Many of the Rabbins believed in the transmigration or revolution of souls, an immemorial doctrine of the Fast, and developed it into the most ludicrous and marvellous details.11 But, with the exception of those who adopted this Indian doctrine, the Rabbins supposed all departed souls to be in the under world, some in the division of Paradise, others in that of hell. Here they fancied these souls to be longingly awaiting the advent of the Messiah. "Messiah and the patriarchs weep together in Paradise over the delay of the time of the kingdom."12 In this quotation the Messiah is represented as being in the under world, for the Jews expected that he would be a man, very likely some one who had already lived. For a delegation was once sent to ask Jesus, "Art thou Elias? art thou the Messiah? art thou that prophet?" Light is thus thrown upon the Rabbinical saying that "it was doubted whether the Messiah would come from the living, or the dead."13 Borrowing some Persian modes of thinking, and adding them to their own inordinate national pride, the Rabbins soon began
5 Talmud, tract. Berachoth.
6 Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, th. ii. cap. v. s. 315.
7 Lightfoot, in Matt. v. 22.
8 Schroder, Satzungen and Gebrauche des Talmudisch Rabbinischen Judenthums, s. 408.
9 Schoettgen, in Johan. xiv. 2.
10 Nov. Test. ex Talmude, etc. illustratum a J. G. Menschen, p. 125.
11 Basnage, Hist. of Jews, lib. iv. cap. 30. Also, Traditions of the Rabbins, in Blackwood for April, 1833.
12 Eisenmenger, th. ii. s. 304.
13 Lightfoot, in Matt. ii. 16.
to fancy that the observance or non observance of the Pharisaic ritual, and kindred particulars, must exert a great effect in determining the destination of souls and their condition in the under world. Observe the following quotations from the Talmud. "Abraham sits at the gate of hell to see that no Israelite enters." "Circumcision is so agreeable to God, that he swore to Abraham that no one who was circumcised should descend into hell."14 "What does Abraham to those circumcised who have sinned too much? He takes the foreskins from Gentile boys who died without circumcision, and places them on those Jews who were circumcised but have become godless, and then kicks them into hell."15 Hell here denotes that division in the under world where the condemned are punished. The younger Buxtorf, in a preface to his father's "Synagoga Judaica," gives numerous specimens of Jewish representations of "the efficacy of circumcision being so great that no one who has undergone it shall go down into hell." Children can help their deceased parents out of hell by their good deeds, prayers, and offerings.16 "Beyond all doubt," says Gfrorer, "the ancient Jewish synagogue inculcated the doctrine of supererogatory good works, the merit of which went to benefit the departed souls."17 Here all souls were, in the under world, either in that part of it called Paradise, or in that named Gehenna, according to certain conditions. But in whichever place they were, and under whatever circumstances, they were all tarrying in expectation of the advent of the Messiah.
How deeply rooted, how eagerly cherished, the Jewish belief in the approaching appearance of the Messiah was, and what a splendid group of ideas and imaginations they clustered around his reign, are well known facts. He was to be a descendant of royal David, an inspired prophet, priest, and king, was to subdue the whole earth beneath his Jewish sceptre and establish from Jerusalem a theocratic empire of unexampled glory, holiness, and delight. In so much the consent was general and earnest; though in regard to many further details there would seem to have been an incongruous diversity of opinions. They supposed the coming of the Messiah would be preceded by ten frightful woes,18 also by the appearance of the prophet Elias as a forerunner.19 There are a few passages in the Rabbinical writings which, unless they were forged and interpolated by Christians at a late period, show that there were in the Jewish mind anticipations of the personal descent of the Messiah into the under world.20 "After this the Messiah, the son of David, came to the gates of the underworld. But when the bound, who are in Gehenna, saw the light of the Messiah, they began rejoicing to receive him, saying, 'He shall lead us up from this darkness.'" "The captives shall
14 Schroder, s. 332.
15 Eisenmenger, th. ii. kap. vi. s. 340.
16 Ibid. s. 358.
17 Geschichte des Urchristenthums, zweit. abth. s. 186. Maimonides also asserts the doctrine of supererogatory works: see p. 237 of H. H. Bernard's Selections from the Yad Hachazakah of Maimonides.
18 Surenhusius, Mischna, pars tertia, p. 308.
19 Lightfoot, in Matt. xvii. 10.
20 For a general view of the Jewish eschatology, see Gfrorer, Geschichte des Urchristenthums, kap. x.; Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, th. ii. kap. xv. xvii.
ascend from the under world, Schechinah at their head."21 Gfrorer derives the origin of the doctrine that Christ rescued souls out of the under world, from a Jewish notion, preserved in the Talmud,22 that the just patriarchs sometimes did it.23 Bertholdt adduces Talmudical declarations to show that through the Messiah "God would hereafter liberate the Israelites from the under world, on account of the merit of circumcision"24 Schoettgen quotes this statement from the Sohar: "Messia shall die, and shall remain in the state of death a time, and shall rise."25 The so called Fourth Book of Ezra says, in the seventh chapter, "My son, the Christ, shall die: then follow the resurrection and the judgment." Although it is clear, from various other sources, as well as from the account in John xii. 34, that there was a prevalent expectation among the Jews that "the Messiah would abide forever," it also seems quite certain that there were at the same time at least obscure presentiments, based on prophecies and traditions, that he must die, that an important part of his mission was connected with his death. This appears from such passages as we have cited above, found in early Rabbinical writers, who would certainly be very unlikely to borrow and adapt a new idea of such a character from the Christians; and from the manner in which Jesus assumes his death to be a part of the Messianic fate and interprets the Scriptures as necessarily pointing to that effect. He charges his disciples with being "fools and blind" in not so understanding the doctrine; thus seeming to imply that it was plainly known to some. But this question the origin of the idea of a suffering, atoning, dying Messiah is confessedly a very nice and obscure one. The evidence, the silence, the inferences, the presumptions and doubts on the subject are such, that some of the most thorough and impartial students say they are unable to decide either way.
However the foregoing question be decided, it is admitted by all that the Jews earnestly looked for a resurrection of the dead as an accompaniment of the Messiah's coming. Whether Christ was to go down into the under world, or to sit enthroned on Mount Zion, in either case the dead should come up and live again on earth at the blast of his summoning trumpet. Rabbi Jeremiah commanded, "When you bury me, put shoes on my feet, and give me a staff in my hand, and lay me on one side, that when the Messiah comes I may be ready."26 Most of the Rabbins made this resurrection partial. "Whoever denies the resurrection of the dead shall have no part in it, for the very reason that he denies it."27 "Rabbi Abbu says, "A day of rain is greater than the resurrection of the dead; because the rain is for all, while the resurrection is only for the just."28 "Sodom and Gomorrah shall not rise in the resurrection of the dead."29 Rabbi Chebbo says, "The patriarchs so vehemently desired to be buried in
