Part 17
We have seen that metempsychosis helped the philosophers to shake, if not to ruin, the belief in infernal punishment. But this belief again had power towards the end of antiquity, when the dualist sects which were the outcome of Persian Mazdeism were propagated and when Plato became the supreme authority in philosophy. We touched on this point, in another lecture,[463] when we showed how the idea of a demons’ prison in the bosom of the earth triumphed.
Thus, when the Roman world was in its decline, men came back to the old threefold distinction of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. The very guilty, who cannot be corrected, are hurled into Tartarus, where they suffer for ever the punishment of their incurable wickedness. Souls less corrupt are subjected to purification, either by passing through the elements or by undergoing successive reincarnations, and thus they regain their original nature before they are readmitted to their first dwelling. Finally, the most perfect souls, those of the wise who have freed themselves from the domination of the body and have not let themselves be contaminated by matter, and those of the pious faithful, to whom religious lustrations have given back their purity or whom initiations to the mysteries have made equal to the gods, at once rise again to the celestial spheres.
In the next lecture we shall speak of the rewards reserved for them in the dwelling of the blessed.
VIII
THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED
We have seen how the evolution of religious faith caused the dwelling-place of the dead to move from the tomb to the nether world and from the nether world to the heavens. When the abode of souls was changed, all the ideas attached to the future life had to be transposed. In this lecture we shall endeavour to make clear how the opinions which were held as to the felicity of the blessed were thus transformed. We shall take up again matter which we have already touched upon in another connection and try to show the successive changes undergone by three manners of conceiving happiness in after life: the repose of the dead, the repast of the dead, and the sight of God.
The most ancient and originally the simplest of these conceptions was that of the repose of the dead. We know[464] that the dead who had not been buried in accordance with the rites were believed to find no rest in the tomb. A corpse had to be committed to the earth with traditional ceremonies in order that the spirit which animated it might have quiet. If this spirit were not subsequently nourished by offerings and sacrifices, it left its burial place and roamed the earth’s surface like an animal driven by hunger. The shades inhabiting the tombs could also be evoked by necromancers and such disturbance broke in upon their rest most unpleasantly.
These archaic ideas were so deeply implanted in the popular mind that other beliefs never expelled them, but supervened and existed side by side with them without causing their disappearance.
On tombs of the imperial period formulas like the following are often read: “_Hic requiescit_,” “Here rests,” “_Quieti aeternae_,” “For eternal rest”—inscriptions which could be interpreted figuratively; but other wishes can only be taken to have a material sense, such as: “_Ossa quiescant_,” “May his bones rest,” and “_Molliter ossa cubent_,” “May the bones lie softly.” Poetry has preserved a number of similar phrases. Tibullus expresses the following wish for a loved woman: “May thy slender form rest well beneath the soft earth.”[465]
The rest which the exact accomplishment of the rites gave to the dead was not physical only but moral also. The dead were _securi_—the word is properly applied to them—that is, they were exempt from care. Doubtless the care from which they were delivered by the cult of the grave, was first that of suffering from hunger and thirst,[466] but the “eternal security” (_securitas aeterna_)[467] they enjoyed was also the absence of all the fears and anxieties which haunt humanity.
When philosophy claimed to free souls from the superstitions of the past, it did not destroy the old conception of rest in the tomb but cleansed it from all material alloy. If it be doubtful whether anything of man survives, it is at least certain that death marks the abolition of the pains of this world and the end of its troubles. _Mors laborum et miseriarum quies_, is Cicero’s definition.[468] Death restores us to that state of tranquillity in which we were before our birth.[469] The “eternal home” which shelters the remains of man is the silent temple in which he no longer has anything to fear from nature or from his fellows.
