Quite another doctrine was propagated by the Syrian cults and the Persian mysteries of Mithras, which spread in the West in the first century of our era. These religions taught that the soul of the just man does not go below the ground but rises to the sky, there to enjoy divine bliss in the midst of the stars in the eternal light. Only the wicked were condemned to roam the earth’s surface, or were dragged by the demons into the dusky depths in which the spirit of evil reigned. Opinions differed as to the region of heaven in which the souls of the elect dwelt. The “Chaldeans,” who looked upon the sun as the master and the intelligence of the universe, made him the author of human reason, which returned to him after it had left the body, while for the priests of Mithras the spirit rose, by way of the planetary spheres, to the summit of the heavens. We will have to examine later the different forms of astral immortality.[[94]] But you will already have noticed how nearly this immortality, as formulated by the Iranian and Semitic sects, approximated to the doctrine taught by Pythagorism and adopted by Neo-Stoicism.
This meeting of the two doctrines was not an effect of chance. The idea that souls are related to the celestial fires, whence they descend at birth and whither they reascend at death, had probably been borrowed by the ancient Pythagoreans from the astral religions of the East. Recent research seems to have established the fact of its Chaldeo-Persian origin. But the Greek philosophers, according to their wont, defined and developed this idea in an original way. In the Hellenistic period, when they adopted astrology, they were subject for the second time to the ascendancy of the scientific religion of the “Chaldeans”; and, in their turn, they reacted on the Oriental cults when these spread in the Graeco-Roman world. We have sure evidence that the mysteries of Mithras were, in particular, strongly affected by the influence of the Pythagorean sect, which was itself organised like a kind of mystery. In a more general way, philosophy introduced into the mysteries ethical ideas and, instead of the purely ritualistic or rather magical means of salvation, some moral requirements became necessary to earn immortality.
There is here a mass of actions and reactions of which the details escape us; but we can form some idea of such a syncretism from the remains of the theological writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, from the writings, that is, which are supposed to contain the revelations of the Egyptian god Thot. This professedly Egyptian wisdom includes a number of ideas and definitions which are characteristic of Posidonius and Neo-Pythagorism. The Greek and the Egyptian elements are so closely associated in it that it is very difficult to separate the one from the other. We find another example of the same mixture in the “Chaldaic Oracles,” which were probably composed about the year 200 of our era and which became one of the sacred books of Neo-Platonism. Unlike the Hermetic writings, this collection of verses does indeed seem to have belonged to a sect practising an actual cult: its greater part is taken up with mythology, and the fantastic mysticism of the East is more prominent here than in the Hermetic lore, but the mind of the compiler of these revelations was also penetrated by the ideas which the Greek masters had widely circulated.
The tenet of astral immortality, which philosophy shared with the cults emanating from Syria and Persia, imposed itself on the ancient world. It is curious to notice how it was introduced into the theology of the very mysteries to which it was at first foreign: Attis ended by becoming a solar god, and thenceforward it was in the heights of heaven that Cybele was united to the souls she had prevented from wandering in darkness and had saved from hell. The priests of the Alexandrian divinities were similarly to explain that the dead had not their dwelling in the interior of our globe, but that the “subterranean” (ὑπόγειος) kingdom of Serapis was situated beneath the earth, that is, in the lower hemisphere of heaven, bounded by the line of the horizon.[[95]]
According as the Oriental religions were more largely propagated, faith in a new eschatology spread gradually among the people; and although memories and survivals of the old belief in the life of the dead in the grave and the shade’s descent into the infernal depths may have lingered, the doctrine which predominated henceforward was that of celestial immortality.
The distance separating the age of Augustus from that of the Flavians on this point can be measured by reading Plutarch’s moral works (about 120 A. D.). A constant preoccupation with religious matters, and in particular a learned curiosity as to the cults of the East, shows itself in this Greek of Chaeronea, living in a country which, in its pride in its own past, had more than any other resisted the invasion of exoticism. Further, the eclectic philosopher likes to insert in his dissertations myths in which, after the fashion of Plato, he expounds the lot of souls in the Beyond and their struggle to rise heavenwards. An attempt has been made to prove—wrongly, I think—that he is here inspired by Posidonius. These apocalyptic visions, which claim to reveal truths previously ignored, are not taken from that well-known writer; they have a religious imprint which betrays sacerdotal influence, and the philosophic ideas they contain are those which were part of the common wisdom of the Pythagoreans and the mysteries.
There doubtless still were in the second century Stoics, like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, for whom the future life was a mere hypothesis, or at most a hope (p. 14), as well as sceptics, like Lucian of Samosata, whose irony mocked all beliefs. But gradually their number diminished and the echo of their voices grew feebler. Faith in survival deepened as present life came to seem a burden harder and harder to bear. The pessimistic idea that birth is a chastisement and that the true life is not that passed on earth, imposed itself in proportion to the growth of public and private ills and to the aggravation of the empire’s social and moral decline. In the period of violence and devastation which occurred in the third century, there was so much undeserved suffering, there were so many unjust failures and unpunished crimes, that men took refuge in the expectation of a better life in which all the iniquity of this world would be retrieved. No earthly hope then brightened life. The tyranny of a corrupt bureaucracy stifled every attempt at political progress. Science seemed exhausted and no longer discovered unknown truths; art was struck with sterility of invention and reproduced heavily the creations of the past. An increasing impoverishment and a general insecurity constantly discouraged the spirit of enterprise. The idea spread that humanity was smitten by incurable decay, that society was on the road to dissolution and the end of the world was impending. All these causes of discouragement and pessimism must be remembered in order to understand the dominance of the old idea, then so often repeated, that a bitter necessity constrains the spirit of man to enclose itself in matter, and that death is a liberation which delivers it from its carnal prison. In the heavy atmosphere of a period of oppression and powerlessness, the despondent souls of men aspired with ineffable ardour to the radiant spaces of heaven.
The mental evolution of Roman society was complete when Neo-Platonism took upon itself the office of directing minds. The powerful mysticism of Plotinus (205–262 A. D.) opened up the path which Greek philosophy was to follow until the world of antiquity reached its end. We shall not undertake to notice in this place the discrepancies of the latest teachers who theorised about the destiny of souls. In the course of these lectures we shall have occasion to quote some of the opinions of Porphyry, the chief disciple of Plotinus, and of his successor Jamblichus, who was, like himself, a Syrian. We will here do no more than indicate broadly what distinguished the theories of this school from those which had hitherto been dominant.
The system generally accepted, by the mysteries as by philosophy, was a pantheism according to which divine energy was immanent in the universe and had its home in the celestial spheres. The souls, conceived as material, could in consequence rise to the stars but did not leave the world. The Neo-Pythagoreans themselves had not had a very firmly established doctrine on this point: while some of them stated that reason was incorporeal, others, as we have seen (p. 24), admitted with the Stoics that it was an igneous substance. It is true that even in paganism the appearance can be discerned of the belief in a Most High (Ὕψιστος) or an unknown god Ἄγνωστος, whom some people supposed to dwell above the starry heavens, beyond the limits of the world, and towards whom pious spirits could rise. The revivers of Platonic idealism asserted the transcendence of God and the spirituality of the soul more strongly and clearly. A whole chapter of the Enneades of Plotinus is taken up with refuting those who held the soul to be material.[[96]] As a principle of life and movement, it is stated to be immortal by its very essence, so that if it kept its purity perfect, it would find after its passage here below eternal felicity in the intelligible world.