that souls are related to the celestial fires, whence they descend at
birth and whither they reascend at death, had probably been borrowed by
the ancient Pythagoreans from the astral religions of the East. Recent
research seems to have established the fact of its Chaldeo-Persian
origin. But the Greek philosophers, according to their wont, defined and
developed this idea in an original way. In the Hellenistic period, when
they adopted astrology, they were subject for the second time to the
ascendancy of the scientific religion of the “Chaldeans”; and, in their
turn, they reacted on the Oriental cults when these spread in the
Graeco-Roman world. We have sure evidence that the mysteries of Mithras
were, in particular, strongly affected by the influence of the
Pythagorean sect, which was itself organised like a kind of mystery. In
a more general way, philosophy introduced into the mysteries ethical
ideas and, instead of the purely ritualistic or rather magical means of
salvation, some moral requirements became necessary to earn immortality.
There is here a mass of actions and reactions of which the details
escape us; but we can form some idea of such a syncretism from the
remains of the theological writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus,
from the writings, that is, which are supposed to contain the
revelations of the Egyptian god Thot. This professedly Egyptian wisdom
includes a number of ideas and definitions which are characteristic of
Posidonius and Neo-Pythagorism. The Greek and the Egyptian elements are
so closely associated in it that it is very difficult to separate the
one from the other. We find another example of the same mixture in the
“Chaldaic Oracles,” which were probably composed about the year 200 of
our era and which became one of the sacred books of Neo-Platonism.
Unlike the Hermetic writings, this collection of verses does indeed seem
to have belonged to a sect practising an actual cult: its greater part
is taken up with mythology, and the fantastic mysticism of the East is
more prominent here than in the Hermetic lore, but the mind of the
compiler of these revelations was also penetrated by the ideas which the
Greek masters had widely circulated.
The tenet of astral immortality, which philosophy shared with the cults
emanating from Syria and Persia, imposed itself on the ancient world. It
is curious to notice how it was introduced into the theology of the very
mysteries to which it was at first foreign: Attis ended by becoming a
solar god, and thenceforward it was in the heights of heaven that Cybele
was united to the souls she had prevented from wandering in darkness and
had saved from hell. The priests of the Alexandrian divinities were
similarly to explain that the dead had not their dwelling in the
interior of our globe, but that the “subterranean” (ὑπόγειος) kingdom of
Serapis was situated beneath the earth, that is, in the lower hemisphere
of heaven, bounded by the line of the horizon.[95]
According as the Oriental religions were more largely propagated, faith
in a new eschatology spread gradually among the people; and although
memories and survivals of the old belief in the life of the dead in the
grave and the shade’s descent into the infernal depths may have
lingered, the doctrine which predominated henceforward was that of
celestial immortality.
The distance separating the age of Augustus from that of the Flavians on
this point can be measured by reading Plutarch’s moral works (about 120
A. D.). A constant preoccupation with religious matters, and in
particular a learned curiosity as to the cults of the East, shows itself
in this Greek of Chaeronea, living in a country which, in its pride in
its own past, had more than any other resisted the invasion of
exoticism. Further, the eclectic philosopher likes to insert in his
dissertations myths in which, after the fashion of Plato, he expounds
the lot of souls in the Beyond and their struggle to rise heavenwards.
An attempt has been made to prove—wrongly, I think—that he is here
inspired by Posidonius. These apocalyptic visions, which claim to reveal
truths previously ignored, are not taken from that well-known writer;
they have a religious imprint which betrays sacerdotal influence, and
the philosophic ideas they contain are those which were part of the
common wisdom of the Pythagoreans and the mysteries.
There doubtless still were in the second century Stoics, like the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, for whom the future life was a mere hypothesis,
or at most a hope (p. 14), as well as sceptics, like Lucian of Samosata,
whose irony mocked all beliefs. But gradually their number diminished
and the echo of their voices grew feebler. Faith in survival deepened as
present life came to seem a burden harder and harder to bear. The
pessimistic idea that birth is a chastisement and that the true life is
not that passed on earth, imposed itself in proportion to the growth of
public and private ills and to the aggravation of the empire’s social
and moral decline. In the period of violence and devastation which
occurred in the third century, there was so much undeserved suffering,
there were so many unjust failures and unpunished crimes, that men took
refuge in the expectation of a better life in which all the iniquity of
this world would be retrieved. No earthly hope then brightened life. The
tyranny of a corrupt bureaucracy stifled every attempt at political
progress. Science seemed exhausted and no longer discovered unknown
truths; art was struck with sterility of invention and reproduced
heavily the creations of the past. An increasing impoverishment and a
general insecurity constantly discouraged the spirit of enterprise. The
idea spread that humanity was smitten by incurable decay, that society
was on the road to dissolution and the end of the world was impending.
All these causes of discouragement and pessimism must be remembered in
order to understand the dominance of the old idea, then so often
repeated, that a bitter necessity constrains the spirit of man to
enclose itself in matter, and that death is a liberation which delivers
it from its carnal prison. In the heavy atmosphere of a period of
oppression and powerlessness, the despondent souls of men aspired with
ineffable ardour to the radiant spaces of heaven.
* * * * *
The mental evolution of Roman society was complete when Neo-Platonism
took upon itself the office of directing minds. The powerful mysticism
of Plotinus (205–262 A. D.) opened up the path which Greek philosophy
was to follow until the world of antiquity reached its end. We shall not
undertake to notice in this place the discrepancies of the latest
teachers who theorised about the destiny of souls. In the course of
these lectures we shall have occasion to quote some of the opinions of
Porphyry, the chief disciple of Plotinus, and of his successor
Jamblichus, who was, like himself, a Syrian. We will here do no more
than indicate broadly what distinguished the theories of this school
from those which had hitherto been dominant.
The system generally accepted, by the mysteries as by philosophy, was a
pantheism according to which divine energy was immanent in the universe
and had its home in the celestial spheres. The souls, conceived as
material, could in consequence rise to the stars but did not leave the
world. The Neo-Pythagoreans themselves had not had a very firmly
established doctrine on this point: while some of them stated that
reason was incorporeal, others, as we have seen (p. 24), admitted with
the Stoics that it was an igneous substance. It is true that even in
paganism the appearance can be discerned of the belief in a Most High
(Ὕψιστος) or an unknown god Ἄγνωστος, whom some people supposed to dwell
above the starry heavens, beyond the limits of the world, and towards
whom pious spirits could rise. The revivers of Platonic idealism
asserted the transcendence of God and the spirituality of the soul more
strongly and clearly. A whole chapter of the _Enneades_ of Plotinus is
taken up with refuting those who held the soul to be material.[96] As a
principle of life and movement, it is stated to be immortal by its very
essence, so that if it kept its purity perfect, it would find after its
passage here below eternal felicity in the intelligible world.
The Neo-Platonists preserved the idea, which had previously been
admitted, that this intellectual essence comes down to earth through the
planetary spheres and the atmosphere, and that as it sinks in the
luminous ether and the damp air, it becomes laden with particles of the
elements through which it passes. It surrounds itself with a garment or,
as it is sometimes called, with a vehicle (ὄχημα) which thickens as it
gradually draws near us.[97] This subtle body, the seat of the passions
and of feeling, is intermediary between the spiritual principle which
has issued from God and the flesh in which it is to enclose itself, and
for certain philosophers it survives death and accompanies the soul to
the Beyond, at least if the soul, not being free from earthly admixture,
cannot wholly leave the world of sense, and therefore rises only to the
planetary circle or to that of the fixed stars.
When the soul has suffered even more from the taint to which its contact
with matter, the source of evil, exposes it, it is doomed to reincarnate
itself in a new body and again to undergo the trial of this life. When
it has become incurably corrupt and burdened with evil, it goes down
into the depths of Hades.
Following Plato, Plotinus and his successors have adopted the
Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. They have even developed it, as
we shall see,[98] together with the whole pessimistic and ascetic
conception of life, the conception which looks at birth as a pain and a
fall, a temporary subjection to a body from which emancipation must be
sought. It is only after this liberation that the soul can reach perfect
wisdom; it must no longer be troubled by the senses if it is to attain
to the end of existence, to union with God.
This union can be realised even during this life in moments of ecstasy,
in which the soul rises above thought and gives itself up entirely to
love for the ineffable Unity in which it is absorbed. Like many other
mystics, Plotinus disdains the ceremonies of positive cults: they were
superfluous to the sage who could of himself enter into communion with
the supreme Being. But even his disciple Porphyry conceded a greater
value to rites and initiations. If they were powerless to lead the
partakers of mysteries to the highest degree of perfection, their effect
yet was to render men worthy to live among the visible gods who people
heaven.[99] But only philosophical wisdom could rise to the intelligible
world and the Unknowable.
