The Complete Essays (97 page)

[It is mad to think that the mortal is able to be joined to the eternal, to agree together and each to help the other. What can we possibly conceive more different, or, rather, more contrary and incompatible, than these two elements, one mortal, the other immortal and eternal, which you would join together to ride out the wildest storm?]

Moreover the soul, like the body, was thought to be involved in death,

[B]
Simul aevo fessa fatiscit
.
[She droops down, tired out with age.]

[C] According to Zeno this is shown to us clearly by the image of sleep (which he thought was both the soul and the body dropping down in a faint):
‘Contrahi animum et quasi labi putat atque concidere’
[He conceived that the soul contracts, as it were, collapses and falls down in a swoon].
³⁰⁵

[A] It was recognized that the soul may sometimes retain her force and vigour to the end; that was explained by the different varieties of illness, just as some men retain one or other of their senses intact to the end – their hearing, say, or their sense of touch – nobody being so enfeebled as to have absolutely no part vigorous and whole.

[B]
Non alio pacto quam si, pes cum dolet aegri,
In nullo caput interea sit forte dolore
.

[In the same way, a sick man’s feet may feel sharp pains, without his head feeling anything.]
³⁰⁶

Our mental insight is to Truth what an owl’s eyes are to the splendour of the sun. Aristotle says that. Is there any better way of convicting ourselves than by noting such total blindness in so clear a light?

[A] Now for the contrary opinion: that the soul is in fact immortal. [C] Cicero says that, at least as far as books are concerned, it was first introduced by Pherecides of Scyros in the time of King Tullus. Some others attribute it to Thales, and there are other candidates.
³⁰⁷
[A] This branch of human learning is treated with the greatest reservation and doubt. On this matter, even the most confirmed Dogmatists are mainly constrained to shelter behind the shadowy teachings of Plato’s Academy. On this subject, nobody knows what Aristotle’s conclusions were, [C] no more than those of the Ancients in general, who handle the matter with a kind of vacillating belief:
‘rem gratissimam promittentium magis quam probantium’
[a thing most pleasing, but more in promise than in proof].
³⁰⁸
[A] Aristotle hid behind a cloud of difficult and incomprehensible words and meanings, leaving his followers arguing as much about what he meant as about the matter itself.

Two considerations made this opinion plausible to them: first, that without the immortality of the soul, fame would have no secure basis and so be hoped for in vain. (By the standards of the world that is a consideration of wonderful importance.) The second is one of utility: it is useful that people should be convinced, [C] as Plato says, [A] that even when vices escape the dark and uncertain vigilance of human justice, they still remain exposed to that of divine Justice which will pursue them even after the death of the guilty.
³⁰⁹
[C] Man takes extreme care to prolong his being, providing for it by all possible means: he has tombs to preserve his body and fame to preserve his soul.

Dissatisfied with his lot, Man has given free run to his opinions, building himself up into something else and propping himself up with his own ingenuity. The soul can never find a sure footing; she is too confused and weak for that. She roams about seeking bases for her hopes and consolations in conditions which are foreign to her nature. She clings to them and puts down roots. These notions which she ingeniously forges for herself may be ever so frivolous and fantastic, but she can find repose in them more surely than in herself, and much more willingly. [A] But it is a source of wonder that even those who are most obstinately attached to so just and clear a persuasion as spiritual immortality fall short, being powerless to establish it by their human ability. [C] One Ancient writer said,
‘Somnia sunt non docentis, sed optantis’
[They are not the dreams of one who demonstrates but of one who desires].
³¹⁰
[A] From this evidence Man realizes that such truth as he does find out for himself is due to Fortune and to chance. Even when truth drops into his hands, Man has no means of seizing hold of it; his reason does not have power enough to establish any rights over it. Every single idea which results from our own reflections and our own faculties – whether it is true or false – is subject to dispute and uncertainty. In bygone days God produced the confusion and disorder of the Tower of Babel as a chastisement of our pride, to teach us our wretchedness and our inadequacy. Everything we undertake without God’s help, everything we try and see without the lamp of his grace, is vanity and madness. The essence of Truth is to be constant and uniform: when Fortune arranges for a little of it to come into our possession, out of weakness we corrupt it and debase it. Any course a man may adopt on his own is allowed by God to lead to this same confusion, the idea of which is so vividly portrayed in the just punishment which God visited upon the
arrogance of Nembroth, bringing to nought his vain attempts to build that pyramidal Tower: [C]
‘Perdam sapientiam sapientium et prudentiam prudentium reprobabo’
[I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will reject]. [A] That diversifying of tongues and language by which God threw confusion over the enterprise of Babel, what else does it signify if not the infinite, endless altercation over discordant opinions and arguments which accompanies the vain structures of human knowledge, enmeshing them in confusion. [C] Usefully enmeshing them! If we actually possessed one grain of knowledge, there would be no holding us back. I like what that Saint said:
‘Ipsa utilitatis occultatio, aut humilitatis exercitatio est, aut elationis attritio’
[Even that which is useful has been rendered obscure: that provides an occasion for exercising our humility and restraining our pride]. To what degree of arrogance and insolence do we not carry our blindness and our brutish stupidity.
³¹¹

[A] But to get back to our subject: it is truly reasonable that we should be beholden to God alone, to the benefit of his grace, for the truth of so excellent a belief: it is from God’s bountiful liberality that we receive the fruition of everlasting life, which is the enjoyment of eternal blessedness.

