The Immortality of the Soul—History of the Doctrine

IF the reader supposes that the first ideas which the ancients had of the soul were the same as those popular among us now, he needs to be undeceived. The idea that after the body dies, the soul, as an immortal, immaterial, conscious, and active personality, goes immediately to Heaven or hell, was not arrived at immediately, but grew out of the imagination, the poetry, the philosophy, and the laws of many ages. It is interesting to trace its gradual development.

The first idea that the ancients conceived of the soul, or spirit, as existing separately from the body after death, was that of a shadow or shade, resembling the body in shape, but larger. This shade was supposed to be a very thin, misty, aerial, material substance. At first the shades of all, both good and bad, were said to be gathered together under ground in hades, or sheol. They were not permitted to visit the upper world among the living. They were said to be in a dreamy, sleeping condition. Gradually, by poetic imagination, they were invested with more life and intelligence, and were assigned employments in hades like those they had led on earth. Then a few were said to come up from their dreary abode, and appear to the living. They represented hades to be a damp, chilly, dismal place. They sighed to return to earth. The scene gradually changed, and they were invested with still more activity, power, and intelligence, and placed in a region of greater light, till a few privileged ones were raised to dwell on the surface of the earth, then higher in the air, and at last to Heaven. They then began to be invested with mighty power as demons, demi-gods, and gods, and were supposed to rule over the living. At last, after long ages, all the good were supposed to go to Heaven at death.

They had similar ideas in regard to the punishment of the wicked in hades. At first

only a very few were punished, then certain crimes in all, and at length all the wicked were punished there at death. But this change in the minds of the people was very slow, and many ages passed before it was effected. Many testimonies could be presented on these points; but I can offer only a few here. The origin of many of these ideas is thus stated by Alger:—

"The origin of many notions touching a future state found in literature, is to be traced to those rambling thoughts and poetic reveries with which even the most philosophic minds, in certain moods, indulged themselves." "Two general sources have now been described of the barbarian conceptions in relation to a future state. First, the natural operation of an earnest recollection of the dead; sympathy, regret, and reverence for them, leading the thoughts and heart to grope after them, to brood over the possibilities of their fate, and to express themselves in rites and emblems. Secondly, the mythological or arbitrary creations of the imagination, when it is set strongly at work, as it must be by the solemn phenomena associated by death. But beyond these two comprehensive statements, there is, directly related to the matter and worthy of separate illustration, a curious action of the mind, which has been very extensively experienced, and fertile of results. It is a peculiar example of the unconscious imputation of objective existence to mental ideas. With the death of the body, the man does not cease to live in the remembrance, imagination, and heart of his surviving friends. By an unphilosophical confusion, this internal image is credited as an external existence. The dead pass from their customary haunts in our society to the emperishable domain of ideas." "Fancy and reason, thus set to work, speedily construct a thousand theories filled with details. Desire fathers thought, and then thought woos belief." (Future Life, part ii, chap. i, p. 81; and part i, chap. iii, p. 38.)

This was the real origin of the notion that the soul lives after the body dies—imagination and desire.

Dr. Knapp, in accounting for this doctrine among the ancients, says: "They often had dreams, in which the dead appeared to them, speaking and acting; and in this way they found their wishes, and the traditions they had received from their fathers, confirmed anew." (Christian Theology, p. 519.)

Even now, wishes, dreams, death-bed scenes, etc., etc., are the best proof which many have of the immortality of the soul.

With regard to the first conception of the abode and condition of the departed spirits, Dr. Knapp remarks: "Far more general was the opinion among the ancient nations that the abode of departed spirits is under the earth; because the dead are laid beneath the ground, and their bodies return to the dust. The souls, there separated from their bodies, were regarded as a sort of aeriel beings or shades. Taken as a whole, the ancient Eastern nations and the Greeks agreed on this point." (Ibid., 524.)

HOMER'S ILIAD.

Turning to Homer, the oldest of the heathen poets, who wrote about nine hundred years before Christ, we find that the ideas then entertained of death were that it was a sleep, and of hades, or the state of the dead, that it was a dark, gloomy, cold place under ground, where the mere powerless shadows of the dead existed in a half-unconscious state. Read a few quotations:—

"Silent they slept, and heard of wars no more."

"And death in lasting slumber seals his eyes."

"The soul, indignant, seeks the realms of night."

"Oppress'd had sunk to death's eternal shade."

"Add one more ghost to Pluto's gloomy reign."

'"Thy Hector, wrapt in everlasting sleep,

Shall neither hear thee sigh, nor see thee weep."

"And seeks the cave of Death's half-brother, sleep."

(Pope's Honier's Iliad, pp. 58, 85, 91, 101, 123, 259, 306.)