The principle of a mystical relation between man and the divinity was to
lead Neo-Platonism to more and more reverence for religious traditions.
For it was held that in the past the revelation of truth had been
granted by Heaven not only to divine Plato and the sages of Greece, but
to all the founders of barbarous cults and authors of sacred writings.
They all communicated profound teaching, which they sometimes hid
beneath the veil of allegory. Inspired by the symbolism of the
Pythagoreans, the last representatives of Greek philosophy claimed to
rediscover the whole of Platonic metaphysics and the Platonic doctrine
of immortality in the myths and rites of paganism. The speeches of
Julian the Apostate on the Sun-King and the Mother of the Gods are
characteristic examples of this bold exegesis, destitute of all critical
and even all common sense, which was adopted by the last champions of
the old beliefs.
* * * * *
These aberrations of Neo-Platonic thought must not hide the school’s
historical importance from us, any more than the excesses of the
superstitious theurgy which invaded it. When it revived Plato’s
idealism, it produced a lasting change in the eschatological ideas which
prevailed in paganism, and it deeply influenced even the Christian
doctrines of immortality held since the fourth century. This will be
better seen, we hope, in the course of these lectures.[100] It may be
said that the conception of the lot of souls which reigned at the end of
antiquity persisted on the whole through the Middle Ages—the immaterial
spirits of the just rising through the planetary spheres to the Supreme
Being enthroned above the zone of the fixed stars; the posthumous
purification of those whom life has sullied in a purgatory intermediary
between heaven and hell; the descent of the wicked into the depths of
the earth where they suffered eternal chastisement. This threefold
division of the universe and of souls was largely accepted at the time
of the Empire’s decline by pagans and by Christians, and after long
centuries it was again to find magnificent expression in Dante’s “Divine
Comedy.” Before it could be destroyed astronomy had to destroy the whole
cosmography of Posidonius and Ptolemy on which it was based. When the
earth ceased to be the centre of the universe, the one fixed point in
the midst of the moving circles of the skies, and became a tiny planet
turning round another heavenly body, which itself moved in the immensity
of space, among an infinity of similar stars, the naïve conception
formed by the ancients of the journey of souls in a well-enclosed world
could no longer be maintained. The progress of science discredited the
convenient solution bequeathed to scholasticism by antiquity, and left
us in the presence of a mystery of which the pagan mysteries never had
even a suspicion.
I
AFTER LIFE IN THE TOMB
When Cicero in his _Tusculans_[101] first touches on the question of the
immortality of the soul, he begins by citing in its support the fact
that belief in it has existed since earliest antiquity. He states that
unless the first Romans were convinced that man was not reduced to
nought, when he left this life, and that all feeling was not
extinguished in death, there could be no explanation of the rules of the
old pontifical law as to funerals and burials, rules the violation of
which was regarded as an inexpiable crime. This remark is that of a very
judicious observer. There subsist in the funeral rites of all peoples,
in the ceremony of mourning established by the religious law or by
tradition, customs which derive from archaic conceptions of life beyond
the tomb and which are still followed although their original meaning is
no longer understood. Modern learning has sometimes successfully sought
to elucidate them, borrowing light from the practices of savage peoples
and from European folk-lore. We will not enter the domain of these
researches, for since our special purpose here is to expound the ideas
as to immortality held in later times, we have to consider only the
beliefs which were still alive in that period. A false interpretation
supplied by a philosopher may have more historical value for us than the
true explanation of an institution which had lost its meaning.
But even among the ideas which were neither obliterated nor discredited,
conceptions which originated at very different dates have to be
distinguished.
The doctrines of paganism, like the soil of our planet, are formed of
superimposed strata. When we dig into them we discover successive layers
under the upper deposits of recent alluvia. Nothing was suddenly
destroyed in ancient religions; their transformations were never
revolutionary. Faith in the past was not entirely abolished when new
ways of believing were formed. Contradictory opinions could exist side
by side for a long time without any shock being caused by their
disagreement; and it was only little by little and slowly that argument
excluded one way of thinking to give place to the other, while there
were always hardy survivals left, both in thought and in customs. Thus
the beliefs as to the future life which were current under the Roman
Empire present a singular mixture, coarse ideas going back to the
prehistoric period mingling with theories imported into Italy at a late
date.
We will today examine the oldest of all the ways of considering survival
in the Beyond: life in the tomb.