The Epicureans who made _ataraxia_ their ideal of life, the Stoics who found theirs in impassivity (ἀπάθεια), could see in the anaesthesia of death the supreme realisation of such absence of emotion and passion. The corpse lies as softly on its last bed as a man plunged in a deep and quiet sleep. The burial place is indeed often consecrated to _Somno aeterno_.[470] This idea is expressed in a thousand forms in literature and in epitaphs. A poor grammarian of Como, who doubtless had had little reason to congratulate himself on life, caused two lines of verse to be engraved on his tomb:[471] “I fled the miseries of sickness and the great ills of life; I am now delivered from all its pains and enjoy a peaceful calm.” On an African grave there are the following words: “After bearing a heavy burden and after manifold toils, he speaks no more, content with the silent dwelling in which he rests.”[472] We read elsewhere, “Life was a pain, death prepared me rest.”[473] The sentiment expressed by these inscriptions and many more like them is no mere reflection of the teaching of philosophers who denied the future life: it is profoundly human. The melodious but melancholy apostrophe of Leconte de Lisle is well known:
“Et toi, divine mort, ou tout rentre et s’efface, Accueille tes enfants dans ton sein étoilé; Affranchis nous du temps, du nombre et de l’espace Et rends nous le repos que la vie a troublé.”
“O Death divine, at whose recall, Returneth all To fade in thy embrace, Gather thy children to thy bosom starred, Free us from time, from number and from space, And give us back the rest that life has marred.”[474]
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.
These were doubtless vulgar prejudices rather than dogmas recognised by orthodoxy, yet they did not remain without influence on the teaching of the doctors of the Church. For instance, Saint Ambrose[495] enlarges on the thought, probably borrowed from some philosopher, that death is good because in it the body, source of our uneasiness, our troubles and our vices, rests, calmed for ever, while the virtuous soul rises to heaven. After the travail of existence the dead rest as man rests on the Sabbath day, and this was, it was explained, the reason why the seventh day was the day of the commemoration of the departed.
The idea of rest in the infernal regions has left no deep traces on the Christian faith, for which the subterranean world became the abode of the wicked. It was, however, somewhere in the bowels of the earth that the dwelling of the righteous who lived before the Redemption was commonly placed, sometimes also that of children who died unbaptised. They found there according to the Pelagians a “place of repose and salvation” outside the kingdom of heaven.[496]
But in Roman times the idea of peace in the celestial light was dominant among the Jews and Christians as among the pagans. Thus the Book of Enoch shows us the prophet carried off in a whirlwind to the heights whence he perceived “the beds where the just rest” amid the saints.[497] We can here point out exactly the most important of the literary intermediaries through whom this conception was transmitted from paganism to Judaism and from Judaism to Christianity. Towards the end of the first century A. D., amid the desolation which followed on the destruction of the Temple, a pious Jew, somewhere in the East, composed and ascribed to the venerable authorship of Esdras an apocalypse which enjoyed singular popularity until the time of its rejection by the Church as apocryphal. The visionary who set it down combines a number of pagan reminiscences with biblical ideas. He promises eternal felicity to the just, and asks himself what will be the lot of souls between the time of their death and the end of the world. Will they be at rest or will they be tortured? And the angel who inspires him answers that when the vital breath has left the body to go again to adore the glory of the Most High, the soul which has violated the divine law will not enter the celestial dwellings but will “wander amidst torments, for ever suffering and saddened on seven paths.” But the soul which has walked in the way of God “will rest in seven orders of rewards.”[498] The sixth of these is the order in which its face begins to shine like the sun and in which it becomes incorruptible, like the stars; the seventh is that in which it wins to the sight of God.
These are conceptions and even expressions which belong to astral immortality, and the Jewish author, like the pagans before him, everywhere contrasts the state of agitation filled with anguish reserved for the guilty with the blessed tranquillity which is the reward of a pious life.[499] The description of the celestial dwelling which Saint Ambrose borrowed from the pseudo-Esdras is singularly like that given by the philosophers of the earlier period: a place in which there is no cloud, no thunder, no lightning, no violence of winds, neither darkness nor sunset, neither summer nor winter to vary the seasons, where no cold is met with, nor hail, nor rain. But the Christian doctor, like the Jewish visionary, adds a new feature: there will be no more sun nor moon nor stars; the light of God will shine alone.[500]
The idea of repose in the eternal light was, thanks to the apocalypse of the supposed Esdras, to become one of those most frequently expressed by epitaphs and ritual. It was from this apocryphal work that the Roman liturgy borrowed the form of a prayer introduced into the office of the dead at least as early as the seventh century and still sung in the funeral service—_Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis_. “Lord, give them eternal rest and may perpetual light shine upon them.”
