did not construct an original metaphysical system comparable to those of
the great founders of schools. But Posidonius was the most prominent
representative of that syncretism which, as we have seen, showed itself
in the Pythagoreans before his day and which reigned in the world about
him, because men were weary of the sterile discussions of opposing
thinkers. He gave the support of his authority and his eloquence to the
eclecticism which reconciled the principles of the ancient Greek
schools. Moreover, his Syrian origin led him to combine these doctrines
with the religious ideas of the East, which had with astrology given the
Hellenes a new conception of man and of the gods.[77]
It is exactly here that Posidonius is important from the point of view
of our subject: his tendencies represent a direct reaction against the
scepticism of his master Panaetius, who denied both the survival of the
soul[78] and the possibility of divination. Posidonius introduced into
Stoicism momentous ideas derived at once from Pythagorism and from
Eastern cults, and sought to establish them firmly by connecting them
with a system of the world, which his vast intelligence had sought to
understand in all its aspects. His faith in immortality is strictly
related to his cosmography and receives support from his physics.
It was this system of the world which was, thanks to Ptolemy’s
authority, to perpetuate itself on the whole until the time of
Copernicus. We will here give a broad outline of its essential features,
because the eschatological doctrines were to remain for centuries
connected with it. The terrestrial globe was held to be suspended,
motionless, in the centre of the universe, surrounded by an atmosphere
formed of the three other elements and reaching to the moon. That part
of the atmosphere which was near the earth was thickened and darkened by
heavy vapours rising from the soil and the waters. Above, there moved a
purer and lighter air which, as it neared the sky, was warmed by contact
with the higher fires. Still higher were ranged the concentric spheres
of the seven planets, wrapped in ether, a subtle and ardent fluid—first
the moon, which still received and gave back the exhalations of the
earth,[79] then Mercury and Venus, the two companions of the sun in his
daily course. The fourth place, that is, the middle point of the
superimposed heavens, was occupied by the luminary of the day,—here
Posidonius forsakes Plato and follows the Chaldeans,—the burning heart
of the world, the intelligent light which is the source of our
minds.[80] Above the sun moved the three higher planets—Mars, Jupiter
and Saturn. And these seven wandering stars were surrounded by the
sphere of the fixed stars, which were animated by constant and uniform
movement. That sphere marked the world’s boundary: beyond it there was
only void or the ether.
The universe, as this philosophy imagined it, had therefore well-defined
limits: when men raised their eyes to the constellations of the
firmament, they thought they perceived its end. The depths of the sky
were not then unfathomable; he who sank his gaze in them was not seized
with giddiness at the abysses nor bewildered by inconceivable
magnitudes, and was not tempted to cry with Pascal:[81] “The eternal
silence of these boundless spaces affrights me.” Nor was the universe
then a multiplicity of heavenly bodies moving to an unknown goal and
perpetually transformed, transitory manifestations of an energy
developed for undiscoverable ends. The conception formed of the world
was static, not dynamic. It was a machine of which the wheels turned
according to immutable laws, an organism of which all the parts were
united by reciprocal sympathy as they acted and reacted on each other.
This organism was alive, penetrated throughout by the same essence as
the soul which maintains our life and thought. This soul was an igneous
breath of which the moral corruption was conceived quite materially.
When it gave itself up to the desires of the senses, to corporeal
passions, its substance thickened and was troubled, and the mud of this
pollution adhered to it like a crust. When the soul left the body at the
time of death, it became a spirit like the multitude of demons who
peopled the atmosphere. But its lot varied in accordance with its
condition. If it were laden with matter, its weight condemned it to
float in the densest air, the damp-charged gas which immediately
surrounded the earth, and its very composition then caused it to
reincarnate itself in new bodies.[82] But if it had remained free from
all alloy its lightness caused it to pass immediately through this
heavier layer of air and bore it to the higher spaces. It stopped in
this ascension when, within the ether which was about the moon, it found
itself in surroundings like its own substance. Some elect beings, the
divine spirits of the sages, kept such purity that they rose through the
ether as far as the highest astral spheres. In this system the doctrine
of immortality is seen to be closely knit up with cosmography.
