VIII - The Felicity of the Blessed

We have seen how the evolution of religious faith caused the dwelling-place of the dead to move from the tomb to the nether world and from the nether world to the heavens. When the abode of souls was changed, all the ideas attached to the future life had to be transposed. In this lecture we shall endeavor to make clear how the opinions which were held as to the felicity of the blessed were thus transformed. We shall take up again matter which we have already touched upon in another connection and try to show the successive changes undergone by three manners of conceiving happiness in after life. The repose of the dead, the repast of the dead, and the sight of God.

The most ancient and originally the simplest of these conceptions was that of the repose of the dead. We know[464] that the dead who had not been buried in accordance with the rites were believed to find no rest in the tomb. A corpse had to be committed to the earth with traditional ceremonies in order that the spirit which animated it might have quiet. If this spirit were not subsequently nourished by offerings and sacrifices, it left its burial place and roamed the earth’s surface like an animal driven by hunger. The shades inhabiting the tombs could also be evoked by necromancers and such disturbance broke in upon their rest most unpleasantly.

These archaic ideas were so deeply implanted in the popular mind that other beliefs never expelled them, but supervened and existed side by side with them without causing their disappearance.

On tombs of the imperial period formulas like the following are often read. “Hic requiescit,” “Here rests,” “Quieti aeternae,” “For eternal rest,” inscriptions which could be interpreted figuratively. But other wishes can only be taken to have a material sense, such as, “Ossa quiescant,” “May his bones rest,” and “Molliter ossa cubent,” “May the bones lie softly.” Poetry has preserved a number of similar phrases. Tibullus expresses the following wish for a loved woman: “May thy slender form rest well beneath the soft earth.”[465]

The rest which the exact accomplishment of the rites gave to the dead was not physical only but moral also. The dead were securi, the word is properly applied to them, that is, they were exempt from care. Doubtless the care from which they were delivered by the cult of the grave, was first that of suffering from hunger and thirst,[466] but the “eternal security” (securitas aeterna)[467] they enjoyed was also the absence of all the fears and anxieties which haunt humanity.

When philosophy claimed to free souls from the superstitions of the past, it did not destroy the old conception of rest in the tomb but cleansed it from all material alloy. If it be doubtful whether anything of man survives, it is at least certain that death marks the abolition of the pains of this world and the end of its troubles. Mors laborum et miseriarum quies, is Cicero’s definition.[468] Death restores us to that state of tranquillity in which we were before our birth.[469] The “eternal home” which shelters the remains of man is the silent temple in which he no longer has anything to fear from nature or from his fellows.

The Epicureans who made ataraxia their ideal of life, the Stoics who found theirs in impassivity (ἀπάθεια), could see in the anaesthesia of death the supreme realisation of such absence of emotion and passion. The corpse lies as softly on its last bed as a man plunged in a deep and quiet sleep. The burial place is indeed often consecrated to Somno aeterno.[470] This idea is expressed in a thousand forms in literature and in epitaphs. A poor grammarian of Como, who doubtless had had little reason to congratulate himself on life, caused two lines of verse to be engraved on his tomb:[471] “I fled the miseries of sickness and the great ills of life; I am now delivered from all its pains and enjoy a peaceful calm.” On an African grave there are the following words: “After bearing a heavy burden and after manifold toils, he speaks no more, content with the silent dwelling in which he rests.”[472] We read elsewhere, “Life was a pain, death prepared me rest.”[473] The sentiment expressed by these inscriptions and many more like them is no mere reflection of the teaching of philosophers who denied the future life. It is profoundly human. The melodious but melancholy apostrophe of Leconte de Lisle is well known:

“Et toi, divine mort, ou tout rentre et s’efface,

Accueille tes enfants dans ton sein étoilé;

Affranchis nous du temps, du nombre et de l’espace

Et rends nous le repos que la vie a troublé.”

“O Death divine, at whose recall,

Returneth all

To fade in thy embrace,

Gather thy children to thy bosom starred,

Free us from time, from number and from space,

And give us back the rest that life has marred.”[474]

In the midst of all the tribulation of our tormented existence, to how many minds, even those which have the strongest religious conviction, have not the immobility and insensibility of those who are no more sometimes seemed like a deliverance? In antiquity also, this aspiration towards the moment when man will obtain remission of all his travail does not necessarily imply the belief that there is no hope beyond the cold sleep of the grave. This yearning mingles with faith in immortality and is transformed with it.

