the
continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and
in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and
the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the
Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which
the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, _Psyche_, "Die
Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic
idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a
philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a
hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural
science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the
perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a
theological speculation. It was by a contradiction that the first Greek
philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and
intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a
Dionysiac and Orphic dogma. But "an immortality of the soul as such, in
virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine force
in the mortal body, was never an object of popular Hellenic belief"
(Rohde, _op. cit._).

Recall the _Phaedo_ of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations. In them
the yearning for personal immortality already shows itself--a yearning
which, as it was left totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the
Hellenic pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very well observes
(_Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage_, 3. Berlin, 1896),
"no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in
the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people
changed so completely their idea of the value of life. The Hellenism
which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism and
neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous
and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as
a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed." Nirvana
is an Hellenic idea.

Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery
of death--a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the
entrance into spiritual puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of
life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity. The
discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the
perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation o