Thus every vicious tendency contracted by the soul during its abode in this world has for this soul consequences which their long duration makes more momentous. If virtue enables it to rise upward at each new birth and to acquire, as the ages revolve, an ever increasing perfection, perversion of character produces effects which are calamitous not only in this life but also in several other lives through the centuries. Moral laws are no less infallible than physical laws. Right or wrong, every act has to be paid for with harm or benefit in the long chain of incarnations. By his acquired disposition, man determines his future throughout a sequence of generations; the evil he suffers is to be imputed not to the creator but to himself. A bust of Plato found at Tivoli and now preserved in San Francisco[[451]] has graven on it the following sentence of the Master as to the lot of immortal souls: “The fault is the chooser’s; God is without fault”—Αἰτία ἑλομένω, ὁ θεὸς ἀναίτιος.
The very fact of birth was a pain for the soul, since it tore it from its celestial home and plunged it into a soiled and troubled world; consequently it was not necessary for the soul’s chastisement that it should descend into the body of animals. Indeed, certain thinkers rejected this kind of metempsychosis: a reasonable spirit could not, they held, dwell in a being deprived of reason. Transmigration occurred therefore exclusively from man to man and from beast to beast. Such was the opinion defended by Porphyry and Jamblichus, who, in order to dispose of the texts of Plato which were contrary to this theory, upheld that he spoke figuratively, and that his “asses,” his “wolves” and his “lions” signified persons who resembled these beasts in ignorance or ferocity.[[452]]
It is seen that this metempsychosis was getting far away from that which had its origin in the primitive beliefs. The “cycle of generation” was no longer conceived as a flux of life circulating throughout the variety of the animate beings peopling the earth, but as the descent and the ascent of a psychic essence, passing alternately from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven.
It is to these doctrines that Virgil alludes when in the Aeneid he shows us, gathered in a remote place of the Elysian Fields, the shades whom after a thousand years a god calls to come in a great troop to the river Lethe, there to drink the forgetfulness of the past, whereby “they begin again to wish to return to the body.”[[453]]
But the poet also gives us precious hints as to the lot reserved for the soul in the interval between its incarnations. For palingenesis, unlike the doctrine of perpetual reincorporation, left a place for chastisement in the infernal regions. These were however situated, as we have seen, for the Pythagoreans and Posidonius, whom Virgil interpreted, not on earth but in the air. It was there that the soul had to purify itself from the stains acquired while it was in touch with the flesh. This pollution, we know,[[454]] was conceived in a very material form. The texts speak of a thickening of the subtle substance of which the soul is formed, of concretions encrusting it, of indelible marks with which the vices stain it. When the soul left the corpse, of which it kept the form, it first, as we have seen, floated in the ambient air. When it was not weighed down by the matter with which it had become impregnated, the breath of the atmosphere raised it gently and, gradually warming it, bore it to the heavens, and this is why the Winds are often represented on tombstones.[[455]] But these Winds, fierce divinities, could also cause the soul to expiate its faults bitterly. If it had lost its purity and lightness, the whirlwinds drew it into their vortex, the storms rolled and buffeted it, thus violently tearing away the crust which had become attached to it. The souls were thus freed from defilements contracted during life just as linen hung in the air is bleached and loses all odour.
Their passage through the air did not complete their purification. In the East the idea was old that above the firmament was found the great reservoir of the waters which fell to the ground as rain. Beyond, a burning zone must extend, where the heavenly bodies were lit, and a river of fire, identified with the Pyriphlegethon of the Greeks, was imagined. These old mythological ideas were brought into relation with Stoic physics: above the region of the winds stretched that of the clouds, in which the rain, the snow and the hail were formed, and higher still there was the burning air, in which the lightning flashed and which touched the starry spheres. The souls must blaze a path through these obstacles. After being tossed and blown about by the winds, they were drenched by rain and plunged into the gulf of the upper waters. They reached at last the fires of heaven, of which the heat scorched them. Not till they had undergone this threefold trial, in the course of which they had passed through countless years of expiation, did they at length find peace in the serenity of the luminous ether.[[456]]
Virgil,[[457]] in the passage already quoted, alludes to this doctrine when, in speaking of the souls, he says:
“... Aliae panduntur inanes
Suspensae ad ventos, aliis sub gurgite vasto