When it was believed that the dead went down into the depths of the earth where lay the infernal kingdom, another meaning was given to their rest. The funeral eulogy of a noble woman who towards the end of the Republican period saved the life of her husband, who had been proscribed, ends with the naïve words, “I pray that the gods thy Manes may grant thee rest and thus protect thee.”[475] The shades of the kinsmen of the dead must receive their souls in the subterranean world[476] and thus ensure their welfare. The road which must be travelled before the abode of the elect was reached was long and beset with dangers. The Book of the Dead in Egypt, the Orphic tablets in Greece, were guides to the Beyond which taught the dead not to stray from the right path and to avoid the various dangers threatening them.[477] Many of them, the impious who had to expiate their misdeeds and the unfortunate to whom funeral duties had not been rendered, wandered wretchedly on the banks of the Styx, vainly longing to enter the “peaceful abode” of the Elysian Fields.[478] There, lying in the cool shade, the blessed enjoyed a felicity exempt from all care. Serene quiet in a sweet idleness cheered by joyous relaxation and wise conversation. Such was the ideal which some mysteries[479] opposed to the weary agitations of earthly life and to the long sufferings of the sinful and vagabond soul. For the adepts of these doctrines the secura quies applied to the repose of the nether world, and this conception of beatitude beyond the grave is found to persist until the end of paganism.[480]

But we have seen that another doctrine triumphed in the Roman period, the doctrine that souls rise to the skies to live there eternally among the stars. In this great metamorphosis of eschatological beliefs what became of the idea of the repose of the dead? The question deserves to be more closely investigated, for the transformation had lasting consequences of which the ultimate effects can be felt even today.

The Pythagoreans were, as we have seen,[481] the first to promulgate the doctrine of celestial immortality in Greece and Italy. One of the allegories familiar to the teaching of the sect connected human destiny with the old myth of Hercules at the crossroads. The Greek letter Y, of which the stem divides midway into two, was in the school the symbol of this comparison. We have already alluded to it elsewhere.[482] When man reaches the age of reason two paths are open to him. One is smooth and easy but ends in an abyss. This is the way of pleasure. The other is at first rough and jagged, it is the hard road of virtue, but he who climbs to the summit of its slope can there rest deliciously from his weariness. Funeral reliefs represent this contrast naïvely. At the bottom of the stele the dead man is often seen accomplishing the labors of his career. At the top of the stone he is shown stretched at his ease on a couch.

The meaning of the allegory is immediately apparent. The quieta sedes in which deserving souls are received, has become the sky. How was this idea developed?

Homer[483] had already described Olympus as “the immovable seat of the gods which is neither shaken by the winds, nor wet by the rains, nor touched by the snow, but is bright with a cloudless light.” The Epicureans applied these lines of the poet to the serene dwelling where nothing occurred to modify the perpetual peace enjoyed by the gods.[484] And the founder of Stoicism had already taught that the pious souls, separated from the guilty, inhabited “tranquil and delectable” regions.[485] Both called this dwelling of the gods or the elect by the same name, sedes quietae.

We must here remember the distinction, established by the philosophers and often repeated, between the sublunary circle and the celestial spheres.[486] Above, the world of the eternal gods. Below, the world of generation and corruption. There the pure ether always kept the same serenity. Here the struggle of the elements called forth unceasing agitation and transformation. On one side reigned peace and harmony, on the other war and discord. The zone of the moon was the boundary between the two contrasted parts of the world, and “the limit between life and death.”[487] It was when they had crossed it, that the souls entered the quietae sedes of the Blessed.

The very ancient idea of a fearful journey which the dead had to make in order to reach Pluto’s subterranean kingdom was transferred to the space lying between the earth and the moon, for this was the region of the universe to which the name of nether world (Inferi)[488] was henceforth applied. As we have seen in the previous lecture,[489] when the soul, escaping from the body, was laden with material dross, it was tossed about for many centuries before it could again win to the ether. Shaken by the winds, swept to and fro by the opposing elements of air, water, and fire, it had to endure a long torture before it was cleansed of the sin which weighed it down. When at length it was freed of every fleshly taint, it escaped from inward trouble also, from the pains and the passions provoked by its union with the body. “Then,” says Seneca, “it tends to return to the place whence it has been sent down. There eternal quiet awaits it when it passes from the confused and gross to the clear and pure.”[490] In the same way certain Neo-Platonists taught that souls which had lived well, rose to the celestial heights and rested there amid the stars. Even in this life the ecstasy, which gave them anticipated enjoyment of the future bliss, is described by them as a transport in which reason attains to absolute stability or equipoise, escapes from all movement and rests in the Supreme Being.[491] Peace in the celestial light. Such is the highest form which the repose of the dead assumed in paganism.[492]

The various ideas which we have just analyzed, those of the repose in the grave, the repose in the infernal regions, and the repose in heaven followed parallel courses during the centuries and in part passed from antiquity to the Middle Ages. But the distinction between them is not always clear. Even in paganism they were intermingled and in the course of time they were gradually confused. In no class of beliefs is the force of tradition greater than in those which center in death, and the Christian peoples clung tenaciously to articles of faith which Jews and pagans had shared before them.

