Pagan Ideas of Immortality During the Early Roman Empire

by Clifford Herschel Moore

But all the ideas, including the Absolute, are, as I have just said, apprehended not by man’s senses but by his intellect. Therefore, argues Plato, man’s reasoning soul must have the same nature as the ideas; like them, it must belong to the world above the senses and with them it must partake of the Absolute. Moreover, since the ideas are eternal and immortal, it inevitably follows that man’s reasoning soul has existed from eternity and will exist forever.[11]

This is not the occasion to discuss the validity of Plato’s doctrine. Aristotle stated, once for all, the fundamental objections to his teacher’s views.[12] But we shall readily grant that, if we accept Plato’s doctrine, his conclusions as to the immortality of the soul may logically follow and that no further evidence is needed to convince us. Yet Plato was not content to let the matter rest on this single argument, for in other dialogues he adduces proofs which do not seem so convincing to us as to their author. He attempts to prove immortality from the self-motion of the soul, again from the dim recollections out of an earlier existence which enable one to recall axiomatic truths or to recognize relations, as in mathematics—things which one has never learned in this present life. On another occasion he argues from the unchanging nature of the soul and from the soul’s superiority to the body. But he seems to have thought the most convincing proof was the fact that the notion of life is inseparable from our concept of the soul; that is, a dead soul is unthinkable. For all these reasons, therefore, he argued that the soul must be immortal.[13]

Whatever we may think of Plato’s different proofs, they have furnished the armories of apologists almost down to our own day. In antiquity they were constantly repeated, in whole or in part, not only by devoted members of the Academy and later by the Neoplatonists, but by the Eclectics and others, like Cicero in the first book of his Tusculan Disputations, and at the close of Scipio’s Dream; they were borrowed by the Stoics, and some eight hundred years after Plato had first formulated them, they were employed by St. Augustine in his tract De Immortalitate Animae. The religious intuition of the Orphic and Pythagorean then was given a rational basis by Plato, and thus supported, proved so convincing to antiquity that Plato’s views were the most important of all in supporting belief in the soul’s immortality. They were in large measure taken up by the Christian church, and, as has been often shown, the doctrine of a spiritual immortality apart and free from the body, was of immense service to primitive Christianity, when the hope of the early return of Christ to found a new kingdom on earth faded before the lengthening years.

To Plato himself his belief in immortality was of the greatest moment, for the whole fabric of his ethical and political philosophy is built against the background of that doctrine. And indeed we should all grant much validity to the argument that the human reason, though weak and limited, is one with the divine and infinite reason; otherwise the human could have no understanding of the divine. But when it is further argued that if the human reason is of the same nature with the divine, it must be eternal and immortal, we may reply that, even so, we are not convinced that the individual soul must therefore have a conscious and separate existence through all eternity; its identity may be lost by absorption into the universal reason, the supreme idea. This is a matter on which Plato nowhere delivers a clear opinion, but his thought is so plainly centered on the individual soul that we can hardly believe that it was possible for him to conceive of the soul’s personality ever being lost in the Absolute.

Although Plato and his greatest pupil, Aristotle, regarded man’s reasoning soul as spiritual, something distinct from matter, few ancient thinkers were able to rise to the concept of the immateriality of man’s reasoning nature. The Stoics, who in their eclectic system borrowed from both Plato and Aristotle, as well as from many other predecessors, held to a strict materialism which they took from Heraclitus. But to their material principle they applied a concept which they took from Aristotle, for they recognized in all things the existence of an active and a passive principle, and they said that by the action of the former on the latter, all phenomena were produced. The active principle they called reason, intelligence, the cause of all things. It was the world-reason which, according to their view, permeated every part of the cosmos, causing and directing all things. To express their concept of its nature, they often named it Fire, the most powerful and active of the elements, or rather the primordial element; again they often called it God, for they did not hesitate to speak of this immanent principle as a person. Furthermore, since man is a part of the cosmos, the world-reason expresses itself in him. Indeed man’s reason, the directing element of the human soul, is itself a part of the world-reason, or in Epictetus’ striking phrase, man is “a fragment of God.”[14] At this point the Stoic and the Platonist were in accord, although the paths of thought which they had travelled were very different. Yet the Stoic could not agree with the Platonist that the individual soul survived forever, since he held to a cyclical theory of the cosmos, according to which this present universe was temporal. It had been created by the eternal fire, by the world-reason, from itself, and it was destined in due season to sink back again into universal fire. Meantime, according to the views of most Stoics, the souls of the just would survive this body, ascending to the spheres above the world, where they would dwell until absorbed once more into the divine element from which they sprang. To the souls of the wicked only a short period at most of post-corporeal existence was granted—brevity of life or annihilation was their punishment.[15]

Strictly speaking, the prospect of the limited existence after death, which the Stoics held out as virtue’s reward, should have had little value for the philosophic mind, especially as their philosophy offered no warrant that personality would survive at all. But it would seem that men at every period of human history have had immortal longings in them so strong that they have eagerly embraced the assurance of even a brief respite from annihilation; certain it is that to many Greeks and Romans the Stoic doctrine of a limited existence after death was a strong incentive to virtue and a consolation in the midst of this world’s trials.

But no doctrine of the post-corporeal existence of the soul has ever had the field entirely to itself. We know that in antiquity even the Stoic conception of the soul’s limited survival, to say nothing of Platonic beliefs in actual immortality, met with much opposition and denial among the intellectual classes. The Epicureans, with their thorough-going atomistic materialism, would not allow that the soul had any existence apart from the body; on the contrary, they held that the soul came into being at the moment of conception, grew with the body, and, at the body’s death, was once more dissolved into the atoms from which it first was formed. Epicurean polemics were directed against both popular superstitions and Platonic metaphysics; the attacks had the advantage of offering rational, and for the day scientific, explanations of natural phenomena, which fed human curiosity as to the causes of things, and which, if accepted, might logically lead to that freedom from the soul’s perturbation which was the aim of the teaching. Moreover, the noble resignation, the high moral and humane zeal, which characterized the Epicurean School at its best, as well as its easy decline into hedonistic appeals, made it popular, especially in the last two centuries before our era. But the very fire and passion of Lucretius, its most gifted Latin exponent, give us the impression that after all most men were not moved to find the peace which the poet promised them, if they would but accept the doctrine of the soul’s dissolution at the moment of death.

The Sceptics also, who claimed not an inconsiderable number of intellectuals, doubted the possibility of a future life, or found themselves unable to decide the matter at all. Like Tennyson’s Sage they would declare:

“Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal.”

Indeed it is true that of all the philosophic sects at the beginning of our era, only those which were imbued with Platonic and Orphic-Pythagorean ideas, had confidence in the soul’s immortality. The Stoic position we have already discussed. Some scholars, following Rohde,[16] claim that there was little belief in any kind of a future life among the educated classes at the time we are considering; this I hold to be an error, although it is certain that the Epicureans and Sceptics had a large following. In any case we need to remind ourselves that the intellectuals are always a small minority, whose views may not represent in any way popular beliefs.