21 Schoettgen, De Messia, lib. vi. cap. v. sect. 1.
22 Eisenmenger, th. ii. ss. 343, 364.
23 Geschichte Urchrist. kap. viii. s. 184.
24 Christologia Judaorum Jesu Apostolorumque Atate, sect. 34, (De Descensu Messia ad Inferos.)
25 De Messia, lib. vi. cap. v. sect. 2.
26 Lightfoot, in Matt. xxvii. 52.
27 Witsius, Dissertatio de Seculo, etc. sect. 9.
28 Nov. Test. Illustratum, etc. a Meuschen, p. 62.
29 Schoettgen, in Johan. vi. 39.
the land of Israel, because those who are dead in that land shall be the first to revive and shall devour his years, [the years of the Messiah.] But for those just who are interred beyond the holy land, it is to be understood that God will make a passage in the earth, through which they will be rolled until they reach the land of Israel."30 Rabbi Jochanan says, "Moses died out of the holy land, in order to show that in the same way that God will raise up Moses, so he will raise all those who observe his law." The national bigotry of the Jews reaches a pitch of extravagance in some of their views that is amusing. For instance, they declare that "one Israelitish soul is dearer and more important to God than all the souls of a whole nation of the Gentiles!" Again, they say, "When God judges the Israelites, he will stand, and make the judgment brief and mild; when he judges the Gentiles, he will sit, and make it long and severe!" They affirm that the resurrection will be effected by means of a dew; and they quote to that effect this verse from Canticles: "I sleep, but my heart waketh; my head is filled with dew, and my locks with drops of the night." Some assert that "the resurrection will be immediately caused by God, who never gives to any one the three keys of birth, rain, and the resurrection of the dead." Others say that the power to raise and judge the dead will be delegated to the Messiah, and even go so far as to assert that the trumpet whose formidable blasts will then shake the universe is to be one of the horns of that ram which Abraham offered up instead of his son Isaac! Some confine the resurrection to faithful Jews, some extend it to the whole Jewish nation, some think all the righteous of the earth will have part in it, and some stretch its pale around all mankind alike.31 They seem to agree that the reprobate would either be left in the wretched regions of Sheol when the just arose, or else be thrust back after the judgment, to remain there forever. It was believed that the righteous after their resurrection would never die again, but ascend to heaven. The Jews after a time, when the increase of geographical knowledge had annihilated from the earth their old Eden whence the sinful Adam was expelled, changed its location into the sky. Thither, as the later fables ran, Elijah was borne in his chariot of fire by the horses thereof. Rabbi Pinchas says, "Carefulness leads us to innocence, innocence to purity, purity to sanctity, sanctity to humility, humility to fear of sins, fear of sins to piety, piety to the holy spirit, the holy spirit to the resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the dead to the prophet Elias."32 The writings of the early Christian Fathers contain many allusions to this blessed habitation of saints above the clouds. It is illustrated in the following quaint Rabbinical narrative. Rabbi Jehosha ben Levi once besought the angel of death to take him up, ere he died, to catch a glimpse of Paradise. Standing on the wall, he suddenly snatched the angel's sword and sprang over, swearing by Almighty God that he would not come out. Death was not allowed to enter Paradise, and the son of Levi did not restore his sword until he had promised to be more gentle towards the dying.33 The righteous were never to return to the dust, but "at the end
30 Schoettgen, De Messia, lib. vi. cap. vi. sect. 27.
31 See an able dissertation on Jewish Notions of the Resurrection of the Dead, prefixed to Humphrey's Translation of Athenagoras on the Resurrection.
32 Surenhusius, Mischna, pars tertia, p. 309.
33 Schroder, s. 419.
of the thousand years," the duration of the Messiah's earthly reign, "when the Lord is lifted up, God shall fit wings to the just, like the wings of eagles."34 In a word, the Messiah and his redeemed ones would ascend into heaven to the right hand of God. So Paul, who said, "I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee," declares that when the dead have risen "we shall be caught up in the clouds to be forever with the Lord."
We forbear to notice a thousand curious details of speculation and fancy in which individual Rabbins indulged; for instance, their common notion concerning the bone luz, the single bone which, withstanding dissolution, shall form the nucleus of the resurrection body. It was a prevalent belief with them that the resurrection would take place in the valley of Jehoshaphat, in proof of which they quote this text from Joel: "Let the heathen be wakened and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge the nations around." To this day, wherever scattered abroad, faithful Jews cling to the expectation of the Messiah's coming, and associate with his day the resurrection of the dead.35 The statement in the Song of Solomon, "The king is held in the galleries," means, says a Rabbinical book, "that the Messiah is detained in Paradise, fettered by a woman's hair!" Every day, throughout the world, every consistent Israelite repeats the words of Moses Maimonides, the peerless Rabbi, of whom it is a proverb that "from Moses to Moses there arose not a Moses:" "I believe with a perfect faith that the Messiah will come, and though he delays, nevertheless, I will always expect him till he come." Then shall glory cover the living, and the risen, children of Israel, and confusion fall on their Gentile foes. In almost every inch of the beautiful valley of Jehoshaphat a Jew has been buried. All over the slopes of the hill sides around lie the thick clustering sepulchral slabs, showing how eagerly the chosen people seek to sleep in the very spot where the first rising of the dead shall be. Entranced and mute,
"In old Jehoshaphat's valley, theyOf Israel think the assembled worldWill stand upon that awful day,When the Ark's light, aloft unfurl'd,Among the opening clouds shall shine,Divinity's own radiant shrine."
Any one familiar with the Persian theology36 will at once notice a striking resemblance between many of its dogmas and those, first, of Pharisaism, secondly, of the popular Christianity. Some examination of this subject properly belongs here. There is, then, as is well known, a circle or group of ideas, particularly pertaining to eschatology, which appear in the later Jewish writings, and remarkably correspond to those held by the Parsees, the followers of Zoroaster. The same notions also reappear in the early Christianity as popularly understood. We will specify some of these correspondences. The doctrine of angels, received by the Jews, their names, offices, rank, and destiny, was borrowed and formed
34 Schoettgen, de Messia, lib. vi. cap. vi. sect. 23; cap. vii. ss. 3, 4.
35 John Allen, Modern Judaism, ch. vi. and xv.
36 See Abriss der Religion Zoroasters nach den Zendbuchern, von Abbe Foucher, in Kleuker's Zend Avesta, band i. zweit anhang, ss. 328-342.
by them during and just after the Babylonish captivity, and is much like that which they found among their enslavers.37 The guardian angels appointed over nations, spoken of by Daniel, are Persian. The angels called in the Apocalypse "the seven spirits of God sent forth into all the earth," in Zechariah "the seven eyes of God which run to and fro through all the earth," are the Amschaspands of the Persian faith. The wars of the angels are described as minutely by the old Persians as by Milton. The Zend Avesta pictures Ahriman pregnant with Death, (die alte hollenschlange, todschwangere Ahriman,) as Milton describes the womb of Sin bearing that fatal monster. The Gahs, or second order of angels, the Persians supposed,38 were employed in preparing clothing and laying it up in heaven to clothe the righteous after the resurrection, a fancy frequent among the Rabbins and repeatedly alluded to in the New Testament. With both the Persians and the Jews, all our race both sexes sprang from one original man. With both, the first pair were seduced and ruined by means of fruit which the devil gave to them. With both, there was a belief in demoniacal possessions, devils or bad spirits entering human bodies. With both, there was the expectation of a great Deliverer, the Persian Sosiosch, the Jewish Messiah, whose coming would be preceded by fearful woes, who would triumph over all evil, raise the dead, judge the world, separate the righteous and the wicked, purge the earth with fire, and install a reign of glorious blessedness.39 "The conception of an under world," says Dr. Roth, "was known centuries before Zoroaster; but probably he was the first to add to the old belief the idea that the under world was a place of purification, wherein souls were purged from all traces of sin."40 Of this belief in a subterranean purgatory there are numerous unmistakable evidences and examples in the Rabbinical writings.41
These notions and others the Pharisees early adopted, and wrought into the texture of what they called the "Oral Law," that body of verbally transmitted legends, precepts, and dogmas, afterwards written out and collected in the Mischna, to which Christ repeatedly alluded with such severity, saying, "Ye by your traditions make the commandments of God of none effect." To some doctrines of kindred character and origin with these Paul refers when he warns his readers against "the worshipping of angels," "endless genealogies," "philosophy falsely so called," and various besetting heresies of the time. But others were so woven and assimilated into the substance of the popular Judaism of the age, as inculcated by the Rabbins, that Paul himself held them, the lingering vestiges of his earnest Pharisaic education and organized experience. They naturally found their way into the Apostolic Church, principally composed of Ebionites, Christians who had been Jews; and from it they were never separated, but have come to us in seeming orthodox garb, and are generally
