipios, Gracchi, Decii, and Fabricii, who were destined through storm
and stress to give the world the calm of the Roman peace.(2564) The poet
of Roman destiny had a marvellous fame among his countrymen. Men rose up
to do him honour when he entered the theatre; the street boys of Pompeii
scratched his verses on the walls.(2565) Can we doubt that the grandest
part of his great poem, which lifts for a moment the veil of the unseen
world, had a profound effect on the religious imagination of the future?
The opinion long prevailed that the period of the early Empire was one of
unbelief or scepticism as to the future life. The opinion was founded on
literary evidence accepted without much critical care. Cicero and Seneca,
Juvenal and Plutarch,(2566) had spoken of the Inferno of Greek legend, its
Cerberus and Chimaera, its gloom of Tartarus, as mere old wives’ fables,
in which even children had ceased to believe. But such testimony should
always be taken with a good deal of reserve. The member of a comparatively
small literary and thoughtful circle is apt to imagine that its ideas are
more widely diffused than they really are. It may well have been that
thoughtful men, steeped in Platonic or Pythagorean faith as to the coming
life, rejected as anthropomorphic dreams the infernal scenery of Greek
legend, just as a thoughtful Christian of our day will hardly picture his
coming beatitude in the gorgeous colouring of the Book of Revelation. Yet
the mass of men will always seek for concrete imagery to body forth their
dim spiritual cravings. They always live in that uncertain twilight in
which the boundaries of pictured symbolism and spiritual reality are
blurred and effaced. Lucian was a pessimist as to spiritual progress, and
he may have exaggerated the materialistic superstition of his time; he had
ample excuse for doing so. Yet, artist as he was, his art would have been
futile and discredited in his own time, if it had not had a solid
background in widely accepted beliefs. And we cannot refuse to admit his
testimony that the visions of the grim ferryman over the waters of Styx,
the awful judge, the tortures of Tartarus, the asphodel meads, and the
water of Lethe, the pale neutral shades who wandered expectant of the
libation on the grave, filled a large space in the imagination of the
crowd.(2567) Plutarch, who sometimes agrees with Juvenal and Seneca as to
the general incredulity, at others holds that a large class of remorseful
sinners have a wholesome fear of the legendary tortures of lost souls, and
that they are eager to purge their guilt before the awful ordeal of the
Eternal Judgment.(2568) And, however pure and etherealised his own views
may have been as to the life to come, no one has left a more lurid picture
of the flames, the gloom, the sounds of excruciating anguish from the
prison-house of the damned, which oppressed the imagination of the
multitude in his time. One part of that vision had a peculiarly tenacious
hold.(2569) The belief in the gruff ferryman of the dead, who sternly
exacted his fare, and drove from the banks of Styx those who had no right
to cross the awful stream, was widely diffused and survived far into the
medieval times. For many centuries, long before and long after the coming
of Christ, the coin which was to secure the passage of the shade into the
world below was placed in the mouth of the corpse.(2570)
The inscriptions might be supposed to give authoritative evidence as to
the belief of ordinary men about the future state. The funerary monuments
from every part of the Roman world are almost countless for the period of
the early Empire. Yet such records, however abundant, are not so clear and
satisfactory as they are by some taken to be. The words of a tombstone are
sometimes a sincere utterance of real affection and faith. They are also
not unfrequently purely conventional, representing a respectable, historic
creed, which may not be that of the man who erects the slab. Just as a
Frenchman, who has never from infancy entered a church, may have his wife
interred with all the solemn forms with which the Catholic Church makes
the peace of the passing soul, so the Roman pagan may have often inscribed
on his family tomb words which expressed the ancient creed of his race
rather than his personal belief. Heredity in religion is a potent
influence, and may be misleading to the inquirer of a later age. An
epitaph should not be construed as a confession of faith.
The great mass of these inscriptions are couched in the same phrases, with
only slight variations. The dedication Dis Manibus, representing the old
Roman faith, is the heading of the majority of them. The vault is an
“eternal home,” whose peace is guarded by prayers or threats and
entreaties. There is a rare dedication to the “ashes” of the dead. There
are many to their “eternal repose.”(2571) But it is surely rather absurd
to find in expressions which occur almost in the same form in the niches
of the Catacombs a tinge of Epicureanism. The poor grammarian of Como, who
left all his substance to his town, may be permitted to enjoy “the calm
peace” he claims after all the troubles of his life, without a suspicion
that he meant the peace of nothingness.(2572) A pious Christian may
rejoice at escaping the miseries of old age, and even hail death as the
last cure of all mortal ills.(2573) Death and sleep have always seemed
near akin, and when the Roman spoke of the sleep of death, he probably did
not often mean that it had no awaking. The morning indeed, as we have
seen, to old imaginations was not very bright. “The day of eternity” was
not irradiated with the golden splendour of Pindar’s Happy Isles; it was
grey and sad and calm. But that it was felt to be a real existence is
shown by the insistent demand on scores of monuments for the regular
service of the living. Every possible precaution is taken by the testator
that his family or his club shall maintain this sympathetic observance for
ever.(2574) With the idea of prolonged existence, of course, is blended
the imaginative hope of having a continued memory among men. And probably
the majority of the funerary inscriptions express this feeling chiefly.
But the same is true of the monuments of every age, and warrants no
conclusion as to the opinions about immortality held by those who raised
them. There is abundance of the purest affection expressed on these
memorials, and sometimes, although not very often, there is the hope of
reunion after death. The wife of a _philologus_ at Narbonne confidently
expects to meet him, or a mother prays her son to take her to
himself.(2575) Such expressions of a natural feeling, the same from age to
age, have really little value as indications of religious belief. But
there are not wanting in the inscriptions references to Tartarus and the
Elysian fields, to Pluto and Proserpine, to Orcus who has snatched away
some one in his bloom. “One little soul has been received among the number
of the gods.”(2576) There are others, impregnated with the prevalent
philosophy, which speak of the soul returning to its source, or of being
dissolved into the infinite ether, or of passing to a distant home in the
stars.(2577) This, however, as M. Boissier says,(2578) must have been the
dream of a small minority. The funerary inscriptions leave the impression
that, down to the final triumph of the Church, the feeling of the Romans
about death was still in the main the feeling of their remote ancestors of
the Samnite and Punic wars. It was a social feeling, in the prospect of a
dim life dependent on the memory of the living, a horror of loneliness and
desertion, the longing for a passing prayer even from a stranger.
Blessings are heaped on him who will not forget the pious duty to the
shade. On him who refuses it is invoked the bitterest curse to Roman
imagination—“May he die the last of his race.”
But no dogmatic ecclesiastical system deterred the Roman from expressing
frankly his unbelief in any future state. And the rejection of all hope
for the future, sometimes coupled with a coarse satisfaction with a
sensual past, is the note of not a few epitaphs of this period. Matrinia,
the wife of one C. Matrinius Valentius, an Epicurean philosopher,
dedicates a tablet to his “eternal sleep,” which in this case is no
conventional phrase.(2579) And others, in even more decided language,
parade their withering faith that this brief life is only a moment of
consciousness between the blank of the past and the blank of the future,
and record their indifference at passing again into the nothingness from
which they came. The formula is frequent—“Non fueram, non sum, nescio”; or
“Non fui, fui; non sum, non curo.” Another adds “non mihi dolet.”(2580)
The subjects of some of these epitaphs seem to have obeyed literally the
counsel of their master Lucretius, though in a sense different from his,
and to have risen up sated with the banquet of life. They express, with
cynical grossness, their only faith in the joys of the flesh, and their
perfect content at having made the most of them. “Balnea, Vina, Venus,”
sums up the tale.(2581) “What I have eaten, what I have drunk, is my own.
