The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

II. Preliminary Stage—Initiated by Poets, Cults, and Mysteries

1. HOMER: PERSISTENCE OF LIFE BEYOND DEATH

About the earliest expression of belief in the persistence of life beyond death appears in Homer and the Homeric poems (c. 850 B.C.). Apart from the question of their precise origin and authorship, and whether they sprang from earlier bards, ⁴ these poems are a witness to the belief of the time. Though they contain conflicting statements, death was not believed to be the end of man; something was believed to survive. Death was not extinction, but continuance of existence. As noted, the soul is conceived to be airy and breathlike, a kind of misty double of the physical body, and superior thereto. It is all very hazy and ethereal. CFF1 534.4

Homer held that life after death was a shadowy counterpart of full-blooded bodily life on earth, a form without substance (Iliad 23; Odyssey 11), the souls fleeing to the house of Hades, gathering place for the departed. They cannot speak until a draught of living blood has restored life to them. There was nothing spiritual about Homer’s souls. Dr. S. D. F. Salmond records that the Greek afterworld was— CFF1 535.1

“a joyless land, wrapt in murky gloom, the dark shadow and spent copy of the world, in which men continue to exist as the wretched images of their former selves.” ⁵ CFF1 535.2

In Homer only one part of man’s composite nature survives death. It was a sort of soul-substance-something possessing faculties that characterize conscious life. The soul, he taught, enjoys an independent and secret existence in the body, and upon the death of the body independently withdraws itself. It exercises no function of the human spirit (thought, will, emotion), which belong to the mind. And all functions of the body disappear with its dissolution into the original elements. Upon the death of the body, and entrance into Hades, ⁶ the soul loses consciousness and thought (Iliad xxiii, 103, 104; 75, 76). It knows nothing of the upper world, and cannot return thither. And its personality does not persist. CFF1 535.3

Parts of the Odyssey (x, xi) do suggest an occasional return of consciousness. But if immortality were vouchsafed to any individual it must be given when living, through translation to the Elysian fields. And as noted, it was the poets who were the earliest heralds of a possible immortality for man. The masses were unmoved by this sentiment, and lived and died under the terrors of a cruel fatalism. CFF1 536.1

However, according to Hesiod (eighth century), survivals of animism appear. In Works and Days (A.D. 109-201) death came to men of the golden race like a sleep, making them like gods and partakers in immortality. After death they became watchers over mankind, and exercised large powers. Men of the silver race had their abode under the earth, but were blessed in the underworld. Those of the bronze race became phantoms in Hades. Such were the mythical concepts of conscious and independent activity of souls after death that helped to form the early Greek doctrine of immortality. CFF1 536.2

Picture 2: Hesiod, Homer:
Poets Like Homer Were the Earliest Greek Proponents of the Persistence of the Soul Beyond Death.
Page 536

2. TRANSMIGRATION THEORY INTRODUCED BY DIONYSIAC CULT

According to R. H. Charles, Oxford authority, the first advance step toward a developed Immortal-Soulism in Greece, of which we have knowledge, came through the Dionysiac cult ⁷ of Thrace. This was based on the presupposition of the original kinship of the gods and man. The Dionysiacs taught that souls retain consciousness after death, and that through certain rites, ceremonies, and ecstasies man becomes one with the gods. CFF1 536.3

“Immortality” and “divinity” were used as interchangeable terms. At death the soul bursts the fetters of the body. The soul has a real existence and continuance, and returns to earth for other incarnations. Thus the doctrine of transmigration of souls, later to appear again and again, came to be adopted, with the soul passing through successive incarnations. ⁸ So the concept of the future life began to be transformed by the Dionysiacs, a secret eschatological cult. ⁹ CFF1 536.4

3. ORPHICS: PERMEATED WITH PANTHEISM AND REINCARNATIONISM

Soon new elements were brought in from the Orphic Mysteries (secret rites for the initiated from the mythical prophet and musician, Orpheus of Thrace) and from the Eleusinian Mysteries, coming from Eleusis in ancient Attica. The Orphic Mysteries differed from the Eleusinian in their foreign origin and distinctly pantheistic basis. ¹⁰ They buttressed this new notion of the future life by insisting that the soul is divine. Hence the concept of the soul as the highest, or divine, part of man was imported into Greece by these mystic Orphic teachers, whose doctrines originally came from the East. CFF1 537.1

