THE invitation of the committee charged with the administration of the Ingersoll lectureship and my own inclination have agreed in indicating that aspect of the general subject of immortality, which I shall try to present tonight. I shall not venture on this occasion to advance arguments for or against belief in a life after death; my present task is a humbler one: I propose to ask you to review with me some of the more significant ideas concerning an existence beyond the grave, which were current in the Greco-Roman world in the time of Jesus and during the earlier Christian centuries, and to consider briefly the relation of these pagan beliefs to Christian ideas on the same subject. In dealing with a topic so vast as this in a single hour, we must select those elements which historically showed themselves to be fundamental and vital; but even then we cannot examine much detail. It may prove, however, that a rapid survey of those concepts of the future life, whose influence lasted long during the Christian centuries, and indeed has continued to the present day, may not be without profit.

The most important single religious document from the Augustan Age is the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid; for although the Aeneid was written primarily to glorify Roman imperial aims, the sixth book gives full expression to many philosophic and popular ideas of the other world and of the future life, which were current among both Greeks and Romans.[1] It therefore makes a fitting point of departure for our considerations. In this book, as you will remember, the poet’s hero, having reached Italian soil at last, is led down to the lower world by the Cumaean Sybil. This descent to Hades belongs historically to that long series of apocalyptic writings which begins with the eleventh book of the Odyssey and closes with Dante’s Divine Comedy. Warde Fowler deserves credit for clearly pointing out that this visit of Aeneas to the world below is the final ordeal for him, a mystic initiation, in which he receives “enlightenment for the toil, peril, and triumph that await him in the accomplishment of his divine mission.” When the Trojan hero has learned from his father’s shade the mysteries of life and death, and has been taught the magnitude of the work which lies before him, and the great things that are to be, he casts off the timidity which he has hitherto shown and, strengthened by his experiences, advances to the perfect accomplishment of his task.[2]

But we are not concerned so much with Virgil’s purpose in writing this apocalyptic book, as with its contents and with the evidence it gives as to the current ideas of the other world and the fate of the human soul. What then does the poet tell us of these great matters? We can hardly do better than to follow Aeneas and his guide on their journey. This side of Acheron they meet the souls of those whose bodies are unburied, and who therefore must tarry a hundred years—the maximum of human life—before they may be ferried over the river which bounds Hades. When Charon has set the earthly visitors across that stream, they find themselves in a place where are gathered spirits of many kinds, who have not yet been admitted to Tartarus or Elysium: first the souls of infants and those who met their end by violence—men condemned to death though innocent, suicides, those who died for love, and warriors—all of whom must here wait until the span of life allotted them has been completed. These spirits passed, the mortal visitors come to the walls of Tartarus, on whose torments Aeneas is not allowed to look, for

But the Sybil, herself taught by Hecate, reveals to him the eternal punishments there inflicted for monstrous crimes. Then the visitors pass to Elysium, where dwell the souls of those whose deserts on earth have won for them a happy lot. Nearby in a green valley, Aeneas finds the shade of his own father, Anchises, looking eagerly at the souls which are waiting to be born into the upper world. In answer to his son’s questions, the heroic shade discloses the doctrine of rebirths—metempsychosis—with its tenets of penance and of purification.[3] Finally, to fulfill the poet’s purpose, Anchises’ spirit points out the souls of the heroes who are to come on earth in due season; the spirits of future Romans pass before Aeneas in long array; and at the climax he sees the soul of Augustus, that prince who was destined in the fullness of time to bring back the Golden Age and to impose peace on the wide world. This prophetic revelation ended, Aeneas enlightened and strengthened for his task, returns to the upper world.

This book seems at first a strange compound indeed of popular belief, philosophy, and theology, which is not without its contradictions. On these, however, we need not pause; but for our present interest we must ask what are the main ideas on which this apocalypse is based. First of all, a future life is taken for granted by the poet; otherwise the book could never have been written. Secondly, we notice that, according to ancient popular belief, the souls of those who had not received the proper burial rites, were doomed to wander on this side of Acheron until a hundred years were completed, and also that souls which were disembodied by violence or by early death, were destined to live out their allotted span of earthly existence before they could enter the inner precincts of Hades. Again the poet represents some few as suffering eternal torments for their monstrous sins or enjoying immortal bliss because of their great deserts. And finally, he shows that the majority of souls must pass through successive lives and deaths, until, purified from the sin and dross of the body by millennial sojourns in the world below, and by virtuous lives on earth, they at last find repose and satisfaction. The popular beliefs which concern details of the future life we shall leave one side for the moment; let us rather first observe that Virgil’s ideas as to rewards and punishments in the next world, as well as his doctrine of successive rebirths and deaths with their accompanying purifications, rest on a moral basis, so that the other world is conceived to be a complement of this: life on earth and life below are opportunities for moral advance without which final happiness cannot be attained. Whence came these ideas of the future life and how far were they current in the ancient world of Virgil’s day?