37 Schroder, p. 385.
38 Yacna, Ha 411. Kleuker, zweit. auf. s. 198.
39 Die Heiligen Schriften der Parsen, von Dr. F. Spiegel, kap. ii. ss. 32-37. Studien and Kritiken, 1885, band i., "Ist die Lehre von der Anferstehung des Leibes nicht ein alt Persische Lehre?" F. Nork, Mythen der Alten Perser als Quellen Christlicher Glaubenslehren und Ritualien.
40 Die Zoroastrischen Glaubenslehre, von Dr. Eduard Roth. s. 450.
41 See, In tom. i. Kabbala Denudata, Synopsis Dogmatum Libri Sohar pp. 108, 109, 113.
retained now. Still, they were errors. They are incredible to the thinking minds of to day. It is best to get rid of them by the truth, that they are pagan growths introduced into Christianity, but to be discriminated from it. By removing these antiquated and incredible excrescences from the real religion of Christ, we shall save the essential faith from the suspicion which their association with it, their fancied identity with it, invites and provokes.
The correspondences between the Persian and the Pharisaic faith, in regard to doctrines, are of too arbitrary and peculiar a character to allow us for a moment to suppose them to have been an independent product spontaneously developed in the two nations; though even in that case the doctrines in question have no sanction of authority, not being Mosaic nor Prophetic, but only Rabbinical. One must have received from the other. Which was the bestower and which the recipient is quite plain.42 There is not a whit of evidence to show, but, on the contrary, ample presumption to disprove, that a certain cycle of notions were known among the Jews previous to a period of most intimate and constant intercourse between them and the Persians. But before that period those notions were an integral part of the Persian theology. Even Prideaux admits that the first Zoroaster lived and Magianism flourished at least a thousand years before Christ. And the dogmas we refer to are fundamental features of the religion. These dogmas of the Persians, not derived from the Old Testament nor known among the Jews before the captivity, soon after that time began to show themselves in their literature, and before the opening of the New Testament were prominent elements of the Pharisaic belief. The inference is unavoidable that the confluence of Persian thought and feeling with Hebrew thought and feeling, joined with the materials and flowing in the channels of the subsequent experience of the Jews, formed a mingled deposit about the age of Christ, which deposit was Pharisaism. Again: the doctrines common to Zoroastrianism and Pharisaism in the former seem to be prime sources, in the latter to be late products. In the former, they compose an organic, complete, inseparable system; in the latter, they are disconnected, mixed piecemeal, and, to a considerable extent, historically traceable to an origin beyond the native, national mind. It is a significant fact that the abnormal symbolic beasts described by several of the Jewish prophets, and in the Apocalypse, were borrowed from Persian art. Sculptures representing these have been brought to light by the recent researches at Persepolis. Finally, all early ecclesiastical history incontestably shows that Persian dogmas exerted on the Christianity of the first centuries an enormous influence, a pervasive and perverting power unspent yet, and which it is one of the highest tasks of honest and laborious Christian students in the present day to explain, define, and separate. What was that Manichaanism which nearly filled Christendom for a hundred years, what was it, in great part, but an influx of tradition, speculation, imagination, and sentiment, from Persia? The Gnostic Christians even had a scripture called "Zoroaster's Apocalypse."43 "The wise men from the east," who knelt before the infant Christ, "and opened their treasures, and gave him gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh," were Persian Magi. We may imaginatively regard that sacred scene as an emblematical figure of the far different tributes which
42 Lucke, Einleitung in die Offenbarung des Johannes, kap. 2, sect. 8.
43 Kleuker, Zend Avesta, band ii. anhang i. s. 12.
a little later came from their country to his religion, the unfortunate contributions that permeated and corrupted so much of the form in which it thenceforth appeared and spread. In the pure gospel's pristine day, ere it had hardened into theological dogmas or become encumbered with speculations and comments, from the lips of God's Anointed Son repeatedly fell the earnest warning, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees." There is far more need to have this warning intelligently heeded now, coming with redoubled emphasis from the Master's own mouth, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees." For, as the gospel is now generally set forth and received, that leaven has leavened well nigh the whole lump of it.
THE disembodied soul, as conceived by the Greeks, and after them by the Romans, is material, but of so thin a contexture that it cannot be felt with the hands. It is exhaled with the dying breath, or issues through a warrior's wounds. The sword passes through its uninjured form as through the air. It is to the body what a dream is to waking action. Retaining the shape, lineaments, and motion the man had in life, it is immediately recognised upon appearing. It quits the body with much reluctance, leaving that warm and vigorous investiture for a chill and forceless existence. It glides along without noise and very swiftly, like a shadow. It is unable to enter the lower kingdom and be at peace until its deserted body has been buried with sacred rites: meanwhile, naked and sad, it flits restlessly about the gates, uttering doleful moans.
The early Greek authors describe the creation as a stupendous hollow globe cut in the centre by the plane of the earth. The upper hemisphere is lighted by beneficent luminaries; the lower hemisphere is filled with unvarying blackness. The top of the higher sphere is Heaven, the bright dwelling of the Olympian gods; its bottom is the surface of the earth, the home of living men. The top of the lower sphere is Hades, the abode of the ghosts of the dead; its bottom is Tartarus, the prison of the Titans, rebellious giants vanquished by Zeus. Earth lies half way from the cope of Heaven to the floor of Tartarus. This distance is so great that, according to Hesiod, it would take an anvil nine days to fall from the centre to the nadir. Some of the ancients seem to have surmised the sphericity of the earth, and to have thought that Hades was simply its dark side, the dead being our antipodes. In the Odyssey, Ulysses reaches Hades by sailing across the ocean stream and passing the eternal night land of the Cimmerians, whereupon he comes to the edge of Acheron, the moat of Pluto's sombre house. Virgil also says, "One pole of the earth to us always points aloft; but the other is seen by black Styx and the infernal ghosts, where either dead night forever reigns or else Aurora returns thither from us and brings them back the day."1 But the prevalent notion evidently was that Hades was an immense hollow region not far under the surface of the ground, and that it was to be reached by descent through some cavern, like that at Avernus.
This subterranean place is the destination of all alike, rapacious Orcus sparing no one, good or bad. It is wrapped in obscurity, as the etymology of its name implies, a place where one cannot see.
"No sun e'er gilds the gloomy horrors there; No cheerful gales refresh the stagnant air."