I have had my life.”(2582) And the departing voluptuary exhorts his
friends to follow his example: “My friends, while we live, let us live”;
“Eat, drink, disport thyself, and then join us.”(2583) A veteran of the
fifth legion records, probably with much truth, that “while he lived he
drank with a good will,”(2584) and he exhorts his surviving friends to
drink while they live. Under the confessional of St. Peter’s at Rome, in
the year 1626, was found a monument of one Agricola of Tibur and his wife.
There was a figure holding a wine-cup, and an inscription so frankly
sensual that the whole was destroyed by order of the Pope. From the copy
which was kept, it appears that Agricola was perfectly satisfied with his
life, and recommended his example to others, “since it all ends in the
grave or the funeral fire.”(2585) But inscriptions such as these are the
exception. The funerary records, as a whole, give a picture of a society
very like our own, with warm affections of kindred or friendship, clinging
to ancestral pieties, ready to hope, if sometimes not clear and confident
in faith.
There was probably a much more settled faith in immortality among the
ordinary masses than among the highly educated. The philosophy of Greece
came to the cultivated Roman world with many different voices on the
greatest problem of human destiny. And the greatest minds, from Cicero to
M. Aurelius, reflect the discordance of philosophy. Nay, some of those
who, in more exalted moods, have left glowing pictures of the future
beatitude, have also at times revealed a mood of melancholy doubt as to
any conscious future life. The prevailing philosophy in the last
generation of the Republic, demoralised by an internecine strife, was that
of Epicurus.(2586) It harmonised with the decay of old Roman religion, and
with the more disastrous moral deterioration in the upper cultivated
class. The cultivated patrician, enervated by vice and luxury, or
intoxicated with the excitement of civil war and the dreams of disordered
ambition, flung off all spiritual idealism, and accepted frankly a lawless
universe and a life of pleasure or power, to be ended by death. The great
poem of Lucretius, the greatest _tour de force_ in Latin, if not in any
literature, braving not only the deepest beliefs of the Latin race, but
the instinctive longings of humanity, was a herculean attempt to relieve
men from the horrors of Graeco-Etruscan superstition. Even the gay
frivolity of the comic stage reveals the terror which the path to Acheron
inspired in the thoughtless crowd(2587)—the terror from which, with all
the fervid zeal of an evangelist, Lucretius sought to relieve his
countrymen.(2588) The pictures of Tartarus had burnt themselves into the
popular imagination. And no message of Epicurus seems to his Roman
interpreter so full of peace and blessing as the gospel of nothingness
after death, the “morningless and unawakening sleep” which ends the
fretful fever of life. As we felt no trouble when the storm of Punic
invasion burst on Italy, we shall be equally unconscious when the
partnership of soul and body is dissolved, even in the clash and fusion of
all the elements in some great cosmic change.(2589) The older Stoicism
permitted the hope of a limited immortality until the next great
cataclysm, in which, after many ages, all things will be swallowed
up.(2590) But Chrysippus admitted this prolonged existence only for the
greater souls. And Panaetius, in the second century B.C., among other
aberrations from the old creed of his school, abandoned even this not very
satisfactory hope of immortality.(2591) Aristotle, while he held the
permanence of the pure thinking principle after death, had given little
countenance to the hope of a separate conscious personality. And the later
Peripatetics, like Alexander Aphrodisias, had gone farther even than their
master in dogmatic denial of immortality.(2592) Whatever support the
instinctive craving of humanity for prolonged existence could obtain from
philosophy was offered by the Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean schools. And
their influence grew with the growing tendency to a revival of faith in
the supernatural. For Plato, with his intense belief in the divine
affinity of the human spirit, must always be the great leader of those who
seek in philosophy an interpreter and a champion of religious intuition.
The Phaedo was the last consolation of many a victim of conscription or
imperial tyranny. Its fine-spun arguments may not have been altogether
convincing, as they hardly seem to be even to the Platonic Socrates. But
Plato was not merely a dialectician, he was also a seer and a poet. And,
on a subject so dim as immortality, where mere intellectual proof, it is
generally recognised, can be no more than tentative and precarious, men
with a deep spiritual instinct have always felt the magnetism of the poet
who could clothe his intuitions in the forms of imagination, who, from a
keener sensibility and a larger vision, could give authority and clearness
to the spiritual intuitions of the race.(2593) The philosophy of the Porch
gave to the Antonine age some of its loftiest characters. But it was not
the philosophy of the future. It was too cold, and too self-centred. It
had too little warmth of sympathy with religious instincts which were
becoming more and more imperious. Although, as we have seen in Seneca, it
was softened by elements borrowed from Platonic sources, in Epictetus and
M. Aurelius, in spite of a rare spiritual elevation, it displays the old
aloofness from the mass of men, and a cold temperance of reserve on the
great question of the future of the soul.
There can be little doubt that in the last age of the Republic a negative
philosophy conspired with a decaying religious sense to stifle the hope of
immortality among the cultivated class. Lucretius was certainly not a
solitary member of his order. His great poem, by its combination of
dialectic subtlety, poetic charm, and lofty moral earnestness, may have
made many converts to its withering creed. In the debate on the fate of
the Catilinarian conspirators, Julius Caesar could assert, without fear of
contradiction or disapproval, that death was the final term alike of joy
and sorrow in human life.(2594) This philosophy, indeed, was waning in
force in the time of Augustus, and its forces were spent before the close
of the first century. Yet the elder Pliny, who saw the reign of Vespasian,
inveighs almost fiercely against the vanity or madness which dreams of a
phantom life beyond the tomb, and robs of its great charm the last kindly
boon of nature.(2595) Seneca on this, as on many other questions of high
moment, is not steady and consistent. In moments of spiritual exaltation
he is filled with apocalyptic rapture at the vision of an eternal world.
At other times he speaks with a cold resignation, which seems to have been
the fashion with men of his class and time, at the possibility of
extinction in death. To the toil-worn spirit, weary of the travail and
disappointments of life, death will be a quiet haven of rest.(2596) The
old terrors of Charon and Cerberus, of the awful Judge and the tortures of
Tartarus, are no longer believed in even by children.(2597) And stripped
of its mythic horrors, death, being the loss of consciousness, must be the
negation of pain and desire and fear. It is, in fact, a return to the
nothingness from which we come, which has left no memory. _Non miser
potest esse qui nullus est._(2598) The literary men and men of the world
in the age of the Flavians, like their successors ever since, probably
occupied themselves little with a problem so long debated and so variously
solved. Quintilian treats the question of the existence of the disembodied
spirit as an open one for dialectical debate.(2599) Tacitus, at once
credulous and sceptical, is no clearer on the subject of immortality than
he is on the subject of miracles, or omens, or Providence. In his eulogy
on Agricola he expresses a faint, pious hope of eternal peace for his
hero, if there is a place in some other world for pious shades, and the
sages are right in thinking that great souls do not perish with the
body.(2600) This is a very guarded and hypothetical hope; and, probably,
the only immortality for his friend in which Tacitus had much confidence
was the undying fame with which the pen of genius can invest its subject.
Tacitus, like so many of his class, had the old Roman distrust of
philosophy, and the philosophies of which men of his generation had a
tincture had no very confident or comforting message about the soul’s
eternal destiny.
Hadrian, the most interesting of the emperors, was probably a sceptic on
this as on all kindred subjects. The greatest practical genius in the
imperial line had, in the field of religion and speculation, an infinite
passion for all that was curious and exotic.(2601) Tramping at the head of
his legions through his world-wide domains, he relieved the tedium of
practical administration by visiting the scenes of historic fame or the
homes of ancient religion both in the East and West. The East particularly
attracted him by its infinite fecundity of superstition. He came to see
whether there was anything in these revelations of the unseen world; he
went away to mock at them. His insatiable curiosity had an endless variety
of moods, and offered an open door to all the influences from many creeds.
