this world has for this soul consequences which their long duration
makes more momentous. If virtue enables it to rise upward at each new
birth and to acquire, as the ages revolve, an ever increasing
perfection, perversion of character produces effects which are
calamitous not only in this life but also in several other lives through
the centuries. Moral laws are no less infallible than physical laws.
Right or wrong, every act has to be paid for with harm or benefit in the
long chain of incarnations. By his acquired disposition, man determines
his future throughout a sequence of generations; the evil he suffers is
to be imputed not to the creator but to himself. A bust of Plato found
at Tivoli and now preserved in San Francisco[451] has graven on it the
following sentence of the Master as to the lot of immortal souls: “The
fault is the chooser’s; God is without fault”—Αἰτία ἑλομένω, ὁ θεὸς
ἀναίτιος.
The very fact of birth was a pain for the soul, since it tore it from
its celestial home and plunged it into a soiled and troubled world;
consequently it was not necessary for the soul’s chastisement that it
should descend into the body of animals. Indeed, certain thinkers
rejected this kind of metempsychosis: a reasonable spirit could not,
they held, dwell in a being deprived of reason. Transmigration occurred
therefore exclusively from man to man and from beast to beast. Such was
the opinion defended by Porphyry and Jamblichus, who, in order to
dispose of the texts of Plato which were contrary to this theory, upheld
that he spoke figuratively, and that his “asses,” his “wolves” and his
“lions” signified persons who resembled these beasts in ignorance or
ferocity.[452]
It is seen that this metempsychosis was getting far away from that which
had its origin in the primitive beliefs. The “cycle of generation” was
no longer conceived as a flux of life circulating throughout the variety
of the animate beings peopling the earth, but as the descent and the
ascent of a psychic essence, passing alternately from heaven to earth
and from earth to heaven.
It is to these doctrines that Virgil alludes when in the Aeneid he shows
us, gathered in a remote place of the Elysian Fields, the shades whom
after a thousand years a god calls to come in a great troop to the river
Lethe, there to drink the forgetfulness of the past, whereby “they begin
again to wish to return to the body.”[453]
* * * * *
But the poet also gives us precious hints as to the lot reserved for the
soul in the interval between its incarnations. For palingenesis, unlike
the doctrine of perpetual reincorporation, left a place for chastisement
in the infernal regions. These were however situated, as we have seen,
for the Pythagoreans and Posidonius, whom Virgil interpreted, not on
earth but in the air. It was there that the soul had to purify itself
from the stains acquired while it was in touch with the flesh. This
pollution, we know,[454] was conceived in a very material form. The
texts speak of a thickening of the subtle substance of which the soul is
formed, of concretions encrusting it, of indelible marks with which the
vices stain it. When the soul left the corpse, of which it kept the
form, it first, as we have seen, floated in the ambient air. When it was
not weighed down by the matter with which it had become impregnated, the
breath of the atmosphere raised it gently and, gradually warming it,
bore it to the heavens, and this is why the Winds are often represented
on tombstones.[455] But these Winds, fierce divinities, could also cause
the soul to expiate its faults bitterly. If it had lost its purity and
lightness, the whirlwinds drew it into their vortex, the storms rolled
and buffeted it, thus violently tearing away the crust which had become
attached to it. The souls were thus freed from defilements contracted
during life just as linen hung in the air is bleached and loses all
odour.
Their passage through the air did not complete their purification. In
the East the idea was old that above the firmament was found the great
reservoir of the waters which fell to the ground as rain. Beyond, a
burning zone must extend, where the heavenly bodies were lit, and a
river of fire, identified with the Pyriphlegethon of the Greeks, was
imagined. These old mythological ideas were brought into relation with
Stoic physics: above the region of the winds stretched that of the
clouds, in which the rain, the snow and the hail were formed, and higher
still there was the burning air, in which the lightning flashed and
which touched the starry spheres. The souls must blaze a path through
these obstacles. After being tossed and blown about by the winds, they
were drenched by rain and plunged into the gulf of the upper waters.