We have sen[493] that the masses did not easily give up their belief that the dead continued, in or about the tomb, a vegetating and uncertain life. Extreme importance was still attached to burial because the more or less unconscious conviction persisted that the soul’s rest depended on that of the body. The dread of ghosts was still the inspiration for some ceremonies performed over the remains of the dead. Nay, a new apprehension was added to this, namely, the fear lest the dead whose bodies were torn from the tomb should have no part in the resurrection of the flesh.[494] The formula, “Hic requiescit,” “Here rests,” was transferred from pagan to Christian epigraphy, and the rest men wished to the departed was first the rest of the corpse, which was peacefully to await the Day of Judgment in its last dwelling.

These were doubtless vulgar prejudices rather than dogmas recognized by orthodoxy, yet they did not remain without influence on the teaching of the doctors of the Church. For instance, Saint Ambrose[495] enlarges on the thought, probably borrowed from some philosopher, that death is good because in it the body, source of our uneasiness, our troubles and our vices, rests, calmed for ever, while the virtuous soul rises to heaven. After the travail of existence the dead rest as man rests on the Sabbath day, and this was, it was explained, the reason why the seventh day was the day of the commemoration of the departed.

The idea of rest in the infernal regions has left no deep traces on the Christian faith, for which the subterranean world became the abode of the wicked. It was, however, somewhere in the bowels of the earth that the dwelling of the righteous who lived before the Redemption was commonly placed, sometimes also that of children who died unbaptized. They found there according to the Pelagians a “place of repose and salvation” outside the kingdom of heaven.[496]

But in Roman times the idea of peace in the celestial light was dominant among the Jews and Christians as among the pagans. Thus the Book of Enoch shows us the prophet carried off in a whirlwind to the heights whence he perceived “the beds where the just rest” amid the saints.[497] We can here point out exactly the most important of the literary intermediaries through whom this conception was transmitted from paganism to Judaism and from Judaism to Christianity. Towards the end of the first century A. D., amid the desolation which followed on the destruction of the Temple, a pious Jew, somewhere in the East, composed and ascribed to the venerable authorship of Esdras an apocalypse which enjoyed singular popularity until the time of its rejection by the Church as apocryphal. The visionary who set it down combines a number of pagan reminiscences with biblical ideas. He promises eternal felicity to the just, and asks himself what will be the lot of souls between the time of their death and the end of the world. Will they be at rest or will they be tortured? And the angel who inspires him answers that when the vital breath has left the body to go again to adore the glory of the Most High, the soul which has violated the divine law will not enter the celestial dwellings but will “wander amidst torments, for ever suffering and saddened on seven paths.” But the soul which has walked in the way of God “will rest in seven orders of rewards.”[498] The sixth of these is the order in which its face begins to shine like the sun and in which it becomes incorruptible, like the stars. The seventh is that in which it wins to the sight of God.

These are conceptions and even expressions which belong to astral immortality, and the Jewish author, like the pagans before him, everywhere contrasts the state of agitation filled with anguish reserved for the guilty with the blessed tranquility which is the reward of a pious life.[499] The description of the celestial dwelling which Saint Ambrose borrowed from the pseudo-Esdras is singularly like that given by the philosophers of the earlier period, a place in which there is no cloud, no thunder, no lightning, no violence of winds, neither darkness nor sunset, neither summer nor winter to vary the seasons, where no cold is met with, nor hail, nor rain. But the Christian doctor, like the Jewish visionary, adds a new feature. There will be no more sun nor moon nor stars. The light of God will shine alone.[500]

The idea of repose in the eternal light was, thanks to the apocalypse of the supposed Esdras, to become one of those most frequently expressed by epitaphs and ritual. It was from this apocryphal work that the Roman liturgy borrowed the form of a prayer introduced into the office of the dead at least as early as the seventh century and still sung in the funeral service, Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis. “Lord, give them eternal rest and may perpetual light shine upon them.”

The idea of the repast of the dead evolved, like that of their repose, as the conception of life beyond the tomb was gradually transformed, and it finally assumed a far higher significance than that originally attributed to it.

According to a belief found everywhere, the dead, as we know,[501] needed nourishment if they were not to suffer from hunger. Hence the obligation to make libations and sacrifices on the tomb and to deposit food and drink there. The neglect of these sacred duties entailed consequences fearful to him who failed to fulfil them, just as their exact observance ensured him the good will of the spirits of the dead.