The restorer of ancient shrines, the admirer of Epictetus, the dabbler in
astrology, the votary of Eleusis(2602) and all the mysteries of the East,
the munificent patron of all professors of philosophy and the arts, the
man who delighted also to puzzle and ridicule them,(2603) had probably few
settled convictions of his own. His last words to his soul, in their
mingled lightness and pathos, seem to express rather regret for the
sunlight left behind than any hope in entering on a dim journey into the
unknown.
The Antonine age was for the masses an age of growing faith, and yet three
or four of its greatest minds, men who had drunk deep of philosophy, or
who had a rare spiritual vision, either denied or doubted the last hope of
humanity. Epictetus came from Phrygia as the slave of a freedman of
Nero.(2604) Even in his days of slavery, he had absorbed the teaching of
Musonius.(2605) He received his freedom, but lived in poverty and physical
infirmity till, in the persecution of Domitian’s reign he was, with the
whole tribe of philosophic preachers, driven from Rome,(2606) and he
settled at Nicopolis in Epirus, where Arrian heard his discourses on the
higher life. According to Hadrian’s biographer, he lived in the greatest
intimacy with that emperor.(2607) He refers more than once to the reign of
Trajan,(2608) but it is hardly possible that the tradition is true which
carries his life into the reign of M. Aurelius, although the great
philosophic emperor owed much to his teaching.(2609)
Epictetus is an example of a profoundly religious mind, to whom personal
immortality is not a necessity of his religion. The great law of life is
glad submission to the will of God, to the universal order. Death, as an
event which is bound to come soon or late, should be regarded without
fear. The tremors it excites are like the shuddering of children at a
tragic mask of Gorgon or Fury. Turn the mask, and the terror is
gone.(2610) For what is death? A separation of soul and body, a
dissolution of our frame into the kindred elements.(2611) The door is
opened, God calls you to come, and to no terrible future. Hades, Acheron,
and Cocytus are mere childish fancies.(2612) You will pass into the wind
or earth or fire from which you come. You will not exist, but you will be
something else of which the world now has need, just as you came into your
present existence when the world had need of you. God sent you here
subject to death, to live on earth a little while in the flesh, to do His
will and serve His purpose, and join in the spectacle and festival. But
the spectacle for you is ended; go hence whither He leads, with adoration
and gratitude for all that you have seen and heard. Make room for others
who have yet to be born in accordance with His will.(2613) Language like
this seems to give slight hope of any personal, conscious life beyond the
grave. Epictetus, like the pious Hebrew of many of the Psalms, seems to be
satisfied with the present vision of God, whether or not there be any
fuller vision beyond the veil. Yet he elsewhere uses almost Platonic
language, which seems to imply that the soul has a separate life, that it
is a prisoner for a time in the bonds of the flesh, and that it passes at
death to the kindred source from which it sprang.(2614) Yet even here the
hope of an individual immortality, of any future reproduction on a higher
scale of the life on earth, need not be implied; it is indeed probably
absent. It is enough for the profoundly religious spirit of Epictetus that
God calls us; whither He calls us must be left to His will.
Galen the physician shows a similar detachment from the ordinary hopes of
humanity as to a future life, although it springs from a very different
environment and training from those of Epictetus. Born in the reign of
Hadrian, and dying in the reign of Septimius Severus, Galen represents the
religious spirit of the Antonine age in his firm belief in a spiritual
Power and Providence.(2615) But in philosophy he was an eclectic of the
eclectics. His medical studies began at the age of seventeen. The
influence of the Platonist, Albinus of Smyrna, above all his stay at
Alexandria, while they gave him a wide range of sympathy, account for the
mingled and heterogeneous character of his philosophic creed, which
contains elements from every system except that of Epicurus.(2616) The
result is a curious hesitation and equipoise between conflicting opinions
on the greatest questions. He is particularly uncertain as to the nature
of the soul and its relation to the body. The Platonic doctrine that the
soul is an immaterial essence, independent of corporeal support, seems to
Galen very disputable. How can immaterial essences have any separate
individuality? How can they diffuse themselves over a corporeal frame and
alter and excite it, as in lunacy or drunkenness? And again, if the
Peripatetic doctrine be true, that the soul is the “form” of the body, we
are soon landed in the Stoic materialism from which Galen shrank. The soul
will become, as in the well-known theory refuted in the Phaedo,(2617) a
“temperament” of bodily states, and its superior endurance, its
immortality, will become a baseless dream. On these great questions the
cautious man of science will not venture to come to any dogmatic
conclusion.(2618)
Galen came to Rome in the year 164, at the beginning of the reign of M.
Aurelius. He soon rose to great fame in his profession, and when, in 168,
he had returned to his native Pergamum, he was recalled by the emperors to
meet them at Aquileia. It was an anxious time. It was the second year of
the campaign against the Marcomanni, and the legions, returning with Verus
from the East, had brought with them the taint of a pestilence which
spread a desolation throughout Italy from which it did not recover for
ages. The slaves were called to arms as in the Punic invasion, along with
the gladiators, and even the brigands of Dalmatia, and the massing of the
forces on the Adriatic only concentrated the malignity of the
plague.(2619) Galen remained with the army for some time, lending his
skill to mitigate the horrors of the disease. He returned to Rome in 170,
and was left there in charge of the youthful Commodus. The philosophic
Emperor and his philosophic physician must have often met in those
dreadful years. And we may be sure, from the detachment of M. Aurelius,
that their conversations would take a wider range than the sanitary
arrangements of the camp. With death in the air, how could two such men,
trained under such masters, fail to question one another as to the sequel
of death? At any rate the fact remains that M. Aurelius on this question
is as submissive as Epictetus, as hesitating as Galen.
M. Aurelius is commonly spoken of as realising Plato’s dream of the
philosopher on the throne. And yet the description is, without some
additions and explanations, somewhat misleading. Philosopher, in the large
speculative sense, he certainly is not in his Meditations. For the
infinite curiosity of intellect, the passion to pierce the veil of the
unknown, to build a great cosmic system, he seems to have had but little
sympathy.(2620) His is the crowning instance of philosophy leaving the
heights and concentrating itself on conduct, which becomes not merely
“three-fourths of life,” but the whole, and his philosophy is really a
religion. It is a religion because it is founded on the great principle of
unquestioning, uncomplaining submission to the will of God, the law of the
whole universe. It is a religion because the repellent and rigorous
teaching of the older Stoicism is, as it is in Epictetus, suffused with a
glow of emotion.(2621) And yet this religion, which makes such immense
demands on human nature, cuts itself off from any support in the hope of a
future life.
On the subject of immortality, indeed, M. Aurelius sometimes seems to
waver. He puts the question hypothetically, or he suggests immortality as
an alternative to extinction at death. “If thou goest indeed to another
life, there is no want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without
sensation, thou wilt cease to be held by pains and pleasures, and to be a
slave to the vessel.”(2622) In one doubtful passage he speaks of “the time
when the soul shall fall out of this envelop, like the child from the
womb.”(2623) He does not dogmatise on a subject so dark. But his favourite
conception of death is that of change, of transformation, of dissolution
into the original elements. An Infinite Spirit, of which the individual
soul is an emanation, pervades the universe, and at death the finite
spirit is reabsorbed by the Infinite.(2624) With this is coupled the
doctrine of the dark Ephesian philosophy, which through Platonism had a
profound influence on later thought. Life is but a moment of consciousness
in the unresting flow of infinite mutation;(2625) it is a dream, a mere
vapour, the sojourn of a passing stranger. And the last thought of
Aurelius probably was that there was no place for a hope of separate
conscious existence after the last mortal change. Soul and body alike are
swept along the stream of perpetual transformation, and this particular
“ego,” with all its dreams and memories, will never re-emerge in a
separate personality.
