The Destiny of the Soul Part 24

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 mult.i.tude 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.ds, 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage 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 ent.i.ty."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 G.o.d condemned to wander on the earth, sky aspiring but sense clouded."

Purged by a sufficient penance, he returns to his former G.o.dlike existence. "When, leaving this body, thou comest to the free ether, thou shalt be no longer a mortal, but an undying G.o.d."

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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.ds: if you land in nonent.i.ty, you will have done with pleasures, pains, and drudgery."32 And again he writes, "If souls survive, how has ethereal s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sages, 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 pa.s.sages on this subject

31 Hist. Anc. Phil. p. iii. b. ix. ch. 4.

32 Meditations, lib. iii. cap. 3.

33 Ibid. lib. iv. cap. 21.

34 Plutarch, Plac. Phil. iv. 7.

35 Tusc. Quast. lib. i. cap. 32.

in his works; but his preponderant authority, upon the whole, is that the soul and the body perish together.36 At one time he says, "The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity."

"As an infant in the womb is preparing to dwell in this world, so ought we to consider our present life as a preparation for the life to come."37 At another time he says, with stunning bluntness, "There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing."

Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil. 38

Besides the mystics, like Plotinus, who affirmed the strict eternity of the soul, and the Stoics, like Poseidonius, who believed that the soul, having had a beginning, must have an end, although it might endure for a long period after leaving the body, there were among the Greeks and Romans two other cla.s.ses of believers in a future life, namely, the ignorant body of the people, who credited, more or less fully, the common fables concerning Hades; and an educated body of select minds, who, while casting off the popular superst.i.tions, yet clung tenaciously to the great fact of immortality in some form or other, without attempting to define the precise mode of it.

There was among the illiterate populace, both Greek and Roman, even from the age of Eumolpus to that of Augustus, a good deal of firm faith in a future life, according to the gross scheme and particulars preserved to us still in the cla.s.sic mythology. A thousand current allusions and statements in the general literature of those times prove the actual existence of a common and literal belief in Hades with all its accompaniments. This was far from being, in the average apprehension, a mere myth. Plato says, "Many, of their own accord, have wished to descend into Hades, induced by the hope of there seeing and being with those they have loved."39 He also says, "When a man is about to die, the stories of future punishment which he had formerly ridiculed trouble him with fears of their truth."40 And that frightful accounts of h.e.l.l really swayed and terrified the people, even so late as the time of the Roman republic, appears from the earnest and elaborate arguments employed by various writers to refute them.

The same thing is shown by the religious ritual enacted at funerals and festivals, the forms of public and private wors.h.i.+p observed till after the conversion of Constantine. The cake of rice and honey borne in the dead hand for Cerberus, the periodical offerings to the ghosts of the departed, as at the festivals called Feralia and Parentalia,41 the pictures of the scenery of the under world, hung in the temples, of which there was a famous one by Polygnotus,42 all imply a literal crediting of the vulgar doctrine. Altars were set up on the spots where Tiberius and Caius Gracchus were murdered, and services were there performed in honor of their manes. Festus, an old Roman lexicographer who lived in the second or third century, tells us there was in the Comitium a stone covered pit which was supposed to be the

36 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften.

Commentarius quo Stoicorum Sententia; de Animorum post mortem Statu satis ill.u.s.trantur.

37 Epist. 102.

38 Troades, 1. 397.

39 Phado, 34.

40 Republic, lib. i. cap. 5.

41 Ovid, Fasti, lib. ii. II. 530-580.

42 Pausanias, lib. x. cap. 28.

mouth of Orcus, and was opened three days in the year for souls to rise out into the upper world.43 Apuleius describes, in his treatise on "the G.o.d of Socrates," the Roman conceptions of the departed spirits of men. They called all disembodied human souls "lemures." Those of good men were "lares," those of bad men "larva." And when it was uncertain whether the specified soul was a lar or a larva, it was named "manes." The lares were mild household G.o.ds to their posterity. The larva were wandering, frightful shapes, harmless to the pious, but destructive to the reprobate.44

The belief in necromancy is well known to have prevailed extensively among the Greeks and Romans. Aristophanes represents the coward, Pisander, going to a necromancer and asking to "see his own soul, which had long departed, leaving him a man with breath alone."45 In Latin literature no popular terror is more frequently alluded to or exemplified than the dread of seeing ghosts. Every one will recall the story of the phantom that appeared in the tent of Brutus before the battle of Philippi. It pervades the "Haunted House" of Plautus. Callimachus wrote the following couplet as an epitaph on the celebrated misanthrope:

"Timon, hat'st thou the world or Hades worse? Speak clear! Hades, O fool, because there are more of us here!" 46

Pythagoras is said once to have explained an earthquake as being caused by a synod of ghosts a.s.sembled under ground! It is one of the best of the numerous jokes attributed to the great Samian; a good nut for the spirit rappers to crack. There is an epigram by Diogenes Laertius, on one Lycon, who died of the gout:

"He who before could not so much as walk alone, The whole long road to Hades travell'd in one night!"

Philostratus declares that the shade of Apollonius appeared to a skeptical disciple of his and said, "The soul is immortal."47 It is unquestionable that the superst.i.tious fables about the under world and ghosts had a powerful hold, for a very long period, upon the Greek and Roman imagination, and were widely accepted as facts.

At the same time, there were many persons of more advanced culture to whom such coa.r.s.e and fanciful representations had become incredible, but who still held loyally to the simple idea of the survival of the soul. They cherished a strong expectation of another life, although they rejected the revolting form and drapery in which the doctrine was usually set forth. Xenophon puts the following speech into the mouth of the expiring Cyrus: "I was never able, my children, to persuade myself that the soul, as long as it was in a mortal body, lived, but when it was removed from this, that it died; neither could I believe that the soul ceased to think when separated from the unthinking and senseless body; but it seemed to me most probable that when pure and free from any union with the body, then it became most

43 De Significatione Verborum, verb.u.m "Ma.n.a.lis."

44 Lessing, Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet.

45 Ayes, I. 1485.

46 Epigram IV.

47 Vita Apollonii, lib. viii. cap. 31.

wise."48 Every one has read of the young man whose faith and curiosity were so excited by Plato's writings that he committed suicide to test the fact of futurity. Callimachus tells the story neatly:

"Cleombrotus, the Ambracian, having said, 'Farewell, O sun!'