Part 4

This religious philosophy, which, by a symbolism transforming the meaning of the traditional beliefs, reconciled these with men’s intelligence, did more than any other to revive faith in immortality. Many enlightened men, like Cicero and Cato, had sought consolation for the misfortunes of this world and a hope for the Beyond in reading Plato, but Plato’s proof of immortality could convince only those already convinced.[74] Pythagorism, on the other hand, offered to restless souls a certainty founded on a revelation made to ancient sages, and it satisfied at once the Roman love for order and rule, and the human love for the marvellous and the mysterious. The evidence of the effect of this philosophy is still recognisable, although it often has not been recognised, in the compositions decorating many sepulchral monuments and in the wording of several epitaphs. A tombstone found at Philadelphia in Lydia is particularly curious.[75] It bears a representation of the Y symbol, that is, of the diverging roads between which man must choose when he leaves childhood behind him. On the one side earthly travail leads the virtuous man to eternal rest; on the other softness and debauchery bring the vicious man to a gulf into which he falls. A metrical epitaph, found at Pisaurum (Pesaro), hints covertly at the ideas of the school. This commemorates a child who, in spite of his youth, had learnt the dogmas of Pythagoras and read “the pious verses of Homer” as well as the philosophers, and had studied in Euclid the sacred science of numbers. His soul, runs the inscription,[76] “goes forward through the gloomy stars of deep Tartarus towards the waters of Acheron,” a sentence which can be understood only on the supposition that Tartarus and Acheron had for the author a figurative meaning and lay in the depths not of the earth but of the sky.

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The belief in a celestial immortality which was thus propagated by the half philosophical, half religious sect of the Pythagoreans was to find a powerful interpreter in a thinker who had a predominant influence over his contemporaries and the succeeding generation—in Posidonius. We know little of his life. Born at Apamea in Syria, about the year 135, he early left his native country, of which he seems to have kept a poor opinion, and as a young student in Athens he attended the lectures of the older Stoic Panaetius. The universal curiosity which was to make him a scholar of encyclopaedic knowledge soon impelled him to take long journeys, in which he even reached the shores of the Atlantic and studied the tides of the ocean. Upon his return he opened a school in the free city of Rhodes and there numbered Cicero among his hearers. When he died at the age of eighty-four the prestige he enjoyed both in the Roman world and among the Greeks was immense. He owed his intellectual ascendancy as much to the marvellous variety of the knowledge which he displayed, as philosopher, astronomer, historian, geographer and naturalist, as to his copious, harmonious and highly coloured style.

A theologian rather than a logician, a scholar rather than a critic, he did not construct an original metaphysical system comparable to those of the great founders of schools. But Posidonius was the most prominent representative of that syncretism which, as we have seen, showed itself in the Pythagoreans before his day and which reigned in the world about him, because men were weary of the sterile discussions of opposing thinkers. He gave the support of his authority and his eloquence to the eclecticism which reconciled the principles of the ancient Greek schools. Moreover, his Syrian origin led him to combine these doctrines with the religious ideas of the East, which had with astrology given the Hellenes a new conception of man and of the gods.[77]

It is exactly here that Posidonius is important from the point of view of our subject: his tendencies represent a direct reaction against the scepticism of his master Panaetius, who denied both the survival of the soul[78] and the possibility of divination. Posidonius introduced into Stoicism momentous ideas derived at once from Pythagorism and from Eastern cults, and sought to establish them firmly by connecting them with a system of the world, which his vast intelligence had sought to understand in all its aspects. His faith in immortality is strictly related to his cosmography and receives support from his physics.

It was this system of the world which was, thanks to Ptolemy’s authority, to perpetuate itself on the whole until the time of Copernicus. We will here give a broad outline of its essential features, because the eschatological doctrines were to remain for centuries connected with it. The terrestrial globe was held to be suspended, motionless, in the centre of the universe, surrounded by an atmosphere formed of the three other elements and reaching to the moon. That part of the atmosphere which was near the earth was thickened and darkened by heavy vapours rising from the soil and the waters. Above, there moved a purer and lighter air which, as it neared the sky, was warmed by contact with the higher fires. Still higher were ranged the concentric spheres of the seven planets, wrapped in ether, a subtle and ardent fluid—first the moon, which still received and gave back the exhalations of the earth,[79] then Mercury and Venus, the two companions of the sun in his daily course. The fourth place, that is, the middle point of the superimposed heavens, was occupied by the luminary of the day,—here Posidonius forsakes Plato and follows the Chaldeans,—the burning heart of the world, the intelligent light which is the source of our minds.[80] Above the sun moved the three higher planets—Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And these seven wandering stars were surrounded by the sphere of the fixed stars, which were animated by constant and uniform movement. That sphere marked the world’s boundary: beyond it there was only void or the ether.