The dead are disconsolate in this dismal realm, and the living shrink from entering it, except as a refuge from intolerable afflictions. The shade of the princeliest hero dwelling there the
1 Georg. lib. i. II. 242-250.
swift footed Achilles says, "I would wish, being on earth, to serve for hire another man of poor estate, rather than rule over all the dead." Souls carry there their physical peculiarities, the fresh and ghastly likenesses of the wounds which have despatched them thither, so that they are known at sight. Companies of fellow countrymen, knots of friends, are together there, preserving their remembrance ofearthly fortunes and beloved relatives left behind, and eagerly questioning each newly arriving soul for tidings from above. When the soul of Achilles is told of the glorious deeds of Neoptolemus, "he goes away taking mighty steps through the meadow of asphodel in joyfulness, because he had heard that his son was very illustrious."2 Sophocles makes the dying Antigone say, "Departing, I strongly cherish the hope that I shall be fondly welcomed by my father, and by my mother, and by my brother."3 It is important to notice that, according to the early and popular view, this Hades, the "dark dwelling of the joyless images of deceased mortals," is the destination of universal humanity. In opposition to its dolorous gloom and repulsive inanity are vividly pictured the glad light of day, the glory and happiness of life. "Not worth so much to me as my life," says the incomparable son of Peleus, "are all the treasures which populous Troy possessed, nor all which the stony threshold of Phoebus Apollo contains in rocky Pytho. Oxen, and fat sheep, and trophies, and horses with golden manes, may be acquired by effort; but the breath of man to return again is not to be obtained by plunder nor by purchase, when once it has passed the barrier of his teeth."
It is not probable that all the ornamental details associated by the poets with the fate and state of the dead as they are set forth, for instance, by Virgil in the sixth book of the Aneid were ever credited as literal truth. But there is no reason to doubt that the essential features of this mythological scenery were accepted in the vulgar belief. For instance, that the popular mind honestly held that, in some vague sense or other, the ghost, on leaving the body, flitted down to the dull banks of Acheron and offered a shadowy obolus to Charon, the slovenly old ferryman, for a passage in his boat, seems attested not only by a thousand averments to that effect in the current literature of the time, but also by the invariable custom of placing an obolus in the dead man's mouth for that purpose when he was buried.
The Greeks did not view the banishment of souls in Hades as a punishment for sin, or the result of any broken law in the plan of things. It was to them merely the fulfilment of the inevitable fate of creatures who must die, in the order of nature, like successive growths of flowers, and whose souls were too feeble to rank with gods and climb into Olympus. That man should cease from his substantial life on the bright earth and subside into sunless Hades, a vapid form, with nerveless limbs and faint voice, a ghostly vision bemoaning his existence with idle lamentation, or busying himself with the misty mockeries of his former pursuits, was melancholy enough; but it was his natural destiny, and not an avenging judgment.
But that powerful instinct in man which desires to see villany punished and goodness rewarded could not fail, among so cultivated a people as the Greeks, to develop a doctrine of future compensation for the contrasted deserts of souls. The earliest trace of the idea of
2 Odyssey, lib. xi. II. 538, 539.
3 Antigone, II. 872-874.
retribution which we find carried forward into the invisible world is the punishment of the Titans, those monsters who tried by piling up mountains to storm the heavenly abodes, and to wrest the Thunderer's bolts from his hand. This germ is slowly expanded; and next we read of a few specified criminals, who had been excessively impious, personally offending Zeus, condemned by his direct indignation to a severe expiation in Tartarus. The insulted deity wreaks his vengeance on the tired Sisyphus, the mocked Tantalus, the gnawed Tityus, and others. Afterwards we meet the statement that condign retribution is always inflicted for the two flagrant sins of perjury and blasphemy. Finally, we discern a general prevalence of the belief that punishment is decreed, not by vindictive caprice, but on the grounds of universal morality, all souls being obliged in Hades to pass before Rhadamanthus, Minos, or Aacus, three upright judges, to be dealt with, according to their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution of poetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, so melodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Some ludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the Emperor Julian's Symposium. The gods prepare for the Roman emperors a banquet, in the air, below the moon. The good emperors are admitted to the table with honors; but the bad ones are hurled headlong down into Tartarus, amidst the derisive shouts of the spectators.
As the notion that the wrath of the gods would pursue their enemies in the future state gave rise to a belief in the punishments of Tartarus, so the notion that the distinguishing kindness of the gods would follow their favorites gave rise to the myth of Elysium. The Elysian Fields were earliest portrayed lying on the western margin of the earth, stretching from the verge of Oceanus, where the sun set at eve. They were fringed with perpetual green, perfumed with the fragrance of flowers, and eternally fanned by refreshing breezes. They were represented merely as the select abode of a small number of living men, who were either the mortal relatives or the special favorites of the gods, and who were transported thither without tasting death, there to pass an immortality which was described, with great inconsistency, sometimes as purely happy, sometimes as joyless and wearisome. To all except a few chosen ones this region was utterly inaccessible. Homer says, "But for you, O Menelaus, it is not decreed by the gods to die; but the immortals will send you to the Elysian plain, because you are the son in law of Zeus."4 Had the inheritance of this clime been proclaimed as the reward of heroic merit, had it been really believed attainable by virtue, it would have been held up as a prize to be striven for. The whole account, as it was at first, bears the impress of imaginative fiction as legibly upon its front as the story of the dragon watched garden of Hesperus's daughters, whose trees bore golden apples, or the story of the enchanted isle in the Arabian tales.
The early location of Elysium, and the conditions of admission to it, were gradually changed; and at length it reappeared, in the under world, as the abode of the just. On one side of the primitive Hades Tartarus had now been drawn up to admit the condemned into its penal tortures, and on the other side Elysium was lowered down to reward the justified by receiving them into its peaceful and perennial happiness; while, between the two, Erebus
4 Odyssey, lib. iv. II. 555-570.
remained as an intermediate state of negation and gloom for unsentenced shades. The highly colored descriptions of this subterranean heaven, frequently found thenceforth, it is to be supposed were rarely accepted as solid verities. They were scarcely ever used, to our knowledge, as motives in life, incitement in difficulties, consolation in sorrow. They were mostly set forth in poems, works even professedly fictitious. They were often denied and ridiculed in speeches and writings received with public applause. Still, they unquestionably exerted some influence on the common modes of thought and feeling, had a shadowy seat in the popular imagination and heart, helped men to conceive of a blessed life hereafter and to long for it, and took away something of the artificial horror with which, under the power of rooted superstition, their departing ghosts hailed the dusky limits of futurity:
"Umbra Non tacitas Erebi sedes, Ditisque profundi Pallida regna petunt."
First, then, from a study of the Greek mythology we find all the dead a dull populace of ghosts fluttering through the neutral melancholy of Hades without discrimination. And finally we discern in the world of the dead a sad middle region, with a Paradise on the right and a Hell on the left, the whole presided over by three incorruptible judges, who appoint the new corners their places in accordance with their deserts.
The question now arises, What did the Greeks think in relation to the ascent of human souls into heaven among the gods? Did they except none from the remediless doom of Hades? Was there no path for the wisest and best souls to climb starry Olympus? To dispose of this inquiry fairly, four distinct considerations must be examined. First, Ulysses sees in the infernal regions the image of Herakles shooting the shadows of the Stymphalian birds, while his soul is said to be rejoicing with fair legged Hebe at the banquets of the immortal gods in the skies. To explain this, we must remember that Herakles was the son of Alcmene, a mortal woman, and of Zeus, the king of the gods. Accordingly, in the flames on Mount Oeta, the surviving ghost which he derived from his mother descends to Hades, but the purified soul inherited from his father has the proper nature and rank of a deity, and is received into the Olympian synod.5 Of course no blessed life in heaven for the generality of men is here implied. Herakles, being a son and favorite of Zeus, has a corresponding destiny exceptional from that of other men.