The custom of holding banquets which united the members of a family beside a grave at a funeral or on certain consecrated days, was connected with this belief. This custom was no mere rendering of an honor to one who had gone, no unmixed manifestation of piety or affection. The motive for these ceremonies was much more concrete. As we have stated elsewhere,[502] men were persuaded that the spirit of him who lay beneath the ground was present at the meal, took its place beside its kin and rejoiced with them. Therefore its share was set aside for it, and by consecrated formulas it was invited to drink and eat. Moreover the guests themselves ate copiously and drank deeply, convinced that the noisy conviviality of the feast was a source of joy and refreshment to the shade in the gloom of its sepulchral existence. Sometimes the dinner took place in a room within the tomb, specially set aside for such meetings, sometimes in one of the gardens which men delighted to make around the “eternal house” of the dead[503] and to which inscriptions sometimes give the name of “paradise” (παράδεισος).[504]

These are customs and ideas which are found everywhere from the time when history had its origin, practices and ideas to which under the Roman Empire the people still clung, and which even partially survived the conversion of the masses to Christianity, although the Church condemned them as pagan. Until the end of antiquity and even in the Middle Ages, banquets, at which wine flowed abundantly, were still held on anniversaries by kinsfolk and friends near the remains of those they loved.[505]

When, however, the conception of survival in the tomb was superseded or overshadowed by that of survival in the nether world, the repast of the dead was also transferred thither. Henceforth it was in the Elysian Fields that pious souls could take their place at the table of the Blessed. The Orphics were the first to introduce into Greece this new idea, which was, however, no more than the development of a pre-Hellenic belief, and it spread through the mysteries of Dionysos[506] to every part of the ancient world. The ritualistic repasts in which the initiate took part, the drunkenness which exalted their whole being, were for the adepts of this cult at once a foretaste and a warrant of the happiness reserved for them in that eternal feast of the subterranean world in which a sweet intoxication would rejoice their soul. That forgetfulness of all cares which the divine liquor gave was connected with Lethe, the water of which, according to mythology, souls drank that they might lose all memory of their former life.

An immense number of reliefs, scattered throughout the whole extent of the Roman Empire, bear witness to the popularity of the belief in this form of immortality. The dead man who has been made a hero and whose family comes to make sacrifices to him is stretched on a couch and lifts the rhyton which holds the heady drink of Bacchus, while before him, on a little table, dishes are placed. These banquets took place, as we have said, in the Elysian Fields, and the idea of the repast thus met and combined with the idea of rest. The Blessed were imagined as lying on a soft bed of flowered grass, taking part in a perpetual feast, to the accompaniment of music and songs. Lucian in his “True Histories”[507] describes, with ironical exaggeration, the joys of these guests who are stretched comfortably among the flowers of a fragrant meadow in the shade of leafy trees, and who gather, instead of fruit, crystal goblets, which fill with wine as soon as they are placed on the table.

In spite of the mockery of sceptics these beliefs still had some faithful partisans even at the end of paganism. A picture discovered in the catacomb of Praetextatus shows us a priest of the Thraco-Phrygian god Sabazios celebrating a mystic banquet with six of his fellows, and another fresco represents the introduction of a veiled woman into the garden of delights, where she has been judged worthy of being received at the table of virtuous souls.[508]

Sometimes in the reliefs of the “funeral banquet” the dead are seen wearing on their head the bushel (modius) of Serapis, with whom, after a virtuous life, they have been identified. This indicates a confusion, to which much other testimony bears witness, between the Bacchic mysteries and the cult of the Alexandrian god.[509] Serapis is the great master of the feast (συμποσιάρχης),[510] the host who must in the nether world entertain those faithful to him. Thus the eschatological beliefs of the Nile Valley mingled with those of Greece. In the country of burning sun, where a straying traveler runs the risk of dying of thirst on the arid stretches of sand, the hope expressed above all others for him who accomplishes the great pilgrimage to the abode of the infernal divinities, is that he may find wherewith to quench his consuming thirst. “May Osiris give thee fresh water” is a wish which the votaries of the Egyptian god often inscribed on their tombs. Thus the repast in the other world was to be above all a refreshment (refrigerium). The word passed into Christian language to denote both earthly “agape” or sacred meal and the bliss of the other world, and even today the Roman Church prays for the spiritual “refreshment” of the dead.[511]

We touch here on a question which is not yet completely elucidated, that of the relation established between the funeral banquet and the salvation of those who took part in it.

In Rome from the end of the Republic onwards this banquet, amid the general decline of faith in immortality, was increasingly detached from the tomb and became a guild or domestic ceremony. The tendency was to reduce it to the repast of a family or confraternity, to the perpetuation among men of the memory of him whose features were preserved by a statue or picture. But the funeral cult acquired new meaning with the spread of Oriental religions. It did not cease to be useful to the dead who were its object, to whose subsistence in the beyond and safe arrival in the Elysian Fields it was still thought to be necessary. The offerings of the living sustained them on their dangerous and hard journey thither. The food and drink restored them on the long road they had to travel before they reached the place of everlasting refreshment.

But the funeral repast was also salutary to those who offered it, and not only because it ensured to them the good will of a spirit or demon capable of protecting them. This banquet, at which wine flowed profusely, was like the “orgies” of the Bacchic and Oriental mysteries, and the resemblance is partly explained by an identity of kind.