If Posidonius has largely borrowed these ideas from the platonising
Pythagorism of his period, he forsook this philosophy on an essential
point. As a Stoic he did not admit the transcendency of God. For him,
God was immanent in the universe; the seat of the directing reason of
the world (ἡγεμονικόν) was the sphere of the fixed stars, which embraced
all other spheres and determined their revolutions. There too, at the
summit of the world but not outside it, the spirits of the blessed
gathered; from these high peaks they delighted to observe earthly
happenings; and when a pious soul tried to rise to them, these
succouring heroes, like our saints, could lend their aid and protection.
This philosophy did not draw its power of persuasion only from its
logical consistency, which satisfied reason, but it also made a strong
appeal to feeling. Posidonius caused a broad stream of mystical ideas,
undoubtedly derived from the beliefs developed by the astral religions
of the East, to flow into the arid bed of a Stoicism which had become
scholastic. For him, reason was not enclosed in the body, even when it
sojourned here below; it escaped from it to pass with marvellous
swiftness from the depths of the sea to the ends of the earth and the
top of the heavens; it flew through all nature, learning to know
physical laws and to admire the divine order ever more and more. Above
all it could never weary of the sight of the glowing constellations and
their harmonious movements. It felt with emotion, as it gave itself up
to contemplating them, its kinship with the celestial fires; it entered
into communion with the higher gods. In enthusiastic terms, echoed by
his imitators, Posidonius described the ecstasy which seized him who
left the earth, who felt himself transported to the midst of the sacred
chorus of the stars and who followed their rhythmic evolutions. In these
transports, the soul did not only win to infinite power, but also
received from heaven the revelation of the nature and cause of the
celestial revolutions. Thus even in this life it had a foretaste of the
beatitude which would belong to it after death when reason, rid of the
weak organs of the senses, would directly perceive all the splendours of
the divine world and would know its mysteries completely.[83]
This theology attributed to man a power such as to satisfy his proudest
feelings. It did not regard him as a tiny animalcule who had appeared on
a small planet lost in immensity, nor did it, when he scrutinised the
heavens, crush him with a sense of his own pettiness as compared with
bodies whose greatness surpassed the limits of his imagination. It made
man king of creation, placed him in the centre of a still limited world
of which the proportions were not so vast that he could not travel all
over his domain. If he could tear himself from the domination of his
body, he became capable of communicating with the visible gods who were
almost within his reach and whom he might hope to equal after his
passage here below. He knew himself to be united to them by an identity
of nature which alone explained how he understood them.
“Quis caelum possit, nisi caeli munere, nosse
Et reperire deum, nisi qui pars ipse Dei est?”[84]
“Who could know heaven save by heavenly grace, or find God if he were
not himself a part of God?”—words of the Roman poet who echoes
Posidonius’ teaching.
* * * * *
It is easy to understand that such ideas were readily adopted at a time
when human minds, tired of inconclusive disputes, despaired of ever
reaching truth by their own strength. The astral mysticism eloquently
preached by Posidonius was to influence all the later Stoicism. Seneca
in particular, in the numerous passages in which he speaks of the misery
and baseness of life in the body and celebrates the felicity of the pure
souls who live among the stars, shows the imprint of the philosopher of
Apamea. And this philosopher also exerted a far-reaching action beyond
the narrow circle of the school. The erudition of the antiquarian Varro,
the poems of Virgil and Manilius and the biblical exegesis of Philo the
Jew, all drew on him for inspiration. But the author in whom we can best
discern his influence is his pupil Cicero, the abundance of whose
writings allows us to follow the evolution of his thought, which is
characteristic of the whole society of his time.