[C] We should freely admit that God alone tells us this, and faith.
³¹²
It is not a lesson we have been taught by Nature or Reason. Anyone who makes repeated examinations of himself, internally and externally, as a human being, with human powers but bereft of the divine privilege of grace; anyone who sees Man as he is, without flattery, will find no quality or faculty in Man which is not redolent of death and dust. The more we attribute, grant and refer to God, the more Christianly we act. Would the Stoic philosopher not be better advised to owe to God what he said he owed to the chance agreement of the Voice of the People?
‘Cum de animarum aeternitate disserimus, non leve momentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos, aut colentium. Utor hac publica persuasione’
[When treating the immortality of the soul we attach no little weight to the general agreement among those who fear or worship the gods of the Underworld. I make good use of this general conviction].
³¹³

[A] The feebleness of human reasoning on this subject is particularly noticeable from the fabulous details which men have added to it in their efforts to discover the characteristics of our future immortality. [C] We may leave aside the Stoics, who grant that souls do have a future life, but only a finite one:
‘usuram nobis largiuntur tanquam cornicibus: diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper, negant’
[They allow us to live as long as crows: our souls last a long time, they say, but not for ever].
³¹⁴

[A] The most universally received opinion (which still subsists today in some places) was the one attributed to Pythagoras – (not that he was the first to hold it, but because his approval and authority gave great weight and credence to it); it was that our souls, when they depart from us, go the rounds from one body to another, from a lion, say, say, to a horse; from a horse, to a king, ceaselessly driven from one abode to another.
³¹⁵
[C] Pythagoras said he distinctly remembered having previously been Aethalides, then Euphorbus, then Hermotimus and finally Pyrrhus, before his soul eventually passed into himself, with recollections covering two hundred and six years.

Some added that these souls sometimes go back to heaven, and then come down again:

O pater, anne aliquas ad coelum hinc ire putandum est
Sublimes animas iterumque ad tarda reverti
Corpora? Quae lucis miseris tam dira cupido?

[O Father, must we believe that some exalted souls go from here to heaven and then come back again to sluggish bodies? Why do those wretches still yearn for the light of day?]
³¹⁶

Origen has souls everlastingly shuttling back and forth between wretchedness and bliss. Varro’s opinion relates how souls rejoin their original bodies after four hundred and forty years have rolled; for Chrysippus that happens after an undefined period.
³¹⁷
Plato says that it was from Pindar and the old
poets that he acquired his belief in the endless succession of changes by which the soul is purified (in the World to Come her rewards and punishments are temporary, since her life on earth is lived within time); he drew the conclusion that the soul must possess a detailed knowledge of the affairs of heaven, hell and earth (having sojourned in them during her many journeys to and fro): for her, It is a matter of recollection.
³¹⁸

Elsewhere, the soul’s progression is like this: if a man has lived well he joins the star to which he is assigned; if badly, he becomes a woman; if even then he does not amend, he changes once more, this time into a beast with attributes appropriate to his vices; he will know no end to his punishments until he returns to his native condition, having rid himself, by force of reason, from all the gross, dull and material qualities within him.
³¹⁹

[A] But I must not forget the objection raised by the Epicureans against this transmigration of souls from body to body. It is quite entertaining. They pose the question: What order could be maintained if the crowds of the dying proved greater than the number being born? The souls turned out of house and home would all be jostling each other, trying to be the first to get into their new containers! They also ask how souls would spend their time while waiting for their new lodgings to be got ready. The Epicureans maintain that if, at the other extreme, more animate creatures were born than died, their bodies would be in a parlous state, having to wait for souls to be poured into them: some would die before they had started to live:

Denique connubia ad veneris partusque ferarum
Esse animas praesto deridiculum esse videtur,
Et spectare immortales mortalia membra
Innumero numero, certareque praeproperanter
Inter se, quae prima potissimaque insinuetur
.

[It seems absurd that souls should have to wait for the connubial embraces and parturitions of beasts – innumerable immortal beings looking out for mortal limbs and struggling among themselves to see who is strong enough to slip in first.]
³²⁰

Others make our souls remain in the body after death, so as to animate the snakes, worms and other creatures which are said to be produced by spontaneous generation in our rotting flesh or even from our ashes. Others
split the soul into two parts, mortal and immortal. Others make it corporeal yet immortal. Others make it immortal, but without knowledge or awareness. There have been those who thought that the souls of the damned become devils [C] (and some of us Christians have thought that, too). [A] Similarly, Plutarch thinks that those who are saved become gods. There are few things that Plutarch asserts with more conviction (everywhere else his manner is one of sustained doubt and indecision). ‘We must think’, he says, ‘and firmly believe that the souls of men who have been virtuous by the standards of Nature and divine Justice, change from men into saints and from saints into demi-gods; finally these demi-gods become gods, once they are perfectly cleansed and purified (as in the sacrifices of purgation), and delivered in this way from death and passability. They do not become gods by some decree of the Senate but are gods in very truth, such as one could rationally expect them to be, full and perfect gods, to whom is granted a most blessed and most glorious apotheosis.’
³²¹
Plutarch is the most reticent and most moderate of the whole bunch, but if you would like to see him indulging in some bolder skirmishing and spinning some miraculous yarns about all this, I refer you to his treatises
On the Moon
and
On the Daemon of Socrates;
there, more clearly than anywhere, you can confirm that the mysteries of philosophy have plenty of oddities in common with poetry; human understanding in its strivings to plumb the depths of everything and to give an account of it, destroys itself, just as we ourselves, tired and exhausted by life’s long race, fall back into childishness.
³²²