M. Aurelius, from the frequency with which he returns to the subject,
seems fully conscious of the instinctive passion for continued life. But
he refuses to recognise it as original and legitimate, and therefore
demanding some account to be given of it.(2626) Still less would he ever
dream of erecting it, as Cicero and Plutarch did, into a powerful argument
for some corresponding satisfaction in another world. It is simply one of
the irrational appetites, a form of rebellion against the universal order,
which must be crushed and brought into submission to inexorable law.
Neither do we find in M. Aurelius any feeling of the need for a
rectification of the injustices of time, for any sphere for the completion
of ineffectual lives, where the crooked may be made straight and the
perverted be restored. He has, apparently, no sympathy with the sadness so
often felt by the noblest minds, at having to go hence with so little
done, so little known. The philosopher seems to have no wish to explore in
some coming life the secrets of the universe, to prolong under happier
conditions the endless quest of the ideal in art and knowledge and
thought, which seems so cruelly baffled by the shortness of the life here
below. The affectionate father and husband and friend seems to have no
dream of any reunion with kindred souls. Above all, this intensely
religious and devout spirit seems to have no conception, such as sometimes
flashes on the mind of Seneca and of Plutarch, of a future beatitude in
the full vision of God. This austere renunciation, if it was deliberate,
of feelings and hopes so dear to humanity, excites a certain admiration,
as the result of a stern self-discipline. It is the resignation of what
are thought to be mere fond, self-flattering fancies in the cold light of
truth, and, as such, it must ever command a reverent respect. Yet how
completely the renunciation cuts off M. Aurelius from the spiritual
movement of his time, from the great onward sweep of humanity to a
spiritual reconstruction!
The attitude of M. Aurelius to the instinctive longing for immortality is
partly dictated by logical loyalty to the fundamental principles of his
theory of life, partly by personal temperament and sad experience. The
cosmic theory of Heraclitus, the infinite flux of cyclic change, left
little ground for faith in the permanence of consciousness. The Stoic
principle of submission to the law of the whole made it a duty to
acquiesce calmly, or even cheerfully, in what has been ordained for us.
The whole duty, the sole blessedness of man, lie in bringing his will into
conformity with the Eternal Reason, and in moulding this brief mundane
life into a slight counterpart of the order of the mighty world. From one
point of view the single human life is infinitely small, a mere point in
infinite age,(2627) agitated by hopes and fears which are mere flitting
dreams of a momentary consciousness. Nay, the grandest features of its
earthly home shrink to mean proportions before the eye of reason. Asia is
a mere corner, the sea a drop, Athos a tiny clod in the universe.(2628)
Life is so little a thing that death is no evil.(2629) Yet, looked at on
another side, the daemon, the divine spark within each of us, may, by its
irresistible power, create a moral whole in each human spirit which,
during its short space of separate being, may have the rounded harmony and
perfectness of the whole vast order—it may become a perfect miniature of
the universe of God.(2630) This consummate result, attainable, though so
rarely attained, is the ideal which alone gives dignity to human life. The
ideal of humanity lies not in any future life or coming age; it may be,
were the will properly aroused to its divine strength, realised here and
now in our short span of forty years of maturity.(2631) Get rid of gross
fears and hopes, aim only at the moral ends which the will, aided by the
daemon within, can surely reach, dismiss the fear of censure from the
ephemeral crowd around us, the craving for fame among ephemeral
generations whom we shall not see,(2632) let the divine impulse within us
gravitate to its proper orbit, and this poor human life is swept into the
eternal movement of the great whole, and, from a moment of troubled
consciousness, becomes a true life in God. Such a life, having fulfilled
the true law of its being, is in itself rounded and complete: it needs no
dreams of future beatitude to rectify its failures or reward its eager
effort. Death to such a soul becomes an unimportant incident, fixed, like
all other changes, in the general order. And the length or shortness of
life is not worth reckoning. The longest life is hardly a moment in
eternity: the shortest is long enough if it be lived well. This life, as
fixed by eternal law, is a whole, a thing by itself, a thing with
innumerable counterparts in the infinite past, destined to be endlessly
reproduced in the years of the limitless future.(2633) To repine at its
shortness is no more rational than to mourn the swift passing of a
springtime, whose glorious promise, yet ever-withering charm, have come
and gone in the self-same way through myriads of forgotten years.
This is the ideal view of an austere creed, with a grandeur of its own
which all generations of the West have agreed to venerate. But the
temperament and the history of M. Aurelius had also their share in shaping
his views of life and death. With infinite charity, indulgence, and even
love for his fellows, he was a pessimist about human life.(2634) He had
good excuse for being so. In the words of one who knew that age as only
genius combined with learning can, _le monde s’attristait_; and with good
cause. The horizon was darkened with ominous thunder-clouds. The internal
forces of the Empire were becoming paralysed by a mysterious weakness. The
dim hordes beyond the Danube had descended with a force only to be
repelled in many weary campaigns. Famine and pestilence were inflicting
worse horrors than the Marcomanni. It was the beginning of the end,
although the end was long deferred. The world was growing sad; but there
was no sadder man than the saintly Stoic on the throne, who had not only
to face the Germans on the Danube, and bear the anxieties of solitary
power, but who had to endure the keener anguish of a soul which saw the
spiritual possibilities of human nature, but also all its littleness and
baseness. The Emperor needed all the lessons of self-discipline and
close-lipped resignation which he had painfully learnt for himself, and
which he has taught to so many generations. There have been few nobler
souls, yet few more hopeless. Like the arch mocker of the time, although
from a very different point of view, he sees this ephemeral life, with its
transient pleasures and triumphs, ending in dust and oblivion.(2635) And
its fragility is only matched by its weary sameness from age to age. The
wintry torrent of endless mutation sweeps all round in an eternal
vortex.(2636) This restless change is a movement of cyclic monotony.(2637)
Go back to Vespasian or Trajan: you will find the same recurring
spectacle, men plotting and fighting, marrying and dying.(2638) The
daughter who watches by her mother’s death-bed soon passes away under
other eyes. The soul can in vision travel far, and survey the infinity of
ages.(2639) It can stretch forward into the endless ages to come, as it
can go back in historic imagination through the limitless past. Yet it
finds nothing strange in the experience of the past, as there will be
nothing new in the experience of our remotest posterity. The man whose
course has run for forty years, if he has any powers of perception, has
concentrated in his brief span the image of all that has been, all that
ever will be in human thought or fate. The future is not gilded by any
dream of progress: it is not to be imaged in any magic light of a Platonic
Utopia, or City of God descending from heaven like a bride.(2640) From
this “terrene filth,” from these poor frivolous souls, what celestial
commonwealth could ever emerge?(2641) The moral is, both on the ground of
high philosophy and sad experience—“be content, thou hast made thy voyage,
thou hast come to shore, quit the ship.”
But even in heathendom, long before M. Aurelius was born, the drift of
thought towards the goal of a personal immortality was strong and intense.