It is beyond doubt that Cicero was an agnostic for the greater part of
his life. His mind found satisfaction in the scepticism of the New
Academy, or rather he adopted towards the future life the received
attitude of the world in which he lived, where the problem of the soul’s
origin and destiny was regarded as not only insoluble but also idle, as
unworthy to absorb the minds of men who should devote their energies to
the service of the state. The question of the cult to be rendered to the
Manes had been settled once for all by the ancient pontifical law. Old
Rome distrusted speculations as to the Beyond because they dangerously
diverted thought from actual realities. But Cicero, by his study of the
writings of his master Posidonius and by his intercourse with the
senator Nigidius Figulus, a fervent adept of Pythagorism,[85] had been
brought into contact with the stream of mystical ideas which was
beginning to flow through the West. Gradually, as he grew older and life
brought him disappointments, his thought was more attracted to religious
ideas.[86] In 54, when he had given up political life, he composed the
_Republic_, an imitation of Plato’s work on the same subject. As Plato
had introduced the myth of Er the Armenian at the end of his work, so
his Roman imitator concludes with the puzzling picture of “Scipio’s
Dream,” where the destroyer of Carthage receives the revelations of the
conqueror of Zama. The hero, from the height of the celestial spheres,
expounds that doctrine of astral immortality which was common to the
Pythagoreans and to Posidonius. It is given as yet only as a dream, a
vision the truth of which is in no way guaranteed. But in 45 B. C.
Cicero suffered a cruel loss in the death of his only daughter Tullia.
His grief persuaded him that this beloved being still lived among the
gods. Even while he accused himself of unreasonable weakness, he ordered
that not a tomb but a chapel (_fanum_), consecrating her apotheosis,
should be raised to this young woman. The letters he wrote at this time
to Atticus, from the shores of the Pomptine Marshes, in the solitude of
Astura, apprise us of his most intimate feelings. He gave vent to his
sorrow in writing a _Consolatio_, and in its preserved fragments we see
him strangely impressed by the Pythagorean doctrines: he speaks of the
soul, exempt from all matter, as celestial and divine and therefore
eternal, of the soul’s life here below as a penalty inflicted on it
because it is born to expiate anterior crimes (_scelerum luendorum
causa_).
Cicero’s sensitive spirit, troubled by the perplexing problem of our
destiny, did not turn to the old discredited beliefs but to the new
conceptions which a mystical philosophy had brought from the East.
_Hortensius_ and the _Tusculans_, written in this period of his life,
show us the empire which the Neo-Stoicism of his master and the
Neo-Pythagorism of his fellow-senator then exercised over his mind,
saddened and disillusioned as he was, and show us too how he sought
consolation for the private and public ills which were overwhelming him
in the luminous doctrine of a blissful survival.
This spiritual evolution is an image of the great change which was about
to take place in the Roman world.
* * * * *
Stoic philosophy, although its maxims had been popularised by education
and literature, was almost as incapable of exercising a wide influence
on the deep masses of the people as the esoteric theosophy revealed in
the aristocratic conventicles of the Pythagoreans. The urban “plebs,” to
which slavery and trade had given a strong admixture of Eastern blood,
and the peasants of the rural districts, where the gaps caused by
depopulation were filled up by a foreign labour supply, were beginning
at the end of the Republican period to hear new dogmas preached, dogmas
which were winning an ever increasing number of believers. The ancient
national cults of Greece and Rome aimed above all at ensuring civic
order and earthly welfare, and paid small regard to the spiritual
perfection of individuals and their eternal future. But now exotic cults
claimed to reveal the secret of immortality to their adepts.[87] The
Oriental mysteries, propagated in the West, united in the promise of
securing holiness in this life and felicity in the next, while they
imparted to their initiates the knowledge of certain rites and required
submission to certain precepts. Instead of the fluctuating and
disputable beliefs of philosophers as to destiny in the Beyond, these
religions gave certainty founded on divine revelation and on the faith
of countless generations attached to them. The truth, which the
mysticism of the thinkers looked to find in direct communication with
heaven, was here warranted by a venerable tradition and by the daily
manifestations of the gods adored. The belief in life beyond the grave,
which had in ancient paganism been so vague and melancholy, was
transformed into confident hope in a definite beatitude. Participation
in the occult ceremonies of the sect was an infallible means of finding
salvation. A society that was weary of doubt received these promises
eagerly, and the old beliefs of the East combined with an eclectic
philosophy to give a new eschatology to the Roman Empire.
