(17) It is also worth mentioning the remark of Philolaus. This Pythagorean speaks as follows: "The ancient theologians and seers testify that the soul is conjoined to the body to suffer certain punishments, and is, as it were, buried in this tomb." And Pindar speaks of the Eleusinian mysteries as follows: "Blessed is he who has seen before he goes under the earth; for he knows the end of life and knows also its divine beginning. Similarly in the Phaedo Plato does not hesitate to write as follows: " And these men who established our mysteries..." down to the words "and will dwell with the gods." And what when he says, " As long as we have still the body and our soul is involved in such evil, shall we never have sufficient possession of that which we desire?" Does he not hint that birth is the cause; of the worst evils? And in the Phaedo he bears witness again: " All who have rightly been concerned with philosophy run the risk that other men will fail to notice that their sole object is to pursue death and dying."

(12) When the Hierarch has finished these things, he places the body in an honourable chamber, with other holy bodies of the same rank. For if, in soul and body, the man fallen asleep passed a life dear to God, there will be honoured, with the devout soul, the body also, which contended with it throughout the devout struggles. Hence the Divine justice gives to it, together with its own body, the retributive inheritances, as companion and participator in the devout, or the contrary, life. Wherefore, the Divine institution of sacred rites bequeaths the supremely Divine participations to them both--to the soul, indeed, in pure contemplation and in science of the things being done, and to the body, by sanctifying the whole man, as in a figure with the most Divine Muron, and the most holy symbols of the supremely Divine Communion, sanctifying the whole man, and announcing, by purifications of the whole man, that his resurrection will be most complete.

(4) "O happy dead! O spirits elect already!" Virgilius made beginning, "by that peace Which I believe is waiting for you all, Tell us upon what side the mountain slopes, So that the going up be possible, For to lose time irks him most who most knows." As sheep come issuing forth from out the fold By ones and twos and threes, and the others stand Timidly, holding down their eyes and nostrils, And what the foremost does the others do, Huddling themselves against her, if she stop, Simple and quiet and the wherefore know not; So moving to approach us thereupon I saw the leader of that fortunate flock, Modest in face and dignified in gait. As soon as those in the advance saw broken The light upon the ground at my right side, So that from me the shadow reached the rock, They stopped, and backward drew themselves somewhat; And all the others, who came after them, Not knowing why nor wherefore, did the same. "Without your asking, I confess to you This is a human body which you see, Whereby the sunshine on the ground is cleft.

(37) The two following extracts are from Clemens Alexandrinus in Stromat. lib. 3. p. 413.

The ancient theologists and priests testify that the soul is conjoined to the body through a certain punishment, and that it is buried in this body as in a sepulchre. Philolaus.

Whatever we see when awake is death; and when asleep, a dream. Pythagoras.

(7) "Whence to the immortal gods the tribes of men The victim's white bones on the altars burn."

(3) Then shall this holiest land, seat of [our] shrines and temples, be choked with tombs and corpses. O Egypt, Egypt, of thy pious cults tales only will remain, as far beyond belief for thy own sons [as for the rest of men]; words only will be left cut on thy stones, thy pious deeds recounting! And Egypt will be made the home of Scyth or Indian, or some one like to them,—that is a foreign neighbour. Ay, for the Godly company shall mount again to Heaven, and their forsaken worshippers shall all die out; and Egypt, thus bereft of God and man, shall be abandoned.

(2) Further, in that ’tis fitting that the prudent should know all before, it is not right ye should be ignorant of this. The time will come when Egypt will appear to have in vain served the Divinity with pious mind and constant worship ; and all its holy cult will fall to nothingness and be in vain. For that Divinity is now about to hasten back from Earth to Heaven, and Egypt shall be left; and Earth, which was the seat of pious cults, shall be bereft and widowed of the presence of the Gods. And foreigners shall fill this region and this land; and there shall be not only the neglect of pious cults, but—what is still more painful,—as though enacted by the laws, a penalty shall be decreed against the practice of [our] pious cults and worship of the Gods—[entire] proscription of them.