They reached at last the fires of heaven, of which the heat scorched
them. Not till they had undergone this threefold trial, in the course of
which they had passed through countless years of expiation, did they at
length find peace in the serenity of the luminous ether.[456]
Virgil,[457] in the passage already quoted, alludes to this doctrine
when, in speaking of the souls, he says:
“... Aliae panduntur inanes
Suspensae ad ventos, aliis sub gurgite vasto
Infectum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni.”
“Some are exposed, hung lightly to the winds; as to others, the crime
infecting them is washed away in a deep gulf or burnt by fire.”
In an eschatological myth, which Plutarch[458] borrows from Demetrius of
Tarsus, he shows us guilty souls who seek to reach the moon and who do
not arrive thither, but are hunted and buffeted as by swelling billows,
and others who have reached the goal, but are rejected and plunged from
on high into the abyss. Similarly, Hermes Trismegistus depicts souls
flung from the height of heaven into the depths of the atmosphere and
delivered to the storms and whirlwinds of warring air, water and fire.
Their eternal punishment is to be tossed and carried in different
directions by the cosmic waves which roll unceasingly between earth and
heaven.[459]
The passage of souls through the elements is represented symbolically on
a funeral monument almost contemporary with the verses of Virgil, which
was discovered near Scarbantia in Pannonia.[460] Above the portraits of
the deceased, there appear first in the spandrels of this _cippus_ two
busts of the winds facing each other. Higher up, on the architrave, are
two Tritons, and on each side of a trident two dolphins, which evidently
represent the idea of the watery element. Finally, at the top of the
stone, in the pediment, we see two lions. The lion, for physical and
astrological reasons, was considered as the symbol of fire, the igneous
principle.
We have seen[461] that for the doctrine which placed the limit of the
dwelling of the gods and the elect in the zone of the moon, another was
substituted according to which the souls, in order to regain the purity
of their original nature, had to traverse the spheres of the planets to
reach the heaven of fixed stars. The trials of purgatory had to be
prolonged up to the entry into the dwelling of the blessed. The idea
was, therefore, conceived of attributing each of the planets to one of
the elements. The moon was the ethereal earth, Mercury the water, Venus
the air, the sun the fire: and inversely, Mars was the fire, Jupiter the
air, Saturn the water, and the sphere of the stars the celestial earth,
in which lay the Elysian Fields. Thus the soul, in order to be saved,
had to be reborn three times in virtue of a triple passage through the
four elements.[462]
This last doctrine, which is connected with astrological speculations,
seems to have had only a limited vogue and to have been of ephemeral
duration. On the other hand, the idea of a purgatory situated in the
atmosphere between our earth and the moon, a place in which souls were
purified not only by fire but also by air and water, was long to survive
the fall of paganism and to be propagated through the Middle Ages in the
West as in the East. For Dante, purgatory still occupied a fiery zone
stretched between the terrestrial and the celestial circles.
* * * * *
Was the soul which, after a long expiation, had reached the Elysian
Fields and the sphere of the stars, always to descend thence, seized
with a blind love for the body, and to pass again through the trials of
another earthly life? No, the ancient Orphics already flattered
themselves that by their cathartic rites they obtained for the soul an
escape from the fatal cycle of generation and regaining of heaven for
ever. The Pythagoreans inherited this doctrine, which they kept until
the Roman period. In spite of the contrary opinion of certain thinkers,
pagan philosophers and priests generally taught that after pilgrimages,
more or less long, after a succession of deaths and rebirths, the
purified spirits returned to dwell for ever in their celestial country.
It was to this goal that the mysteries promised to lead their initiate;
this was the end which the sages flattered themselves that they attained
by their virtue.
It will be understood that such a hope, combined with the suppression of
eternal damnation in Hades, led necessarily to the doctrine of the
eventual salvation of all souls. We know this system especially through
Origen, but he merely reproduced a theory to which the evolution of
pagan ideas had led.
We have seen that metempsychosis helped the philosophers to shake, if
not to ruin, the belief in infernal punishment. But this belief again
had power towards the end of antiquity, when the dualist sects which
were the outcome of Persian Mazdeism were propagated and when Plato
became the supreme authority in philosophy. We touched on this point, in
another lecture,[463] when we showed how the idea of a demons’ prison in
the bosom of the earth triumphed.
