THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS DID NOT BELIEVE THE SOUL IMMORTAL by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 12, 1878

THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS DID NOT BELIEVE THE SOUL IMMORTAL.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

We shall now show by overwhelming evidence that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, as at present held, has not been generally believed by the human race.

Let us bear in mind, however, what the present orthodox doctrine of the immortality of the soul is, for which universal belief is claimed. It is that every man is born with an immaterial, spiritual, immortal soul, which simply lives in this body as in a house or cage. This soul, whether righteous or wicked, will live eternally as an individual, personal, conscious soul. It will never die, neither will it lose its personality. Such a doctrine, it is claimed, has been the common sentiment of mankind. This we deny, and now offer the proof. Paul says of the Gentiles that they were without God, and having no hope. Eph. 2:12. Had they believed the soul immortal, they would have had a hope of a future life. But they had no such hope, hence no such faith.

THE IDEAS OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS.

When we go back to a period a few centuries before the birth of Christ, to the early ages of the world, we find no evidence that in the infancy of such nations as the Greeks and Romans the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was believed among them. It cannot be proved that they did believe it. All their ideas and traditions of a future world, so far as they had any, represented it as a material place, and the people as material, corporeal beings, the same as in this world.

On this point the learned Dr. Priestly says: “It is expressly asserted by Aristotle and others, says Mr. Toland (Letters to Serena, p. 22), that the most ancient Greek philosophers did not dream of any principle or actuating spirit in the universe itself, no more than in any of the parts thereof; but explained all the phenomena of nature by matter and local motion, levity and gravity or the like; and rejected all that the poets said of gods, demons, souls, ghosts, Heaven, hell, visions, prophecies, miracles, etc., as fables invented at pleasure, and fictions to divert their readers.”

Says a learned author: “The Greeks sometimes depicted death and sleep as twin boys, one black, one white, borne slumbering in the arms of their mother, night.” This was their idea of death,—a deep sleep. But many ages, even thousands of years, passed away before we learn of any one who had any notion of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It first originated with a few priests and lawgivers, was taken up by poets and philosophers, and finally was acknowledged by the people.

THE EGYPTIANS.

Herodotus, the oldest historian, says: “The Egyptians also were the first who asserted the doctrine that the soul of man is immortal.” Other nations did not believe it till they learned it of the Egyptians, as I show in another article. This was not till a few centuries before Christ, about the time of Socrates and Plato, both of whom advocated that doctrine. They lived about B. C. 400. These philosophers confessed that their doctrine was not generally believed. One of Socrates’ disciples, Cebes, told him that the doctrine he taught concerning the immortality of the soul and a future state, “met with little credit among men;” that “most men seemed to think that the soul was immediately dissolved at death, and that it vanished and was dissipated like the wind or smoke, or became nothing at all; and that it needed no small persuasion and faith to believe that the soul exists and has some power and intelligence after the man is dead.” Socrates himself had said the same thing just before,—that his doctrine was not believed by the generality of the people.

Simmias, another of the dialogists in the Phaedo, represents it as the opinion of many that the soul is dissipated when a man dies, and that this is the end of its existence. And Socrates, speaking of the soul’s being blown away, and perishing with the body, declares that this was what was said by most men.

“From these testimonies it plainly appears,” says Leland in his admirable work on the “necessity of a Divine Revelation,” vol. ii. p. 383, “that the mortality of the soul was a doctrine which prevailed among the Athenians in the time of Socrates, who were looked upon as the most learned and polite of all the Grecians.”

Plato complained that his argument on the subject met with little credit. But did not Socrates and Plato succeed in converting all men to their new ideas of the soul? By no means. The above author, on page 384, continues: “There is no great reason to think that the state of things among the Athenians grew better afterward, but rather the contrary.”

IN THE TIME OF THE CÆSARS.

We come now to the time of Polybius, who was born B. C. 203. “There is a remarkable passage by Polybius,” says Leland, “which shows that the disbelief of a future state had in his time become very common and fashionable, both among persons of superior rank and among the lower kind of people.” The doctrine of the immortality of the soul was, then, far from being universally believed as yet.

We next come to the time of Cicero, who was born B. C. 107. Perhaps this doctrine had gained greater credence by that time. Hear our learned author again: “What that great man Cicero says of the philosophers in his time is remarkable. In that celebrated treatise where he sets himself to prove the immortality of the soul, he represents the contrary, as there were crowds of opponents; not the Epicureans only, but, which he could not well account for, those that were esteemed the most learned persons had that doctrine in contempt.”

Mr. Watson, speaking of the same time, says: “Both philosophers and poets regarded them as vulgar fables. . . . Nor was the skepticism and unbelief of the wise and great long kept from the vulgar, among whom they wished to maintain the old superstitions as instruments by which they might be controlled. Cicero complains that the common people in his day mostly followed the doctrine of Epicurus.” Epicurus denied the immortality of the soul. This testimony is worthy of consideration. The mass of the common people followed Epicurus, that is, they totally denied the doctrine that the soul is immortal. And the poets and philosophers taught them this! Then who believed the doctrine at that time? It was universally disbelieved.

Cæsar represents the same thing as being true in his day. So it was in the time of Plutarch, who was born about the middle of the first century. “He intimates that these things were not commonly believed.” Not only the philosophers, but the mass of the Roman people, had no faith in the doctrine of future rewards and punishments.

Of the popular religion Mr. Jones says: “The Romans in general knew the whole to be an imposition, and many of them ridiculed the pretense that the institution was divine.” Again he says: “The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and of a future state of rewards and punishments, was but little understood, and, of course, only very partially acknowledged. Hence, at the period when Christ appeared any notions of this kind found little or no acceptance among the Greeks and Romans, but were regarded in the light of old wives’ fables fit only for the amusement of women and children.”

The learned Mr. Milman bears this decided testimony: “One class of fables seems to have been universally exploded even in the earliest youth,—those which related to another life. The picture of the unrivaled satirist may be overcharged, but it corresponds strictly with the public language of the orator and the private sentence of the philosopher:— “The silent realm of disembodied ghosts,\nThe frogs that croak along the Stygian coasts,\nThe thousand souls in one crazed vessel steer’d,\nNot boys believe, save boys without a beard.”

“Even the religious Pausanias speaks of the immortality of the soul as a foreign doctrine, introduced by the Chaldeans and the Magi, and embraced by some of the Greeks, particularly by Plato. Pliny, whose Natural History opens with a declaration that the universe is the sole Deity, devotes a separate chapter to a contemptuous exposure of the idle notion of the immortality of the soul, as a vision of human pride, and equally absurd, whether under the form of existence in another sphere or under that of transmigration.”

Gibbon, the celebrated historian, thus confirms this statement of the case: “We are sufficiently acquainted with the eminent persons who flourished in the age of Cicero and of the first Cæsars, with their actions, their characters, and their motives, to be assured that their conduct in this life was never regulated by any serious conviction of the rewards or punishments of a future state. At the bar and in the senate of Rome the ablest orators were not apprehensive of giving offense to their hearers by exposing that doctrine as an idle and extravagant opinion, which was rejected with contempt by every man of a liberal education and understanding.”

D. M. CANRIGHT.