Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

by Erwin Rohde

§ 5

Ionic physiology had fixed its attention on Nature as a whole, and on the phenomena of life displayed in every nook and corner of the universe; man, as a mere ripple on the surface of the ocean of becoming and taking form, was almost entirely neglected. A philosophy that made it its main effort to learn the nature of man, and, still further, with the knowledge so acquired, to show man the way and purpose of his living, had to try other paths.

This is what Pythagoras of Samos did. What he called his “Philosophy”[31] was in essence a practical effort. Plato[32] tells us that Pythagoras was so peculiarly honoured because he discovered a special mode of directing one’s life. A distinct way of living, formed on a religious and ethical basis, was his creation. How far his “polymathy”,[33] which indubitably contained already the substance of Pythagorean science, may have become a system in his hands, is not distinctly known. What is certain is that in Kroton he formed a society which, together with the strict rules in accordance with which he organized their manner of life for his associates, eventually spread far and wide among the Achæan and Dorian cities of the Italian “great Greece”. In this society a profound conception of human life and its purposes was given practical and visible application, and to have brought this about must be regarded as the act and the special service of Pythagoras. The fundamental conception of this way of life, except in so far as it may have contained from the beginning a mystic philosophy of numbers, was by no means the special invention of Pythagoras; the new and potent feature which he introduced was the force of personality which was able to give life and body to the ideal. What was apparently lacking in similar movements in ancient Greece was now provided by a great man who for his followers was a pattern and an example, a leader inspiring imitation and emulation. His personality became a centre to which a whole community was attracted by a sort of inward necessity. Before very long this founder of a community appeared to his followers as a superman, unique and incomparable among all other men. Some lines of Empedokles,[34] who did not himself belong to the Pythagorean society, bear witness to this fact, and to his followers Pythagoras became in memory a saint or even a god in human form, and they related legends of the miracles he had [375] performed. For us it is difficult to form a connected picture or trace the real features of the man beneath the dazzling halo of the saint.

The teaching which enabled him to knit together his followers in a far closer bond of fellowship in living than had been achieved by any Orphic sect, must still in the main have coincided with what in the Orphic doctrine immediately related to the religious life. He too pointed out the way of salvation for the soul and his doctrine of the soul formed the central feature of his philosophy.

So far as our scanty and dubious evidence serves us, the substance of the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul may be stated as follows.

The soul of man, once more regarded entirely as the “double” of the visible body and its powers, is a daimonic immortal being[35] that has been cast down from divine heights and for a punishment is confined within the “custody” of the body.[36] It has no real relationship with the body; it is not what may be called the personality of the individual visible man; any soul may dwell in any body.[37] When death separates it from the body the soul must first endure a period of purgation in Hades[38] and then return again to the upper world. The souls invisibly swarm about the living;[39] in the tremulous motion of motes in the sunbeam the Pythagoreans saw the movement of the “souls”.[40] The whole air is full of souls.[41] Upon earth, however, the soul must seek out another body, and this may be repeated many times. So it wanders a long way, passing through many bodies of men and beasts.[42] Very ancient tradition[43] said that Pythagoras himself remembered the earlier incarnations through which his soul had passed (and of which he gave information for the instruction and warning of the faithful). Here, too, the doctrine of the soul’s transmigrations took on an edificatory character in a religious and ethical sense. The conditions of the new incarnations and the character of the new lifetime are governed by the performances of the past life. What the soul has done in the past, that it must suffer in its own person when it becomes a man again.[44]

It is thus of primary importance both for the present life and for future incarnations to know and to follow the methods of salvation delivered by Pythagoras to his followers. The society points out the way to its company of the faithful in purifications and initiations, in a “Pythagorean life”[45] entirely organized with the same purpose in view—to “follow the god”.[46] Much of the old ritual symbolism that had been [376] in use for ages must have been incorporated in this Pythagorean asceticism.[47] The theological ethic of asceticism was essentially negative in character, and here, too, it meant nothing more than a protecting of the soul against the attacks of external evil that might come and pollute it.[48] All that matters is to keep the soul pure: no need for moral reformation—only that it be kept free from external evil. The fact of immortality, the soul’s perpetuity, stands fast and unalterable; as it was from the beginning so it must ever be and live.[49] To lift it at last altogether from this earthly existence and restore it to a free divine state of being—that, at least, was the final goal.[50]