* * * * *
Ethnology has proved that among all peoples the belief that the dead
continue to live in the tomb has reigned, and sometimes still reigns.
The primitive man, disconcerted by death, cannot persuade himself that
the being who moved, felt, willed, as he does, can be suddenly deprived
of all his faculties. The most ancient and the crudest idea is that the
corpse itself keeps some obscure sensitiveness which it cannot manifest.
It is imagined to be in a state like sleep. The vital energy which
animated the body is still attached to it and cannot exist without it.
This belief was so powerful in Egypt that it inspired a whole section of
the funeral ritual and called forth the infinite care that was taken to
preserve mummies. Even in the West it survived vaguely, and traces of it
might still be discovered today. Lucretius combats this invincible
illusion of men who, even while they affirm that death extinguishes all
feeling, keep a secret uneasiness as to the suffering which their mortal
remains may undergo and are frightened by the idea that their bodies may
be eaten by worms or carnivorous animals. They cannot separate
themselves from this prone body, which they believe is still their self.
Why, continues the poet, would it be more painful to be the prey of wild
beasts than to be burnt by the flame of the pyre, to freeze lying on the
icy slab of the grave or to be crushed by the weight of heaped-up
earth?[102] This very fear that the earth may weigh heavily on those who
are deposited in the grave shows itself among many peoples who inter
their dead, and was expressed in Rome by a formula so very usual that it
was recalled in epitaphs by initials only: “_S(it) t(ibi) t(erra)
l(evis)_,” “May earth be light for thee.” Until the Empire Stoic
philosophers could be found who upheld that the soul endures only for
the time for which the body is preserved.[103]
But experience proved that the corpse decomposed rapidly in the soil,
all that remained of it being a skeleton bereft of the organs of
sensation. When the custom of incineration, followed in Italy from the
prehistoric period, became practically general in Rome, the destruction
of the body took place regularly before the eyes of those present. Thus
men reached the belief that those near and dear to them, whom they
sometimes saw again in their dreams or seemed to feel beside them, who
were kept alive at least in memory, differed from the beings of flesh
and bones whom they had known. From those material individuals subtle
elements detached themselves, filled with a mysterious force which
subsisted when the human organism had crumbled to dust or been reduced
to ashes. It was this same principle which temporarily departed from
persons who lost consciousness in a faint or a lethargy. If this light
essence did not leave a dying man at the moment of his death—whether or
not it could escape from his body immediately was indeed uncertain—it
was set free by the funeral fire,[104] but it still inhabited the tomb
in which his remains rested. The idea that it was somehow attached to
his remains had taken root in men’s minds, and even literature bears
witness to the persistence of this deeply implanted popular belief.
Propertius,[105] when cursing a woman, desires that “her Manes may not
be able to settle near her ashes.” And at Liternum in Campania, where
Scipio Africanus caused himself to be buried because, as he said, he did
not wish to leave even his bones to his ungrateful country, the grotto
was shown where he rested and where, so men believed,[106] “a serpent
kept guard over his Manes.”
This primitive conception of the persistence of a latent life in the
cold and rigid corpse or of its passage to a vaporous being like the
body, is connected with the belief that the dead retain all the needs
and feelings which were previously theirs. The funeral cult, celebrated
at the tomb, is born of this belief. It proceeds from fear as much as
from piety, for the dead are prone to resentment and quick in vengeance.
The unknown force which inhabits them, the mysterious power which causes
them to act, inspired great awe. If the natural course of their
existence had been interrupted, especially if they had died before their
time, they were suspected of being victims of some mischievous
enchantment; their sickness was looked upon as an invasion of maleficent
spirits provoked by spells. The wrath of those who had thus been torn
from their homes and their wonted way of life was to be dreaded. Loud
outbursts of grief followed by prolonged manifestations of mourning must
prove to them, in the first place, that they were truly lamented and
that no attempt had been made to get rid of them. Then, in their new
abode to which they were conveyed, they must be ensured a bearable
existence, in order that they might remain therein quietly and not
trouble their families nor punish, by some intrusion, those who
neglected them. Solicitude for the beloved, the desire to prevent their
suffering, the hope of obtaining their protection, partly account for
the origin and maintenance of these practices, but they were above all
inspired by the terror which spirits called forth, as is proved by the
fact that they were the same for all the departed without distinction,
for those who had been loved and those who had been hated.