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The idea of the repast of the dead evolved, like that of their repose, as the conception of life beyond the tomb was gradually transformed, and it finally assumed a far higher significance than that originally attributed to it.
According to a belief found everywhere, the dead, as we know,[501] needed nourishment if they were not to suffer from hunger. Hence the obligation to make libations and sacrifices on the tomb and to deposit food and drink there. The neglect of these sacred duties entailed consequences fearful to him who failed to fulfil them, just as their exact observance ensured him the good will of the spirits of the dead.
The custom of holding banquets which united the members of a family beside a grave at a funeral or on certain consecrated days, was connected with this belief. This custom was no mere rendering of an honour to one who had gone, no unmixed manifestation of piety or affection. The motive for these ceremonies was much more concrete. As we have stated elsewhere,[502] men were persuaded that the spirit of him who lay beneath the ground was present at the meal, took its place beside its kin and rejoiced with them. Therefore its share was set aside for it, and by consecrated formulas it was invited to drink and eat. Moreover the guests themselves ate copiously and drank deeply, convinced that the noisy conviviality of the feast was a source of joy and refreshment to the shade in the gloom of its sepulchral existence. Sometimes the dinner took place in a room within the tomb, specially set aside for such meetings, sometimes in one of the gardens which men delighted to make around the “eternal house” of the dead[503] and to which inscriptions sometimes give the name of “paradise” (παράδεισος).[504]
These are customs and ideas which are found everywhere from the time when history had its origin, practices and ideas to which under the Roman Empire the people still clung, and which even partially survived the conversion of the masses to Christianity, although the Church condemned them as pagan. Until the end of antiquity and even in the Middle Ages, banquets, at which wine flowed abundantly, were still held on anniversaries by kinsfolk and friends near the remains of those they loved.[505]
When, however, the conception of survival in the tomb was superseded or overshadowed by that of survival in the nether world, the repast of the dead was also transferred thither. Henceforth it was in the Elysian Fields that pious souls could take their place at the table of the Blessed. The Orphics were the first to introduce into Greece this new idea, which was, however, no more than the development of a pre-Hellenic belief, and it spread through the mysteries of Dionysos[506] to every part of the ancient world: the ritualistic repasts in which the initiate took part, the drunkenness which exalted their whole being, were for the adepts of this cult at once a foretaste and a warrant of the happiness reserved for them in that eternal feast of the subterranean world in which a sweet intoxication would rejoice their soul. That forgetfulness of all cares which the divine liquor gave was connected with Lethe, the water of which, according to mythology, souls drank that they might lose all memory of their former life.
An immense number of reliefs, scattered throughout the whole extent of the Roman Empire, bear witness to the popularity of the belief in this form of immortality. The dead man who has been made a hero and whose family comes to make sacrifices to him is stretched on a couch and lifts the _rhyton_ which holds the heady drink of Bacchus, while before him, on a little table, dishes are placed. These banquets took place, as we have said, in the Elysian Fields, and the idea of the repast thus met and combined with the idea of rest. The Blessed were imagined as lying on a soft bed of flowered grass, taking part in a perpetual feast, to the accompaniment of music and songs. Lucian in his “True Histories”[507] describes, with ironical exaggeration, the joys of these guests who are stretched comfortably among the flowers of a fragrant meadow in the shade of leafy trees, and who gather, instead of fruit, crystal goblets, which fill with wine as soon as they are placed on the table.
In spite of the mockery of sceptics these beliefs still had some faithful partisans even at the end of paganism. A picture discovered in the catacomb of Praetextatus shows us a priest of the Thraco-Phrygian god Sabazios celebrating a mystic banquet with six of his fellows, and another fresco represents the introduction of a veiled woman into the garden of delights, where she has been judged worthy of being received at the table of virtuous souls.[508]