Naturally it does not follow that, because Rome’s greatest poet chose to picture souls surviving their corporeal homes, the average man believed in a future life, but there is abundant evidence that the poet was appealing to widespread beliefs, when he wrote his apocalyptic book.[4] In fact from the earliest times known to us, both Greeks and Romans held to a belief in some kind of extended life for souls after the death of the body.[5] Both peoples had their cults of the dead, rites of tendance and of riddance, festivals both public and private, which leave no doubt that the great majority of men never questioned that the spirits of the departed existed after this life, and that those spirits were endowed with power to harm or to bless the living.[6] But beyond this rather elementary stage of belief the Romans never went of themselves. The Greeks, however, began early to develop eschatological ideas which had, and which still have, great importance.

The eleventh book of the Odyssey, as I have already said, is the oldest “Descent to Hades” in European literature. The souls of the dead are there represented as dwelling in the land of shadows, having no life, but leading an insubstantial existence, without punishment or reward. Such a future world could have no moral or other value; it could only hang over men as a gloomy prospect of that which awaited them when the suns of this world had forever set. But in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. other ideas came to the front, which were influential throughout later history. In those two centuries fall the first period of Greek individualism and a religious revival—two things not wholly disconnected. The Orphic sect, which appeared in the sixth century, was made up of religious devotees who adopted a purified form of the religion of Dionysus.[7] The center of the Orphic faith and mystic ceremonial was the myth of the birth, destruction, and rebirth of the god. According to the story, Dionysus was pursued by the Titans, powers hostile to Zeus. In his distress the god changed himself into various creatures, finally taking on the form of a bull, which the Titans tore in pieces and devoured. But the goddess Athena saved the heart and gave it to Zeus who swallowed it. Hence sprang the new Dionysus. The Titans Zeus destroyed with his thunderbolt and had the ashes scattered to the winds. From these ashes, in one form of the myth, man was made, and therefore he was thought to unite in his person the sinful Titanic nature and the divine Dionysiac spark. The parallelism between this story and the myths of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis is at once evident. They are all gods who die and live again, and thus become lords of death and life, through whom man gains assurance of his own immortality.

Our chief concern with the Orphics here is that they seem to have introduced among the Greeks the idea that the soul of man was divine, was a [Greek: daimÔn] which had fallen, and for its punishment was imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. In its corporeal cell it was condemned to suffer defilement until released by death, when it passed to Hades. Its lot there depended on its life on earth. As an Orphic fragment says: “They who are righteous beneath the rays of the sun, when they die, have a gentler lot in a fair meadow by deep flowing Acheron.... But they who have worked wrong and insolence under the rays of the sun are led down beneath Cocytus’s watery plain into chill Tartarus.”[8] The soul’s sojourn in Hades therefore was a time of punishment and of purification, even as life itself was a penance for sin. According to a common belief, at least in Plato’s day, after a thousand years the soul entered a new incarnation, and so on through ten rounds of earth and Hades, until at last, freed from sin and earthly dross by faithful observance of a holy life on earth and by the purification which it underwent below, it returned to its divine abode; but those who persisted in sin were condemned to all the punishments which man’s imagination could devise; the wicked were doomed to lie in mud and filth, while evil demons rent their vitals. Indeed the horrors which the medieval Christian loved to depict in order to terrify the wicked and to rejoice the faithful, were first devised by the Orphics and their heirs, for exactly the same purpose.

But what bases did the Orphics find for their belief in the divine nature of the soul? In their mythology they had said that man was created out of the ashes of the Titans in which a spark of Dionysus still remained. But in fact they seem to have rested on faith or intuition, without working out clearly a philosophic answer. They were indeed deeply conscious of man’s dual nature; they perceived that on the one hand he is pulled by his baser instincts and desires, which they naturally attributed to the body, and that on the other hand he is prompted by nobler aspirations, which they assigned to his soul. This higher part of man’s dual self was, for them, the Dionysiac element in him. And man’s moral obligation they held to be to free this divine element from the clogging weight of the body, to cease to “blind his soul with clay.” So far as we are aware, the Orphics were the first among the Greeks to make the divinity of the soul a motive for the religious life, and perhaps the first to see that, if the soul is divine, it may naturally be regarded as eternally so, and therefore as immortal. What more momentous thoughts as to the soul’s nature and its destiny could any sect have introduced than these? They were shared by their contemporaries, the Pythagoreans; in fact it is hard to say with certainty which sect developed these concepts first.[9]

