Clifford Herschel Moore

“ Yet the Stoic could not agree with the Platonist that the individual soul survived forever, since he held to a cyclical theory of the cosmos, according to which this present universe{22} was temporal. It had been created by the eternal fire, by the world-reason, from itself, and it was destined in due season to sink back again into universal fire. Meantime, according to the views of most Stoics, the souls of the just would survive this body, ascending to the spheres above the world, where they would dwell until absorbed once more into the divine element from which they sprang. ”

“ In view of the facts with which we have been occupied we shall not make the error of thinking that Christianity brought the hope of immortality among men, for, as we have seen, hope—nay, sure confidence, in the soul’s survival was widespread throughout the ancient world when Jesus began his ministry. ”

“ We may fairly say that, in spite of popular doubt, intellectual scepticism, and philosophic denial, beliefs in some kind of existence beyond the grave were widespread in the Greco-Roman world at the beginning of our era. For many, probably for most, belief did not advance beyond inherited intuitions, fears, or hopes, which were fostered by tendance of the dead, prescribed by immemorial custom. Many, both the simple and the learned, found their assurance in diverse forms of Greek mysteries ”

“ To express their concept of its nature, they often named it Fire, the most powerful and active of the elements, or rather the primordial element; again they often called it God, for they did not hesitate to speak of this immanent principle as a person. Furthermore, since man is a part of the cosmos, the world-reason expresses itself in him. Indeed man’s reason, the directing element of the human soul, is itself a part of the world-reason, or in Epictetus’ striking phrase, man is “a fragment of God.” ”

“ The popular beliefs which concern details of the future life we shall leave one side for the moment; let us{8} rather first observe that Virgil’s ideas as to rewards and punishments in the next world, as well as his doctrine of successive rebirths and deaths with their accompanying purifications, rest on a moral basis, so that the other world is conceived to be a complement of this: life on earth and life below are opportunities for moral advance without which final happiness cannot be attained. ”

“ What notions of heaven and of hell did the Greeks and Romans have? This inquiry is often made. The reply is easily given. Man has always painted hell and paradise after his own conception of suffering and of happiness, just as truly as he has made God after his own image. Consequently the ancient’s ideas of the future life ranged all the way from the grossest materialistic concepts to highly spiritualized beliefs. Plato in the Republic makes Adeimantus say that some seem to think that an immortality of drunkenness is virtue’s highest meed. ”

“ He maintained that behind this transient phenomenal world known to us through the senses, lies another world, the world of ideas, invisible, permanent, and real, which can be grasped by the reason only. These permanent ideas, he said, are of various grades and degrees, the supreme idea being that of the Good and the Beautiful, which is the cause of all existence, truth, and knowledge; it at once comprehends these things within itself and is superior to them ”

“ As an Orphic fragment says: “They who are righteous beneath the rays of the sun, when they die, have a gentler lot in a fair meadow by deep flowing Acheron.... But they who have worked wrong and insolence under the rays of the sun are led down beneath Cocytus’s watery plain into chill Tartarus.” ”

“ He{17} attempts to prove immortality from the self-motion of the soul, again from the dim recollections out of an earlier existence which enable one to recall axiomatic truths or to recognize relations, as in mathematics—things which one has never learned in this present life. On another occasion he argues from the unchanging nature of the soul and from the soul’s superiority to the body. But he seems to have thought the most convincing proof was the fact that the notion of life is inseparable from our concept of the soul; that is, a dead soul is unthinkable. ”

“ The later mystic philosophies laid much stress on an ascetic discipline in this life, to secure the soul’s purification, and all taught that the great end of man was to attain to the knowledge of God,{41} wherein lay man’s supreme happiness. Such knowledge, it was thought, could come only through a revelation. Here these philosophies agreed with the teaching of the oriental mysteries, and indeed with popular belief as well. On the question of the immortality of the soul, however, the later mystics brought forward no new arguments. ”

“ But all the ideas, including the Absolute, are, as I have just said, apprehended{16} not by man’s senses but by his intellect. Therefore, argues Plato, man’s reasoning soul must have the same nature as the ideas; like them, it must belong to the world above the senses and with them it must partake of the Absolute. ”

“ Baptism in primitive Christianity was at first symbolical—an act of ritual purification, which was believed to indicate the remission of sins and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit. [37] But by the second century Christianity had become a mystery in the Greek sense, into which the novice, after a period of preparation, was duly initiated by baptism; and indeed the act was believed to have a magic power to secure immortality, closely parallel to that of the pagan initiation.{53} [38] We all know that the ecclesiastical confidence which such belief inspires is far from unknown today. ”

“ They are all gods who die and live again, and thus become lords of death and life, through whom man gains assurance of his own immortality.
Our chief concern with the Orphics here is that they seem to have introduced among the Greeks the idea that the soul of man was divine, was a [Greek: daimôn] which had fallen, and for its punishment was imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. In its corporeal cell it was condemned to suffer defilement until released by death,{12} when it passed to Hades. Its lot there depended on its life on earth. ”

“ In the third century of the Christian era, an official of the mysteries set up an inscription which declares: “Verily glorious is that mystery vouchsafed by the blessed gods, for death is no ill for mortals, but rather a good.” ”

“ But it would seem that men at every period of human history have had immortal longings in them so{23} strong that they have eagerly embraced the assurance of even a brief respite from annihilation; certain it is that to many Greeks and Romans the Stoic doctrine of a limited existence after death was a strong incentive to virtue and a consolation in the midst of this world’s trials. ”

