The beatitude of the elect, as conceived by astral immortality, was a magnified projection to heaven of the joys which a religion of the erudite held to be most worthy of virtuous spirits. When pagan theology transported the abode of the most favoured souls outside the boundaries of the universe to a world beyond the senses,[[535]] the happiness of these souls could no longer consist solely in the sight and the hearing of the motion of the spheres. This entirely material conception of felicity in the Beyond had to be spiritualised. The ecstasy of Plotinus does not stop short at the visible gods of the firmament; in it the soul is transported beyond even the world of ideas and reaches, in an upward rush of love, the divine unity in which it merges, ridding itself of all consciousness and all form. This is the supreme goal which none can attain after death save him who has conquered perfect purity. But the aristocratic intellectualism of this philosophy reserved this union with the first Principle for an élite of sages. Paganism in its decline believed in a hierarchy of souls ascending to the divinity, in a scale of merit corresponding to various degrees of rewards: the majority lived among the stars and, divine like them, helped them to govern the earth—we already know their blessed lot; others who were more perfect entered the intelligible cosmos[[536]] and their happiness, as it was imagined, is but a more exalted counterpart of the joys attributed to the former class. They were plunged in immovable contemplation of pure Ideas; forgetting earthly things, they were wholly absorbed by this intense activity of thought which was to them an inexpressible joy. Moreover, being set free from the bonds of their flesh and of their individuality, they could embrace in a single glance all the separate intelligences which together formed the divine Nous, and thus had a simultaneous intuition of everything, the direct comprehension of the ultimate reason of things.

Beatific vision of the splendour of God, immediate perception of all truth, mystic love for an ineffable Beauty—these were sublime speculations which were to be unendingly reproduced and developed after the fall of paganism. Unavailing efforts to represent a state inconceivable to any human imagination, they expressed the ardent yearning of religious souls towards an ideal of perfection and felicity. But this high religious spirituality had gradually broken away from somewhat coarse beliefs which had little by little been purified. The rapture which transported Plotinus to those summits where reason, bewildered as in a swoon, forsakes even thought in order to lose itself within a principle which is above all definition, is directly connected with the ecstasy which in the temples of Egypt came upon the devotee who, like the philosopher, conversed “alone with the lone god,”[[537]] whom the priest had evoked, and believed that in this vision he found a guarantee of eternal happiness.

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[1]. Plut., Pericl., 8.

[2]. Pensées, III, 194 (t. II, p. 103, ed. Brunschvigg).