It was not clear to me how I could continue to call myself “helped” when I was on the point of being dissolved into the four elements. If I were a criminal, successful in escaping punishment on earth, I might deem it “help” (after a fashion) to know that I should be equally successful after quitting the earth, because I need not fear Hades and its three rivers as enemies. But where were the “friends”? The four elements promised but cold friendship! Arrian’s comment rose to my mind, and a second time I assented to it, “I cannot say that this satisfies me.” Epictetus was so averse from anything like cant or insincerity of expression that I was amazed—as I still am—that he could use, in such a context, the words “friendly and akin.” Surely Sappho’s cry was truer, when she wandered alone through the woods where she had once been loved by Phaon—
“This place is now dead dust. He was its life.”
What would it profit that my “fiery part” should return to fire? It might as well go astray into water, or earth, or into extinction, as far as I cared. To be still loved would have been to be still in some kind of home. But who would love my four elements? I should be “not I,” but only four severed portions of what had once been “I,” fragments incapable even of mourning, wandering among “dead dust,” no better than “dead dust” themselves! How infinitely should I have preferred that Epictetus—if he could not honestly accept the confident hope of Socrates concerning a life after death,—should have said simply this, “As to what Zeus does with our souls after death, others think they know much. I know nothing, except that He does what is best.”
Reviewing passages in which Epictetus had mentioned the “soul,” I was more perplexed than ever. For in those he distinctly recognised the “soul” as “better than the flesh,” or “better than the body,” and as using the body as its instrument. When, therefore, he spoke of God as saying to man, “Come!” he ought to have supposed God to be addressing the whole man, soul as well as body, or perhaps the soul alone, (using the body, or the flesh, as its instrument). But if God said to the human soul “Come!” how could He go on to say “Such part as was fire in you” and so on, just as though we knew, without proof, that the soul was composed of nothing but fire, earth, air and water? We knew no such thing. On the contrary, Epictetus continually assumed that we have within ourselves “mind” and “logos.” He also said that “The being of God” is “mind, knowledge, right logos.” Now he could hardly suppose that “mind” and “logos” were composed of fire, earth, air, and water. For my part, I did not feel that I knew anything certain about the distinctions between “mind,” “soul,” “logos” and “I.” But those who made distinctions appeared to me under an obligation to say what they meant by them.
It appeared to me that our Master had been inconsistent. As a rule, he dealt with each of us as having a soul that was our real self, and a body that was the tool of the soul. “Tyrants,” he would say, “can hurt your body but they cannot hurt you.” Might not a pupil of his go on consistently to say, “Death can kill your body but it cannot kill you”? This, at all events, was what Socrates meant, when he said, “As for me, Meletus could not hurt me.… He might kill, or banish, or degrade,” for he certainly meant “kill” the body, not “kill” the soul.
Subsequently, when I came to read the Christian gospels, I found two of them making this distinction in the words, “Be not afraid of them that kill the body.” One of them added, “but cannot kill the soul,” the other added “but cannot do anything more.” Then I understood more clearly why Epictetus said nothing about what became of the soul after death. For these two Christian writers spoke of a possibility that the soul might be “destroyed in hell” or “cast into hell.” Now this was just what Epictetus did not himself believe, and wished to make others disbelieve. He preferred to give up the belief of Socrates that the good “go to the islands of the blessed” after death, rather than believe also that the bad go to a place of the accursed. Hence he dropped all thought of the essential part, or parts, of man, namely, the soul, mind, and logos, as soon as he came to speak of man’s death.
The consequence was that Epictetus confused us by an ambiguous use of “you.” As long as we were alive he said to us, “You must regard your body as a mere tool,” where by “you” he meant the incorporeal part of man. As soon as we were on the point of death, he said to us, “Do not be alarmed. You are going into the four elements,” where by “you” he apparently meant our corporeal part. I felt sure then (as I do now) that he did not intend to confuse us. He seemed to me to have been confused by his own intense desire to persuade himself that men must do good without hope of any reward at all except the consciousness of doing good in this present life. I had not at that time read the Christian gospels; but several passages in Paul’s epistles occurred to me as contrary to this doctrine of Epictetus, and I thought that our Master might have been biassed in part by Paul (as Scaurus had suggested)—only not, in this instance, imitating Paul, but contradicting him. So I took up the epistle to the Romans intending to read what Paul said there about Christ’s death and resurrection.