And this was only one consequence of a movement which had profoundly
affected human thought, and had compelled Stoicism to recast itself, as in
the teaching of Seneca. Pure reason could not explain the relation of man
to the universe, it could not satisfy the deepest human instincts. The
maxim, “live according to Nature,” was interpreted by the Stoic to mean a
life in accordance with our own higher nature, the Divine element within
us. Yet this interpretation only brought out the irreconcilable
discordance between the two conceptions of Nature in the physical universe
and in the human spirit. There are depths and mysteries in the one which
have no answering correspondence in the other. Something more than reason
is needed to solve the problems of human destiny, the mysterious range of
human aspiration. Nature, as a system of cold impersonal processes, has no
sympathy with man, she may be icily indifferent or actively hostile. To
conform one’s life to the supposed dictates of an abstract Reason,
asserting itself in physical laws, which seem often to make a mockery of
the noblest effort and aspiration of man, demanded a servility of
submission in human nature, and called upon it to disown a large part of
its native powers and instincts. Man, a mere ghost of himself, attenuated
to a bloodless shade, finds himself in presence of a power cold,
relentless, unmoral, according to human standards, a power which makes
holocausts of individual lives to serve some abstract and visionary ideal
of the whole. The older Stoicism provided no object of worship. For
worship cannot be paid to an impersonal law without moral attributes. You
may in abject quietism submit to it, but you cannot revere or adore it. It
is little wonder that the Stoic sage, who could triumph over all material
obstructions by moral enthusiasm, was sometimes exalted above the Zeus who
represented mere passionless physical law. Such an idea—for it cannot be
called a Being—has no moral import, it supplies no example, succour, or
inspiration. The sage may for a moment have a superhuman triumph, in his
defiance of the temptations or calamities with which Nature has surrounded
him, but it is a lonely triumph of inhuman pride.(2642) It may be the
divine element within him which has given him the victory, but this is
conceived as the mere effluence of that subtle material force which moves
under all the phenomena of physical Nature. In surrendering yourself to
the impulse of such a power you are merely putting yourself in line with
the other irrational subjects of impersonal law. There is here, it need
not be said, no stimulus to moral life, there is the absolute negation of
it. The affinity of the human soul with the soul of the world is a mere
physical doctrine, however refined and subtle be the “fiery breath” which
is the common element of both. But prolonged ethical study and analysis
combined with the infiltration of Platonism by degrees to modify
profoundly the Stoic conception of the nature of God, and of the relation
of man to Him. God tended to become more and more a person, a moral power,
a father. And the indwelling God became the voice of conscience,
consoling, prompting, supporting, inspiring an ideal of fuller communion
in another sphere. Was the longing for continued life, in communion with
kindred souls, with a Divine Spirit, which has made us what we are, to be
relegated to the limbo of anthropomorphic dreams?
Seneca, as we have seen in a former chapter, still retains some of the
hard orthodoxy of the older Stoicism. In his letters to Lucilius he
occasionally uses the language of the old Stoic materialism.(2643) But
there can be little doubt that Seneca had assimilated other conceptions
antagonistic to it. God becomes more a Person, distinct from the world,
which He has created, which He governs, which He directs to moral
ends.(2644) He is not merely the highest reason, He is also the perfect
wisdom, holiness, and love. He is no longer a mere blind force or fate; He
is the loving, watchful Father, and good men are His sons. The apparent
calamities which they have to suffer are only a necessary discipline, for,
“whom He loves He tries and hardens by chastisement.”(2645) God can never
really injure, for His nature is love, and we are continually loaded with
His benefits.(2646) In his view of the constitution of man, Seneca has
deviated even further from the creed of his school. He appears indeed to
assert sometimes that the soul is material, but it is matter so fine and
subtle as to be indistinguishable from what we call spirit. And the
ethical studies of Seneca compelled him to abandon the Stoic doctrine of
the simple unity of the soul for the Platonic dualism, with the opposition
of reason and animal impulse. The latter has its seat in the body, or the
flesh, as he often calls it. And of the flesh he speaks with all the
contempt of the _Phaedo_. It is a mere shell, a fetter, a prison; or a
humble hostelry which the soul occupies only for a brief space.(2647) With
the flesh the spirit must wage perpetual war, as the alien power which
cramps its native energies, darkens its vision, and perverts its judgment
of the truth. The true life of the spirit will, as in the theology of
Plato, only begin when the unequal partnership is dissolved.(2648)
The orthodox Stoic doctrine allowed a limited immortality, till the next
great cosmic conflagration. But it was doubtful whether even this
continued existence was real personal life, and with some Stoic doctors it
was a privilege confined to the greater souls.(2649) Like nearly all
philosophers of this age, Seneca occasionally seems to admit the
possibility of a return to antenatal nothingness at death. “Non potest
miser esse qui nullus est” is a consolation often administered even by
those who have the hope of something better than the peace of
annihilation.(2650) It was a consolation which might be a very real one to
men living in the reign of Nero. Taken at the worst, death can only be
dissolution, for the rivers of fire and the tortures of Tartarus are mere
figments of poetic fancy. The mind trained in submission to universal law
will not shrink from a fate which awaits the universe by fire or
cataclysmal change. Its future fate can only be either to dwell calmly for
ever among kindred souls, or to be reabsorbed into the general
whole.(2651) But in moments of spiritual exaltation, such an alternative
does not satisfy Seneca. He has got far beyond the grim submission, or
graceful contempt, of aristocratic suicide, or even the faith in a bounded
immortality. He has a hope at times apparently more clear than any felt by
the Platonic Socrates on the last evening in prison. Death is no longer a
sleep, a blank peace following the futile agitations of life: it is the
gateway to eternal peace. The brief sojourn in the body is the prelude to
a longer and nobler life.(2652) The hour, at which you shudder as the
last, is really the birthday of eternity, when the mind, bursting from its
fetters, will expatiate in all the joy of its freedom in the light, and
have unrolled before it all the secrets and splendour of starry worlds,
without a haunting shadow.(2653) Nay, the vision is moralised almost in
Christian fashion. The thought of eternity compels us to think of God as
witness of every act, to remember that “decisive hour” when, with all
veils and disguises removed, the verdict on our life will be pronounced.
It also gives the hope of purging away for ever the taint of the flesh and
entering on communion with the spirits of the blessed.(2654) Thus as
though with the Eternal eyes upon him, a man should shrink from all the
baser and meaner side of his corporeal life, and so prepare himself for
the great ordeal, and the beatitude of the life to come.
In the apocalypse of Seneca a new note is struck in pagan meditation on
the immortality. We have left far behind the thought of the Manes haunting
the ancestral tomb, and soothed in returning years by the jet of wine or
the bunch of violets. We are no longer watching, with Pindar or Virgil,
the spirits basking in Elysian meads and fanned by ocean breezes. We are
far on the way to the City of God, _cujus fundamenta in montibus sanctis_.
And indeed Seneca has probably travelled as far towards it as any one born
in heathendom ever did. It is not wonderful that, in the fierce religious
struggle of the fourth century, his moral enthusiasm, his view of this
life as a probation for the next, his glowing vision of an almost
Christian heaven, should have suggested an imaginary intercourse with St
Paul.(2655)
What were the influences which really moulded his highest conception of
the future state, how much was due to a pure and vigorous spiritual
intuition, how much to Platonic and Pythagorean sources, we cannot pretend
to say. In Seneca’s most enraptured previsions of immortality, the very
exuberance of the rhetoric seems to be the expression of intense personal
feeling. But Seneca’s was a very open and sensitive mind. One of his
teachers was Sotion, who, like his master Sextius, was called a
Pythagorean, and who, on true Pythagorean principles, taught Seneca to
abstain from animal food.(2656) We may be sure that no Pythagorean teacher
of that age would fail to discuss with his pupil the problem of the future
life. It is true that Seneca only once or twice alludes to the doctrine of
a previous life, and he only mentions the Pythagorean school to record the
fact that in his day it was without a head.(2657) But that does not
preclude the supposition that he may have felt its influence in the
formative years of youth. And the Pythagoreans of the early empire were a
highly eclectic school. They still reproduced the spirit of their founder
in mathematical symbolism, in the ideal of asceticism, in a pronounced
religious tendency.(2658) But they had absorbed much from Platonism, as
well as from the Lyceum and the Porch. These mingled influences also
account for the profound alterations which Stoicism had undergone in the
mind of Seneca. And his contempt for the body or the flesh, and many of
the phrases in which its cramping, lowering influences are described,
savour of the Pythagorean and Platonist schools.