Such expressions are frequent all through the Iliad.

Homer always describes hades as a dreary, gloomy place, thus:—

"When to grim Pluto's gloomy gates he went."

"Go, guide thy darksome steps to Pluto's dreary hall."

"By thy black waves, tremendous Styx! that flow

Through the drear realms of gliding ghosts below."

(Pope's Homer's Iliad, pp. 151, 265, 269.)

The souls there are described as feeble, shadowy, and voiceless.

"Then the wan shades and feeble ghosts implore."

"To all the phantom nations of the dead."

(Pope's Homer's Odyssey, p. 601.)

Finally Homer, in his Odyssey, relates the descent of Ulysses into hades, and his interview with the souls of the dead. We give a few quotations:—

"Now the wan shades we hail,

When lo! appeared along the dusky coasts,

Thin, airy shoals of visionary ghosts."

Of the soul of his mother he says:—

"Now a thin form is all Anticlea was.

Still in the dark abodes of death I stood,

When near Anticlea, moved and drank the blood.

Straight all the mother in her soul awakes,

And owning her Ulysses, thus she speaks:

Comest thou, my son, alive, to realms beneath,

The dolesome realms of darkness and of death?

Comest thou alive from pure etherial day?

Dire is the region, dismal is the way."

"Thrice in my arms I strove her shade to bind,

Thrice through my arms she slipp'd like empty

wind."

(Ibid., pp. 605, 606, 608, 609.)

Ulysses complaining of this, his mother replies:—

"All, all are such when life the body leaves;

No more the substance of the man remains,

While the impassive soul reluctant flies,

Like a vain dream, to these infernal skies.

But from the dark dominion speed thy way,

And climb the steep ascent to upper day:

To thy chaste bride the wondrous story tell,

The woes, the horrors, and the laws of hell."

(Ibid., p. 609.)

Of a great king now dead he says:—

"His substance vanish'd, and his strength decay'd;

Now all Atrides is an empty shade."

(Ibid., p. 614.)

The soul of the mighty Achilles says:—

"Talk not of ruling in this dolorous gloom,

Nor think vain words (he cried) can ease my doom

Rather I'd choose laboriously to bear

A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air;

A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,

Than reign the sceptered monarch of the dead."

(Ibid., p. 616.)

He would rather be a slave and live on earth than be a king in the land of spirits! How different, how exactly the reverse; of the modern ideas of the spirit land!

The following gives a good general idea of ancient opinion with regard to the state of the dead. It will be noticed that they all considered the soul material: "The disembodied soul, as conceived by the Greeks, and after them by the Romans, is material, but of so thin a contexture that it cannot be felt with the hands. It is exhaled with the dying breath, or issues through a warrior's wounds. The sword passes through its uninjured form as through the air. It is to the body what a dream is to waking action. Retaining the shape, lineaments, and motion the man had in life, it is immediately recognized upon appearing. It quits the body with much reluctance, leaving that warm and vigorous investiture for a chill and forceless existence. It glides alone without noise, and very swiftly, like a shadow. It is unable to enter the lower kingdom and be at peace until its deserted body has been buried with sacred rites; meanwhile, naked and sad, it flits restlessly about the gates, uttering doleful moans." (Doctrine of a Future Life, pp. 175, 176.)

Thus the happiness of the soul was intimately connected with that of the body.

With regard to the gradual development of their ideas of hell, ghosts, etc., Alger says:—

"First, then, from a study of the Greek mythology, we find all the dead a dull populace of ghosts, fluttering through the neutral melancholy of hades without discrimination. And finally we discern, in the world of the dead, a sad middle region, with a paradise on the right land, and a hell on the left, the whole presided over by three incorruptible judges, who appoint the new-comers their places in accordance with their deserts." (Ibid., p. 179.)

"The native Hebrew conception of the state of the dead was that of the voiceless gloom and dismal slumber of sheol, whither all alike went." (Ibid., p. 261.) "But, after a time, these places in the lower world were divided, and the residences of the righteous and the wicked were conceived of as separate." (Knapp's Theol., sec. 150, p. 524.)

We cannot fail to observe that the ancients, instead of having a clear and well-defined doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the conscious state of the dead, gradually developed these ideas, not from an early and clear tradition, but from the causes already given, and from others yet to be named. This is an important fact in our investigation, and it should be well weighed.

INFLUENCE OE THE POETS.

The influence of the poets and poetry aided greatly in the development of early conceptions concerning the state of the dead. The poets have always had a great influence in shaping the ideas and traditions of rude nations. No subject ever furnished a better theme for poetic fiction and imagination than that of the place and condition of men after death; and in none has greater liberty of fancy been taken than in this. Whoever wishes proof of this, may look into the pages of Homer, Virgil, Dante, etc. These poets have given loose reins to their warm imaginations, to revel in the most horrid scenes. Their productions have been eagerly listened to by the people, and the effect has been marked and lasting. These poets were the ones who first taught the ancient heathen their religious tenets.

