Erwin Rohde

“ The enfeebled hand and the failing mind betray themselves in every utterance—in the last spasms of vital energy that inspired the art and literature of moribund Greece. The impoverishment of the vital forces out of which Greece had once brought forth the flower of its special and characteristic spirit makes itself felt in the altered relation of the individual to the whole, and of the totality of visible life to the shadowy powers of the unseen world. Individualism has had its day. No longer is the emancipation of the individual the object of man’s endeavour ”

“ Would the flower of the heroic chivalry, including Achilles himself, have been doomed to that dim shadow-world in which we see them wandering in the Nekyia of the Odyssey, if a way out into a life exempt from death had already revealed itself to imagination at the time when the Epic gave the stamp of its approval to the stories which dealt with the fate of the greater number of the heroes? ”

“ But the individual who with his sufferings must serve a purpose that is not his own, Humanity that lives under such bitter laws—what elevating and consoling thoughts are awakened by the contemplation of their fate. The poet employs all the resources of his overwhelming art to secure the profoundest sympathies of his hearers for the undeserved sufferings of the victim, for the delusions of well-intentioned but limited vision that must always stray from the goal at which it aims. ”

“ This, then, is the keystone that completes the arch of Orphic religion—the belief in the divine, immortal, and abiding life of the soul for whom union with the body and its desires is a thwarting hindrance and repression—a punishment from which its one desire, as soon as it is awakened to a full knowledge of itself is to escape in order that it may belong entirely to itself in full enjoyment of its powers. ”

“ The Stoic Emperor is uncertain whether death is a dissipation of the elements of the soul (as the atomists teach) or whether the mind survives in a conscious or an unconscious existence that must yet disappear eventually in the life of the Whole. All things are in perpetual flux—so the Law of the universe has willed it—nor shall the human personality maintain itself untouched and unchanged. ”

“ But when the battle had been fought and lost it became apparent to all the world that it was a corpse that rode before the exalted combatants, like the body of the dead Cid Campeador fastened upon his horse and leading his hosts against the Moors. The ancient religion of Greece, and with it the whole civilized life of the Greek world, faded and died at that discovery, and could not be recalled to life. A newer faith, very differently endowed and having power to crush the heavily laden soul and point it upwards in absolute submission to the divine compassion, held the field. ”

“ Offerings to the dead at a funeral occur in Homer only on special and isolated occasions and accompanied by an obsolete and half-understood ritual. Here they were the regular procedure both with rich and poor alike. But why should they have made offerings to their dead if they did not believe in their power? And why should they have taken away gold and jewellery and art treasures of all kinds and in astonishing quantities from the living and given them to the dead if they had not believed that the dead could find enjoyment in their former possessions even in the grave? ”

“ Once reflection on such problems is aroused, life itself, standing as it does on the threshold of all sensation and experience, soon begins to appear no less mysterious than death—that kingdom into which no experience reaches. It may even come about that when they are regarded too long and too hard, light and darkness seem to change places. It was to a Greek poet that the question suggested itself: “Who knows then whether Life be not Death, and what we here call Death be called Life there below?” ”

“ To a few lofty spirits among mankind, it offers a reward that beckons from eternity. Freedom from life in the corruptible body is the prize it offers; that and a never-ending union with true Reality—a return to what is everlasting and divine. A symbol of what the philosopher has achieved after his death will be provided by the community by whom the departed will be honoured as a Daimon.105
Such then is the ideal vision of a civilization in which the belief in the soul’s immortality and its vocation to an everlasting life in the kingdom of the gods was held with profound and serious conviction. ”

“ Even before the days of Herakleitos the torch of philosophic inquiry had been borne from the coasts of Ionia to the West by Xenophanes of Kolophon who in a life of adventure had wandered as far as Southern Italy and Sicily. For his fiery temperament the most subtle reflection was turned into life and experience, and the one enduring source of Being to which he ever directed his gaze became the universal Divinity that is all perception and thought, that tirelessly embraces all things in its thought and intelligence, and, without beginning or end, perpetually remains the same with itself. ”

“ Is it possible to believe that a realistically imaginative, materially minded people like the Greeks would have regarded as immortal a creature incapable (once the funeral is over) of requiring or receiving further nourishment—either in religious cult or otherwise?
The daylight world of Homer is thus freed from spectres of the night (for even in dreams the psyche is seen no more after the body is burnt) ; from those intangible and ghostly essences at whose unearthly activity the superstitious of every age tremble. The living are no longer troubled by the dead. ”

“ If that memory dies out, if the venerating thoughtfulness of the living ceases, the soul of the departed is at once deprived of the sole element in which it still maintained its shadow of an existence. ”