Secondly, another double representation, somewhat similar, but having an entirely different interpretation, occurs in the case of Orion, the handsome Hyrian hunter whom Artemis loved. At one time he is described, like the spectre of the North American Indian, chasing over the Stygian plain the disembodied animals he had in his lifetime killed on the mountains:
"Swift through the gloom a giant hunter flies: A ponderous brazen mace, with direful sway, Aloft he whirls to crush the savage prey;
5 Ovid, Met. lib. ix. II. 245-272.
Grim beasts in trains, that by his truncheon fell, Now, phantom forms, shoot o'er the lawn of hell."
In the common belief this, without doubt, was received as actual fact. But at another time Orion is deified and shown as one of the grandest constellations of the sky,
"A belted giant, who, with arm uplift, Threatening the throne ofZeus, forever stands, Sublimely impious."
This, obviously, is merely a poetic symbol, a beautiful artifice employed by the poets to perpetuate a legend by associating it with the imperishable hieroglyphs of the galaxy. It is not credible that men imagined that group of stars only outlined in such shape by the help of arbitrary fancy to be literally the translated hunter himself. The meaning simply was that he was immortalized through the eternal linking of his name and form with a stellar cluster which would always shine upon men. "The reverence and gratitude of a weak world for the heroes and benefactors they could not comprehend, named them divinities, whom they did star together to an idolatrous immortality which nationalized the heavens" with the shining shapes of the great and brave. These types of poetry, symbols lent to infant science, were never meant to indicate a literal translation and metamorphosis of human souls, but were honors paid to the memories of illustrious men, emblems and pledged securities of their unfading fame. With what glorious characters, with what forms of deathless beauty, defiant of decay, the sky was written over! Go out this evening beneath the old rolling dome, when the starry scroll is outspread, and you may still read the reveries of the marvelling minds of the antique world, as fresh in their magic loveliness as when the bards and seers of Olympus and the Agean first stamped them in heaven. There "the great snake binds in his bright coil half the mighty host." There is Arion with his harp and the charmed dolphin. The fair Andromeda, still chained to her eternal rock, looks mournfully towards the delivering hero whose conquering hand bears aloft the petrific visage of Medusa. Far off in the north the gigantic Bootes is seen driving towards the Centaur and the Scorpion. And yonder, smiling benignantly upon the crews of many a home bound ship, are revealed the twin brothers, joined in the embrace of an undying friendship.
Thirdly, it is asserted by several Latin authors, in general terms, that the ghost goes to Hades but the soul ascends to heaven; and it has been inferred most erroneously that this statement contains the doctrine of an abode for men after death on high with the gods. Ovid expresses the real thought in full, thus:
"Terra tegit carnem; tumulum circumvolat umbra; Orcus habet manes; spiritus astra petit."
"The earth conceals the flesh; the shade flits round the tomb; the under world receives the image; the spirit seeks the stars." Those conversant with the opinions then prevalent will scarcely doubt that these words were meant to express the return of the composite man to the primordial elements of which he was made. The particulars of the dissolving individual are absorbed in the general elements of the universe. Earth goes back to earth, ghost to the realm of ghosts, breath to the air, fiery essence of soul to the lofty ether in whose pure radiance the stars burn. Euripides expressly says that when man dies each part goes whence it came, "the body to the ground, the spirit to the ether."6 Therefore the often misunderstood phrase of the Roman writers, "the soul seeks the stars," merely denotes the impersonal mingling after death of the divine portion of man's being with the parent Divinity, who was supposed indeed to pervade all things, but more especially to reside beyond the empyrean.
Fourthly: what shall be said of the apotheosis of their celebrated heroes and emperors by the Greeks and Romans, whereby these were elevated to the dignity of deities, and seats were assigned them in heaven? What was the meaning of this ceremony? It does not signify that a celestial immortality awaits all good men; because it appears as a thing attainable by very few, is only allotted by vote of the Senate. Neither was it supposed actually to confer on its recipients equality of attributes with the great gods, making them peers of Zeus and Apollo. The homage received as gods by Alexander and others during their lives, the deification of Julius Casar during the most learned and skeptical age of Rome, with other obvious considerations, render such a supposition inadmissible. In view of all the direct evidence and collateral probabilities, we conclude that the genuine import of an ancient apotheosis was this: that the soul of the deceased person so honored was admitted, in deference to his transcendent merits, or as a special favor on the part of the gods, into heaven, into the divine society. He was really a human soul still, but was called a god because, instead of descending, like the multitude of human souls, to Hades, he was taken into the abode and company of the gods above the sky. This interpretation derives support from the remarkable declaration of Aristotle, that "of two friends one must be unwilling that the other should attain apotheosis, because in such case they must be forever separated."7 One would be in Olympus, the other in Hades. The belief that any, even a favored few, could ever obtain this blessing, was of quite limited development, and probably sprang from the esoteric recesses of the Mysteries. To call a human soul a god is not so bold a speech as it may seem. Plotinus says. "Whoever has wisdom and true virtue in soul itself differs but little from superior beings, in this alone being inferior to them, that he is in body. Such an one, dying, may therefore properly say, with Empedocles, 'Farewell! a god immortal now am I.'"
The expiring Vespasian exclaimed, "I shall soon be a god."8 Mure says that the doctrine of apotheosis belonged to the Graco Pelasgic race through all their history.9 Seneca severely satirizes the ceremony, and the popular belief which upheld it, in an elaborate lampoon called Apocolocyntosis, or the reception of Claudius among the pumpkins. The broad travesty of
6 The Suppliants, l. 533.
7 Nicomachean Ethics, lib. viii. cap. 7.
8 Suetonius, cap. xxiii.
9 Hist. Greek Literature, vol. i. ch. 2, sect. 5.
Deification exhibited in Pumpkinification obviously measures the distance from the honest credulity of one class and period to the keen infidelity of another.
One of the most important passages in Greek literature, in whatever aspect viewed, is composed of the writings of the great Theban lyrist. Let us see what representation is there made of the fate of man in the unseen world. The ethical perception, profound feeling, and searching mind of Pindar could not allow him to remain satisfied with the undiscriminating views of the future state prevalent in his time. Upon such a man the problem of death must weigh as a conscious burden, and his reflections would naturally lead him to improved conclusions. Accordingly, we find him representing the Blessed Isles not as the haven of a few favorites of the gods, but as the reward of virtue; and the punishments of the wicked, too, are not dependent on fickle inclinations, but are decreed by immutable right. He does not describe the common multitude of the dead, leading a dark sad existence, like phantoms in a dream: his references to death and Hades seem cheerful in comparison with those of many other ancient Greek authors. Dionysius the Rhetorician, speaking of his Threnes, dirges sung at funerals, says, "Simonides lamented the dead pathetically, Pindar magnificently."
His conceptions of the life to come were inseparably connected with certain definite locations. He believed Hades to be the destination of all our mortal race, but conceived it subdivided into a Tartarus for the impious and an Elysium for the righteous. He thought that the starry firmament was the solid floor of a world of splendor, bliss, and immortality, inhabited by the gods, but fatally inaccessible to man. When he thinks of this place, it is with a sigh, a sigh that man's aspirations towards it are vain and his attempts to reach it irreverent. This latter thought he enforces by an earnest allusion to the myth of Bellerophon, who, daring to soar to the cerulean seat of the gods on the winged steed Pegasus, was punished for his arrogance by being hurled down headlong. These assertions are to be sustained by citations of his own words. The references made are to Donaldson's edition.