The universe, as this philosophy imagined it, had therefore well-defined limits: when men raised their eyes to the constellations of the firmament, they thought they perceived its end. The depths of the sky were not then unfathomable; he who sank his gaze in them was not seized with giddiness at the abysses nor bewildered by inconceivable magnitudes, and was not tempted to cry with Pascal:[81] “The eternal silence of these boundless spaces affrights me.” Nor was the universe then a multiplicity of heavenly bodies moving to an unknown goal and perpetually transformed, transitory manifestations of an energy developed for undiscoverable ends. The conception formed of the world was static, not dynamic. It was a machine of which the wheels turned according to immutable laws, an organism of which all the parts were united by reciprocal sympathy as they acted and reacted on each other.

This organism was alive, penetrated throughout by the same essence as the soul which maintains our life and thought. This soul was an igneous breath of which the moral corruption was conceived quite materially. When it gave itself up to the desires of the senses, to corporeal passions, its substance thickened and was troubled, and the mud of this pollution adhered to it like a crust. When the soul left the body at the time of death, it became a spirit like the multitude of demons who peopled the atmosphere. But its lot varied in accordance with its condition. If it were laden with matter, its weight condemned it to float in the densest air, the damp-charged gas which immediately surrounded the earth, and its very composition then caused it to reincarnate itself in new bodies.[82] But if it had remained free from all alloy its lightness caused it to pass immediately through this heavier layer of air and bore it to the higher spaces. It stopped in this ascension when, within the ether which was about the moon, it found itself in surroundings like its own substance. Some elect beings, the divine spirits of the sages, kept such purity that they rose through the ether as far as the highest astral spheres. In this system the doctrine of immortality is seen to be closely knit up with cosmography.

If Posidonius has largely borrowed these ideas from the platonising Pythagorism of his period, he forsook this philosophy on an essential point. As a Stoic he did not admit the transcendency of God. For him, God was immanent in the universe; the seat of the directing reason of the world (ἡγεμονικόν) was the sphere of the fixed stars, which embraced all other spheres and determined their revolutions. There too, at the summit of the world but not outside it, the spirits of the blessed gathered; from these high peaks they delighted to observe earthly happenings; and when a pious soul tried to rise to them, these succouring heroes, like our saints, could lend their aid and protection.

This philosophy did not draw its power of persuasion only from its logical consistency, which satisfied reason, but it also made a strong appeal to feeling. Posidonius caused a broad stream of mystical ideas, undoubtedly derived from the beliefs developed by the astral religions of the East, to flow into the arid bed of a Stoicism which had become scholastic. For him, reason was not enclosed in the body, even when it sojourned here below; it escaped from it to pass with marvellous swiftness from the depths of the sea to the ends of the earth and the top of the heavens; it flew through all nature, learning to know physical laws and to admire the divine order ever more and more. Above all it could never weary of the sight of the glowing constellations and their harmonious movements. It felt with emotion, as it gave itself up to contemplating them, its kinship with the celestial fires; it entered into communion with the higher gods. In enthusiastic terms, echoed by his imitators, Posidonius described the ecstasy which seized him who left the earth, who felt himself transported to the midst of the sacred chorus of the stars and who followed their rhythmic evolutions. In these transports, the soul did not only win to infinite power, but also received from heaven the revelation of the nature and cause of the celestial revolutions. Thus even in this life it had a foretaste of the beatitude which would belong to it after death when reason, rid of the weak organs of the senses, would directly perceive all the splendours of the divine world and would know its mysteries completely.[83]

This theology attributed to man a power such as to satisfy his proudest feelings. It did not regard him as a tiny animalcule who had appeared on a small planet lost in immensity, nor did it, when he scrutinised the heavens, crush him with a sense of his own pettiness as compared with bodies whose greatness surpassed the limits of his imagination. It made man king of creation, placed him in the centre of a still limited world of which the proportions were not so vast that he could not travel all over his domain. If he could tear himself from the domination of his body, he became capable of communicating with the visible gods who were almost within his reach and whom he might hope to equal after his passage here below. He knew himself to be united to them by an identity of nature which alone explained how he understood them.

“Quis caelum possit, nisi caeli munere, nosse Et reperire deum, nisi qui pars ipse Dei est?”[84]

“Who could know heaven save by heavenly grace, or find God if he were not himself a part of God?”—words of the Roman poet who echoes Posidonius’ teaching.

