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| Refutation of the Homeric View of the Soul's Detention from Hades Owing to the Body's Being Unburied. That Souls Prematurely Separated from the Body Had to Wait for Admission into Hades Also Refuted.
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Chapter
LVI.—Refutation of the Homeric View of the Soul’s Detention
from Hades Owing to the Body’s Being Unburied. That Souls
Prematurely Separated from the Body Had to Wait for Admission into
Hades Also Refuted.
There arises the question, whether this takes place
immediately after the soul’s departure from the body; whether some souls
are detained for special reasons in the meantime here on earth; and
whether it is permitted them of their own accord, or by the
intervention of authority, to be removed from Hades1813
at some subsequent time? Even such opinions
as these are not by any means lacking persons to advance them with
confidence. It was believed that the unburied dead were not admitted
into the infernal regions before they had received a proper sepulture;
as in the case of Homer’s Patroclus, who earnestly asks for a
burial of Achilles in a dream, on the ground that he could not enter
Hades through any other portal, since the souls of the sepulchred dead
kept thrusting him away.1814
| 1814 Iliad, xxiii.
72, etc. | We know that Homer
exhibited more than a poetic licence here; he had in view the rights of
the dead. Proportioned, indeed, to his care for the just honours of the
tomb, was his censure of that delay of burial which was injurious to
souls. (It was also his purpose to add a warning), that no man should,
by detaining in his house the corpse of a friend, only expose himself,
along with the deceased, to increased injury and trouble, by the
irregularity1815
of the consolation
which he nourishes with pain and grief. He has accordingly kept a
twofold object in view in picturing the complaints of an unburied soul:
he wished to maintain honour to the dead by promptly attending to their
funeral, as well as to moderate the feelings of grief which their
memory excited. But, after all, how vain is it to suppose that the soul
could bear the rites and requirements of the body, or carry any of them
away to the infernal regions! And how much vainer still is it, if
injury be supposed to accrue to the soul from that neglect of burial
which it ought to receive rather as a favour! For surely the soul
which had no willingness to die might well prefer as tardy a removal to
Hades as possible. It will love the undutiful heir, by whose means it
still enjoys the light. If, however, it is certain that injury accrues
to the soul from a tardy interment of the body—and the gist of
the injury lies in the neglect of the burial—it is yet in the
highest degree unfair, that that should receive all the injury to which
the faulty delay could not possibly be imputed, for of course all the
fault rests on the nearest relations of the dead. They also say that
those souls which are taken away by a premature death wander about
hither and thither until they have completed the residue of the years
which they would have lived through, had it not been for their untimely
fate. Now either their days are appointed to all men severally, and if
so appointed, I cannot suppose them capable of being shortened; or if,
notwithstanding such appointment, they may be shortened by the will of
God, or some other powerful influence, then (I say) such shortening is
of no validity, if they still may be accomplished in some other way.
If, on the other hand, they are not appointed, there cannot be any
residue to be fulfilled for unappointed periods. I have another remark
to make. Suppose it be an infant that dies yet hanging on the breast;
or it may be an immature boy; or it may be, once more, a youth arrived
at puberty: suppose, moreover, that the life in each case ought
to have reached full eighty years, how is it possible that the soul of
either could spend the whole of the shortened years here on earth after
losing the body by death? One’s age cannot be passed without
one’s body, it being by help of the body that the period of life
has its duties and labours transacted. Let our own people, moreover,
bear this in mind, that souls are to receive back at the resurrection
the self-same bodies in which they died. Therefore our bodies
must be expected to resume the same conditions and the same ages, for
it is these particulars which impart to bodies their especial modes. By
what means, then, can the soul of an infant so spend on earth its
residue of years, that it should be able at the resurrection to assume
the state of an octogenarian, although it had barely lived a month? Or
if it shall be necessary that the appointed days of life be fulfilled
here on earth, must the same course of life in all its vicissitudes,
which has been itself ordained to accompany the appointed days, be also
passed through by the soul along with the days? Must it employ itself
in school studies in its passage from infancy to boyhood; play the
soldier in the excitement and vigour of youth and earlier manhood; and
encounter serious and judicial responsibilities in the graver years
between ripe manhood and old age? Must it ply trade for profit, turn up
the soil with hoe and plough, go to sea, bring actions at law, get
married, toil and labour, undergo illnesses, and whatever casualties of
weal and woe await it in the lapse of years? Well, but how are all
these transactions to be managed without one’s body? Life (spent)
without life? But (you will tell me) the destined period in question is
to be bare of all incident whatever, only to be accomplished by merely
elapsing. What, then, is to prevent its being fulfilled in Hades, where
there is absolutely no use to which you can apply it? We therefore
maintain that every soul, whatever be its age on quitting the
body, remains unchanged in
the same, until the time shall come when the promised perfection shall
be realized in a state duly tempered to the measure of the peerless
angels. Hence those souls must be accounted as passing an exile in
Hades, which people are apt to regard as carried off by violence,
especially by cruel tortures, such as those of the cross, and the axe,
and the sword, and the lion; but we do not account those to be violent
deaths which justice awards, that avenger of violence. So then,
you will say, it is all the wicked souls that are banished in Hades.
(Not quite so fast, is my answer.) I must compel you to determine (what
you mean by Hades), which of its two regions, the region of the good or
of the bad. If you mean the bad, (all I can say is, that) even now the
souls of the wicked deserve to be consigned to those abodes; if you
mean the good why should you judge to be unworthy of such a
resting-place the souls of infants and of virgins, and1816
| 1816 We have treated
this particle as a conjunction but it may only be an intensive particle
introducing an explanatory clause: “even those which were
pure,” etc. [a better rendering.] | those which, by reason of their condition in
life were pure and innocent?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
