Part 22 (1/2)

38 Yacna, Ha 411. Kleuker, zweit. auf. s. 198.

39 Die Heiligen Schriften der Pa.r.s.en, von Dr. F. Spiegel, kap. ii.

ss. 32-37. Studien and Kritiken, 1885, band i., ”Ist die Lehre von der Anferstehung des Leibes nicht ein alt Persische Lehre?” F.

Nork, Mythen der Alten Perser als Quellen Christlicher Glaubenslehren und Ritualien.

40 Die Zoroastrischen Glaubenslehre, von Dr. Eduard Roth. s. 450.

41 See, In tom. i. Kabbala Denudata, Synopsis Dogmatum Libri Sohar pp. 108, 109, 113.

retained now. Still, they were errors. They are incredible to the thinking minds of to day. It is best to get rid of them by the truth, that they are pagan growths introduced into Christianity, but to be discriminated from it. By removing these antiquated and incredible excrescences from the real religion of Christ, we shall save the essential faith from the suspicion which their a.s.sociation with it, their fancied ident.i.ty with it, invites and provokes.

The correspondences between the Persian and the Pharisaic faith, in regard to doctrines, are of too arbitrary and peculiar a character to allow us for a moment to suppose them to have been an independent product spontaneously developed in the two nations; though even in that case the doctrines in question have no sanction of authority, not being Mosaic nor Prophetic, but only Rabbinical. One must have received from the other. Which was the bestower and which the recipient is quite plain.42 There is not a whit of evidence to show, but, on the contrary, ample presumption to disprove, that a certain cycle of notions were known among the Jews previous to a period of most intimate and constant intercourse between them and the Persians. But before that period those notions were an integral part of the Persian theology. Even Prideaux admits that the first Zoroaster lived and Magianism flourished at least a thousand years before Christ. And the dogmas we refer to are fundamental features of the religion. These dogmas of the Persians, not derived from the Old Testament nor known among the Jews before the captivity, soon after that time began to show themselves in their literature, and before the opening of the New Testament were prominent elements of the Pharisaic belief. The inference is unavoidable that the confluence of Persian thought and feeling with Hebrew thought and feeling, joined with the materials and flowing in the channels of the subsequent experience of the Jews, formed a mingled deposit about the age of Christ, which deposit was Pharisaism. Again: the doctrines common to Zoroastrianism and Pharisaism in the former seem to be prime sources, in the latter to be late products. In the former, they compose an organic, complete, inseparable system; in the latter, they are disconnected, mixed piecemeal, and, to a considerable extent, historically traceable to an origin beyond the native, national mind. It is a significant fact that the abnormal symbolic beasts described by several of the Jewish prophets, and in the Apocalypse, were borrowed from Persian art. Sculptures representing these have been brought to light by the recent researches at Persepolis. Finally, all early ecclesiastical history incontestably shows that Persian dogmas exerted on the Christianity of the first centuries an enormous influence, a pervasive and perverting power unspent yet, and which it is one of the highest tasks of honest and laborious Christian students in the present day to explain, define, and separate. What was that Manichaanism which nearly filled Christendom for a hundred years, what was it, in great part, but an influx of tradition, speculation, imagination, and sentiment, from Persia? The Gnostic Christians even had a scripture called ”Zoroaster's Apocalypse.”43 ”The wise men from the east,” who knelt before the infant Christ, ”and opened their treasures, and gave him gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh,” were Persian Magi. We may imaginatively regard that sacred scene as an emblematical figure of the far different tributes which

42 Lucke, Einleitung in die Offenbarung des Johannes, kap. 2, sect. 8.

43 Kleuker, Zend Avesta, band ii. anhang i. s. 12.

a little later came from their country to his religion, the unfortunate contributions that permeated and corrupted so much of the form in which it thenceforth appeared and spread. In the pure gospel's pristine day, ere it had hardened into theological dogmas or become enc.u.mbered with speculations and comments, from the lips of G.o.d's Anointed Son repeatedly fell the earnest warning, ”Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.” There is far more need to have this warning intelligently heeded now, coming with redoubled emphasis from the Master's own mouth, ”Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.” For, as the gospel is now generally set forth and received, that leaven has leavened well nigh the whole lump of it.

CHAPTER X.

GREEK AND ROMAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

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 pa.s.ses 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 recognised upon appearing. It quits the body with much reluctance, leaving that warm and vigorous invest.i.ture for a chill and forceless existence.

It glides along 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.