The immortality they taught was not a pale reflection of the earthly life, but a release, or deliverance, of the soul from the body—the body being considered a prison or tomb. ¹¹ And the chain of rebirths involved must be broken if the soul is to find freedom with the gods. CFF1 537.2

The essence of Orphic emphasis was that the initiate might, by pure life and asceticism and mystical ceremonies, achieve mystic identification with the divine nature, and thus perfect his immortal character—not as the Dionysiacs, who often sought to develop this immortality through orgiastic ecstasy. More than that, in Orphic teaching transmigration (metempsychosis) ¹² comes to be not merely a means of preserving the vitality of the soul but also a punishment and discipline for the soul. CFF1 538.1

However, it is alleged that the soul does not attain its highest freedom until freed from this cycle of rebirths, and lives eternally in God. ¹³ After many incarnations it rises to perfection and is absorbed, or reabsorbed, into the divine. By this time there is a well-defined doctrine of the origin, essence, and destiny of the soul. The Eastern tinge is unmistakable. CFF1 538.2

As indicated, under the Orphics there came in an “indissoluble connection” between guilt and expiation. The soul meets with retributive judgment in the “lower world.” Hades becomes the intermediate abode of the soul, where it is purified, until time for its return to the upper life. Then at last, when “fully cleansed” through its “cycle of rebirths,” “it ascends ... to enjoy a never-ending existence with God.” Thus the soul, pure or impure, is held to be not only immortal but eternal—and consequently without beginning or end. CFF1 538.3

According to the exhaustive researches of Erwin Rohde, the Orphic poems and theogony combined transmigration with the divinity of the soul, and stressed the migration of the soul through many mortal bodies. It is essential to note that the soul is portrayed as part of the all-embracing Divine Essence, with recurring incarnations—traversing a great “Circle of Necessity” in the “Wheel of Birth.” ¹⁴ It is a cycle of “becoming” and “perishing,” perpetually repeated. CFF1 538.4

There is alternating pollution and purification for these deathless souls. The soul is imprisoned in a “cell” (body), from which it is periodically set free—only soon to be imprisoned again. So it is successively fettered and unfettered. As the soul is immortal, even the wicked cannot perish entirely. But no Eternal Torment in hell was taught, only repeated transmigrations. Such is the pagan foundation. CFF1 539.1

And Dr. Eduard Zeller, former professor of philosophy in the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, points out the fact that in Greek literature pantheism first clearly appears in a fragment of these Orphic poems, and that the pantheistic strain runs through the whole Orphic cosmogony, or theory of the origin of the world. And he cites Herodotus as declaring that the Orphics obtained the transmigration concept from Egypt—or more accurately, from Egypt and India. So it came to pass that in due time these concepts passed from the mysteries to Greek philosophy. ¹⁵ CFF1 539.2

Furthermore, according to Fairbairn, ¹⁶ the Orphic theosophy ¹⁷ was a “speculation amalgam” of Greek, Oriental, and Egyptian elements, its speculative elements taking on this crude pantheism. The universe, they held—the earth, starry heavens, sun, and man—issued from Zeus. And the generation principle of the universe embraces the generated, or universe. Orphic pantheism was thus a distinctive development, with its characteristic phraseology. And pantheism always involved metempsychosis. CFF1 539.3

While there are new forms, the being is held to be always the same. So man, emanating from the Supreme One, has a cycle of appearances. The spirit, or soul, is to be separated from the body-prison in which it is confined because of past sins. Then at death the soul enters Hades to be rewarded or punished, and returned to earth. Absolutions and rites purify the soul. CFF1 539.4

Summarizing then: In the Orphics, the Innate-Immortality concept is entered upon as a new stage of development, the soul being to man what God is to the world. Moreover, death destroys only the prison. While there is continuance, the individual is, as Fairbairn puts it, “only an emanation from a deified universe, revolving in a cycle of necessity.” ¹⁸ CFF1 540.1