Thus, when the Roman world was in its decline, men came back to the old
threefold distinction of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. The very
guilty, who cannot be corrected, are hurled into Tartarus, where they
suffer for ever the punishment of their incurable wickedness. Souls less
corrupt are subjected to purification, either by passing through the
elements or by undergoing successive reincarnations, and thus they
regain their original nature before they are readmitted to their first
dwelling. Finally, the most perfect souls, those of the wise who have
freed themselves from the domination of the body and have not let
themselves be contaminated by matter, and those of the pious faithful,
to whom religious lustrations have given back their purity or whom
initiations to the mysteries have made equal to the gods, at once rise
again to the celestial spheres.
In the next lecture we shall speak of the rewards reserved for them in
the dwelling of the blessed.
VIII
THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED
We have seen how the evolution of religious faith caused the
dwelling-place of the dead to move from the tomb to the nether world and
from the nether world to the heavens. When the abode of souls was
changed, all the ideas attached to the future life had to be transposed.
In this lecture we shall endeavour to make clear how the opinions which
were held as to the felicity of the blessed were thus transformed. We
shall take up again matter which we have already touched upon in another
connection and try to show the successive changes undergone by three
manners of conceiving happiness in after life: the repose of the dead,
the repast of the dead, and the sight of God.
The most ancient and originally the simplest of these conceptions was
that of the repose of the dead. We know[464] that the dead who had not
been buried in accordance with the rites were believed to find no rest
in the tomb. A corpse had to be committed to the earth with traditional
ceremonies in order that the spirit which animated it might have quiet.
If this spirit were not subsequently nourished by offerings and
sacrifices, it left its burial place and roamed the earth’s surface like
an animal driven by hunger. The shades inhabiting the tombs could also
be evoked by necromancers and such disturbance broke in upon their rest
most unpleasantly.
These archaic ideas were so deeply implanted in the popular mind that
other beliefs never expelled them, but supervened and existed side by
side with them without causing their disappearance.
On tombs of the imperial period formulas like the following are often
read: “_Hic requiescit_,” “Here rests,” “_Quieti aeternae_,” “For
eternal rest”—inscriptions which could be interpreted figuratively; but
other wishes can only be taken to have a material sense, such as: “_Ossa
quiescant_,” “May his bones rest,” and “_Molliter ossa cubent_,” “May
the bones lie softly.” Poetry has preserved a number of similar phrases.
Tibullus expresses the following wish for a loved woman: “May thy
slender form rest well beneath the soft earth.”[465]
The rest which the exact accomplishment of the rites gave to the dead
was not physical only but moral also. The dead were _securi_—the word is
properly applied to them—that is, they were exempt from care. Doubtless
the care from which they were delivered by the cult of the grave, was
first that of suffering from hunger and thirst,[466] but the “eternal
security” (_securitas aeterna_)[467] they enjoyed was also the absence
of all the fears and anxieties which haunt humanity.
When philosophy claimed to free souls from the superstitions of the
past, it did not destroy the old conception of rest in the tomb but
cleansed it from all material alloy. If it be doubtful whether anything
of man survives, it is at least certain that death marks the abolition
of the pains of this world and the end of its troubles. _Mors laborum et
miseriarum quies_, is Cicero’s definition.[468] Death restores us to
that state of tranquillity in which we were before our birth.[469] The
“eternal home” which shelters the remains of man is the silent temple in
which he no longer has anything to fear from nature or from his fellows.
The Epicureans who made _ataraxia_ their ideal of life, the Stoics who
found theirs in impassivity (ἀπάθεια), could see in the anaesthesia of
death the supreme realisation of such absence of emotion and passion.