But Seneca is an inconsistent, though eloquent and powerful, expounder of
that faith in personal immortality, with its moral consequences, which
goes back through many ages to Plato, to Pythagoras, to the obscure
apostles of the Orphic revelation, perhaps to Egypt.(2659) The mythical
Orpheus represents, in the field of religion and in the theory of life and
death, an immense revolution in Greek thought and an enduring spirit which
produced a profound effect down to the last years of paganism in the
West.(2660) With the names of Orpheus and Pythagoras are connected the
assured faith in immortality, the conception of this life as only
preparatory and secondary to the next, the need for purgation and
expiation for deeds done in the body, the doctrine of transmigration and
successive lives, possibly in animal forms. Orpheus was also the mythical
founder of mysteries in whose secret lore the initiated were always
supposed to receive some comforting assurance of a life to come.(2661) A
spokesman in one of Cicero’s dialogues recalls with intense gratitude the
light of hope and cheerfulness which the holy rites had shed for him both
on life and death.(2662) And Plutarch, on the death of their daughter,
reminded his wife of the soothing words which they had together heard from
the hierophant in the Dionysiac mysteries.(2663) Long before their day
Plato had often, on these high themes, sought a kind of high
ecclesiastical sanction or suggestion for the tentative conclusions of
dialectic.(2664) The great name of Orpheus, and the mystic lore of this
esoteric faith, had indeed in Plato’s day been sadly cheapened and
degraded by a crowd of mercenary impostors.(2665) And even the venerable
rites of Eleusis may have contained an element of coarseness, descending
from times when the processes of nature were regarded unveiled.(2666) But
philosophy and reason, which purged and elevated religion as a whole, did
the same service for the mysteries, and Orphic and Pythagorean became
almost convertible.(2667) The systems represent a converging effort to
solve those great questions which lie on the borderland of religion and
philosophy, questions on which the speculative intellect is so often
foiled, and has to fall back on the support of faith and religious
intuition.(2668) In an age which had forsaken curious speculation, whose
whole interest was concentrated on the moral life, an age which longed for
spiritual vision and supernatural support, an essentially religious
philosophy like the new Pythagoreanism was sure to be a great power.
Gathering up impartially whatever suited its main end from the ancient
schools, maintaining a scrupulous reverence for all the devotion of the
past, it shed over all a higher light, issuing, as its votaries believed,
from the lands of the dawn.(2669) Keeping a consecrated place for all the
gods of popular tradition, linking men to the Infinite by a graduated
hierarchy of spirits with their home in the stars, it rose to the
conception of the One, pure, passionless Being to whom no bloody sacrifice
is to be offered, who is to be worshipped best by silent adoration and a
life of purity. And in cultivating this purity, the grossness of the body
must be attenuated by a strict rule of life.(2670) And though the Highest
be so remote and so ethereal, He has not left us without messengers and
interpreters to bridge the vast interval between us and the Infinite, by
means of dream and vision and oracle. A world of strange daemonic life
surrounds us, a world of spirits and heroic souls akin to ours.(2671) For
though we are immersed in the alien element of the flesh, yet our complex
soul has a divine part, which may even here below have converse with the
Divine. During its period of duress and probation, it may indeed become
irremediably tainted by contact with matter. It may also, hearkening to
the voice of philosophy, hold itself clear and pure from such defilement.
When the mortal severance of the two natures comes, the divine part does
not perish with its mouldering prison, but it may have a very different
destiny in the ages to come, according to the manner of its earthly life.
This life and the eternal state are linked in an inevitable moral
sequence; as we sow, so shall we reap in successive lives. There is a
Great Judgment in the unseen world, with momentous, age-long effects. The
spirit which has refused to yield to the seductions of the flesh may, in
the coming life, rise to empyrean heights beyond human imagination to
picture. The soul which has been imbruted by its environment may have to
pass a long ordeal of three thousand years, and then return to another
sojourn in human form, or it may sink hopelessly to ever lower depths of
degradation.
The biography of Apollonius of Tyana is, of course, in one sense a
romance.(2672) Yet its tales of miracle should hardly be allowed to
obscure its value as a picture of the beliefs of that age. We cannot doubt
that the Pythagorean apostle of the time of the Flavians went all over the
Roman world, preaching his gospel of moral and ritual purity, kindling or
satisfying the faith in the world of spirit, striving in a strange fashion
to reconcile a mystic monotheism and devotion to a pure life of the soul
with a scrupulous reverence for all the mythologies. It may, at first
sight, appear strange that a mystic like Apollonius, of the Pythagorean
school, should so seldom allude to the subject of immortality. The truth
is that Apollonius was not a dogmatic preacher; he dealt little in
theories. His chief business, as he conceived it, was with practical
morality, and the reform or restoration of ritual where it had fallen into
desuetude and decay.(2673) Penetrated as he was with the faith in a
spiritual world, he seems to assume as a postulate the eternity of the
soul, and its incarnation for a brief space on earth. During its sojourn
in the flesh, it is visited by visions from on high, and such revelations
are vouchsafed in proportion to its ascetic purity.(2674) What conception
of the life to come Apollonius entertained we cannot say; but its reality
to him was a self-evident truth. We are surrounded by the spirits of the
departed, although we know it not. Sailing among the islands of the
Aegean, he once gratified his disciples by the tale of his having met the
shade of Achilles at his tomb in the Troad.(2675) Men said that the hero
was really dead, and in the old home of the Myrmidons, his worship was
forgotten. But Apollonius, in a prayer which he had learnt from the sages
on the Ganges, called upon the heroic shade to dispel all doubts by
appearing at his call. At once an earthquake shook the tomb, and a fair
youthful form was by his side of wondrous beauty and superhuman stature,
clothed in a Thessalian mantle. His stature grew more majestic, and his
beauty more glorious as Apollonius gazed. But the sage had no weak fears
in the presence even of so august a spirit, and pressed him with questions
which savour far more of antiquarian than spiritual interest. Was Helen
really in Troy? Why does not Homer mention Palamedes? The hero resolved
his doubts, sent a warning message to the Thessalians to restore his
forgotten honours, and in a soft splendour vanished at the first
cock-crow.(2676)
The biography of Apollonius closes with a tale which throws a strong light
on the spiritual cravings of that age. The sage firmly believed in
transmigration and immortality, although he discouraged debate on these
high themes.(2677) After his death, the youth of Tyana were much occupied
with solemn thoughts. But there was a sceptic among them who had vainly
besought the departed philosopher to return from spiritland and dispel his
doubts as to the future life. At last one day he fell asleep among his
companions, and then suddenly started up as one demented, with the cry—“I
believe thee.” Then he told his friends that he had seen the spirit of the
sage, that he had been actually among them, though they knew it not,
chanting a marvellous song of life and death. It told of the escape of the
soul from the mouldering frame and of its swift flight to ethereal worlds.
