Such a sacrament and such aspirations might well have offended even those Christians of early days, if such there were, who were willing to deal sympathetically with paganism; that those who were its declared enemies, and were ready to use against it the weapons of perversion and vituperation, found in this conception a vulnerable point, is readily understood. It is true indeed that in the very idea which they most vilified there was a certain curious analogy between the new religion and the old. Just as paganism allowed to each man or woman individually the hope of becoming the bridegroom or the bride of one of their many deities, so Christianity represented the Church, the whole body of the faithful collectively, as the bride of its sole deity. But the analogy is superficial only. The bond of feeling which united the Church with God was very differently conceived from that which drew together the pagans and their deities. The chastened ‘charity’ (ἀγάπη) of the Christians had little in common with the passionate love (ἔρως) with which the Greeks of old time had dared look upon their gods. Theirs was the Love that ‘held firm the reins and drave the wedding-car of Zeus and blessed Hera[1521]’; the Love that hovered above the steeds of Hades and changed for Persephone the road of death into a road to bliss; the Love whom ‘no immortal may escape nor any of mankind whose life passeth it as a day, but whoso hath him is as one mad[1522]’; and the only true consummation of such love was wedlock.
This conception necessarily implied the equality of men with their gods in the future life; and that future equality was sometimes represented as no more than a return to that which was in the beginning. ‘One is the race of men with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath; yet are they sundered by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken[1523].’ So sang Pindar of the past and of the present; but the Orphic tablet which has been already quoted carries on the thought into the future:
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,
Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.
For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,
But Fate laid me low....’
So far with Pindar. But the dead man’s claims do not end there: ‘I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld’; already had he received a foretaste of that divine wedlock which implied equality with the gods; and so there comes the answer, ‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’
This idea commended itself even to thinkers who did not believe in bodily survival after death. Plato, in the Phaedo, where above all things is taught the perishable nature of the body and the immortality of the soul alone, yet avails himself of the belief that the pure among mankind shall attain even to godhead hereafter. To him the pure are not the initiated indeed, but the earnest strivers after wisdom. In his theory of retributive metempsychosis he surmises that those who have followed the lusts of the flesh shall hereafter enter the ranks of asses and other lustful beasts; that those who have wrought violence shall enter the ranks of wolves and hawks and kites; that those who have practised what is popularly accounted virtue, but without true understanding, shall enter the ranks of harmless and social creatures, bees, wasps, and ants, or even the ranks of men once more. ‘But into the ranks of gods none may enter without having followed after wisdom and so departing hence wholly pure—none save the lover of knowledge[1524].’ What precise meaning Plato attached to his phrase ‘to enter the ranks’ (εἰς γένος ἐνδύεσθαι or ἀφικνεῖσθαι), to which he adheres throughout the passage, is a question which agitated the Neoplatonists[1525] somewhat needlessly. The phrase is intended either literally throughout or allegorically throughout. If it be allegorical, the meaning must be that all human souls shall enter again into human bodies, but that they shall start this new phase of existence with the qualities of lust, violence, respectability, or real virtue and purity, acquired in the previous life—merely resembling, as nearly as men may, asses, wolves, bees, or gods. Now as regards the first three classes, this allegorical interpretation, if a little forced, is feasible enough; but what of the fourth class? Shall the soul which has attained purity, the very negation of fleshliness in Plato’s view, suffer re-incarnation and struggle once more against the flesh? Surely the allegorical explanation is at once condemned. The phrase was intended literally[1526]. Plato signified the re-incarnation of the lustful, the violent, and the merely respectable, in the forms of animals of like character, and he signified—I must not say the re-incarnation, for Plato’s gods were spiritual and not carnal—but the regeneration of the pure in the form of gods. And in the same spirit Plutarch too contemplated the possibility of some men’s souls becoming first heroes, and from heroes rising to the rank of ‘daemons,’ and from ‘daemons’ coming to share, albeit but rarely, in real godhead[1527].
Thus even the highest aspirations of the most spiritually-minded of pagan thinkers owed much to the purely popular religion. The Orphic tablet links up the popular conception of death as a wedding with the Platonic conception of the deification of the soul. ‘I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the underworld’: ‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’
But if Plato, even in his conception of a purely spiritual life hereafter, owed something to the popular religion, he drew upon it far more freely in his conception of Love. In the Symposium one speech after another culminates in the assertion of that belief which found its highest expression in the mysteries. ‘So then I say,’ says Phaedrus, ‘that Love is the most venerable of the gods, the most worthy of honour, the most powerful to grant virtue and blessedness unto mankind both in life and after death[1528].’ And in the same tone too Eryximachus: ‘He it is that wields the mightiest power and is the source for us of all blessedness and of our power to have loving fellowship both with one another and with the gods that are stronger than we[1529].’ And finally Aristophanes: It is Love, ‘who in this present life gives us most joys by drawing like unto like, and for our hereafter displays hopes most high, if we for our part display piety towards the gods, that he will restore us to our erstwhile nature and will heal us and will make us happy and blessed[1530].’