The ritual of the gods whose death and resurrection were commemorated, Bacchus, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, was probably a development of the funeral ritual, and the banquet of initiation was thus related to the banquet at the grave. On the one hand, it was believed that by a mystic union with the god, men could share his blessed lot after the transient trial of a death like his.[512] On the other hand, it was with a dead man that a repast was taken, but with one who also, in some sort, had become a god, who had preceded the diners into the other world and awaited them there. “Live happy and pour out wine to our Manes,” says a Latin epitaph of Syria, engraved beneath a scene of libation, “recollecting that one day you will be with us.”[513]

According to an opinion which often found expression, the shades themselves rejected whoever did not deserve to enter the abode of the Blessed, but willingly received the pious soul which had always fulfilled its duty towards them.[514] For admission to this club of posthumous diners a members vote was necessary. Thus the funeral banquet took on the character of a mystic banquet. That is, it came to be conceived as a prelibation of the banquet at which the elect feasted in the other world. The wish which the guests made to each other, “Drink and live!” became an allusion, no more to this earthly life, but to that other existence in which they would participate in the felicity of him who had gone before them and who would help them to rejoin him therein. The following advice, repeated elsewhere in various forms, is found on the tomb of a priest of Sabazios. “Drink, eat, jest and come to me. That is what you will carry away with you” (hoc tecum feres).[515] This is not to be understood here as an Epicurean invitation to enjoy life because all else is vain,[516] but a veiled expression of faith in the efficacy for the salvation of the initiate attributed to the joyous banquets which gathered men about a tomb.

The connection between the beliefs of the mysteries and the hopes attached to the funeral cult became more intimate as immortality brought the spirits of the dead nearer the celestial divinities. The idea that some few privileged mortals win admission to the banquet of the gods is very ancient. An inscription of Sendjerli in Syria, which goes back to the eighth century before our era, orders sacrifices to be made in order that the soul of King Panamu “may eat and drink with the god Hadad,”[517] and Greek mythology told that certain heroes, such as Heracles, who had been carried off to heaven, had there become the table companions of the gods. Horace states that Augustus, borne to the ethereal summits, will there rest between Hercules and Pollux, “drinking nectar with his rosy lips.”[518] But we have seen elsewhere that apotheosis, or deification, which was at first the privilege of an aristocracy, became the common lot of all pious souls,[519] and that the Elysian Fields were transferred from the depths of the infernal realm to the upper spheres of the world. The repast of the Blessed was thus transported to heaven.[520] This removal to the region of the stars seems to have been first made in the astral religion of Syria, but it was commonly accepted in western paganism. This is why in funeral reliefs of the Roman period, in which the dead are shown banqueting, such representations are placed in the upper part of the stele, above the scenes of earthly life which fill the lower portion of the stone. The emperor Julian is giving us a mocking picture of this repast of the heroes, when in one of his satires he shows us the shades of the Caesars at table immediately beneath the moon, in the highest zone of the atmospheres, in accordance with the ideas of the Stoics.[521] Men readily fashioned the heroes who tasted the joys of Olympus on the pattern of the celestial divinities, resplendent with light, clothed in garments of dazzling whiteness, their heads crowned with rays or surrounded by a luminous nimbus, singing, as in a Greek symposium, melodious hymns.

The philosophers of course gave a symbolical interpretation of the intoxication of the souls which took part in the feast, explaining it as the ravishing of reason penetrated by divine intelligence. We will return to their doctrines presently.

The Jews of the Alexandrian period shared the belief in the celestial banquet with the Syrian paganism and transmitted it to the Christians. The Paradise of the elect was often conceived as a shady garden where tables were set out at which immortal guests passed their time in endless joy. Thus, not to mention better-known texts, Aphraates, a Syriac author of the first half of the fourth century, depicts the felicity of the Blessed, clothed in light, who are admitted to the divine table and are there fed with food which never fails. “There the air is pleasant and serene, a brilliant light shines, trees grow of which the fruit ripens perpetually, of which the leaves never fall, and beneath these shades, which give out a sweet fragrance, the souls eat this fruit and are never satiated.”[522]

The representation of this feast of Paradise recurs several times in the paintings of the catacombs, but in them the wine is poured out by Peace (Eirene) and Charity (Agape). An allegorical explanation gave a spiritual meaning to the food and drink consumed by the elect. But the old idea which was at the root of all the later development, the idea of a material repast in which the dead participated, did not disappear from popular faith when the conception that souls rose to the sky was adopted, and in many countries it has not been obliterated even today.[523]

Even in the pagan period, as we have said, enlightened minds accepted the old descriptions of joyous feasts in fresh meadows only in a figurative sense. A less coarse conception of immortality suffered them to be looked upon only as symbols or metaphors. This conception of celestial beatitude originated not in the cult of the dead but in the cult of the gods. It was at first as material as preceding conceptions, but it became purified as the idea of psychic survival was spiritualised.

