But in opposition to this pantheism which, while identifying God with the universe, placed the chief home of divine energy in the celestial spheres and particularly in the highest of them, the sectaries of Plato transported the supreme Power beyond the limits of the world and made of him a Being no longer immanent, but transcendent and distinct from all matter. This conception became more and more predominant in pagan theology as Stoicism lost influence in favour of Neo-Platonism. This God, “ultramundane and incorporeal, father and architect” of creation,[[257]] had his seat, it was thought, in the infinite light which extended beyond the starry spheres. Religion called him sometimes the Most High (Ὕψιστος), sometimes Jupiter, but gave him at the same time the epithets “Uppermost,” “Insuperable” (summus, exsuperantissimus).[[258]] It was this celestial Father whom the elect souls aspired to join, but only those who had attained to perfection succeeded in doing so, as we shall see in our last lecture. The others stayed, in accordance with their degree of purity, in a lower zone of the successive stages formed by the atmosphere, by the planetary circles, and by the heaven of the fixed stars, which were the “visible gods,” opposed to the spiritual world.[[259]]
This was the last conception of paganism and on the whole it was to impose itself on men for many centuries. Judaism had already made concessions to the astronomical theories of the “Chaldeans,” and had borrowed from them the idea of seven stories of heavens, an idea which we find developed in particular in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. It also belonged to Christianity almost from the beginning, and the gnostics gave it a large place in their speculations. But especially Origen, who borrowed it directly from the Greek philosophers, lent the authority of his name to the doctrines of astral eschatology. According to him, souls, after they have sojourned in Paradise, which he imagined as a remote place of earth where they learn terrestrial truths, rise to the zone of the air and there understand the nature of the beings who people this element. But if they are free from all material weight, they cross the atmosphere rapidly and reach “the dwellings of the heavens,” that is, the celestial spheres. There they grasp the nature of the stars and the causes of their movements. Finally, when they have made such progress that they have become pure intelligences, they are admitted to contemplate the reasonable essences face to face and see invisible things, enjoying their perfection. Although Origen was condemned by the Church, his ideas were not abolished. Since the Christian lore adopted the ancient conception of the world’s structure, as formulated by Ptolemy, it had necessarily to admit that souls traversed the planetary circles in order to reach that “supermundane light” in which they found perfect beatitude. Dante’s Paradise, with its choirs of angels and its classes of the blessed, distributed among the superimposed spheres of the heavens, is a magnificent testimony to the strength of the tradition which antiquity bequeathed to the Middle Ages. Before this tradition could be destroyed, Galileo and Copernicus had to ruin Ptolemy’s system and open up to the imagination the infinite spaces of a limitless universe.
IV
THE WINNING OF IMMORTALITY
A fundamental difference distinguishes the conception of immortality as it appears in the religion of the Roman Empire from our modern ideas. Immortality, as we conceive of it, follows on the very nature which we ascribe to the human soul. It is affirmed by some, denied by others, in accordance with the character which each one attributes to the principle of conscious thought, but whenever credence is given to it, it is generally supposed to be absolute, eternal, universal. For the ancients, on the other hand, immortality was no more than conditional: it might not be perpetual and it might not belong to all men. According to the Platonists the soul, an incorruptible essence, a principle of life and movement, survived necessarily;[[260]] according to the Epicureans, being composed of atoms, it was dissolved at the moment of death.[[261]] But between these extreme opinions of the philosophers, the religion of the people remained faithful to the old belief that the shade must be nourished with offerings and sacrifices, that if it lacked sustenance it was condemned to waste away miserably. This conception, like not a few others which were fading away in the West, was revived when the Orientals imposed on the Roman world their more primitive and sometimes very crude beliefs. The normal destiny of the soul was therefore to survive the body for a certain time, then in its turn to disappear. A second death (δεύτερος θάνατος) completed the work of the first which gave the corpse over to corruption. The spiritual essence which had abandoned the body was annihilated after it. Such was the inevitable necessity imposed on mankind. Immortality was a privilege of divinity. The man who was exempted from the common lot of his kind was therefore the equal of the gods; he had risen above his perishable condition to acquire the everlasting youth of the Olympians, the unlimited duration of the stars which travel the heavens, the eternity of the Supreme Being.