In the second Pythian Ode10 Pindar repeats, and would appear to endorse, the old monitory legend of Ixion, who for his outrageous crimes was bound to an ever revolving wheel in Hades and made to utter warnings against such offences as his own. In the first Pythian we read, "Hundred headed Typhon, enemy of the gods, lies in dreadful Tartarus."11 Among the preserved fragments of Pindar the one numbered two hundred and twenty three reads thus: "The bottom of Tartarus shall press thee down with solid necessities." The following is from the first Isthmian Ode: "He who, laying up private wealth, laughs at the poor, does not consider that he shall close up his life for Hades without honor."12 The latter part of the tenth Nemean Ode recounts, with every appearance of devout belief, the history of Castor and Pollux, the god begotten twins, who, reversing conditions with each other on successive days and nights, spent their interchangeable immortality each alternately in heaven and in Hades. The astronomical interpretation of this account may be correct; but its applicability to the wondering faith of the earlier poets is extremely doubtful.
The seventh Isthmian contains this remarkable sentence: "Unequal is the fate of man: he can think of great things, but is too ephemeral a creature to reach the brazen floored seat of the gods."13 A similar sentiment is expressed in the sixth Nemean: "Men are a mere nothing; while to the gods the brazen heaven remains a firm abode forever."14 The one hundred and second fragment is supposed to be a part of the dirge composed by Pindar on the death of the grandfather of Pericles. It runs in this way: "Whoso by good fortune has seen the things in the hollow under the earth knows indeed the end of life: he also knows the beginning vouchsafed by Zeus." It refers to initiation in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and means that the initiate understands the life which follows death. It is well known that a clear doctrine of future retribution was inculcated in the Mysteries long before it found general publication. The ninety fifth fragment is all that remains to us of a dirge which appears, from the allusion in the first line, to have been sung at a funeral service performed at midnight, or at least after sunset. "While it is night here with us, to those below shines the might of the sun; and the red rosied meadows of their suburbs are filled with the frankincense tree, and with golden fruits. Some delight themselves there with steeds and exercises, others with games, others with lyres; and among them all fair blossoming fortune blooms, and a fragrance is distilled through the lovely region, and they constantly mingle all kinds of offerings with the far shining fire on the altars of the gods." This evidently is a picture of the happy scenes in the fields that stretch around the City of the Blessed in the under world, and is introduced as a comfort to the mourners over the dead body.
The ensuing passage the most important one on our subject is from the second Olympic Ode.15 "An honorable, virtuous man may rest assured as to his future fate. The souls of the lawless, departing from this life, suffer punishment. One beneath the earth, pronouncing sentence by a hateful necessity imposed upon him, declares the doom for offences committed in this realm of Zeus. But the good lead a life without a tear, among those honored by the gods for having always delighted in virtue: the others endure a life too dreadful to look upon. Whoever has had resolution thrice in both worlds to stand firm, and to keep his soul pure from evil, has found the path of Zeus to the tower of Kronos, where the airs of the ocean breathe around the Isle of the Blessed, and where some from resplendent trees, others from the water glitter golden flowers, with garlandsofwhich they wreathe their wrists and brows in the righteous assemblies of Rhadamanthus, whom father Kronos has as his willing assistant." The "path of Zeus," in the above quotation, means the path which Zeus takes when he goes to visit his father Kronos, whom he originally dethroned and banished, but with whom he is now reconciled, and who has become the ruler of the departed spirits of the just, in a peaceful and joyous region.
The following passage constitutes the ninety eighth fragment. "To those who descend from a fruitless and ill starred life Persephone [the Queen of the Dead] will grant a compensation for their former misfortune, after eight years [the judicial period of atonement and lustration for great crimes] granting them their lives again. Then, illustrious kings, strong,
13 Ll. 42-44.
14 Ll. 4-6.
15 Ll. 55-78.
swift, wise, they shall become the mightiest leaders; and afterwards they shall be invoked by men as sacred heroes." In this piece, as in the preceding one where reference is made to the thrice living man, is contained the doctrine, early brought from the East, that souls may repeatedly return from the dead and in new bodies lead new lives. One other fragment, the ninety sixth, added to the foregoing, will make up all the important genuine passages in Pindar relating to the future life. "By a beneficent allotment, all travel to an end freeing from toil. The body indeed is subject to the power of death; but the eternal image is left alive, and this alone is allied to the gods. When we are asleep, it shows in many dreams the approaching judgment concerning happiness and misery." When our physical limbs are stretched in insensible repose, the inward spirit, rallying its sleepless and prophetic powers, foretells the balancing awards of another world.
We must not wholly confound with the mythological schemes of the vulgar creed the belief of the nobler philosophers, many of whom, as is well known, cherished an exalted faith in the survival of the conscious soul and in a just retribution. "Strike!" one of them said, with the dauntless courage of an immortal, to a tyrant who had threatened to have him brayed in a mortar: "strike! you may crush the shell of Anaxarchus: you cannot touch his life." Than all the maze of fabulous fancies and physical rites in which the dreams of the poets and the guesses of the people were entangled, how much more
"Just was the prescience of the eternal goalThat gleamed, 'mid Cyprian shades, on Zeno's soul, Or shone to Plato in the lonely cave, God in all space, and life in every grave!"
An account of the Greek views on the subject of a future life which should omit the doctrine of Plato would be defective indeed. The influence of this sublime autocrat in the realms of intellect has transcended calculation. However coldly his thoughts may have been regarded by his contemporary countrymen, they soon obtained cosmopolitan audience, and surviving the ravages of time and ignorance, overleaping the bars of rival schools and sects, appreciated and diffused by the loftiest spirits of succeeding ages, closely blended with their own speculations by many Christian theologians have held an almost unparalleled dominion over the minds of millions of men for more than fifty generations.
In the various dialogues of Plato, written at different periods of his life, there are numerous variations and inconsistencies of doctrine. There are also many mythical passages obviously intended as symbolic statements, poetic drapery, by no means to be handled or looked at as the severe outlines of dialectic truth. Furthermore, in these works there are a vast number of opinions and expressions introduced by the interlocutors, who often belong to antagonistic schools of philosophy, and for which, of course, Plato is not to be held responsible. Making allowance for these facts, and resolutely grappling with the many other difficulties of the task, we shall now attempt to exhibit what we consider were the real teachings of Plato in relation to the fate of the soul. This exposition, sketchy as it is, and open to question as it may be in some particulars, is the carefully weighed result of earnest, patient, and repeated study of all the relevant passages.
In the first place, it is plain that Plato had a firm religious and philosophical faith in the immortality of the soul, which was continually attracting his thoughts, making it a favorite theme with him and exerting no faint influence on his life. This faith rested both on ancient traditions, to which he frequently refers with invariable reverence, and on metaphysical reasonings, which he over and over presents in forms of conscientious elaboration. There are two tests of his sincerity of faith: first, that he always treats the subject with profound seriousness; secondly, that he always uses it as a practical motive. "I do not think," said Socrates, "that any one who should now hear us, even though he were a comic poet, would say that I am talking idly."16 Again, referring to Homer's description of the judgments in Hades, he says, "I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in the most healthy condition."17 "To a base man no man nor god is a friend on earth while living, nor under it when dead," say the souls of their ancestors to the living; "but live honorably, and when your destined fate brings you below you shall come to us as friends to friends."18 "We are plants, not of earth, but of heaven."19 We start, then, with the affirmation that Plato honestly and cordially believed in a future life.
