For the survival after the body’s death, indubitably attributed to the Psyche in the Homeric Poems, is conceived there, throughout, as a miserably shrunken consciousness, and one which is dependent for its continuance upon the good offices bestowed by the survivors upon the corpse and grave. And the translation of the still living Menelaus to Elysium (Od. IV, 560-568) is probably a later insertion; belongs to a small class of exceptional cases; implies the writer’s inability to conceive a heightened consciousness for the soul, after the soul’s separation from the body; and is based, not upon any virtue or reward, but upon Menelaus’s family-relationship to Zeus. Ganymede gets similarly translated because of his physical beauty (II. XX, 232 seq.).
Hesiod, though later than Homer as a writer, gives us, in his account of the Five Ages of the World (Works and Days, ll. 109-201), some traces of an Animistic conception of a heightened life of the bodiless soul beyond the grave,—a conception which had been neglected or suppressed by Homer, but which had evidently been preserved alive in the popular religion of, at least, Central Greece. Yet Hesiod knows of such a life only for the Golden and for the Silver Ages, and for some miraculous, exceptional cases of the fourth, the Heroic Age: already in the third, the Bronze Age, and still more emphatically in his own fifth, the Iron Age, there are no such consolations: nothing but the shrunken consciousness of the Homeric after-death Psyche is, quite evidently, felt by him to be the lot of all souls in the hard, iron present.
The Cultus of the Heroes is already registered in Draco’s Athenian Laws, in about 620 B.C., as a traditional custom. And these Heroes have certainly lived at one time as men upon earth, and have become heroes only after death; their souls, though severed from the body, live a heightened imperishable life, indeed one that can mightily help men here below and now,—so at Delphi and at Salamis against the Persians. Yet here again each case of such an elevation was felt to be a miracle, an exception incapable of becoming a universal law: not even the germ of a belief in the Immortality of the soul as such seems to be here.
The Cultus of the Nether-World Deities, of the Departed generally, and, as the culmination of all this movement, the Eleusinian Mysteries, must not be conceived as involving or as leading to, any belief in the ecstatic elevation of the soul, or consciousness of its God-likeness; and such unending bliss as is secured, is gained by men, not because they are virtuous and devout, but through their initiation into the Mysteries. Rhode assures us, rightly I think, that “it remains unproved that, during the classical period of Greek culture, the belief in Judges and a Judgment to be held in Hades over the deeds done by men on earth, had struck root among the people”; Professor Percy Gardner adds his great authority to the same conclusion.[196] Here again it is Plato who is the first to take up a clearly and consistently spiritual and universalistic position.
Indeed it is only in the predominantly neuropathic, indeed largely immoral and repulsive, forms of the Dionysiac sect and movement, (at work, perhaps, already in the eighth century B.C. and which leads on to the formation of the more aristocratic and priestly Orphic communities) that a demonstrable and direct belief arose in the soul’s intrinsic God-likeness, or even divinity, and in its immortality, or even eternity; and that stimulations, materials, and conceptions were furnished to Greek thought, which are traceable wheresoever it henceforth inclines to belief in the soul’s intrinsic Immortality.
Yet the leaven spread but slowly into philosophy. For the Ionian philosophers, and among them Heraclitus, the impressive teacher of the flux of all things, flourish from about 600 to 430 B.C.; but, naïve Materialists and Pantheists as they are, they frankly exclude all survival of individual consciousness after death. The Eleatic philosophers live between 550 and 450 B.C., and are all busy with a priori logical constructions of the physical world, conceived as sole and self-explanatory; and amongst them is Parmenides, the powerful propounder of the complete identity and immutability of all reality. Those transcendent spiritual beliefs appear first as part, indeed as the very foundation, although still rather of a mode of life than of a formal philosophy, in the teaching and community of Pythagoras, who seems to have lived about 580 to 490 B.C., and who certainly emigrated from Asia Minor to Croton in Southern Italy. The soul appears here as intrinsically immortal, indeed without beginning and without end. And then Immortality forms one (the mystical) of the two thoroughly heterogeneous elements of the, otherwise predominantly Ionic and Materialistic, philosophy of Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily, about 490 to 435 B.C. In both these cases the Dionysiac-Orphic provenance of the “Immortality”-doctrines is clearly apparent.
And then, among the poets who bridge over the period up to Plato, we find Pindar, who, alongside of reproductions of the ordinary, popular conceptions, gives us at times lofty, Orphic-like teachings as to the eternity, the migration, and the eventual persistent rest and happiness of the just Soul, and as to the suffering of the unjust one; Aeschylus, who primarily dwells upon the Gods’ judgment in this life, and who makes occasional allusions to the after-life which are partly still of the Homeric type; Sophocles, who indeed refers to the special privileges which, in the after-life, attend upon the souls that have here been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, and who causes Oedipus to be translated, whilst still alive, to Other-World happiness, but who knows nothing of an unceasing heightened consciousness for all men after death; and Euripides, who, showing plainly the influence of the Sophists, gives expression, alongside of Pantheistic identifications of the soul and of the aether, to every kind of misgiving and doubt as to any survival after death.
And as to the appearance of the doctrine among the Jews, we again find a surprising lateness. I follow here, with but minor contributions and modifications from other writers and myself, the main conclusions of Dr. Charles’s standard Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, London, 1899, whose close knowledge of the subject is unsurpassed, and who finds as many and as early attestations as are well-nigh findable by serious workers.[197]
“The primitive beliefs of the individual Israelite regarding the future life, being derived from Ancestor-worship, were implicitly antagonistic to Yahwism, from its first proclamation by Moses.… This antagonism becomes explicit and results in the final triumph of Yahwism.” And to the early Israelite, even under Yahwism, “the religious unit was” not the individual but “the family or tribe.” Thus, even fully six centuries after Moses, “the message of the prophets of the eighth century,” Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, “is still directed to the nation, and the judgments they proclaim are collective punishment for collective guilt. It is not till late in the seventh century B.C. that the problem of individual retribution really emerged, and received its first solution in the teaching of Jeremiah.” And “the further development of these ideas,” by the teaching of Ezekiel and of some of the Psalms and Proverbs, as regards individual responsibility and retribution in this life, and by the deep misgivings and keen questionings of Job and Ecclesiastes, as to the adequacy of this teaching, “led inevitably to the conception of a blessed life beyond the grave.”
Yet throughout the Hebrew Old Testament the Eschatology of the Nation greatly predominates over that of the Individual. Indeed in pre-Exilic times “the day of Yahwe,” with its national judgments, constitutes the all but exclusive subject of the prophetic teaching as to the future. Only from the Exile, (597 to 538 B.C.), onwards, does the eschatological development begin to grow in complexity, for now the individualism first preached by Jeremiah begins to maintain its claim also. But not till the close of the fourth century, or the beginning of the third century B.C., do the separate eschatologies of the individual and of the nation issue finally in their synthesis: the righteous individual will participate in the Messianic Kingdom, the righteous dead of Israel will arise to share therein,—thus in Isaiah xxvi, 1-19, a passage which it is difficult to place earlier than about 334 B.C. The resurrection is here limited to the just. In Daniel xii, 2, which is probably not earlier than 165 B.C., the resurrection is extended, not indeed to all members of Israel, but, with respective good and evil effects, to its martyrs and apostates.