Thus writes Herodotus: "For I am of opinion that Hesiod and Homer [poets] lived four hundred years before my time, and not more, and these were they who framed atheogony for the Greeks, and gave names to the gods, and assigned to them honors and arts, and declared their several forms." (Herod. Euterpe ii, 53, p. 116.)

History abundantly shows that the fancy of poets has done more than anything else to build up this visionary doctrine of a hell and heaven of departed ghosts. Says Enfield: "Every poet enlarged and moulded the ancient fables according to the fertility or luxuriancy of his own fancy; so that they were not only increased from time to time without limit, but in many particulars so materially altered that their original features could scarcely be perceived." (Hist. Philo., p. 63.) Says another: "It is a common saying that the license of the poets caused greater injury to the ancient theology than all other things put together." (Cudworth's Int. System, vol. i, p. 619, note.)

The learned Mosheim thus candidly states the poetic origin of the popular pagan notions of hell:—

"It is notorious that those who embodied the dogmas of antiquity in verse, borrowed the coloring and embellishments by which they sought to gain for them a readier access into the popular mind from ancient history, and formed a certain discipline called in the present day mythology, compounded of the precepts of ancient philosophers and the legends of their own country. Hence they also obscured with the same ornaments and fictions the most simple doctrine of the state of souls after death, in order to beguile and conciliate the ears of the multitude who held in firm remembrance the affairs and exploits of bygone ages as handed down from their ancestors. First of all, the subterranean place itself, in which disembodied souls were supposed to be confined, was depicted by them in such a way as accorded with Grecian conceptions, and the manners of the times in which they lived. In the next place, being aware that that incredible multitude of souls could not possibly dispense with a leader and king, they selected Pluto out of ancient tradition, a certain king, probably of Epirus or some other province, well known to the common people for his severity, and assigned to him the sovereignty of the shades. On him they bestowed all the concomitants with which the kings of their own times were accustomed to be surrounded,—a palace, servants, wife, counselors, lictors, executioners, porters, and the like. But as they had founded so dreadful, dismal a community, in order to express all these, they were obliged to have recourse to the most hideous and horrible imagery. This is well known to the reader of Homer, Virgil, and the other poets.

"That in the remotest ages dogs were chained to the doors of the rich and powerful for the purpose of deterring the approach of mendicants and thieves, is a fact which has long ago been demonstrated by learned men. The poets, therefore, considered it incumbent upon themselves to commit the custody of hell in like manner to a great and savage dog, which, to produce a more powerful impression upon the minds of the vulgar, they feigned to be triple-headed. For as the infernal dominions were divided into three parts, namely, Tartarus, Elysian Fields, and the abode of souls not yet purged and proved, and consequently the door and entrance of this gloomy realm was threefold, it was reasonable that the dog placed at the threshold of hell should be endowed with a threefold head, in order to be able to guard all the inlets. In Homer's time, kings had already departed from the ancient simplicity, and no longer adjudicated on the causes of their subjects, but had delegated this office to others. It was therefore proper to exempt the king of hell also from this labor. Hence they selected from the ancient history of their country those men that had formerly enjoyed a high reputation for justice and rigor, and were commonly regarded as the first examples of most upright, just judges, namely, Rhodamanthas, Minos, and Eacus, whom they installed in that awful tribunal, and appointed as inquisitors of souls. And with respect to these judges they used the same expressions as though they perfectly resembled those whom they saw administering justice in their own times, either as regards the form of trial or any other characteristic by which a judge is usually distinguished from the rest of the people.

"As this region was believed to be situated underneath the earth, the road which led to it was necessarily described as rugged, dark, dreary, and unknown to mortals. Disembodied souls, therefore, would probably have missed their way, unless they had been furnished with a guide; probably, also, some of those who were weighed down with consciousness of crime would have chosen to wander about on the earth forever, rather than descend into a place which they foresaw was about to be the most dreadful and fatal to themselves. Even this inconvenience was provided against by the poets; for they assigned Mercury as the guide and conductor of the dead, and taught the people that he not only pointed out the way to errant souls, but compelled the reluctant to enter it. The rest I pass over; for I have no intention here of explaining the fables of the poets, or of trespassing upon the province of the philosopher." (Cudworth's Intell. Sys., vol. iii, pp. 293, 294, note.)

This is a truthful and candid statement of the real origin of the heathen doctrine concerning the place and condition of the dead. Yet much of this is retained to-day in the Christian creeds as Bible truth!