If he became a god after his death it was sometimes because he had been one ever since his birth. For men were not all born equal: if each of them possessed the psyche which nourished and animated the body, yet all men did not equally receive the divine effluence (πνεῦμα) which gave reason. This reason, which distinguished man from the beasts, was akin to the fires of the stars; it established between man and heaven a community of nature (συγγένεια) which alone made it possible for him to acquire a knowledge of divinity,[[262]] the “gnosis” of God and of the world which He animated. This special grace also exempted him who obtained it from the passions and weaknesses to which the inclinations of the flesh exposed him. It made him pious, temperate and chaste: he was holy (sanctus).[[263]] It communicated to him a lucidity and power lacking to the common run of mortals. He penetrated the secrets of nature and commanded the elements; he received revelations and was capable of prophetic divination. Inversely, every exceptional quality was regarded as superhuman; every extraordinary act seemed a miracle. The most enlightened spoke merely of celestial inspiration. “Nemo magnus vir sine quodam adflatu divino,” said Cicero.[[264]] The many saw in these privileged beings earthly incarnations of all the Olympians. From the moment of their appearance on the earth these men were really gods; their soul kept its higher nature in all its purity; it would indubitably return after death to its place of origin. Such are the leading ideas which explain the belief in the immortality of the heroes.
Among those who escaped the common law of death because they were divine, first of all, were the kings. In all times kings have been looked upon as of superior essence to the rest of mankind, and the ancient East approximated them or made them equal to the heavenly powers. The Hellenistic realms, in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, raised the cult of the monarch to the rank of a state institution; and the Caesars inherited this homage, which was rendered to them by their subjects even in their lifetime, first in the East and then throughout the Empire. The powerful chief who delivered his state from the scourge of invasion and ensured it peace and welfare, accomplished a work which seemed to be beyond the ability of man, and he was adored as a present god (ἐπιφανὴς θεός, praesens numen), a saviour (σωτήρ). Sometimes the god incarnate in him was specified; and he was looked upon as a manifestation of Zeus, Apollo, or another. Very ancient but still active beliefs gave him the power to command nature as well as men. If the fields were fertile, if the flocks and herds had increased, these were benefits received from the godlike sovereign. No miracle was beyond his accomplishment. He was the providence of his people, having indeed the power of foreseeing and foretelling the future. According to Manilius,[[265]] it was to kings, whose lofty thoughts reached the heights of the sky, that nature first revealed her mysteries. The pagan theologians affirmed, indeed, that the souls of kings came from a higher place than those of other men, and that these august personages borrowed more from heaven than the common crowd of mortals.[[266]] And thus, death had no sooner carried them off from the earth than their souls once again rose to the stars, who welcomed them as their equals (sideribus recepti). It was thought that an eagle or the chariot of the sun bore them away.[[267]] It may seem strange that the senate should deliberate as to whether or not a deceased emperor deserved apotheosis, and should refuse or accord him official canonisation. But this act is in conformity with all the ideas we have described, since the monarch’s benefits and victories were the proof of his divine origin, and since, if he had committed crimes and caused misfortunes, he was thus shown to be in no respect a god.
In the remote ages of ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs were the first whom Osiris consented to identify with himself, or whom their father Ra bore away in the solar boat, but little by little the rites practised in order to ensure eternity to the sovereign were extended to the magnates surrounding him. Thus immortality was a kind of posthumous nobility bestowed on the great servants of the state, or usurped by them, long before the rest of the people obtained it. In Greece, also, kings were the first to be the objects of a cult as protecting heroes, but after them other classes of eminent men received the same title and the same adoration, in particular the founder of a city, its lawmaker who had given it a constitution and the warrior who had victoriously defended it. In the same way as fabulous demigods, Castor and Pollux or Hercules, had in heaven become brilliant stars as a reward for their earthly deeds, they also were public benefactors who by their works and their virtues had shown themselves worthy of the same “catasterism.” These ideas passed to Rome with the Stoic philosophy. After having given a list of those who had triumphed in the wars of the Republic, Cicero lays down as a fact that not one of them could have attained so far without the help of God;[[268]] and elsewhere he states more explicitly:[[269]] “To all who have saved, succoured or aggrandized their country, a fixed place in which they shall enjoy everlasting bliss is assigned in heaven, for it is from heaven that they who guide and guard cities have descended, thither to reascend.” The ex-consul Cicero claimed apotheosis for the great men of the state: this was the republican transformation of the doctrine of the divinity of kings.
Pagan theology was to give much wider extension to this doctrine. In a curious passage Hermes Trismegistus[[270]] explains that there are royal, that is to say divine, souls of different kinds, for there is a royalty of the spirit, a royalty of art, a royalty of science, and even a royalty of bodily strength. All exceptional men were godly, and it was not to be admitted that the sacred energy which animated them was extinguished with them.
Pious priests, like kings, were judged, or rather judged themselves, to be worthy of immortality. Who could more justly deserve a share in the felicity of the gods than those who on the earth had lived in their company and known their designs? He who had thus been in communication with the godhead and learnt his secrets was raised above the condition of humanity. This sacred knowledge, this gift of prophecy, this “gnosis,” which was inseparable from piety, transformed him who had obtained it, set him free even in life from the condemnation of fate; and after death he went to the immortals whose confidant he had been here below.