We have seen in another lecture[524] that the “sight of the god” who was adored was the highest degree of initiation. Theurgy flattered itself that it could evoke divine apparitions at will. These visions have been described to us by those who claimed to have been favoured with them.[525] Their character and their effects have moreover been analysed in detail in the treatise of Jamblichus, On the Mysteries. The impression most immediately produced by these epiphanies was a boundless admiration for their splendor. The incomparable beauty with which the gods were radiant, the supernatural light in which they were wrapped, had such an effect on men that they could hardly bear the effulgence and nearly lost consciousness, but their souls were flooded with unspeakable joy and purified for ever.

To this ineffable delight of a heart possessed of divine love there was added the highest revelation for the intelligence.[526] Must not the infallible “gnosis” be that which was the result of instruction received directly from the mouth of a celestial power which had come down to earth?

The devotees who had obtained the signal favor of this resplendent vision, were thenceforth united to the deity who had manifested himself to them, and were certain to share his immortal life. The fugitive pleasure which they had felt on earth would become a bliss without end in the kingdom of the dead. There they would see face to face the god who protected them and learn from him all that had remained hidden from them in this life.

These ideas, half religious, half magical, are very ancient, especially in Egypt, but they were transformed by astrolatry. Here the celestial powers had not to be summoned by prayer or invoked by incantations in order that they might come and converse with the faithful, but were perpetually visible and offered themselves, day and night, to the veneration of humanity.

Henceforth the knowledge of divine things was no longer to be communicated by the words which the initiate believed that he heard in the silence of the sanctuary. It was revealed by a mysterious inspiration to him who had deserved it by a fervent observation of the heavens.[527] Thus by an illumination of the intelligence the astral powers unveiled their will and the secrets of their movements to their attentive servants. Here below this knowledge was always imperfect and fragmentary, but it would be completed in another world, when reason once more would rise aloft to the starry spaces whence it had descended.

This eschatological doctrine, which made astronomy the source of virtue and of immortality, could only be developed by a clergy devoted to the study of that science. Its first authors were doubtless the “Chaldeans,” who transmitted it to Greece with their theories as to the divisions of the sky and the heavenly bodies. The most ancient writing in which this Oriental influence asserts itself clearly is the Epinomis, probably a work of the astronomer Philip of Opus, a disciple of Plato. Let us listen to his own words.[528]

“When man perceives the harmony of the sky and the immovable order of its revolutions, he is first filled with joy and struck with admiration. Then the passion is born in him to learn about them all that it is possible for his mortal nature to know, for he is persuaded that he will thus lead the best and happiest existence and will go after his death to the places suited to virtue. Then being veritably and really initiate, pure reason taking part in the only wisdom, he will spend the rest of his time in contemplation of what is most beautiful among all visible things.”

This passage shows clearly the manner in which astrolatry modified ancient ideas as to the sight of a god, the reverential wonder felt in his presence by the faithful, the truth communicated to them and the immortality which completed their initiation. The doctrine of an intellectual reward for the Blessed was to attract scholars who in this world gave themselves up to study. Spiritual activity, which emancipates from material care and gives man nobility and virtue, seemed to them to be the only occupation worthy of the elect. If the theory that the Blessed would after death find this activity in the midst of the divine stars, is probably of “Chaldean” origin, it was developed by the Greek philosophers and in particular by Posidonius. It was also admitted into the Roman mysteries, which, being penetrated by the spirit of Oriental theologies, claimed to supply their adepts with a complete explanation of the universe.

We have already alluded to this system in speaking of astral mysticism.[529] Nature herself has destined man to gaze upon the skies. Other animals are bent to the earth; he proudly lifts his head to the stars. His eye, a tiny mirror in which immensity is reflected, the soul’s door, open to the infinite, follows the evolutions of the heavenly bodies from here below. By their splendor they make men marvel and by their majesty compel them to veneration. Their complicated movements, ruled by an immovable rhythm, are inconceivable unless they are endowed with infallible reason.

The observation of the sky is not only an inexhaustible source of aesthetic emotion. It also causes the soul, a detached parcel of the fires of the ether, to enter into communion with the gods which shine in the firmament. Possessed with the desire to know them, this soul receives their revelations. They instruct it as to their nature. Thanks to them, it understands the phenomena produced in the cosmic organism. Thus scientific curiosity is also conceived as a yearning for God. The love of truth leads to holiness more surely than initiations and priests.