“Thou shalt know all when thou art no more; but while thou art yet among
the living, why seek to pierce the mystery?”(2678)
The new Platonist school, with Plutarch and Maximus at their head, were,
in this age, the great apostles of the hope of immortality. Platonists in
their theory of mind and God, Neo-Pythagorean in their faith in the
openness of the human spirit at its best to supernatural influences, they
felt the doctrine of the coming life to be axiomatic. It is true that the
author of the _Consolation to Apollonius_, seems at times to waver, as
Seneca did, between the idea of extinction at death and the hope of
eternal beatitude.(2679) This piece is full of pessimist thoughts of life,
and embalms many a sad saying of the Greek poets on its shortness and its
misery.(2680) Bringing far more sorrow than joy, life may well be regarded
as a mysterious punishment. That Thracian tribe which mourned at each
birth as others do at death, had a true philosophy of man’s estate. The
great consolation is that, in the phrase of Heraclitus, death and life are
one, we are dying every moment from our birth. Death is the great healer,
in the words of Aeschylus, the deliverer from the curse of existence,
whether it be an eternal sleep or a far journey into an unknown land. The
prospect of blank nothingness offers no terrors; for the soul only returns
to its original unconsciousness. But this was hardly a congenial mood to
the author, and before the close, he falls back on the solace of mystic
tradition or poetic vision, that, for the nobler sort, there is a place
prepared in the ages to come, after the Great Judgment, when all souls,
naked and stripped of all trappings and disguises, shall have to answer
for the deeds done in the body.(2681) The same faith is professed by
Plutarch to his wife in the Consolation on the death of their little
daughter, which took place while Plutarch was from home. The loss of a
pure bright young soul, full of love and kindness to all, even to her
lifeless toys, was evidently a heavy blow.(2682) But Plutarch praises his
wife’s simple restraint and abstinence from the effusive parade of
conventional mourning. All such displays seemed to him a rather vulgar
intemperance and self-indulgence.(2683) And why grieve for one who is
spared all grief? She had her little joys, and, knowing no other, she
suffers no pain of loss. Yet Plutarch would not have his wife accept the
cold consolation that death brings unconsciousness. He reminds her of the
brighter, more cheering vision which they have enjoyed together as
communicants in the Dionysiac mysteries. If the soul is undying, if it is
of divine parentage and has a divine destiny, then the shortness of its
imprisonment and exile is a blessing. The captive bird may come by use and
wont actually to love its cage. And the worst misery of old age is not
grey hairs and weakness, but a dull absorption in the carnal and
forgetfulness of divine things. “Whom the gods love die young.” By calling
them back early, they save them from long wanderings.(2684)
Plutarch’s belief in immortality is a religious faith, a practical
postulate. He nowhere discusses the bases of the belief in an exhaustive
way. It is rather inseparable from his conception of God and His justice,
and the relation of the human soul to God.(2685) He admits that the
prospect of reward or punishment in another world has but little influence
on men’s conduct.(2686) Few believe in the tales of tortures of the
damned. And those who do can soothe their fears, and purchase a gross
immortality, by initiations and indulgences.(2687) Yet it is impossible to
doubt that to Plutarch the hope of the eternal life was a precious
possession. He assails with force, and even asperity, the Epicurean school
for their attempt to rob humanity of it, on the pretext of relieving men
of a load of superstitious fears. They are like men on board a ship who,
letting the passengers know that they have no pilot, console them with the
further information that it does not matter, as they are bound to drive
upon the rocks.(2688) The great promise of Epicurus was to free men from
the spectral terrors with which poetic fancy had filled the scenery of the
under world. But in doing so, he invested death with a new horror
infinitely worse than the fabled tortures of the damned. It was a subtle
fallacy which taught that, as annihilation involves the extinction of
consciousness, the lamented loss of the joys and vivid energy of life was
a mere imagination projected on a blank future where no regret could ever
disturb the tranquillity of nothingness(2689). Plutarch took his stand on
psychology. The passion for continued existence is, as a matter of fact,
the most imperious in our nature. With the belief in immortality, Epicurus
sweeps away the strongest and dearest hopes of the mass of men. This life
is indeed full of pain and sorrow; yet men cling to it passionately,
merely as life, in the darkest hours. And they are ready to brave the
worst horrors of Cerberus and Chimaera for the chance of continued
existence.(2690) The privation of a dream of happiness in another world is
a real loss, even though, when the grey day of nothingness dawns, the
consciousness of loss be gone. Is it a light thing to tell the nobler
spirits, the moral athletes, who have battled with evil all life long,
that they have been contending for a visionary crown?(2691) Is it nothing
to the idealist who, amid all the obstructions of the life in the flesh,
has been fostering his nobler powers, in the hope of eternal freedom and
the full vision of truth, that that real life to which he fancied death
was only the gateway is, after all, a mere illusion? Nor does Plutarch
disdain to take account of that vivacity of love which in all ages has
sought to soften the bitterness of parting by the hope of reunion and
recognition in other worlds.(2692)
The Consolation to Apollonius only refers briefly to the punishment of
lawless wealth and power, as the complement to the reward of virtue.(2693)
But this aspect of immortality is dwelt on at length in the remarkable
treatise on the Delays of the Divine Vengeance. The problem of hereditary
guilt, and the punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers in
this world, in view of the justice and benevolence of God, leads on to the
thought of another tribunal which may terribly correct the injustices of
time.(2694) The doctrine of Divine providence and the doctrine of
immortality stand or fall together.(2695) God could not take so much care
for ephemeral souls, blooming for a brief space and then withering away,
as in the women’s soon-fading gardens of Adonis.(2696) Above all, Apollo
would be the greatest deceiver, the god who has so often solemnly from the
tripod ordered rites of expiation and posthumous honours to be paid to
lofty souls departed.(2697) Yet, like his great master Plato, Plutarch
felt that the full assurance of the long dream of humanity lies beyond the
veil—that we know not what we shall be. And, like the master, he invoked
the apocalyptic power of the religious and poetic imagination to fortify
the hesitating conclusions of the reason.
The visionary power and charm of the great master, whose reign was to be
prolonged for ages after Plutarch’s time, is seen, perhaps in a faint
reflection, in Plutarch’s mythical forecast of the future of the soul.
Plato’s psychology, his sharp opposition of the reason to the lower nature
rooted in the flesh, his vision of the Eternal Goodness, his intensely
moral conception of the responsibility of life on earth, its boundless
possibilities of future unimpeded intuition, its possible eternal
degradation through ages of cyclic change, all this, together with kindred
elements, perhaps from the Semitic east, had left a profound effect on
religious minds. The greatness of S. Augustine is nowhere more apparent
than in his frank recognition of the spiritual grandeur of Plato. And that
great spirit, so agile in dialectic subtlety, so sublime in its power of
rising above the cramping limitations of our mortal life, is also, from
its vivid poetic sympathy, most ready to aid weak ordinary souls to climb
“the altar stairs.” Never was pure detached intelligence wedded so
harmoniously to glowing imagination, never was ethereal truth so clothed
in the warm colouring and splendour of the world of sense. Where reason
has strained its utmost strength to solve the eternal riddle, ecstatic
vision and religious myth, transcending the limits of space and time, must
be called in to lend their aid.
Plato and the Platonic Socrates are fully conscious that the conclusions
of philosophic reason on a future state can be only tentative. And they
often fall back on a divine doctrine, or tradition, or a mythopoeic power
by which poetic imagination peoples the dim regions of a world beyond the
senses. The visions of Timarchus and Thespesius in Plutarch are, like the
Nekuia of the _Phaedo_ and of the _Republic_, an effort of the religious
imagination to penetrate the darkness from which reason recoils. Nor is
the effort strange in one who, along with the purest conception of an
immaterial spirit, still believed in the efficacy of legend and material
symbol to reveal the truth which they veiled.(2698)
Thespesius of Soli, a man of evil life, once fell from a height, was taken
up for dead, but revived again on the third day, on the eve of his
funeral. He came back to the living an altered man, after a marvellous
experience. His soul, on escaping from the body, was swept along a sea of
light among the stars.(2699) He saw other souls emerging in the form of
fiery bubbles, which burst and gave forth a subtle form in the likeness of
man.(2700) Three or four he recognised, and would have spoken to them, but
they seemed delirious or senseless, and shrank away from him, forming in
the end little companies of their own, who swept along in wild disordered
movements, uttering strange cries of wailing or terror. The soul of an old
acquaintance then hailed him and became his guide, pointing out that the
souls of the really dead cast no shadow, being perfectly pellucid,
surrounded by light. Yet some of them are marked with scales and weals and
blotches. Adrasteia is the inevitable judge of all, and, through three
ministers, three great classes of criminals receive their proper doom.