The corpse lies as softly on its last bed as a man plunged in a deep and
quiet sleep. The burial place is indeed often consecrated to _Somno
aeterno_.[470] This idea is expressed in a thousand forms in literature
and in epitaphs. A poor grammarian of Como, who doubtless had had little
reason to congratulate himself on life, caused two lines of verse to be
engraved on his tomb:[471] “I fled the miseries of sickness and the
great ills of life; I am now delivered from all its pains and enjoy a
peaceful calm.” On an African grave there are the following words:
“After bearing a heavy burden and after manifold toils, he speaks no
more, content with the silent dwelling in which he rests.”[472] We read
elsewhere, “Life was a pain, death prepared me rest.”[473] The sentiment
expressed by these inscriptions and many more like them is no mere
reflection of the teaching of philosophers who denied the future life:
it is profoundly human. The melodious but melancholy apostrophe of
Leconte de Lisle is well known:
“Et toi, divine mort, ou tout rentre et s’efface,
Accueille tes enfants dans ton sein étoilé;
Affranchis nous du temps, du nombre et de l’espace
Et rends nous le repos que la vie a troublé.”
“O Death divine, at whose recall,
Returneth all
To fade in thy embrace,
Gather thy children to thy bosom starred,
Free us from time, from number and from space,
And give us back the rest that life has marred.”[474]
In the midst of all the tribulation of our tormented existence, to how
many minds, even those which have the strongest religious conviction,
have not the immobility and insensibility of those who are no more
sometimes seemed like a deliverance? In antiquity also, this aspiration
towards the moment when man will obtain remission of all his travail
does not necessarily imply the belief that there is no hope beyond the
cold sleep of the grave. This yearning mingles with faith in immortality
and is transformed with it.
When it was believed that the dead went down into the depths of the
earth where lay the infernal kingdom, another meaning was given to their
rest. The funeral eulogy of a noble woman who towards the end of the
Republican period saved the life of her husband, who had been
proscribed, ends with the naïve words: “I pray that the gods thy Manes
may grant thee rest and thus protect thee.”[475] The shades of the
kinsmen of the dead must receive their souls in the subterranean
world[476] and thus ensure their welfare. The road which must be
travelled before the abode of the elect was reached was long and beset
with dangers. The Book of the Dead in Egypt, the Orphic tablets in
Greece, were guides to the Beyond which taught the dead not to stray
from the right path and to avoid the various dangers threatening
them.[477] Many of them, the impious who had to expiate their misdeeds
and the unfortunate to whom funeral duties had not been rendered,
wandered wretchedly on the banks of the Styx, vainly longing to enter
the “peaceful abode” of the Elysian Fields.[478] There, lying in the
cool shade, the blessed enjoyed a felicity exempt from all care. Serene
quiet in a sweet idleness cheered by joyous relaxation and wise
conversation—such was the ideal which some mysteries[479] opposed to the
weary agitations of earthly life and to the long sufferings of the
sinful and vagabond soul. For the adepts of these doctrines the _secura
quies_ applied to the repose of the nether world, and this conception of
beatitude beyond the grave is found to persist until the end of
paganism.[480]
But we have seen that another doctrine triumphed in the Roman period,
the doctrine that souls rise to the skies to live there eternally among
the stars. In this great metamorphosis of eschatological beliefs what
became of the idea of the repose of the dead? The question deserves to
be more closely investigated, for the transformation had lasting
consequences of which the ultimate effects can be felt even today.
The Pythagoreans were, as we have seen,[481] the first to promulgate the
doctrine of celestial immortality in Greece and Italy. One of the
allegories familiar to the teaching of the sect connected human destiny
with the old myth of Hercules at the crossroads. The Greek letter Y, of
which the stem divides midway into two, was in the school the symbol of
this comparison—we have already alluded to it elsewhere.[482] When man
reaches the age of reason two paths are open to him. One is smooth and
easy but ends in an abyss: this is the way of pleasure. The other is at
first rough and jagged—it is the hard road of virtue—but he who climbs
to the summit of its slope can there _rest_ deliciously from his
weariness. Funeral reliefs represent this contrast naïvely: at the
bottom of the stele the dead man is often seen accomplishing the labours
of his career; at the top of the stone he is shown stretched at his ease
on a couch.
The meaning of the allegory is immediately apparent: the _quieta sedes_
in which deserving souls are received, has become the sky. How was this
idea developed?