(16) Herodotus, it is clear, makes Solon say the same as this: "0 Croesus, every man is a misfortune." And his myth about Cleobis and Biton has obviously no other intention than to disparage birth and praise death. " As scattered leaves, so is mankind," says Homer.41 And in the Cratylus Plato attributes to Orpheus the doctrine that the soul in this body is suffering punishment. This is what he says: "Some say that the body is a tomb of the soul, as being buried in it for the present life. And because the soul expresses (semainei) by this body whatever it may wish to express, so it is rightly called a tomb (sema). The Orphics, in particular, seem to have given it this name, as they think the soul suffers punishment for its misdeeds,"

(3) The Egyptians, like many other ancient nations, held the doctrine of the preexistence of souls. They held it not like philosophers or poets, but as an article of their popular and traditional creed

(58) And though indeed the bestial body must putrefy and rot, yet its power and virtue live, and in the meanwhile there grow out of its power, in its mother, fair, beautiful roses, blossoms and flowers; and though it were quite burnt up and consumed in the fire, yet its power and virtue stand in the four elements in the word, and the soul qualifieth, mixeth or uniteth therewith; for the soul is in heaven, and the same heaven is everywhere, even in the midst or centre of the earth.

(19) The soul in man, however - not every soul, but one that pious is - is a daimonic something and divine. And such a soul when from the body freed, if it have fought the fight of piety - the fight of piety is to know God and to do wrong to no man - such a soul becomes entirely mind. Whereas the impious soul remains in its own essence, chastised by its own self, and seeking for an earthly body where to enter, if only it be human. For that no other body can contain a human soul; nor is it right that any human soul should fall into the body of a thing that doth possess no reason. For that the law of God is this: to guard the human soul from such tremendous outrage.

(45) Prato saith: It behoves you all, O Masters, when those bodies are being dissolved, to take care lest they be burnt up, as also to wash them with sea water, until all their salt be turned into sweetness, clarifies, tinges, becomes tincture of copper, and then goes off in flight! Because it was necessary that one should become tingeing, and that the other should be tinged, for the spirit being separated from the body and hidden in the other spirit, both become volatile.

Therefore the Wise have said that the gate of flight must not be opened for that which would flee, (or that which does not flee),* by whose flight death is occasioned, for by the conversion of the sulphureous thing into a spirit like unto itself, either becomes volatile, since they are made aeriform spirits prone to ascend in the air. But the Philosophers seeing that which was not volatile made volatile with the volatiles, iterated these to a body like to the non-volatiles, and put them into that from which they could not escape.* They iterated them to a body like unto the bodies from which they were extracted, and the same were then digested. But as for the statement of the Philosopher that the tingeing agent and that which is to be tinged are made one tincture, it refers to a spirit concealed in another humid spirit.

Know also that one of the humid spirits is cold, but the other is hot, and although the cold humid is not adapted to the warm humid, nevertheless they are made one.

Therefore, we prefer these two bodies, because by them we rule the whole work, namely, bodies by not-bodies, until incorporeals become bodies, steadfast in the fire, because they are conjoined with volatiles, which is not possible in any body, these excepted. For spirits in every wise avoid bodies, but fugitives are restrained by incorporeals. Incorporeals, therefore, similarly flee from bodies; those, consequently, which do not flee are better and more precious than all bodies. These things, therefore, being done, take those which are not volatile and join them; wash the body with the incorporeal until the incorporeal receives a non-volatile body; convert the earth into water, water into fire, fire into air, and conceal the fire in the depths of the water, but the earth in the belly of the air, mingling the hot with the humid, and the cold with the dry. Know, also, that Nature overcomes Nature, Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature contains Nature.

(386) ‘Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should be seen both of mortals and immortals 2 .’ And again:— ‘O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but no mind at all 3 !’ Again of Tiresias:— ‘[To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,] that he alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades 4 .’ Again:— ‘The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamenting her fate, leaving manhood and youth 5 .’ Again:— ‘And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth 6 .’ And,— ‘As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved 7 .’ And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death. Undoubtedly. Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names which describe the world below—Cocytus and Styx,

(1) [Asclepius] Rightly and truly, O Thrice-greatest one, thou speakest. This is the prize for those who piously subordinate their lives to God and live to help the world.

[Trismegistus] [To those], however, who have lived in other fashion impiously,—[to them] both is return to Heaven denied, and there’s appointed them migration into other bodies unworthy of a holy soul and base; so that, as this discourse of ours will show, souls in their life on earth run risk of losing hope of future immortality.

(2) It is of this Soul especially that we read "All Soul has care for the Soulless"- though the several Souls thus care in their own degree and way. The passage continues- "Soul passes through the entire heavens in forms varying with the variety of place"- the sensitive form, the reasoning form, even the vegetative form- and this means that in each "place" the phase of the soul there dominant carries out its own ends while the rest, not present there, is idle.

