In the midst of all the tribulation of our tormented existence, to how many minds, even those which have the strongest religious conviction, have not the immobility and insensibility of those who are no more sometimes seemed like a deliverance? In antiquity also, this aspiration towards the moment when man will obtain remission of all his travail does not necessarily imply the belief that there is no hope beyond the cold sleep of the grave. This yearning mingles with faith in immortality and is transformed with it.
When it was believed that the dead went down into the depths of the earth where lay the infernal kingdom, another meaning was given to their rest. The funeral eulogy of a noble woman who towards the end of the Republican period saved the life of her husband, who had been proscribed, ends with the naïve words: “I pray that the gods thy Manes may grant thee rest and thus protect thee.”[[475]] The shades of the kinsmen of the dead must receive their souls in the subterranean world[[476]] and thus ensure their welfare. The road which must be travelled before the abode of the elect was reached was long and beset with dangers. The Book of the Dead in Egypt, the Orphic tablets in Greece, were guides to the Beyond which taught the dead not to stray from the right path and to avoid the various dangers threatening them.[[477]] Many of them, the impious who had to expiate their misdeeds and the unfortunate to whom funeral duties had not been rendered, wandered wretchedly on the banks of the Styx, vainly longing to enter the “peaceful abode” of the Elysian Fields.[[478]] There, lying in the cool shade, the blessed enjoyed a felicity exempt from all care. Serene quiet in a sweet idleness cheered by joyous relaxation and wise conversation—such was the ideal which some mysteries[[479]] opposed to the weary agitations of earthly life and to the long sufferings of the sinful and vagabond soul. For the adepts of these doctrines the secura quies applied to the repose of the nether world, and this conception of beatitude beyond the grave is found to persist until the end of paganism.[[480]]
But we have seen that another doctrine triumphed in the Roman period, the doctrine that souls rise to the skies to live there eternally among the stars. In this great metamorphosis of eschatological beliefs what became of the idea of the repose of the dead? The question deserves to be more closely investigated, for the transformation had lasting consequences of which the ultimate effects can be felt even today.
The Pythagoreans were, as we have seen,[[481]] the first to promulgate the doctrine of celestial immortality in Greece and Italy. One of the allegories familiar to the teaching of the sect connected human destiny with the old myth of Hercules at the crossroads. The Greek letter Y, of which the stem divides midway into two, was in the school the symbol of this comparison—we have already alluded to it elsewhere.[[482]] When man reaches the age of reason two paths are open to him. One is smooth and easy but ends in an abyss: this is the way of pleasure. The other is at first rough and jagged—it is the hard road of virtue—but he who climbs to the summit of its slope can there rest deliciously from his weariness. Funeral reliefs represent this contrast naïvely: at the bottom of the stele the dead man is often seen accomplishing the labours of his career; at the top of the stone he is shown stretched at his ease on a couch.
The meaning of the allegory is immediately apparent: the quieta sedes in which deserving souls are received, has become the sky. How was this idea developed?
Homer[[483]] had already described Olympus as “the immovable seat of the gods which is neither shaken by the winds, nor wet by the rains, nor touched by the snow, but is bright with a cloudless light.” The Epicureans applied these lines of the poet to the serene dwelling where nothing occurred to modify the perpetual peace enjoyed by the gods.[[484]] And the founder of Stoicism had already taught that the pious souls, separated from the guilty, inhabited “tranquil and delectable” regions.[[485]] Both called this dwelling of the gods or the elect by the same name—sedes quietae.
We must here remember the distinction, established by the philosophers and often repeated, between the sublunary circle and the celestial spheres.[[486]] Above, the world of the eternal gods; below, the world of generation and corruption. There the pure ether always kept the same serenity; here the struggle of the elements called forth unceasing agitation and transformation. On one side reigned peace and harmony, on the other war and discord. The zone of the moon was the boundary between the two contrasted parts of the world, and “the limit between life and death.”[[487]] It was when they had crossed it, that the souls entered the quietae sedes of the Blessed.
The very ancient idea of a fearful journey which the dead had to make in order to reach Pluto’s subterranean kingdom was transferred to the space lying between the earth and the moon, for this was the region of the universe to which the name of nether world (Inferi)[[488]] was henceforth applied. As we have seen in the previous lecture,[[489]] when the soul, escaping from the body, was laden with material dross, it was tossed about for many centuries before it could again win to the ether. Shaken by the winds, swept to and fro by the opposing elements of air, water and fire, it had to endure a long torture before it was cleansed of the sin which weighed it down. When at length it was freed of every fleshly taint, it escaped from inward trouble also, from the pains and the passions provoked by its union with the body. “Then,” says Seneca, “it tends to return to the place whence it has been sent down; there eternal quiet awaits it when it passes from the confused and gross to the clear and pure.”[[490]] In the same way certain Neo-Platonists taught that souls which had lived well, rose to the celestial heights and rested there amid the stars. Even in this life the ecstasy, which gave them anticipated enjoyment of the future bliss, is described by them as a transport in which reason attains to absolute stability or equipoise, escapes from all movement and rests in the Supreme Being.[[491]] Peace in the celestial light: such is the highest form which the repose of the dead assumed in paganism.[[492]]
The various ideas which we have just analysed—those of the repose in the grave, the repose in the infernal regions and the repose in heaven—followed parallel courses during the centuries and in part passed from antiquity to the Middle Ages. But the distinction between them is not always clear. Even in paganism they were intermingled and in the course of time they were gradually confused. In no class of beliefs is the force of tradition greater than in those which centre in death, and the Christian peoples clung tenaciously to articles of faith which Jews and pagans had shared before them.
We have seen[[493]] that the masses did not easily give up their belief that the dead continued, in or about the tomb, a vegetating and uncertain life. Extreme importance was still attached to burial because the more or less unconscious conviction persisted that the soul’s rest depended on that of the body. The dread of ghosts was still the inspiration for some ceremonies performed over the remains of the dead. Nay, a new apprehension was added to this, namely, the fear lest the dead whose bodies were torn from the tomb should have no part in the resurrection of the flesh.[[494]] The formula, “Hic requiescit,” “Here rests—,” was transferred from pagan to Christian epigraphy, and the rest men wished to the departed was first the rest of the corpse, which was peacefully to await the Day of Judgment in its last dwelling.