Secondly, his ethical and spiritual beliefs, like those of nearly all the ancients, were closely interwoven with physical theories and local relations. The world to him consisted of two parts, the celestial region of ideas, and the mundane region of material phenomena, corresponding pretty well, as Lewes suggests, to our modern conception of heaven and earth. Near the close of the Phado, Socrates says that the earth is not of the kind and magnitude usually supposed. "We dwell in a decayed and corroded, muddy and filthy region in the sediment and hollows of the earth, and imagine that we inhabit its upper parts; just as if one dwelling in the bottom of the sea should think that he dwelt on the sea, and, beholding the sun through the water, should imagine that the sea was the heavens. So, if we could fly up to the summit of the air as fishes emerging from the sea to behold what is on the earth here and emerge hence, we should know that the true earth is there. The people there dwell with the gods, and see things as they really are; and what the sea is to us the air is to them, and what the air is to us the ether is to them." Again, in the tenth book of the Republic, eleventh chapter, the soul is metaphorically said in the sea of this corporeal life to get stones and shell fish attached to it, and, fed on earth, to be rendered to a great extent earthy, stony, and savage, like the marine Glaucus, some parts of whose body were broken off and others worn away by the waves, while such quantities of shells, sea weed, and stones had grown to him that he more resembled a beast than a man. In keeping with the whole tenor of the Platonic teaching, this is a fine illustration of the fallen state of man in his vile environment of flesh here below. The soul, in its earthly sojourn, embodied here, is as much mutilated and degraded from its equipped and pure condition in its lofty natal home, the archetypal world of Truth above the base Babel of material existence, as Glaucus was on
16 Phado, 40.
17 Gorgias, 173.
18 Menexenus, 19.
19 Timaus, 71.
descending from his human life on the sunny shore to his encrusted shape and blind prowling in the monstrous deep.
At another time Plato contrasts the situation of the soul on earth with its situation in heaven by the famous comparison of the dark cave. He supposes men, unable to look upwards, dwelling in a cavern which has an opening towards the light extending lengthwise through the top of the cavern. A great many images, carrying various objects and talking aloud, pass and repass along the edge of the opening. Their shadows fall on the side of the cave below, in front of the dwellers there; also the echoes of their talk sound back from the wall. Now, the men, never having been or looked out of the cave, would suppose these shadows to be the real beings, these echoes the real voices. As respects this figure, says Plato, we must compare ourselves with such persons. The visible region around us is the cave, the sun is the light, and the soul's ascent into the region of mind is the ascent out of the cave and the contemplation of things above.20
Still again, Plato describes the ethereal paths and motions of the gods, who, in their chariots, which are the planets and stars, ride through the universe, accompanied by all pure souls, "the family of true science, contemplating things as they really are." "Reaching the summit, they proceed outside, and, standing on the back of heaven, its revolution carries them round, and they behold that supercelestial region which no poet here can ever sing of as it deserves." In this archetypal world all souls of men have dwelt, though "few have memory enough left," "after their fall hither," "to call to mind former things from the present." "Now, of justice and temperance, and whatever else souls deem precious, there are here but faint resemblances, dull images; but beauty was then splendid to look on when we, in company with the gods, beheld that blissful spectacle, and were initiated into that most blessed of all mysteries, which we celebrated when we were unaffected by the evils that awaited us in time to come, and when we beheld, in the pure light, perfect and calm visions, being ourselves pure and as yet unmasked with this shell of a body to which we are now fettered."21
To suppose all this employed by Plato as mere fancy and metaphor is to commit an egregious error. In studying an ancient author, we must forsake the modern stand point of analysis, and envelop ourselves in the ancient atmosphere of thought, where poetry and science were as indistinguishably blended in the personal beliefs as oxygen and nitrogen are in the common air. We have not a doubt that Plato means to teach, literally, that the soul was always immortal, and that in its anterior states of existence, in the realm of ideas on high, it was in the midst of those essential realities whose shifting shadows alone it can behold in its lapsed condition and bodily imprisonment here. That he closely intertwisted ethical with physical theories, spiritual destinies with insphering localities, the fortunes of men with the revolutions of the earth and stars, is a fact which one can hardly read the Timaus and fail to see; a fact which continually reappears. It is strikingly shown in his idea of the consummation of all things at regular epochs determined by the recurrence of a grand
20 Republic, lib. vii. cap. 1 4.
21 Phadrus, 56-58, 63, 64.
revolution of the universe, a period vulgarly known under the name of the "Platonic Year."22 The second point, therefore, in the present explanation of Plato's doctrine of another life, is the conception that there is in the empyrean a glorious world of incorruptible truth, beauty, and goodness, the place of the gods, the native haunt of souls; and that human souls, having yielded to base attractions and sunk into bodies, are but banished sojourners in this phenomenal world of evanescent shadows and illusions, where they are "stung with resistless longings for the skies, and only solaced by the vague and broken reminiscences of their former state."
Thirdly, Plato taught that after death an unerring judgment and compensation await all souls. Every soul bears in itself the plain evidence of its quality and deeds, its vices and virtues; and in the unseen state it will meet inevitable awards on its merits. "To go to Hades with a soul full of crimes is the worst of all evils."23 "When a man dies, he possesses in the other world a destiny suited to the life which he has led in this."24 In the second book of the Republic he says, "We shall in Hades suffer the punishment of our misdeeds here;" and he argues at much length the absolute impossibility of in any way escaping this. The fact of a full reward for all wisdom and justice, a full retribution for all folly and vice, is asserted unequivocally in scores of passages, most of them expressly connecting the former with the notion of an ascent to the bright region of truth and intellect, the latter with a descent to the black penal realm of Hades. Let the citation of a single further example suffice. "Some souls, being sentenced, go to places of punishment beneath the earth; others are borne upward to some region in heaven."25 He proves the genuineness of his faith in this doctrine by continually urging it, in the most earnest, unaffected manner, as an animating motive in the formation of character and the conduct of life, saying, "He who neglects his soul will pass lamely through existence, and again pass into Hades, aimless and unserviceable."26
The fourth and last step in this exposition is to show the particular form in which Plato held his doctrine of future retribution, the way in which he supposed the consequences of present good and evil would appear hereafter. He received the Oriental theory of transmigration. Souls are born over and over. The banishment of the wicked to Tartarus is provisional, a preparation for their return to incarnate life. The residence of the good in heaven is contingent, and will be lost the moment they yield to carelessness or material solicitations. The circumstances under which they are reborn, the happiness or misery of their renewed existence, depend on their character and conduct in their previous career; and thus a poetic justice is secured. At the close of the Timaus, Plato describes the whole animal kingdom as consisting of degraded human souls, from "the tribe of birds, which were light minded souls, to the tribe of oysters, which have received the most remote habitations as a punishment of their extreme ignorance." "After this manner, then, both formerly and
22 Statesman, 14, 15.
23 Gorgias, 165.
24 Republic, lib. vi. cap. i.
25 Phadrus, 61.
26 Timaus, 18.
now, animals transmigrate, experiencing their changes through the loss or acquisition of intellect and folly." The general doctrine of metempsychosis is stated and implied very frequently in many of the Platonic dialogues. Some recent writers have tried to explain these representations as figures of speech, not intended to portray the literal facts, but merely to hint their moral equivalents. Such persons seem to us to hold Plato's pages in the full glare of the nineteenth century and read them in the philosophic spirit of Bacon and Comte, instead of holding them in the old shades of the Academy and pondering them in the marvelling spirit of Pythagoras and Empedocles.