But the Orphic-Pythagorean confidence in the immortality of the soul was at the most only an emotional belief. It remained for Plato in the early fourth century to give that belief a philosophic basis and thereby to transform it into a reasonable article of religion. This he fundamentally did, when he brought his concept of the reasoning soul into connection with his doctrine of “forms” or “ideas.” He maintained that behind this transient phenomenal world known to us through the senses, lies another world, the world of ideas, invisible, permanent, and real, which can be grasped by the reason only. These permanent ideas, he said, are of various grades and degrees, the supreme idea being that of the Good and the Beautiful, which is the cause of all existence, truth, and knowledge; it at once comprehends these things within itself and is superior to them; it is the Absolute, God.[10]

But all the ideas, including the Absolute, are, as I have just said, apprehended not by man’s senses but by his intellect. Therefore, argues Plato, man’s reasoning soul must have the same nature as the ideas; like them, it must belong to the world above the senses and with them it must partake of the Absolute. Moreover, since the ideas are eternal and immortal, it inevitably follows that man’s reasoning soul has existed from eternity and will exist forever.[11]

This is not the occasion to discuss the validity of Plato’s doctrine. Aristotle stated, once for all, the fundamental objections to his teacher’s views.[12] But we shall readily grant that, if we accept Plato’s doctrine, his conclusions as to the immortality of the soul may logically follow and that no further evidence is needed to convince us. Yet Plato was not content to let the matter rest on this single argument, for in other dialogues he adduces proofs which do not seem so convincing to us as to their author. He attempts to prove immortality from the self-motion of the soul, again from the dim recollections out of an earlier existence which enable one to recall axiomatic truths or to recognize relations, as in mathematics—things which one has never learned in this present life. On another occasion he argues from the unchanging nature of the soul and from the soul’s superiority to the body. But he seems to have thought the most convincing proof was the fact that the notion of life is inseparable from our concept of the soul; that is, a dead soul is unthinkable. For all these reasons, therefore, he argued that the soul must be immortal.[13]

Whatever we may think of Plato’s different proofs, they have furnished the armories of apologists almost down to our own day. In antiquity they were constantly repeated, in whole or in part, not only by devoted members of the Academy and later by the Neoplatonists, but by the Eclectics and others, like Cicero in the first book of his Tusculan Disputations, and at the close of Scipio’s Dream; they were borrowed by the Stoics, and some eight hundred years after Plato had first formulated them, they were employed by St. Augustine in his tract De Immortalitate Animae. The religious intuition of the Orphic and Pythagorean then was given a rational basis by Plato, and thus supported, proved so convincing to antiquity that Plato’s views were the most important of all in supporting belief in the soul’s immortality. They were in large measure taken up by the Christian church, and, as has been often shown, the doctrine of a spiritual immortality apart and free from the body, was of immense service to primitive Christianity, when the hope of the early return of Christ to found a new kingdom on earth faded before the lengthening years.

To Plato himself his belief in immortality was of the greatest moment, for the whole fabric of his ethical and political philosophy is built against the background of that doctrine. And indeed we should all grant much validity to the argument that the human reason, though weak and limited, is one with the divine and infinite reason; otherwise the human could have no understanding of the divine. But when it is further argued that if the human reason is of the same nature with the divine, it must be eternal and immortal, we may reply that, even so, we are not convinced that the individual soul must therefore have a conscious and separate existence through all eternity; its identity may be lost by absorption into the universal reason, the supreme idea. This is a matter on which Plato nowhere delivers a clear opinion, but his thought is so plainly centered on the individual soul that we can hardly believe that it was possible for him to conceive of the soul’s personality ever being lost in the Absolute.