The salvation ensured by the mysteries was conceived as identification
with the god venerated in them. By virtue of this union the initiate was
reborn, like this god, to new life after he had perished, or, like him,
escaped from the fatal law of death which weighs on humanity. He was
“deified” or “immortalised,” after he had taken part, as actor, in a
liturgical drama reproducing the myth of the god whose lot was thus
assimilated to his own. Purifications, lustrations and unctions,
participation in a sacred banquet, revelations, apparitions and
ecstasies—a complicated series of ceremonies and instructions helped to
bring about this metamorphosis of the faithful whom a higher power
absorbed or penetrated with its energy. We shall return to this
sacramental operation which made pious souls equal to the divinity.[88]
There is another point on which, in the course of this historical
introduction, we must dwell a little longer, namely, the evolution
undergone by the conception of the Beyond taught in the different
mysteries and the share of philosophy in the transformation. For if in
the various sects the liturgy was usually preserved with scrupulous
fidelity, its theological interpretation varied considerably as time
passed. In paganism much doctrinal liberty was always combined with
respect for rites.
Some of the mysteries often gave in their beginnings a rather coarse
idea of the future life, and the pleasures which might be enjoyed
therein were very material. The ancient Greek conception, going back to
Orphism, was, as we have seen, that of a subterranean kingdom divided
into two contrasted parts—Tartarus where the wicked, plunged in a dark
slough or subjected to other pains, suffering the chastisement of their
faults, on the one side; on the other, the Elysian Fields, those
flowered, luminous meadows, gay with song and dance, in which the
blessed pursued their favourite occupations, whether they were allowed
to dwell there for ever, or whether they awaited there the hour fixed
for their rebirth on earth.[89] This eschatology, which had become the
common possession of the Hellenes, was certainly that of the mysteries
of Greece and in particular of the mysteries of Eleusis. But these
mysteries were never more than local religions: however numerous were
the initiates attracted by their renown, they were bound to the soil
where they were born. Thus their influence was very limited in the Roman
period and cannot be compared with that of the universal cults which
were propagated throughout the Mediterranean world. As for Orphism,
which was never connected with any one temple, it is doubtful whether it
still constituted an actual sect, and if it did, it certainly spread
over a very narrow field. Its influence was perpetuated chiefly because
it was absorbed by Pythagorism.
Among the mysteries propagated in the West, the most ancient were those
of the Thraco-Phrygian gods, Dionysos and Sabazios, who were indeed
looked upon as identical. We know that in 186 B. C. a _senatus
consultum_ forbade the celebration of the Bacchanalia in Italy, and in
139 some sectaries of Jupiter Sabazius, who identified this god with the
Jahve-Sabaoth of the Jews, were expelled from Rome by the praetor at the
same time as the “Chaldeans.” The cult practised by the votaries of
Bacchus or Liber Pater, whose confraternities were maintained until the
end of paganism, differed profoundly from the Dionysos worship of
ancient Greece: a number of Oriental elements had been introduced into
it; in particular, the relations between Dionysos and Osiris, which go
back to a very remote period, had become singularly close in Egypt.
However, many reliefs on tombstones and the celebrated paintings found
in the catacombs of Praetextatus prove that the cults of the
Thraco-Phrygian gods remained faithful to the old idea of a future life.
The shade went down into the bowels of the earth, never again to leave
them. If judged worthy, it took part in an eternal banquet, of which the
initiate received a foretaste on earth, in the feasts of the mysteries.
Sacred drunkenness, a divine exaltation, was the pledge of the joyous
intoxication which the god of wine would grant in Hades to the faithful
who had united themselves to him.[90]
In 205, towards the end of the second Punic war, the cult of Cybele, the
Great Mother of the Gods, and of Attis, her associate, was transported
from Pessinus in Phrygia and officially adopted by the Roman people. The
great feasts of this religion were celebrated in March about the equinox
and commemorated the death and resurrection of Attis, the emblem of
vegetation, which, after it has withered, flowers again in the spring.