Homer[483] had already described Olympus as “the immovable seat of the
gods which is neither shaken by the winds, nor wet by the rains, nor
touched by the snow, but is bright with a cloudless light.” The
Epicureans applied these lines of the poet to the serene dwelling where
nothing occurred to modify the perpetual peace enjoyed by the gods.[484]
And the founder of Stoicism had already taught that the pious souls,
separated from the guilty, inhabited “tranquil and delectable”
regions.[485] Both called this dwelling of the gods or the elect by the
same name—_sedes quietae_.
We must here remember the distinction, established by the philosophers
and often repeated, between the sublunary circle and the celestial
spheres.[486] Above, the world of the eternal gods; below, the world of
generation and corruption. There the pure ether always kept the same
serenity; here the struggle of the elements called forth unceasing
agitation and transformation. On one side reigned peace and harmony, on
the other war and discord. The zone of the moon was the boundary between
the two contrasted parts of the world, and “the limit between life and
death.”[487] It was when they had crossed it, that the souls entered the
_quietae sedes_ of the Blessed.
The very ancient idea of a fearful journey which the dead had to make in
order to reach Pluto’s subterranean kingdom was transferred to the space
lying between the earth and the moon, for this was the region of the
universe to which the name of nether world (_Inferi_)[488] was
henceforth applied. As we have seen in the previous lecture,[489] when
the soul, escaping from the body, was laden with material dross, it was
tossed about for many centuries before it could again win to the ether.
Shaken by the winds, swept to and fro by the opposing elements of air,
water and fire, it had to endure a long torture before it was cleansed
of the sin which weighed it down. When at length it was freed of every
fleshly taint, it escaped from inward trouble also, from the pains and
the passions provoked by its union with the body. “Then,” says Seneca,
“it tends to return to the place whence it has been sent down; there
eternal quiet awaits it when it passes from the confused and gross to
the clear and pure.”[490] In the same way certain Neo-Platonists taught
that souls which had lived well, rose to the celestial heights and
rested there amid the stars. Even in this life the ecstasy, which gave
them anticipated enjoyment of the future bliss, is described by them as
a transport in which reason attains to absolute stability or equipoise,
escapes from all movement and rests in the Supreme Being.[491] Peace in
the celestial light: such is the highest form which the repose of the
dead assumed in paganism.[492]
The various ideas which we have just analysed—those of the repose in the
grave, the repose in the infernal regions and the repose in
heaven—followed parallel courses during the centuries and in part passed
from antiquity to the Middle Ages. But the distinction between them is
not always clear. Even in paganism they were intermingled and in the
course of time they were gradually confused. In no class of beliefs is
the force of tradition greater than in those which centre in death, and
the Christian peoples clung tenaciously to articles of faith which Jews
and pagans had shared before them.
We have seen[493] that the masses did not easily give up their belief
that the dead continued, in or about the tomb, a vegetating and
uncertain life. Extreme importance was still attached to burial because
the more or less unconscious conviction persisted that the soul’s rest
depended on that of the body. The dread of ghosts was still the
inspiration for some ceremonies performed over the remains of the dead.
Nay, a new apprehension was added to this, namely, the fear lest the
dead whose bodies were torn from the tomb should have no part in the
resurrection of the flesh.[494] The formula, “_Hic requiescit_,” “Here
rests—,” was transferred from pagan to Christian epigraphy, and the rest
men wished to the departed was first the rest of the corpse, which was
peacefully to await the Day of Judgment in its last dwelling.
These were doubtless vulgar prejudices rather than dogmas recognised by
orthodoxy, yet they did not remain without influence on the teaching of
the doctors of the Church. For instance, Saint Ambrose[495] enlarges on
the thought, probably borrowed from some philosopher, that death is good
because in it the body, source of our uneasiness, our troubles and our
vices, rests, calmed for ever, while the virtuous soul rises to heaven.
After the travail of existence the dead rest as man rests on the Sabbath
day, and this was, it was explained, the reason why the seventh day was
the day of the commemoration of the departed.
The idea of rest in the infernal regions has left no deep traces on the
Christian faith, for which the subterranean world became the abode of
the wicked. It was, however, somewhere in the bowels of the earth that
the dwelling of the righteous who lived before the Redemption was
commonly placed, sometimes also that of children who died unbaptised.
They found there according to the Pelagians a “place of repose and
salvation” outside the kingdom of heaven.[496]