Although Plato and his greatest pupil, Aristotle, regarded man’s reasoning soul as spiritual, something distinct from matter, few ancient thinkers were able to rise to the concept of the immateriality of man’s reasoning nature. The Stoics, who in their eclectic system borrowed from both Plato and Aristotle, as well as from many other predecessors, held to a strict materialism which they took from Heraclitus. But to their material principle they applied a concept which they took from Aristotle, for they recognized in all things the existence of an active and a passive principle, and they said that by the action of the former on the latter, all phenomena were produced. The active principle they called reason, intelligence, the cause of all things. It was the world-reason which, according to their view, permeated every part of the cosmos, causing and directing all things. To express their concept of its nature, they often named it Fire, the most powerful and active of the elements, or rather the primordial element; again they often called it God, for they did not hesitate to speak of this immanent principle as a person. Furthermore, since man is a part of the cosmos, the world-reason expresses itself in him. Indeed man’s reason, the directing element of the human soul, is itself a part of the world-reason, or in Epictetus’ striking phrase, man is “a fragment of God.”[14] At this point the Stoic and the Platonist were in accord, although the paths of thought which they had travelled were very different. Yet the Stoic could not agree with the Platonist that the individual soul survived forever, since he held to a cyclical theory of the cosmos, according to which this present universe was temporal. It had been created by the eternal fire, by the world-reason, from itself, and it was destined in due season to sink back again into universal fire. Meantime, according to the views of most Stoics, the souls of the just would survive this body, ascending to the spheres above the world, where they would dwell until absorbed once more into the divine element from which they sprang. To the souls of the wicked only a short period at most of post-corporeal existence was granted—brevity of life or annihilation was their punishment.[15]

Strictly speaking, the prospect of the limited existence after death, which the Stoics held out as virtue’s reward, should have had little value for the philosophic mind, especially as their philosophy offered no warrant that personality would survive at all. But it would seem that men at every period of human history have had immortal longings in them so strong that they have eagerly embraced the assurance of even a brief respite from annihilation; certain it is that to many Greeks and Romans the Stoic doctrine of a limited existence after death was a strong incentive to virtue and a consolation in the midst of this world’s trials.

But no doctrine of the post-corporeal existence of the soul has ever had the field entirely to itself. We know that in antiquity even the Stoic conception of the soul’s limited survival, to say nothing of Platonic beliefs in actual immortality, met with much opposition and denial among the intellectual classes. The Epicureans, with their thorough-going atomistic materialism, would not allow that the soul had any existence apart from the body; on the contrary, they held that the soul came into being at the moment of conception, grew with the body, and, at the body’s death, was once more dissolved into the atoms from which it first was formed. Epicurean polemics were directed against both popular superstitions and Platonic metaphysics; the attacks had the advantage of offering rational, and for the day scientific, explanations of natural phenomena, which fed human curiosity as to the causes of things, and which, if accepted, might logically lead to that freedom from the soul’s perturbation which was the aim of the teaching. Moreover, the noble resignation, the high moral and humane zeal, which characterized the Epicurean School at its best, as well as its easy decline into hedonistic appeals, made it popular, especially in the last two centuries before our era. But the very fire and passion of Lucretius, its most gifted Latin exponent, give us the impression that after all most men were not moved to find the peace which the poet promised them, if they would but accept the doctrine of the soul’s dissolution at the moment of death.

The Sceptics also, who claimed not an inconsiderable number of intellectuals, doubted the possibility of a future life, or found themselves unable to decide the matter at all. Like Tennyson’s Sage they would declare:

Indeed it is true that of all the philosophic sects at the beginning of our era, only those which were imbued with Platonic and Orphic-Pythagorean ideas, had confidence in the soul’s immortality. The Stoic position we have already discussed. Some scholars, following Rohde,[16] claim that there was little belief in any kind of a future life among the educated classes at the time we are considering; this I hold to be an error, although it is certain that the Epicureans and Sceptics had a large following. In any case we need to remind ourselves that the intellectuals are always a small minority, whose views may not represent in any way popular beliefs.

We are, however, not without evidence that there were doubters among the common people. Flippant epigrams and epitaphs show that men could at least assume a cynicism toward life and a light-heartedness toward death which equal Lucian’s. More than once we can read funerary inscriptions to this effect: “I was nothing, I am nothing. Do thou who art still alive, eat, drink, be merry, come.”[17] Or sentiments like this: “Once I had no existence; now I have none. I am not aware of it. It does not concern me.”[18] Again we find the denial: “In Hades there is no boat, no Charon, no Aeacus who holds the keys, no Cerberus. All of us, whom death has taken away are rotten bones and ashes; nothing more.”[19] The sentiments are perhaps as old as thinking man. They have at times touches of humor which call forth a smile, as in the anxious inquiries of Callimachus’ epigram: “Charidas, what is below?” “Deep darkness.” “But what of the paths upward?” “All a lie.” “And Pluto?” “Mere talk.” “Then we’re lost.”[20]

Such expressions, of course, must not be given too much weight in our reckoning. The longing for annihilation, which appeals at times to most weary mortals, also led to dedications “to eternal rest” or “to eternal sleep.”[21] But after all the number of such epitaphs is comparatively small. In the nature of the case many funerary inscriptions give no testimony for or against a belief in immortality; but large numbers show confidence, or a hope, in a future life.