Now, in humanity the lower is not supreme; it is an accompaniment; but neither does the better rule unfailingly; the lower element also has a footing, and Man, therefore, lives in part under sensation, for he has the organs of sensation, and in large part even by the merely vegetative principle, for the body grows and propagates: all the graded phases are in a collaboration, but the entire form, man, takes rank by the dominant, and when the life-principle leaves the body it is what it is, what it most intensely lived.

This is why we must break away towards the High: we dare not keep ourselves set towards the sensuous principle, following the images of sense, or towards the merely vegetative, intent upon the gratifications of eating and procreation; our life must be pointed towards the Intellective, towards the Intellectual-Principle, towards God.

Those that have maintained the human level are men once more. Those that have lived wholly to sense become animals- corresponding in species to the particular temper of the life- ferocious animals where the sensuality has been accompanied by a certain measure of spirit, gluttonous and lascivious animals where all has been appetite and satiation of appetite. Those who in their pleasures have not even lived by sensation, but have gone their way in a torpid grossness become mere growing things, for this lethargy is the entire act of the vegetative, and such men have been busy be-treeing themselves. Those, we read, that, otherwise untainted, have loved song become vocal animals; kings ruling unreasonably but with no other vice are eagles; futile and flighty visionaries ever soaring skyward, become highflying birds; observance of civic and secular virtue makes man again, or where the merit is less marked, one of the animals of communal tendency, a bee or the like.

(4) Which what it finds there active doth attract Into its substance, and becomes one soul, Which lives, and feels, and on itself revolves. And that thou less may wonder at my word, Behold the sun's heat, which becometh wine, Joined to the juice that from the vine distils. Whenever Lachesis has no more thread, It separates from the flesh, and virtually Bears with itself the human and divine; The other faculties are voiceless all; The memory, the intelligence, and the will In action far more vigorous than before. Without a pause it falleth of itself In marvellous way on one shore or the other; There of its roads it first is cognizant. Soon as the place there circumscribeth it, The virtue informative rays round about, As, and as much as, in the living members. And even as the air, when full of rain, By alien rays that are therein reflected, With divers colours shows itself adorned, So there the neighbouring air doth shape itself Into that form which doth impress upon it Virtually the soul that has stood still.

(2) Now, amongst the profane, some illogically think to go to a non-existence; others that the bodily blending with their proper souls will be severed once for all, as unsuitable to them in a Divine life and blessed lots, not considering nor being sufficiently instructed in Divine science, that our most Godlike life in Christ has already begun. But others assign to souls union with other bodies, committing, as I think, this injustice to them, that, after (bodies) have laboured together with the godly souls, and have reached the goal of their most Divine course, they relentlessly deprive them of their righteous retributions. And others (I do not know how they have strayed to conceptions of such earthly tendency) say, that the most holy and blessed repose promised to the devout is similar to our life in this world, and unlawfully reject, for those who are equal to the Angels, nourishments appropriate to another kind of life. None of the most religious men, however, will ever fall into such errors as these; but, knowing that their whole selves will receive the Christ-like inheritance, when they have come to the goal of this present life, they see more clearly their road to incorruption already become nearer, and extol the gifts of the Godhead, and are filled with a Divine satisfaction, no longer fearing the fall to a worse condition, but knowing well that they will hold firmly and everlastingly the good things already acquired. Those, however, who are full of blemishes, and unholy stains, even though they have attained to some initiation, yet, of their own accord, have, to their own destruction, rejected this from their mind, and have rashly followed their destructive lusts, to them when they have come to the end of their life here, the Divine regulation of the Oracles will no longer appear as before, a subject of scorn, but, when they have looked with different eyes upon the pleasures of their passions destroyed, and when they have pronounced blessed the holy life from which they thoughtlessly fell away, they are, piteously and against their will, separated from this present life, conducted to no holy hope, by reason of their shameful life.

(5) For the Pythagorean Theano writes, "Life were indeed a feast to the wicked, who, having done evil, then die; were not the soul immortal, death would be a godsend." And Plato in the Phaedo, "For if death were release from everything," and so forth. We are not then to think according to the Telephus of Aeschylus, "that a single path leads to Hades." The ways are many, and the sins that lead thither. Such deeply erring ones as the unfaithful are, Aristophanes properly makes the subjects of comedy. "Come," he says, "ye men of obscure life, ye that are like the race of leaves, feeble, wax figures, shadowy tribes, evanescent, fleeting, ephemeral." And Epicharmus, "This nature of men is inflated skins."