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It is easy to understand that such ideas were readily adopted at a time when human minds, tired of inconclusive disputes, despaired of ever reaching truth by their own strength. The astral mysticism eloquently preached by Posidonius was to influence all the later Stoicism. Seneca in particular, in the numerous passages in which he speaks of the misery and baseness of life in the body and celebrates the felicity of the pure souls who live among the stars, shows the imprint of the philosopher of Apamea. And this philosopher also exerted a far-reaching action beyond the narrow circle of the school. The erudition of the antiquarian Varro, the poems of Virgil and Manilius and the biblical exegesis of Philo the Jew, all drew on him for inspiration. But the author in whom we can best discern his influence is his pupil Cicero, the abundance of whose writings allows us to follow the evolution of his thought, which is characteristic of the whole society of his time.

It is beyond doubt that Cicero was an agnostic for the greater part of his life. His mind found satisfaction in the scepticism of the New Academy, or rather he adopted towards the future life the received attitude of the world in which he lived, where the problem of the soul’s origin and destiny was regarded as not only insoluble but also idle, as unworthy to absorb the minds of men who should devote their energies to the service of the state. The question of the cult to be rendered to the Manes had been settled once for all by the ancient pontifical law. Old Rome distrusted speculations as to the Beyond because they dangerously diverted thought from actual realities. But Cicero, by his study of the writings of his master Posidonius and by his intercourse with the senator Nigidius Figulus, a fervent adept of Pythagorism,[85] had been brought into contact with the stream of mystical ideas which was beginning to flow through the West. Gradually, as he grew older and life brought him disappointments, his thought was more attracted to religious ideas.[86] In 54, when he had given up political life, he composed the _Republic_, an imitation of Plato’s work on the same subject. As Plato had introduced the myth of Er the Armenian at the end of his work, so his Roman imitator concludes with the puzzling picture of “Scipio’s Dream,” where the destroyer of Carthage receives the revelations of the conqueror of Zama. The hero, from the height of the celestial spheres, expounds that doctrine of astral immortality which was common to the Pythagoreans and to Posidonius. It is given as yet only as a dream, a vision the truth of which is in no way guaranteed. But in 45 B. C. Cicero suffered a cruel loss in the death of his only daughter Tullia. His grief persuaded him that this beloved being still lived among the gods. Even while he accused himself of unreasonable weakness, he ordered that not a tomb but a chapel (_fanum_), consecrating her apotheosis, should be raised to this young woman. The letters he wrote at this time to Atticus, from the shores of the Pomptine Marshes, in the solitude of Astura, apprise us of his most intimate feelings. He gave vent to his sorrow in writing a _Consolatio_, and in its preserved fragments we see him strangely impressed by the Pythagorean doctrines: he speaks of the soul, exempt from all matter, as celestial and divine and therefore eternal, of the soul’s life here below as a penalty inflicted on it because it is born to expiate anterior crimes (_scelerum luendorum causa_).

Cicero’s sensitive spirit, troubled by the perplexing problem of our destiny, did not turn to the old discredited beliefs but to the new conceptions which a mystical philosophy had brought from the East. _Hortensius_ and the _Tusculans_, written in this period of his life, show us the empire which the Neo-Stoicism of his master and the Neo-Pythagorism of his fellow-senator then exercised over his mind, saddened and disillusioned as he was, and show us too how he sought consolation for the private and public ills which were overwhelming him in the luminous doctrine of a blissful survival.

This spiritual evolution is an image of the great change which was about to take place in the Roman world.

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Stoic philosophy, although its maxims had been popularised by education and literature, was almost as incapable of exercising a wide influence on the deep masses of the people as the esoteric theosophy revealed in the aristocratic conventicles of the Pythagoreans. The urban “plebs,” to which slavery and trade had given a strong admixture of Eastern blood, and the peasants of the rural districts, where the gaps caused by depopulation were filled up by a foreign labour supply, were beginning at the end of the Republican period to hear new dogmas preached, dogmas which were winning an ever increasing number of believers. The ancient national cults of Greece and Rome aimed above all at ensuring civic order and earthly welfare, and paid small regard to the spiritual perfection of individuals and their eternal future. But now exotic cults claimed to reveal the secret of immortality to their adepts.[87] The Oriental mysteries, propagated in the West, united in the promise of securing holiness in this life and felicity in the next, while they imparted to their initiates the knowledge of certain rites and required submission to certain precepts. Instead of the fluctuating and disputable beliefs of philosophers as to destiny in the Beyond, these religions gave certainty founded on divine revelation and on the faith of countless generations attached to them. The truth, which the mysticism of the thinkers looked to find in direct communication with heaven, was here warranted by a venerable tradition and by the daily manifestations of the gods adored. The belief in life beyond the grave, which had in ancient paganism been so vague and melancholy, was transformed into confident hope in a definite beatitude. Participation in the occult ceremonies of the sect was an infallible means of finding salvation. A society that was weary of doubt received these promises eagerly, and the old beliefs of the East combined with an eclectic philosophy to give a new eschatology to the Roman Empire.

