[82]. In fact, a recognition of a place of happiness and a place of punishment in the other life accompanies sooner or later a certain stage of ethical culture in all communities. In India it appears in the late Vedic and post-Vedic periods, together with the ethical doctrine of metempsychosis, and though, as is natural in such a stage of development, various ideas are held respecting the destinies of the good and the bad, the ethical distinction between these classes of persons, with a systematic awarding of rewards and punishments, becomes firmly established: Yama becomes an ethical judge. In the Brahmanas, Manu, and the Mahabharata, we find a sort of heaven for the virtuous and a hell for the vicious. While the academic thought of Brahmanism and the altruistic systems of Jainism and Buddhism looked to the absorption of the departed into the All, the popular Hindu faith held fast to the scheme of happiness and wretchedness in the future.[172] As in Dante's Divina Commedia, the heaven was somewhat colorless, the hell more distinct and picturesque; pain is acute and varied, happiness is calm and uniform.
[83]. The later Egyptian eschatological development was not unlike the later Hindu. The good were rewarded with delightful habitations in the West or with the Sun; the bad were tortured in a gloomy place.[173]
[84]. As regards the early Greek eschatological scheme, it is suggested by S. Reinach[174] that the descriptions of punishments in Tartarus (as in the cases of Tantalus and others) arose from misunderstood representations of the condition of the dead in the other world, they being represented either as engaged in the occupations of this life, or as they were at the moment of death. The great punishments, in fact, are assigned only to heroic mythical offenders, but there seems to be no reason why the idea of retribution should not be supposed to enter into such descriptions. Separation of the good from the bad on ethical grounds appears in Greece in the time of Plato. In various passages he describes the savage places (Tartarus and others) to which criminals go after death, and the happy abodes of the virtuous.[175] These abodes were not with the gods; the occasional translations to heaven (Heracles, Ganymede) are exceptional honors paid to heroes and favorites.
[85]. The Jewish conception of a punitive future belongs to the Greek period of Jewish history, and was probably developed on Hebrew lines under Greek and Egyptian influence. A combination of the Old Testament view of future retribution on earth with the conception of torture in the other world is given in Enoch.[176] In some circles Sheol was placed in the West and divided into two regions, one of happiness, the other of punishment,[177] or the good dwell with the angels in heaven, the bad in hell.[178] By others the abodes of the dead were placed in the heavenly regions: of the seven heavens, the second was assigned to the bad and the third to the good.[179] With all the variation of locality, the separation of the bad from the good is made permanent, and this distinction is maintained in the New Testament, which throughout assigns the wicked to hell (Gehenna or Tartarus), while the righteous dwell sometimes on the renovated earth, sometimes in the heavenly regions.[180]
[86]. The Jewish and Christian books mentioned above content themselves with the general statement that the punishment of the wicked will be torture by fire and cold. Succeeding Christian books elaborated the picture of torture with great ingenuity; the Apocalypse of Peter, following and expanding the description of Plato and Enoch, has an elaborate barbarous apparatus of punishment, and this scheme, continued through a series of works,[181] has its culmination in Dante's Inferno, where, however, the ethical element is pronounced, though colored by the poet's likes and dislikes.
[87]. Purgatory. The wicked dead were not always left hopeless in their place of punishment. Kindly human feeling (shown in early stages by pious care for the well-being of the dead) and the analogy of earthly procedures, civil and religious, led to the view that, after the expiation of faults by suffering, the evildoer might be freed from his prison and gain a place of happiness. Pardon and purification were effected on earth by punishments (scourging, imprisonment, etc.) or by ritual processes (ablution, fastings, etc.)—why not in the other life? In some systems of transmigration the man, forced after death to assume a lower form, may rise by good conduct to a higher form. In Plato's imaginative construction of the Underworld[182] those who have lived neither well nor ill are purified in the Acherusian lake and then receive rewards according to their deserts; and those who have committed great but not unpardonable crimes may come to the lake (after having suffered the pains of Tartarus) and be freed from trouble if they obtain pardon from those they have wronged. But as here, so hereafter, certain offenses were regarded as unpardonable. The purgatorial conception passed into patristic and Roman and Eastern Christianity and Talmudic and Medieval Judaism.[183]
[88]. Resurrection. The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which has been fully developed only by the Persians and the Jews (and from them taken by Christianity and Islam), appears to have grown from simple beginnings. It is the expression of the conviction that the perfect man is made up of soul and body, and its full form is found only in periods of high ethical culture. But in very early times the belief in the intimate connection between body and soul appears in the care taken among certain peoples to preserve the bones or the whole body of the deceased as a possible future abode for the soul;[184] and, on the other hand, as the soul, it was held, might return to the body and be dangerous to the living, means were sometimes employed to frighten it off. It seems to have been believed in some cases that the destruction of the body involved the destruction of the soul (New Zealand). An actual entrance of a departed soul into a human body is involved in some early forms of the doctrine of reincarnation,[185] but this is not the restoration of the dead man's own body. It was held in Egypt (and not improbably elsewhere) that the soul after death might desire to take possession of its own body, and provision was made for such an emergency; but this belief seems not to have had serious results for religious life. A temporary reunion of soul and body appears in the figure of the vampire, which, however, is a part of a popular belief and religiously not important. But these passing beliefs indicate a general tendency, and may have paved the way for the more definite conception of bodily restoration.
[89]. The more developed Hindu doctrine (Brahmanic, Jainistic, Buddhistic) recognized a great variety of possible forms of reincarnation (human and nonhuman), and made a step forward by including the continuity or reëstablishment of moral life and responsibility (the doctrine of karma).[186] It, however, never reached the form of a universal or partial resurrection.
[90]. The birthplace of this latter doctrine appears to have been the region in which Mazdaism arose, the country south of the Caspian Sea. Windischmann infers from Herodotus, iii, 62, that it appears as a Mazdean belief as early as the sixth century B.C.[187] This is doubtful, but it is reported as a current belief by Theopompus.[188] Its starting-point was doubtless the theory of reincarnation, which, we may suppose, the Iranian Aryans shared with their Indian brethren. Precisely what determined the Iranian movement toward this specific form of reincarnation we have no means of knowing. It may be due to the same genius for simple organization that led the Zoroastrians to discard the mass of the old gods and elevate Ahura Mazda to the chief place in the pantheon; their genius for practical social religious organization may have induced them to select human reincarnation as the most natural and the most effective morally, and to discard other forms as unworthy.[189] The dead man's own body would then be the natural dwelling place of his soul; but a refined body (as in 1 Cor. xv) might be regarded as better suited to the finer life of the future. Whatever the cause, they adopted this conception, and probably through their influence it passed to, or was formulated by, the Jews, among whom it appears in the second century B.C. (in the Book of Daniel).[190] In Daniel and 2 Maccabees resurrection is confined to the Jews; in Enoch it is sometimes similarly confined, sometimes apparently universal.[191] In the New Testament also the same diversity of statement appears; resurrection seems to be confined to believers in some passages[192] and to be universal in others.[193] In the former case it is regarded as a reward of piety and as a consequence of the intimate relation between the man and God or Christ; unbelievers then remain in hades, where they are punished. But universal resurrection was probably thought of as involved in the grandiose conceptions of a final judgment and a final moral restoration.[194]