(29) But- keeping to our illustration, by which the body is warmed by soul and not merely illuminated by it- how is it that when the higher soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital principle?

For a brief space there is; and, precisely, it begins to fade away immediately upon the withdrawal of the other, as in the case of warmed objects when the fire is no longer near them: similarly hair and nails still grow on the dead; animals cut to pieces wriggle for a good time after; these are signs of a life force still indwelling.

Besides, simultaneous withdrawal would not prove the identity of the higher and lower phases: when the sun withdraws there goes with it not merely the light emanating from it, guided by it, attached to it, but also at once that light seen upon obliquely situated objects, a light secondary to the sun's and cast upon things outside of its path ; the two are not identical and yet they disappear together.

But is this simultaneous withdrawal or frank obliteration?

The question applies equally to this secondary light and to the corporeal life, that life which we think of as being completely sunk into body.

No light whatever remains in the objects once illuminated; that much is certain; but we have to ask whether it has sunk back into its source or is simply no longer in existence.

How could it pass out of being, a thing that once has been?

But what really was it? We must remember that what we know as colour belongs to bodies by the fact that they throw off light, yet when corruptible bodies are transformed the colour disappears and we no more ask where the colour of a burned-out fire is than where its shape is.

Still: the shape is merely a configuration, like the lie of the hands clenched or spread; the colour is no such accidental but is more like, for example, sweetness: when a material substance breaks up, the sweetness of what was sweet in it, and the fragrance of what was fragrant, may very well not be annihilated, but enter into some other substance, passing unobserved there because the new habitat is not such that the entrant qualities now offer anything solid to perception.

May we not think that, similarly, the light belonging to bodies that have been dissolved remains in being while the solid total, made up of all that is characteristic, disappears?

It might be said that the seeing is merely the sequel to some law , so that what we call qualities do not actually exist in the substances.

But this is to make the qualities indestructible and not dependent upon the composition of the body; it would no longer be the Reason-Principles within the sperm that produce, for instance, the colours of a bird's variegated plumage; these principles would merely blend and place them, or if they produced them would draw also on the full store of colours in the sky, producing in the sense, mainly, of showing in the formed bodies something very different from what appears in the heavens.

But whatever we may think on this doubtful point, if, as long as the bodies remain unaltered, the light is constant and unsevered, then it would seem natural that, on the dissolution of the body, the light- both that in immediate contact and any other attached to that- should pass away at the same moment, unseen in the going as in the coming.

But in the case of the soul it is a question whether the secondary phases follow their priors- the derivatives their sources- or whether every phase is self-governing, isolated from its predecessors and able to stand alone; in a word, whether no part of the soul is sundered from the total, but all the souls are simultaneously one soul and many, and, if so, by what mode; this question, however, is treated elsewhere.

Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige of the soul actually present in the living body: if there is truly a soul, then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it will go with soul as soul must: if it is rather to be thought of as belonging to the body, as the life of the body, we have the same question that rose in the case of the vestige of light; we must examine whether life can exist without the presence of soul, except of course in the sense of soul living above and acting upon the remote object.

(1) These things having been defined, I think it necessary also to describe the things religiously performed by us over those who have fallen asleep. For neither is this also the same between the holy and the unholy; but, as the form of life of each is different, so also, when approaching death, those who have led a religious life, by looking steadfastly to the unfailing promises of the Godhead (inasmuch as they have observed their proof, in the resurrection proclaimed by it), come to the goal of death, with firm and unfailing hope, in godly rejoicing, knowing that at the end of holy contests their condition will be altogether in a perfect and endless life and safety, through their future entire resurrection. For the holy souls, which may possibly fall during this present life to a change for the worse, in the regeneration, will have the most Godlike transition to an unchangeable condition. Now, the pure bodies which are enrolled together as yoke-fellows and companions of the holy souls, and have fought together within their Divine struggles in the unchanged steadfastness of their souls throughout the divine life, will jointly receive their own resurrection; for, having been united with the holy souls to which they were united in this present life, by having become members of Christ, they will receive in return the Godlike and imperishable immortality, and blessed repose. In this respect then the sleep of the holy is in comfort and unshaken hopes, as it attains the goal of the Divine contests.