Of the numerous passages in which these ideas are expressed I will recall one which is well known but is not always well understood.[530] Virgil in his Georgics tells us what he looks to receive from the sweet Muses whom he serves, being “struck with a great love for them.” Not, as one would expect, poetic inspiration but physical science. The Muses are to point out to him the paths of the stars in the sky, to explain to him the reasons for eclipses, tides and earthquakes and the variations in the length of the day. “Happy is he,” the poet concludes, “who can know the causes of things, who treads underfoot all fear and inexorable fate and vain rumours as to greedy Acheron.”[531] There is, in spite of a reminiscence of Lucretius, nothing Epicurean in the idea here expressed. The man who has won knowledge of Nature, which is divine, escapes the common lot and does not fear death because a glorious immortality is reserved for him.

For these joys which the acquisition of wisdom gives here below, partially and intermittently, are in the other life bestowed with absolute fulness and prolonged for ever. Reason, set free from corporeal organs, attains to an infinite perceptive power and can satisfy the insatiable desire of knowledge which is innate within reason itself. The Blessed souls will thus be able at once to delight in the marvellous spectacle of the world and to obtain perfect understanding thereof. They will not weary of following the rhythmic evolutions of the chorus of stars of which they form part, of noting the causes and the rules which determine their movements. From the height of their celestial observatory they will also perceive the phenomena of our globe and the actions of men. Nothing which happens in nature or in human society will be hidden from them. This speculative life (βιὸς θεωρητικός) is the only one on earth or in heaven which is worthy of the sage.

To observe the course of the stars throughout eternity may appear to us a desperately monotonous occupation, a rather unenviable beatitude. For the stars, shorn of their divinity, are for us no more than gaseous or solid bodies circulating in space, and we analyse with the spectroscope their chemical composition. But the ancients felt otherwise. They describe with singular eloquence the “cosmic emotion” which seized them as they contemplated their southern skies. Their soul was ravished, borne on the wings of enthusiasm into the midst of the dazzling gods which from the earth had been descried throbbing in the radiance of the ether. These mystic transports were compared by them to Dionysiac intoxication. An “abstemious drunkenness”[532] raised man to the stars and kindled in him an impassioned ardor for divine knowledge. And as the exaltation produced by the vapors of wine gave to the mystics of Bacchus a foretaste of the joyous inebriation promised to them in the Elysian banquet, so the ecstasy which uplifted him who contemplated the celestial gods caused him to feel the happiness of another life while he was yet here below.[533]

“I know,” says an epigram of Ptolemy himself,[534] “I know that I am mortal, born for a day, but when I follow the serried crowd of the stars in their circular course my feet touch the earth no longer. I go to Zeus himself and sate myself with ambrosia, the food of the gods.”

In the same way the intoxication produced by music, the divine possession which purified man by detaching him from material cares, caused him to taste for an instant the felicity which would fill his whole being when he should harken to the sweet harmony produced by the rotation of the spheres, the celestial concert which the ears of mortals are incapable of hearing, as their eyes cannot bear the brilliance of the sun. Men’s instruments could cause the perception of only a weak echo of these delightful chords, but they awoke in the soul a passionate desire for heaven, where the unspeakable joy produced by the cosmic symphony would be felt.

The beatitude of the elect, as conceived by astral immortality, was a magnified projection to heaven of the joys which a religion of the erudite held to be most worthy of virtuous spirits. When pagan theology transported the abode of the most favored souls outside the boundaries of the universe to a world beyond the senses,[535] the happiness of these souls could no longer consist solely in the sight and the hearing of the motion of the spheres. This entirely material conception of felicity in the Beyond had to be spiritualized. The ecstasy of Plotinus does not stop short at the visible gods of the firmament. In it the soul is transported beyond even the world of ideas and reaches, in an upward rush of love, the divine unity in which it merges, ridding itself of all consciousness and all form. This is the supreme goal which none can attain after death save him who has conquered perfect purity. But the aristocratic intellectualism of this philosophy reserved this union with the first Principle for an élite of sages. Paganism in its decline believed in a hierarchy of souls ascending to the divinity, in a scale of merit corresponding to various degrees of rewards. The majority lived among the stars and, divine like them, helped them to govern the earth. We already know their blessed lot. Others who were more perfect entered the intelligible cosmos[536] and their happiness, as it was imagined, is but a more exalted counterpart of the joys attributed to the former class. They were plunged in immovable contemplation of pure Ideas. Forgetting earthly things, they were wholly absorbed by this intense activity of thought which was to them an inexpressible joy. Moreover, being set free from the bonds of their flesh and of their individuality, they could embrace in a single glance all the separate intelligences which together formed the divine Nous, and thus had a simultaneous intuition of everything, the direct comprehension of the ultimate reason of things.

Beatific vision of the splendor of God, immediate perception of all truth, mystic love for an ineffable Beauty—these were sublime speculations which were to be unendingly reproduced and developed after the fall of paganism. Unavailing efforts to represent a state inconceivable to any human imagination, they expressed the ardent yearning of religious souls towards an ideal of perfection and felicity. But this high religious spirituality had gradually broken away from somewhat coarse beliefs which had little by little been purified. The rapture which transported Plotinus to those summits where reason, bewildered as in a swoon, forsakes even thought in order to lose itself within a principle which is above all definition, is directly connected with the ecstasy which in the temples of Egypt came upon the devotee who, like the philosopher, conversed “alone with the lone god,”[537] whom the priest had evoked, and believed that in this vision he found a guarantee of eternal happiness.