The practical philosophy of the Pythagorean school is founded upon a conception of the soul as absolutely distinct from “nature”, and, in fact, opposed to it. It is thrust into the life of nature, but it is in a foreign world where it preserves its self-enclosed individuality intact and from which it escapes into independence to undergo ever-renewed incarnations. Its origin is supra-mundane, and so, too, when liberated from the shackles of natural life it will one day be enabled to return to a supernatural existence as a spirit.

Not one of these ideas is achieved by a process of scientific thinking. Physiology, the science of the world and all the phenomena of the world could never lead to the conception of the soul’s separateness from nature and its life. It was not from Greek science, but neither was it, as ancient tradition would have us believe, from foreign lands, that Pythagoras got his belief in the fallen nature of the soul, descended from supra-mundane heights to this earthly nature, and in its long pilgrimage through many bodies on the completion of which it is to be free at last, through purifications and initiations. He may have owed much to his travels; from his stay in Egypt, perhaps, he may (like Demokritos after him) have derived the stimulus to his mathematical discoveries and much else besides of the “learning” which Herakleitos ascribes to him. His doctrine of the soul, on the other hand, simply reproduces in essentials the fanciful ideas of the old popular psychology, as it had been enlarged and transformed by the theologi and the purification priests. Tradition was right in its estimation of his character, when it set him in this company and made him the pupil of Pherekydes of Syros, the theologos.[51]

It can hardly be doubted that Pythagoras himself laid the foundations of the Pythagorean science—the doctrine of the creation of the world and perhaps, too, the interpretation of [377] all being and becoming in the world as due to the action and relation of numbers, as the essential basis of all things—all this, at least in elementary outline, must have been handed on by him to his followers. After his death the two sides of his doctrine continued to develop for a period in loose conjunction side by side; the guidance of life by the mystical and religious philosophy (though this, indeed, was hardly capable of further development), and the scientific interest which grew into a fairly elaborate system. Indeed, with the break-up of the Pythagorean society and its bifurcation in the fifth century, the scattered members of the band now brought into touch with the scientific studies of other communities and cut off from the ideal of the Pythagorean life which could only be realized within the limits of the society, were forced to continue their scientific studies in solitude. Pythagorean science, evolving, as it did, a picture of the world as a whole, no less than Ionian physiology deprived the soul of the unique and, indeed, antagonistic relation to nature that Pythagorean theology had given it. Philolaos, conceiving it in a manner strictly conforming to the mathematical and musical theory, called the soul a Harmony of contrary elements united together in the body.[52] If, however, the soul is only a binding-together of opposites to unity and harmony, then it must, when death breaks up the conjunction of the united elements, itself pass away and perish.[53] It is difficult to imagine how the older Pythagorean faith in the soul as an independent being dwelling in the body and surviving it—in the immortal soul, in fact—could be accommodated to this conception. Can it be that the two conceptions were not originally intended to be brought into conjunction at all, or were not meant to exclude each other? Ancient tradition spoke of different groups among the followers of Pythagoras who had also different objects, methods, and aims of study; nor shall we be inclined to deny all credibility to this tradition when we observe how little, in fact, Pythagorean science and Pythagorean faith had to do with each other.[54]

And yet we have to admit that the same Philolaos, who described the soul as a harmony of its body, also spoke of the soul as an independent and imperishable being. We may well doubt whether these two contradictory utterances can really come from the same man and apply to the same object; though the same man might really speak in varying language about the one soul if he recognized different parts of the soul of which different truths held good; and this was, in fact, first suggested by the Pythagorean school.[55] [378]