“ The Greek mysteries, which did not concern themselves with metempsychosis, by the fifth century before our era likewise made future happiness depend in part at least on righteousness in this life; the oriental mysteries too made this existence the condition of the next. In short, we may say that wherever men believed in any kind of a future existence, they almost universally held to the common belief that future happiness was to be the reward of a virtuous life on{57} earth. But this is one of the fundamental principles of Christianity. ”

“ The religious intuition of the Orphic and Pythagorean then was given a rational basis by Plato, and thus supported, proved so convincing to antiquity that Plato’s views were the most important of all in supporting belief in the soul’s immortality. ”

“ To these ideas Jesus’ teaching was closely related, although he gave a nobler meaning to Jewish doctrine, and he did not limit the hope of a future existence so narrowly as{46} some would do. Moreover, he adopted from the law the teaching which made salvation and future happiness depend on a love for God and for one’s fellow-men, which would result in an unselfish life of righteousness. Salvation, he taught, was a present experience, open to every man who conformed to the requirement. ”

“ But what bases did the Orphics find for their belief in the divine nature of the soul? In their mythology they had said that man was created out of the ashes of the Titans in which a spark of Dionysus still remained. But in fact they seem to have rested on faith or intuition, without working out clearly a philosophic answer. They were indeed deeply conscious of man’s dual nature ”

“ But when it is further argued that if the human reason is of the same nature with the divine, it must be eternal and immortal, we may reply that, even so, we are not convinced that the individual soul must therefore have a conscious and separate existence through all eternity ”

“ After the crucifixion of Jesus, the Apostles and their successors naturally made his person, death, and resurrection the great means through which his followers secured salvation. Paul, moreover, taught that through faith—using the word in a somewhat unusual sense—the believer secured the actual presence of Christ within him, entered into a mystic union with the divine Saviour, by which the man was freed from sin and reborn into a new spiritual life ”

“ Undoubtedly during the opening centuries of the Christian era there was a growing belief in the soul’s immortality, or at least an increasing hope of a future life, but such hopes and beliefs, outside Christianity, were not based on new arguments. Plato had once for all in antiquity, supplied the philosophic grounds for confidence. Only in modern times have new arguments of any weight been adduced.{42} ”

“ When the Trojan hero has learned from his father’s shade the mysteries of life and death, and has been taught the magnitude of the work which lies before him, and the great things that are to be, he casts off the timidity which he has hitherto shown and, strengthened{4} by his experiences, advances to the perfect accomplishment of his task. ”

“ In answer to his son’s questions, the heroic shade discloses the doctrine of rebirths—metempsychosis—with its{6} tenets of penance and of purification. [3] Finally, to fulfill the poet’s purpose, Anchises’ spirit points out the souls of the heroes who are to come on earth in due season; the spirits of future Romans pass before Aeneas in long array; and at the climax he sees the soul of Augustus, that prince who was destined in the fullness of time to bring back the Golden Age and to impose peace on the wide world. ”

“ When Charon has set the earthly visitors across that stream, they find themselves in a place where are gathered spirits of many kinds, who have not yet been admitted to Tartarus or Elysium: first the souls of infants and those who met their end by violence—{5}men condemned to death though innocent, suicides, those who died for love, and warriors—all of whom must here wait until the span of life allotted them has been completed. ”

“ But no doctrine of the post-corporeal existence of the soul has ever had the field entirely to itself. We know that in antiquity even the Stoic conception of the soul’s limited survival, to say nothing of Platonic beliefs in actual immortality, met with much opposition and denial among the intellectual classes. The Epicureans, with their thorough-going atomistic materialism, would not allow that the soul had any existence apart from the body ”

“ The soul’s sojourn in Hades therefore was a time of punishment and of purification, even as life itself was a penance for sin. According to a common belief, at least in Plato’s day, after a thousand years the soul entered a new incarnation, and so on through ten rounds of earth and Hades, until at last, freed from sin and earthly dross by faithful observance of a holy life on earth and by the purification which it underwent below, it returned to its divine abode; but those who persisted in sin were condemned to all the{13} punishments which man’s imagination could devise ”

“ Again the poet represents some few as suffering eternal torments for their monstrous sins or enjoying immortal bliss because of their great deserts. And finally, he shows that the majority of souls must pass through successive lives and deaths, until, purified from the sin and dross of the body by millennial sojourns in the world below, and by virtuous lives on earth, they at last find repose and satisfaction. ”

“ Although Plato and his greatest pupil, Aristotle, regarded man’s reasoning soul as spiritual, something distinct from matter, few ancient thinkers were able to rise to the concept of the immateriality of man’s reasoning nature. ”

“ I have already referred to the fact that it represents a mystic initiation of Virgil’s hero as preparation for his holy task. Now we know that at all times the convictions of the majority of men are founded not on the arguments which thinkers can supply, but on hopes, intuitions, and emotional experiences. Such were the grounds on which the{31} Orphic built his hope of the purified soul’s ultimate happiness. More popular than Orphism were the Greek mysteries, of which the most important were those celebrated annually at Eleusis in Attica. ”

“ Hence sprang the new Dionysus. The Titans Zeus destroyed with his thunderbolt and had the ashes scattered to the winds. From these ashes, in one form of the myth, man was made, and therefore he was thought to unite in his person the sinful Titanic nature and the divine Dionysiac spark. ”