FOOTNOTES

484. Lucretius, III, 18 ss.

485. Zeno, fr. 147 (von Arnim, Fragm. Stoicorum, I, p. 40): “Zeno docuit sedes piorum ab impiis esse discretas et illos quidem quietas ac delectabiles habitare regiones.”

486. See Introd., p. 25; Lecture III, p. 96.

487. Macrob., Somn. Scip., I, 11, 6: “Vitae mortisque confinium.”

488. See above, Lecture II, p. 81 s.

489. See Lecture VII, p. 185 s.

490. Sen., Consol. Marc., 24, 5: “(Animus) nititur illo unde demissus est; ibi illum aeterna requies manet e confusis crassisque pura et liquida visentem.”

491. Plotin., IX, 8, 9, p. 768 A; IX, 8, 11, p. 770 C.

492. Cf. Aug., Serm., CCLX (P.L. XXXVIII, 1132, 38): “Dixerunt Platonici ... animas, ire ad superna caelorum et requiescere ibi in stellis et luminibus istis conspicuis.”

493. Lecture I, p. 45 ss.

494. Ibid., p. 69.

495. St. Ambrose, De bono mortis, 9; cf. Kaibel, Inscr. Sic. It., 2117.

496. Aug., De anima, II, 12.

497. Book of Enoch, 39.

498. IV Esdr., VII, 91: “Requiescent per septem ordines”; cf. VII, 95 (p. 131 ss., Violet).

499. IV Esdr., VII, 36, 38 (p. 146, Violet).

500. Ambrose, De bono mortis, 12, § 53 (P.L., XIV, 154); cf. IV Esdr., VII, 39.

501. See Lecture I, p. 50.

502. See Lecture I, p. 54.

503. Ibid., p. 57.

504. Calder, Journal of Roman Studies, 1912, p. 254.

505. See above, Lecture I, p. 55 ss.

506. See Introd., p. 35; Lecture IV, p. 126.

507. Lucian, Verae hist., II, 14.

508. Best reproduction, Wilpert, Pitture delle Catacombe Romane, II, 132–133.

509. See above, Introd., pp. 35, 37.

510. Aelius Arist., XLV (VIII), 27 (p. 360, Keil).

511. See my Oriental Religions, Chap. IV, end.

512. See Lecture IV, p. 122; Introd., p. 34.

513. CIL, III, 14165.

514. See Lecture I, p. 68; II, p. 86; V, p. 134.

515. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 1317 = CIL, VI, 142; cf. Plato, Phaedo, p. 107D.

516. As it is elsewhere; cf. Introd., p. 11.

517. Lagrange, Religions sémitiques2, 1905, p. 493.

518. Horace, Od., III, 3, 12.

519. Lecture IV, p. 113 s., 116 ss.

520. See, for instance, Kaibel, Epigr. Graeca, 312, 13.

521. Julian, Caesares, p. 307 C; cf. Introd., p. 29; Lecture III, p. 98.

522. Patrologia Orientalis, I, p. 1014.

523. See above, Lecture I, p. 55 s.

524. Lecture IV, p. 121.

525. For instance, by the physician Thessalus (under Nero); cf. Cat. codd. astrol., VIII, 3, p. 137; VIII, 4, p. 257.

526. Cf. Lecture IV, pp. 121, 125 s.

527. See above, Lecture IV, p. 126.

528. P. 896 C; cf. p. 992 B.

529. See above, Lecture IV, p. 126.

530. The true interpretation has been given by Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, 1913, p. 112 s.

531. Georg., II, 489 ss.: “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Atque metus omnis et inexorabile Fatum Subiecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.”

532. Νηφάλιος μέθη, Philo., probably after Posidonius.

533. Cf. Lecture IV, p. 126.

534. Anthol. Palatina, IX, 577: Οἶδ’ ὅτι θνατὸς ἐγὼ καὶ ἐφάμερος, ἀλλ’ ὅταν ἄστρων μαστεύω πυκινὰς ἀμφιδρομους ἕλικας οὐκετ’ ἐπιψαύω γαίης ποσὶν, ἀλλὰ παρ’ αὐτῷ Ζανὶ θεοτρεφέος πίμπλαμαι ἀμβροσίης.

535. See Introd., p. 4.

536. See Lecture III, p. 108.

537. Μόνος πρὸς μόνῳ. The expression had been used by religion before being taken over by philosophy. Cf. Le culte égyptien et le mysticisme de Plotin, in Monuments Piot, XXV, 1922, p. 78 ss.