This eschatological doctrine, which made astronomy the source of virtue and of immortality, could only be developed by a clergy devoted to the study of that science. Its first authors were doubtless the “Chaldeans,” who transmitted it to Greece with their theories as to the divisions of the sky and the heavenly bodies. The most ancient writing in which this Oriental influence asserts itself clearly is the Epinomis, probably a work of the astronomer Philip of Opus, a disciple of Plato. Let us listen to his own words:[[528]]
“When man perceives the harmony of the sky and the immovable order of its revolutions, he is first filled with joy and struck with admiration. Then the passion is born in him to learn about them all that it is possible for his mortal nature to know, for he is persuaded that he will thus lead the best and happiest existence and will go after his death to the places suited to virtue. Then being veritably and really initiate, pure reason taking part in the only wisdom, he will spend the rest of his time in contemplation of what is most beautiful among all visible things.”
This passage shows clearly the manner in which astrolatry modified ancient ideas as to the sight of a god, the reverential wonder felt in his presence by the faithful, the truth communicated to them and the immortality which completed their initiation. The doctrine of an intellectual reward for the Blessed was to attract scholars who in this world gave themselves up to study. Spiritual activity, which emancipates from material care and gives man nobility and virtue, seemed to them to be the only occupation worthy of the elect. If the theory that the Blessed would after death find this activity in the midst of the divine stars, is probably of “Chaldean” origin, it was developed by the Greek philosophers and in particular by Posidonius. It was also admitted into the Roman mysteries, which, being penetrated by the spirit of Oriental theologies, claimed to supply their adepts with a complete explanation of the universe.
We have already alluded to this system in speaking of astral mysticism.[[529]] Nature herself has destined man to gaze upon the skies. Other animals are bent to the earth; he proudly lifts his head to the stars. His eye, a tiny mirror in which immensity is reflected, the soul’s door, open to the infinite, follows the evolutions of the heavenly bodies from here below. By their splendour they make men marvel and by their majesty compel them to veneration. Their complicated movements, ruled by an immovable rhythm, are inconceivable unless they are endowed with infallible reason.
The observation of the sky is not only an inexhaustible source of aesthetic emotion. It also causes the soul, a detached parcel of the fires of the ether, to enter into communion with the gods which shine in the firmament. Possessed with the desire to know them, this soul receives their revelations. They instruct it as to their nature; thanks to them, it understands the phenomena produced in the cosmic organism. Thus scientific curiosity is also conceived as a yearning for God. The love of truth leads to holiness more surely than initiations and priests.
Of the numerous passages in which these ideas are expressed I will recall one which is well known but is not always well understood.[[530]] Virgil in his Georgics tells us what he looks to receive from the sweet Muses whom he serves, being “struck with a great love for them.” Not, as one would expect, poetic inspiration but physical science. The Muses are to point out to him the paths of the stars in the sky, to explain to him the reasons for eclipses, tides and earthquakes and the variations in the length of the day. “Happy is he,” the poet concludes, “who can know the causes of things, who treads underfoot all fear and inexorable fate and vain rumours as to greedy Acheron.”[[531]] There is, in spite of a reminiscence of Lucretius, nothing Epicurean in the idea here expressed. The man who has won knowledge of Nature, which is divine, escapes the common lot and does not fear death because a glorious immortality is reserved for him.
For these joys which the acquisition of wisdom gives here below, partially and intermittently, are in the other life bestowed with absolute fulness and prolonged for ever. Reason, set free from corporeal organs, attains to an infinite perceptive power and can satisfy the insatiable desire of knowledge which is innate within reason itself. The Blessed souls will thus be able at once to delight in the marvellous spectacle of the world and to obtain perfect understanding thereof. They will not weary of following the rhythmic evolutions of the chorus of stars of which they form part, of noting the causes and the rules which determine their movements. From the height of their celestial observatory they will also perceive the phenomena of our globe and the actions of men. Nothing which happens in nature or in human society will be hidden from them. This speculative life (βιὸς θεωρητικός) is the only one on earth or in heaven which is worthy of the sage.
To observe the course of the stars throughout eternity may appear to us a desperately monotonous occupation, a rather unenviable beatitude. For the stars, shorn of their divinity, are for us no more than gaseous or solid bodies circulating in space, and we analyse with the spectroscope their chemical composition. But the ancients felt otherwise: they describe with singular eloquence the “cosmic emotion” which seized them as they contemplated their southern skies—their soul was ravished, borne on the wings of enthusiasm into the midst of the dazzling gods which from the earth had been descried throbbing in the radiance of the ether. These mystic transports were compared by them to Dionysiac intoxication; an “abstemious drunkenness”[[532]] raised man to the stars and kindled in him an impassioned ardour for divine knowledge. And as the exaltation produced by the vapours of wine gave to the mystics of Bacchus a foretaste of the joyous inebriation promised to them in the Elysian banquet, so the ecstasy which uplifted him who contemplated the celestial gods caused him to feel the happiness of another life while he was yet here below.[[533]]
“I know,” says an epigram of Ptolemy himself,[[534]] “I know that I am mortal, born for a day, but when I follow the serried crowd of the stars in their circular course my feet touch the earth no longer: I go to Zeus himself and sate myself with ambrosia, the food of the gods.”
In the same way the intoxication produced by music, the divine possession which purified man by detaching him from material cares, caused him to taste for an instant the felicity which would fill his whole being when he should harken to the sweet harmony produced by the rotation of the spheres, the celestial concert which the ears of mortals are incapable of hearing, as their eyes cannot bear the brilliance of the sun. Men’s instruments could cause the perception of only a weak echo of these delightful chords, but they awoke in the soul a passionate desire for heaven, where the unspeakable joy produced by the cosmic symphony would be felt.