The faithful associated their own destiny with the lot of their god:
like him they would be reborn to a new life after they had died. Their
doctrines on this point were certainly transformed as time passed, for
no Oriental cult which spread in the West underwent more evolution,
since none was more fundamentally barbarous when it came from Asia.
Originally, Cybele was the goddess of the dead, because Mother Earth
receives them into her bosom. Every Phrygian tomb is a sanctuary and its
epitaph a dedication: often the graves are consecrated to the goddess
and bear her image or that of the lion, her substitute. Often too the
tombstone has the shape of a door, the door of the subterranean world
whither the dead descend. The belief seems to have been held that the
deceased were absorbed in the Great Mother who had given them birth, and
that they thus participated in her divinity. She brought forth corn and
grapes for men and thus sustained them day by day, and the bread and
wine, taken in the meal which was the essential act of the initiation,
would ensure immortality to those who were of the mystery. “Thou givest
us the food of life with unfailing constancy,” says a prayer, “and when
our soul departs we will take refuge in thee. Thus all that thou givest,
always falls to thee again.”[91]
Towards the end of the Republic the mysteries of Isis and Serapis, which
had come from Alexandria and had already spread through the south of
Italy, established themselves in Rome and maintained themselves there in
spite of opposition from the senate. Under the Empire, the Egyptian
religion displayed all the pomp of its liturgy in magnificent temples
and had a number of votaries in every province. The cult of Osiris, of
which that of Serapis was a form, was originally a cult of the fields,
like that of Attis, and the great feast which its adherents celebrated
in autumn recalls the Phrygian spring feasts. The death of Osiris, whose
body had been torn to pieces by Seth, was mourned; and when Isis had
found the scattered fragments of the corpse, joined them together and
reanimated it, noisy rejoicing followed the lamentation. Like the
initiates of Cybele and Attis, those of Isis and Serapis were associated
with the passion and resurrection of their god. And, in the same way,
the oldest conception of immortality in these mysteries was that the
departed went down into the infernal regions, where a man became another
Serapis, a woman another Isis, which is to say that they were
assimilated to the gods who had granted them salvation.[92] This is why
on numerous funeral reliefs the dead man, who has become a hero and is
shown lying on a couch, bears on his head the bushel (_modius_) which is
the attribute of Serapis. In consequence, however, of the identification
of this god with Dionysos, the joys beyond the grave are also
represented as a feast in the Elysian Fields at which the great master
of banquets presides.[93]
All these mysteries conceive immortality as a descent of the dead into
Hades. For them, the kingdom of the dead lies in the bosom of the earth.
Those who have been initiated will there enjoy a felicity made up of
purely material pleasures, or they will be identified with the powers
who reign over the nether world and will have part in their divine life.
It will be noticed how closely this last conception approached to that
of ancient Stoicism, according to which the various parts of the human
organism, dissociated by death, were to regain their integrity in the
divine elements of the universe.
Quite another doctrine was propagated by the Syrian cults and the
Persian mysteries of Mithras, which spread in the West in the first
century of our era. These religions taught that the soul of the just man
does not go below the ground but rises to the sky, there to enjoy divine
bliss in the midst of the stars in the eternal light. Only the wicked
were condemned to roam the earth’s surface, or were dragged by the
demons into the dusky depths in which the spirit of evil reigned.
Opinions differed as to the region of heaven in which the souls of the
elect dwelt. The “Chaldeans,” who looked upon the sun as the master and
the intelligence of the universe, made him the author of human reason,
which returned to him after it had left the body, while for the priests
of Mithras the spirit rose, by way of the planetary spheres, to the
summit of the heavens. We will have to examine later the different forms
of astral immortality.[94] But you will already have noticed how nearly
this immortality, as formulated by the Iranian and Semitic sects,
approximated to the doctrine taught by Pythagorism and adopted by
Neo-Stoicism.