We are led by the following considerations to think that Plato really meant to accredit the transmigration of souls literally. First, he often makes use of the current poetic imagery of Hades, and of ancient traditions, avowedly in a loose metaphorical way, as moral helps, calling them "fables." But the metempsychosis he sets forth, without any such qualification or guard, with so much earnestness and frequency, as a promise and a warning, that we are forced, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, to suppose that he meant the statements as sober fact and not as mythical drapery. As with a parable, of course we need not interpret all the ornamental details literally; but we must accept the central idea. And in the present case the fundamental thought is that of repeated births of the soul, each birth trailing retributive effects from the foregone. For example, the last four chapters of the tenth book of the Republic contain the account of Erus, a Pamphylian, who, after lying dead on the battle field ten days, revived, and told what he had seen in the other state. Plato in the outset explicitly names this recital an "apologue." It recounts a multitude of moral and physical particulars. These details may fairly enough be considered in some degreeas mythical drapery, or as the usual traditional painting; but the essential conception running through the account, for the sake of which it is told, we are not at liberty to explain away as empty metaphor. Now, that essential conception is precisely this: that souls after death are adjudged to Hades or to heaven as a recompense for their sin or virtue, and that, after an appropriate sojourn in those places, they are born again, the former ascending, squalid and scarred, from beneath the earth, the latter descending, pure, from the sky. In perfect consonance with this conclusion is the moral drawn by Plato from the whole narrative. He simply says, "If the company will be persuaded by me, considering the soul to be immortal and able to bear all evil and good, we shall always persevere in the road which leads upwards."
Secondly, the conception of the metempsychosis is thoroughly coherent with Plato's whole philosophy. If he was in earnest about any doctrine, it was the doctrine that all knowledge is reminiscence. The following declarations are his. "Soul is older than body." "Souls are continually born over again from Hades into this life." "To search and learn is simply to revive the images of what the soul saw in its pre existent state of being in the world of realities."27 Why should we hesitate to attribute a sincere belief in the metempsychosis to the acknowledged author of the doctrine that the soul lived in another world before appearing here, and that its knowledge is but reminiscence? If born from the other world
27 Menexenus, 15.
once, we may be many times; and then all that is wanted to complete the dogma of transmigration is the idea of a presiding justice. Had not Plato that idea?
Thirdly, the doctrine of a judicial metempsychosis was most profoundly rooted in the popular faith, as a strict verity, throughout the great East, ages before the time of Plato, and was familiarly known throughout Greece in his time. It had been imported thither by Musaus and Orpheus at an early period, was afterwards widely recommended and established by the Pythagoreans, and was unquestionably held by many of Plato's contemporaries. He refers once to those "who strongly believe that murderers who have gone to Hades will be obliged to come back and end their next lives by suffering the same fate which they had before inflicted on others."28 It is also a remarkable fact that he states the conditions of transmigration, and the means of securing exemption from it, in the same way that the Hindus have from immemorial time: "The soul which has beheld the essence of truth remains free from harm until the next revolution; and if it can preserve the vision of the truth it shall always remain free from harm," that is, be exempt from birth; but "when it fails to behold the field of truth it falls to the earth and is implanted in a body."29 This statement and several others in the context corresponds precisely with Hindu theology, which proclaims that the soul, upon attaining real wisdom, that is, upon penetrating beneath illusions and gazing on reality, is freed from the painful necessity of repeated births. Now, since the Hindus and the Pythagoreans held the doctrine as a severe truth, and Plato states it in the identical forms which they employed, and never implies that he is merely poetizing, we naturally conclude that he, too, veritably inculcates it as fact.
Finally, we are the more confirmed in this supposition when we find that his lineal disciples and most competent expounders, such as Proclus, and nearly all his later commentators, such as Ritter, have so understood him. The great chorus of his interpreters, from Plotinus to Leroux, with scarcely a dissentient voice, approve the opinion pronounced by the learned German historian of philosophy, that "the conception of the metempsychosis is so closely interwoven both with his physical system and with his ethical as to justify the conviction that Plato looked upon it as legitimate and valid, and not as a merely figurative exposition of the soul's life after death." To sum up the whole in one sentence: Plato taught with grave earnestness the immortality of the soul, subject to a discriminating retribution, which opened for its temporary residences three local regions, heaven, earth, and Hades, and which sometimes led it through different grades of embodied being. "O thou youth who thinkest that thou art neglected by the gods, the person who has become more wicked departs to the more wicked souls; but he who has become better departs to the better souls, both in life and in all deaths."30
Whether Aristotle taught or denied the immortality of the soul has been the subject of innumerable debates from his own time until now. It is certainly a most ominous fact that his great name has been cited as authority for rejecting the doctrine of a future life by so many
28 The Laws, b. ix. ch. 10.
29 Phadrus, 60-62.
30 The Laws, lib. x. cap. 13.
of his keenest followers; for this has been true of weighty representatives of every generation of his disciples. Antagonistic advocates have collected from his works a large number of varying statements, endeavoring to distinguish between the literal and the figurative, the esoteric and the popular. It is not worth our while here, either for their intrinsic interest or for their historic importance, to quote the passages and examine the arguments. All that is required for our purpose may be expressed in the language of Ritter, who has carefully investigated the whole subject: "No passage in his extant works is decisive; but, from the general context of his doctrine, it is clear that he had no conception of the immortality of any individual rational entity."31
It would take a whole volume instead of a chapter to set forth the multifarious contrasting tenets of individual Greek philosophers, from the age of Pherecydes to that of Iamblichus, in relation to a future life. Not a few held, with Empedocles, that human life is a penal state, the doom of such immortal souls as for guilt have been disgraced and expelled from heaven. "Man is a fallen god condemned to wander on the earth, sky aspiring but sense clouded." Purged by a sufficient penance, he returns to his former godlike existence. "When, leaving this body, thou comest to the free ether, thou shalt be no longer a mortal, but an undying god." Notions of this sort fairly represent no small proportion of the speculations upon the fate of the soul which often reappear throughout the course of Greek literature. Another class of philosophers are represented by such names as Marcus Antoninus, who, comparing death to disembarkation at the close of a voyage, says, "If you land upon another life, it will not be empty of gods: if you land in nonentity, you will have done with pleasures, pains, and drudgery."32 And again he writes, "If souls survive, how has ethereal space made room for them all from eternity? How has the earth found room for all the bodies buried in it? The solution of the latter problem will solve the former. The corpse turns to dust and makes space for another: so the spirit, let loose into the air, after a while dissolves, and is either renewed into another soul or absorbed into the universe. Thus room is made for succession."33 These passages, it will be observed, leave the survival of the soul at all entirely hypothetical, and, even supposing it to survive, allow it but a temporary duration. Such was the common view of the great sect of the Stoics. They all agreed that there was no real immortality for the soul; but they differed greatly as to the time of its dissolution. In the words of Cicero, "Diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper, negant:" they say souls endure for a long time, but not forever. Cleanthes taught that the intensity of existence after death would depend on the strength or weakness of the particular soul. Chrysippus held that only the souls of the wise and good would survive at all.34 Panatius said the soul always died with the body, because it was born with it, which he proved by the resemblances of children's souls to those of their parents.35 Seneca has a great many contradictory passages on this subject
31 Hist. Anc. Phil. p. iii. b. ix. ch. 4.