“ The eager and unswerving effort of these wise men to educate themselves to the attainment of freedom and peace, of purity and goodness of heart, wins our admiration—not least in the case of Seneca in whom the struggle for self-mastery and philosophic calm must have been a continual war with his own too-receptive and imaginative nature. But just as they looked for no supernatural helper and redeemer but trusted to the power of their own spirit for the assurance of success, so they required no promise of a future crowning of their labours in an after-life of the soul. ”

“ As for death—the state which is to follow our life here—there is no danger of anyone mistaking that for life. “Do not try and explain away death to me,” says Achilles to Odysseus in Hades; and this would be the answer any Homeric man would have given to the sophisticated poet, if he had tried to persuade him that the state of things after life on this earth is the real life. Nothing is so hateful to man as death and the gates of Hades: for when death comes it is certain that life—this sweet life of ours in the sunlight—is done with, whatever else there may be to follow. ”

“ Semele lives for ever, though she died under the crash of the thunder-bolt.28 The barrier between men and gods is not insuperable; we can distantly approach the immortals not only in greatness of mind, but in bodily vigour.29 One mother gave birth to both races, though the gulf between them is indeed a deep one; man is nought—a shadow’s dream-image; for the gods the brazen heavens remain for ever as an unconquerable stronghold.30 Only a miracle of divine interference with the lawful and normal course of nature, can raise the individual soul to the everlasting life of the gods and Heroes. ”

“ A spirit of contentment and leisure seems to flow like an undercurrent through the whole poem, and has made for itself a haven of rest in the midst of the busy action of the story. When the poet’s own feelings find their true expression they show us idyllic scenes of quiet enjoyment of daily life; magnificent in the country of the Phæacians, gay and more homely at the farm of Eumaios; pictures of quiet repose after the fights of the heroic past, that have now faded into a mere pleasant memory, such as we get in the house of Nestor, or in the Palace of Menelaos and the regained Helen. ”

“ But for that reason the cult of Heroes cannot be the origin of the belief in an immortality belonging to all human souls by their very nature. Nor can this ever have been its effect. In the beginning, among the hosts that streamed down to Hades, the special individuals who had another fate were a small class apart and favoured above all others—and so it still remained. Though the numbers of the heroic figures might be increased enormously, yet every individual case of the transition of a human soul into the ranks of the Heroes was a fresh and special miracle. ”

“ Even in its deepest and most essential character the old national spirit of Greece, which had drawn its strength from its clear-cut individuality, seemed to be suffering damage through the unlimited extension eastwards and westwards of Greek life. It did not cease to be an immeasurable advantage to be a Greek, but a Greek now meant anyone who had a share in the one thing that still distinguished and characterized the Greeks, namely, Greek culture—and Greek culture was no longer confined to a single nation. ”

“ The practice of cremation itself will perhaps give us one last piece of evidence that there had been a time when the idea of the prolonged sojourn of the disembodied spirit in the realm of the living and its power of influencing the survivors existed among the Greeks. Homer knows of no other kind of funeral than that of fire. On a funeral pyre are burnt the bodies of king or leader with the most solemn ritual; those of the common people fallen in war are given to the flames with less ceremony; none are buried. ”

“ The chief figures, the outstanding representatives of this heroic company, we may say, were those whose lifetime was fixed by legend or history in the distant past—who were in fact the ancestors of later humanity. The worship of Heroes is not, then, a cult of souls, but in a narrower sense a cult of ancestors. Even their name, as it appears, distinguishes the Heroes as men of the past. ”

“ The soul can escape out of time and space and find its home in eternity, without at the same time losing its own self in the General and Universal that stands above time and space. We must not inquire what sort of personality and individual distinctness can yet remain with the soul when it has cast off all effort, desire, sense-perception, and everything related to the world of change and multiplicity, to become once more a pure mirror of the eternal. ”

“ In fact if the truth were told we should rather have to admit that it is easier for us to sympathize with such overflowing of sensation and all that goes with it than with the opposite pole of Greek religious life, the calm and measured composure with which man lifted up heart and eye to the gods, as the patterns of all life and the patrons of a serenity as brilliant and unmoved as that of the clear heavens themselves. ”

“ The belief in immortality here becomes the corner-stone of a building, the architect of which regards all earthly things as only valid for the moment, and therefore of profound unimportance. For him only the Heaven of the spiritual world with its everlasting laws and 476 patterns seriously matters. He discards without a regret the whole of Greek culture as it had expressed itself in state and society, custom and art—an art that will last as long as humanity itself. ”

“ Nevertheless, not once does he vouchsafe a word that might point forward to a land of blessed immortality for the departed. There is a vestige of life still remaining for the dead—but it is in this world; the memory of the living and their own great name honoured by after generations is all that can prolong their existence. ”