LECTURES XII, XIII THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
The philosophical and religious belief in immortality came to the Greeks from the mystical tradition associated with the worship of Dionysus. These orgiastic cults produced flashes of intuition that man is immortal. But the belief was slow in taking root, as the literature shows. Pythagoreanism, an intellectualised Orphism, taught the immortality of the Soul, its migration to other bodies, and the doctrine of cosmic cycles. Plato argues in favour of immortality but we cannot find any fixed and definite views on the subject in his writings. Aristotle seems to have disbelieved in what we should call personal immortality. The eschatology of the Stoics was vague and uncertain ; the Epicureans denied a future life altogether. Plutarch is a believer, and narrates visions of judgment not unlike those of Dante.
Christian eschatology was by no means consistent in the second and third centuries. Tertullian is strangely materialistic: his real belief seems to have been that the soul dies with the body, to be raised again at the last day by a miracle. Widely different views were held about the intermediate state. Clement and Origen accept, with some reservations, the Greek conception of immortality; the resurrection of the body, though not denied, is tacitly shelved. Origen is notable as teaching a succession of world-orders, with sustained upward progress. ^
For Plotinus, the Soul neither comes into existence nor perishes ; it is the indestructible principle of life. He has no room for bodily I resurrection; and rejects the popular notion of spiritual bodies in a semi-gaseous condition. The distinctions of individuals are not lost in the eternal world ; but Spirits are completely transparent to one another; all that separates us here will have disappeared. Souls which have lived unrighteously are reincarnated in bodies of a lower order, and are sometimes chastised by their daemon or guardian angel. But only the lower soul can thus fall; the higher part is sinless.
The problem is how to maintain the true view of eternity, as supra-temporal existence, without either sundering the eternal and temporal from each other, or reducing the world of time to a vain shadow. We know under the form of eternity whatever we know as sharing in Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Eternity is the kingdom of Divine Ideas or absolute values.
The doctrine of reincarnation offers us chains of personalities linked together by impersonal transitions. Nothing survives except the{ bare being of the Soul, and its liabilities. The doctrine has found, strong support in modern times, e.g. in Krause, Swedenborg, Lavater, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, McTaggart, Hume, Goethe, and Lessing speak of it with respect.