Some are punished swiftly on earth, another class meet with heavier
judgment in the shades. The utterly incurable are ruthlessly pursued by
the Erinnys, and finally plunged in a dark abyss, of which the horrors
might not be told. The second class undergo a fierce purgatorial
cleansing, in which some spirits have all their stains wiped out and
become clear and lustrous. But where evil is more obstinate, and passion
again and again asserts its power, the soul long retains a colour
appropriate to its peculiar vice. The mean avaricious soul is dark and
squalid; the cruel is blood-red; the envious violet and livid. Short of
the worst eternal torture, souls with insatiable craving for fleshly
delights, gravitate to a birth into low animal forms.(2701)
Thespesius and his guide are then swept on wings of light to other and
less gloomy scenes. Over the chasm of Forgetfulness, clothed in its
recesses with flowers and herbs which exhale a fragrant odour, the opening
through which Dionysus had passed to his place among the gods, floated a
cloud of spirits like birds, drinking in the fragrance with mirth and
gladness. On again they passed, till they came to a crater which received
the flow of many-coloured streams, snow-white or rainbow-hued,(2702) and
hard by was the oracle of Night and Selene, from which issue dreams and
phantoms to wander among men. Then Thespesius was dazzled with the
radiance which shot from the Delphic tripod upwards to the peaks of
Parnassus; and, blinded by the radiance, he could only hear the shrill
voice of a woman chanting a song which seemed to tell of the hour of his
own death. The woman, his guide explained, was the Sibyl who dwells on the
face of the moon. The sweep of the moon’s onward course prevented him
catching the Sibyl’s words to the full, but he heard a prophecy of the
desolation of Campania by the fires of Vesuvius, and the death of the
emperor.
Other scenes of punishment follow, among which Thespesius saw his own
father rising from the abyss, covered with weals and marks of torture
which had been inflicted for a long-buried crime. Finally, the friendly
guide vanished, and Thespesius was forced onwards by dread spectral forms
to witness fresh scenes of torment. The hypocrite who had hidden his vices
under a veil of decorum was forced, with infinite pain of contortion, to
turn out his inmost soul. The avaricious were plunged by daemons by turns
in three lakes, one of boiling gold, one of freezing lead, and one of
hardest iron. But the worst fate of all was reserved for those whose sins
had been visited on their innocent descendants upon earth, who pursued
them with curses, or clung around them in clouds like bees or bats,
keeping ever poignant the memory of transmitted guilt and suffering.(2703)
The vision of Timarchus, in the piece on the Genius of Socrates, has a
rather different motive from that which inspired the vision of Thespesius.
Thespesius came back with a message as to the endless consequences of sin
in worlds beyond the senses, and the far-reaching responsibilities of the
life on earth. The experiences of Timarchus in the cave of Trophonius were
intended to teach the doctrine of the existence, apart from the lower
powers akin to fleshly nature, of the pure intelligence or daemon, which,
coming from the Divine world, can catch its voices and transmit them to
the mortal life here below. Timarchus made the descent into the cave of
Trophonius and spent in its weird darkness two nights and a day, during
which he saw a wondrous revelation of the spirit-world.(2704) His higher
part, escaping from the sutures of the head, emerged in pellucid ether.
There was no trace of earthly scenery, but countless islands swept around
him, gleaming with the shifting colours of lambent fire, amid tones coming
from ethereal distances.(2705) From a yawning abyss of surging darkness
arose endless wailings and moans. An unseen guide explained to him the
fourfold division of the universe and the boundaries of its provinces.
High above all is the sphere of the One and the Invisible. Next in order
is the region of pure mind, of which the Sun is lord. The third is the
debatable land between pure intelligence and the sensible and mortal—the
region of soul, whose mistress is the moon. Styx is the boundary between
this lunar kingdom and the low world of matter, sin, and death. The three
realms beneath the highest correspond to the three elements of our
composite nature,—mind, soul, and body.(2706) This mortal life is a
temporary and unequal partnership of the Divine reason with the lower
appetites, which have their roots in the flesh. It is an exile, an
imprisonment; it is also a probation of the higher part of human nature,
and its escape comes to it by a twofold death. The first, imperfect and
incomplete, is the severance of soul from body in what men call death, the
falling away of the gross wrappings of matter. This death is under the
sway of Demeter. The second, under the care of Persephone, is a slower
process, in which the ethereal reason, the true eternal personality of
man, is finally released from association with the passionate and
sensitive nature, which is akin to the bodily organism. After the first
corporeal death, all souls wander for a time in the space between the moon
and earth. In the vision of Timarchus, he saw over the chasm of darkness a
host of stars with a curious variety of motion. Some shot up from the gulf
with a straight decided impetus. Others wavered in deflexions to right or
left, or, after an upward movement, plunged again into the abyss. These
motions, as the invisible guide expounded, represent the various
tendencies of souls, corresponding to the strength or weakness of the
spiritual force within them. All souls have an element of the Divine
reason, but it is variously blended with the baser elements in different
natures. In some it becomes completely sunk and absorbed in the life of
the senses. In others, the rational part holds itself above the lower
bodily life, and maintains an almost separate existence. And yet there are
natures in which the rational and irrational elements wage a long and
indecisive conflict until, slowly, at last, the passions recognise their
rightful master, and become obedient to the heavenly voice within. The
debased and hopeless souls, rising for a moment after death, are repelled
with fierce angry flashes by the moon, and fall back again to the world of
sense and corruption, to undergo a second birth. The purer souls are
received by her for a loftier destiny. In some, the pure spiritual part is
finally released by the love of the Sun from the lower powers of the soul,
which wither and fade away as the body does on earth. Others, still
retaining the composite nature, though no longer tainted by the flesh,
dwell in the moon as daemons, but often revisit the earth on various
missions, to furnish inspiration to oracles and mysteries, to save men
from crime or to punish, to help the struggling by land or sea. But even
the daemons may fall from their high estate. If, in their duties of
providence and succour, they show anger or favour or envy, they may be
thrust down once more into the purgatory of material form.(2707)
It may well be that the unsympathetic critic will regard such an
imaginative invasion of the unseen as a freak of lawless fancy, hardly
worth chronicling. And like all similar attempts, the apocalypse of
Plutarch may easily be treated with an airy ridicule. To a more serious
criticism, it seems vitiated by a radical inconsistency. Starting with the
principle of the absolutely immaterial nature of the immortal part of man,
it yet depicts its future existence in the warmest colours of the world of
sense. Its struggles, its tortures, its beatitude are described in terms
which might seem fitting only to a corporeal nature. All this is true; and
yet the answer which Plutarch would probably have made to any such cavils
is very simple. How can you speak of pure disembodied spirit at all, how
can you imagine it, save in the symbolism of ordinary speech? Refine and
subtilise your language to the very uttermost, and it will still retain
associations and reminiscences, however faint and distant, of the material
world. Myth and symbol are necessary to any expression of human thought
alike about God and the future of the soul. The Infinite Spirit and the
future destiny of the finite, which is His child, are equally beyond the
range of human sense and speech. When the human spirit has exhausted all
its efforts of imagination to pierce the darkness of the world beyond the
grave, it takes refuge in some religious system which claims to have a
divine message and speaks in the tones of another world. The voice from
eternity came to troubled heathendom from Egypt and the East.