The early Greek authors describe the creation as a stupendous hollow globe cut in the centre by the plane of the earth. The upper hemisphere is lighted by beneficent luminaries; the lower hemisphere is filled with unvarying blackness. The top of the higher sphere is Heaven, the bright dwelling of the Olympian G.o.ds; its bottom is the surface of the earth, the home of living men.

The top of the lower sphere is Hades, the abode of the ghosts of the dead; its bottom is Tartarus, the prison of the t.i.tans, rebellious giants vanquished by Zeus. Earth lies half way from the cope of Heaven to the floor of Tartarus. This distance is so great that, according to Hesiod, it would take an anvil nine days to fall from the centre to the nadir. Some of the ancients seem to have surmised the sphericity of the earth, and to have thought that Hades was simply its dark side, the dead being our antipodes.

In the Odyssey, Ulysses reaches Hades by sailing across the ocean stream and pa.s.sing the eternal night land of the Cimmerians, whereupon he comes to the edge of Acheron, the moat of Pluto's sombre house. Virgil also says, ”One pole of the earth to us always points aloft; but the other is seen by black Styx and the infernal ghosts, where either dead night forever reigns or else Aurora returns thither from us and brings them back the day.”1 But the prevalent notion evidently was that Hades was an immense hollow region not far under the surface of the ground, and that it was to be reached by descent through some cavern, like that at Avernus.

This subterranean place is the destination of all alike, rapacious Orcus sparing no one, good or bad. It is wrapped in obscurity, as the etymology of its name implies, a place where one cannot see.

”No sun e'er gilds the gloomy horrors there; No cheerful gales refresh the stagnant air.”

The dead are disconsolate in this dismal realm, and the living shrink from entering it, except as a refuge from intolerable afflictions. The shade of the princeliest hero dwelling there the

1 Georg. lib. i. II. 242-250.

swift footed Achilles says, ”I would wish, being on earth, to serve for hire another man of poor estate, rather than rule over all the dead.” Souls carry there their physical peculiarities, the fresh and ghastly likenesses of the wounds which have despatched them thither, so that they are known at sight. Companies of fellow countrymen, knots of friends, are together there, preserving their remembrance ofearthly fortunes and beloved relatives left behind, and eagerly questioning each newly arriving soul for tidings from above. When the soul of Achilles is told of the glorious deeds of Neoptolemus, ”he goes away taking mighty steps through the meadow of asphodel in joyfulness, because he had heard that his son was very ill.u.s.trious.”2 Sophocles makes the dying Antigone say, ”Departing, I strongly cherish the hope that I shall be fondly welcomed by my father, and by my mother, and by my brother.”3 It is important to notice that, according to the early and popular view, this Hades, the ”dark dwelling of the joyless images of deceased mortals,” is the destination of universal humanity. In opposition to its dolorous gloom and repulsive inanity are vividly pictured the glad light of day, the glory and happiness of life. ”Not worth so much to me as my life,” says the incomparable son of Peleus, ”are all the treasures which populous Troy possessed, nor all which the stony threshold of Phoebus Apollo contains in rocky Pytho. Oxen, and fat sheep, and trophies, and horses with golden manes, may be acquired by effort; but the breath of man to return again is not to be obtained by plunder nor by purchase, when once it has pa.s.sed the barrier of his teeth.”

It is not probable that all the ornamental details a.s.sociated by the poets with the fate and state of the dead as they are set forth, for instance, by Virgil in the sixth book of the Aneid were ever credited as literal truth. But there is no reason to doubt that the essential features of this mythological scenery were accepted in the vulgar belief. For instance, that the popular mind honestly held that, in some vague sense or other, the ghost, on leaving the body, flitted down to the dull banks of Acheron and offered a shadowy obolus to Charon, the slovenly old ferryman, for a pa.s.sage in his boat, seems attested not only by a thousand averments to that effect in the current literature of the time, but also by the invariable custom of placing an obolus in the dead man's mouth for that purpose when he was buried.

The Greeks did not view the banishment of souls in Hades as a punishment for sin, or the result of any broken law in the plan of things. It was to them merely the fulfilment of the inevitable fate of creatures who must die, in the order of nature, like successive growths of flowers, and whose souls were too feeble to rank with G.o.ds and climb into Olympus. That man should cease from his substantial life on the bright earth and subside into sunless Hades, a vapid form, with nerveless limbs and faint voice, a ghostly vision bemoaning his existence with idle lamentation, or busying himself with the misty mockeries of his former pursuits, was melancholy enough; but it was his natural destiny, and not an avenging judgment.

But that powerful instinct in man which desires to see villany punished and goodness rewarded could not fail, among so cultivated a people as the Greeks, to develop a doctrine of future compensation for the contrasted deserts of souls. The earliest trace of the idea of