The salvation ensured by the mysteries was conceived as identification with the god venerated in them. By virtue of this union the initiate was reborn, like this god, to new life after he had perished, or, like him, escaped from the fatal law of death which weighs on humanity. He was “deified” or “immortalised,” after he had taken part, as actor, in a liturgical drama reproducing the myth of the god whose lot was thus assimilated to his own. Purifications, lustrations and unctions, participation in a sacred banquet, revelations, apparitions and ecstasies—a complicated series of ceremonies and instructions helped to bring about this metamorphosis of the faithful whom a higher power absorbed or penetrated with its energy. We shall return to this sacramental operation which made pious souls equal to the divinity.[88]

There is another point on which, in the course of this historical introduction, we must dwell a little longer, namely, the evolution undergone by the conception of the Beyond taught in the different mysteries and the share of philosophy in the transformation. For if in the various sects the liturgy was usually preserved with scrupulous fidelity, its theological interpretation varied considerably as time passed. In paganism much doctrinal liberty was always combined with respect for rites.

Some of the mysteries often gave in their beginnings a rather coarse idea of the future life, and the pleasures which might be enjoyed therein were very material. The ancient Greek conception, going back to Orphism, was, as we have seen, that of a subterranean kingdom divided into two contrasted parts—Tartarus where the wicked, plunged in a dark slough or subjected to other pains, suffering the chastisement of their faults, on the one side; on the other, the Elysian Fields, those flowered, luminous meadows, gay with song and dance, in which the blessed pursued their favourite occupations, whether they were allowed to dwell there for ever, or whether they awaited there the hour fixed for their rebirth on earth.[89] This eschatology, which had become the common possession of the Hellenes, was certainly that of the mysteries of Greece and in particular of the mysteries of Eleusis. But these mysteries were never more than local religions: however numerous were the initiates attracted by their renown, they were bound to the soil where they were born. Thus their influence was very limited in the Roman period and cannot be compared with that of the universal cults which were propagated throughout the Mediterranean world. As for Orphism, which was never connected with any one temple, it is doubtful whether it still constituted an actual sect, and if it did, it certainly spread over a very narrow field. Its influence was perpetuated chiefly because it was absorbed by Pythagorism.

Among the mysteries propagated in the West, the most ancient were those of the Thraco-Phrygian gods, Dionysos and Sabazios, who were indeed looked upon as identical. We know that in 186 B. C. a _senatus consultum_ forbade the celebration of the Bacchanalia in Italy, and in 139 some sectaries of Jupiter Sabazius, who identified this god with the Jahve-Sabaoth of the Jews, were expelled from Rome by the praetor at the same time as the “Chaldeans.” The cult practised by the votaries of Bacchus or Liber Pater, whose confraternities were maintained until the end of paganism, differed profoundly from the Dionysos worship of ancient Greece: a number of Oriental elements had been introduced into it; in particular, the relations between Dionysos and Osiris, which go back to a very remote period, had become singularly close in Egypt. However, many reliefs on tombstones and the celebrated paintings found in the catacombs of Praetextatus prove that the cults of the Thraco-Phrygian gods remained faithful to the old idea of a future life. The shade went down into the bowels of the earth, never again to leave them. If judged worthy, it took part in an eternal banquet, of which the initiate received a foretaste on earth, in the feasts of the mysteries. Sacred drunkenness, a divine exaltation, was the pledge of the joyous intoxication which the god of wine would grant in Hades to the faithful who had united themselves to him.[90]

In 205, towards the end of the second Punic war, the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, and of Attis, her associate, was transported from Pessinus in Phrygia and officially adopted by the Roman people. The great feasts of this religion were celebrated in March about the equinox and commemorated the death and resurrection of Attis, the emblem of vegetation, which, after it has withered, flowers again in the spring. The faithful associated their own destiny with the lot of their god: like him they would be reborn to a new life after they had died. Their doctrines on this point were certainly transformed as time passed, for no Oriental cult which spread in the West underwent more evolution, since none was more fundamentally barbarous when it came from Asia. Originally, Cybele was the goddess of the dead, because Mother Earth receives them into her bosom. Every Phrygian tomb is a sanctuary and its epitaph a dedication: often the graves are consecrated to the goddess and bear her image or that of the lion, her substitute. Often too the tombstone has the shape of a door, the door of the subterranean world whither the dead descend. The belief seems to have been held that the deceased were absorbed in the Great Mother who had given them birth, and that they thus participated in her divinity. She brought forth corn and grapes for men and thus sustained them day by day, and the bread and wine, taken in the meal which was the essential act of the initiation, would ensure immortality to those who were of the mystery. “Thou givest us the food of life with unfailing constancy,” says a prayer, “and when our soul departs we will take refuge in thee. Thus all that thou givest, always falls to thee again.”[91]