“Before his time, any person of outstanding achievement was called a sage. But when Pythagoras, who considered it arrogance to call oneself wise, was asked his profession, he replied that he was a philosopher, that is, a man in pursuit of, or in love with, wisdom.” Augustine, City of God
The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence appertaining to the endless and exact repetition of life-cycles was attributed to the Pythagoreans by Aristotle’s pupil, Eudemus, who wrote a book on physics. It is not certain whether the scientific faction of the Pythagorean brotherhood actually espoused the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence—the Doctrine may have been Aristotle's notion. The brotherhood certainly did develop the Orphic Doctrine of Metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls into other bodies after death, but it is doubtful that Pythagoras himself taught metempsychosis.
The relationship of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence—an amoral if not immoral doctrine since cycles of relatively good and evil are endlessly repeated—to the Doctrine of Metempsychosis, which allows the moral individual who does his duty to eventually escape from vicious cycles, has endlessly intrigued philosophers and theologians alike.
"If we are to believe the Pythagoreans," said Eudemus, "I shall once more gossip among you with this little staff in my hands, and again as now will ye be standing before me, and likewise will it be with all the rest." Thus we have an early expression of the universal law of identical cyclic successions or circular courses, the theory that the same thing precedes all beginnings and follows all ends.
The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence is similar to other hypotheses derived from the will to live and the wish to survive the obvious death of the body with its simultaneous disappearance of its spirit or breath. Death is similar to sleep, therefore one might conjure up a permanent soul, and imagine that, although the dead body apparently does not arise, its soul, the principle of permanence behind apparent change, might awaken somewhere else, unseen, in another sort of body, or perhaps in a replication of the body left behind.
The ancients believed that the same body would be resurrected, wherefore they buried the body standing up for its convenience upon resurrection. Adherents to the belief in bodily resurrection certainly would not cremate the body. Chinese ancients abhorred the mutilation or dismemberment of the body, wanting it resurrected whole—the eunuch carried his severed member in a box so he might be rejoined with it upon death.
Notwithstanding those who want the same body resurrected, a person who views the decay and dissolution of a corpse and observes the ebb and flow and transformation of other things on Earth, might be led to imagine that a soul survives the death of its housing, or, if you will, throws off its cloak and migrates from body to body, perhaps in a circular or spiral course, from form to form, until, if s/he so wishes, it is released from the wheel of births. Many were those who entertained such a wish, and conceived of the body as the soul's grave, from which it might escape: the pilgrim might atone, by virtue of the right purification process and unswerving faith, for the original sin of his race, and ascend from the hellish muck, to heaven, where s/he would join the gods for dinner.
We recall a popular myth about the tainting of human nature: Zeus and Persephone begat Zagreus-Dionysus. The Titans wanted to kill the child, so he turned into a bull and fled. The Titans caught up with him, killed and ate him. Athena however rescued the heart for Zeus, who swallowed it, then struck the Titans with a thunderbolt. Mankind arose from their ashes, part Dionysian (good) and part Titanic (evil). The objective of the moral or pure life is to purge the evil part and save the good one. Pindar informs us that, after humans die, some of the most distinguished among them are reincarnated after eight years, and become heroes hence Persephone's grief over the murder of her child is assuaged. Pindar provides an alternative, more democratic theory: worlds are places of reward and punishment, and persons who lead three good lives after this world are released from further births. As for righteous conduct, the Pythagorean brothers, for example, eschewed beans and meat among other things, and asked themselves three questions before they went to sleep: In what have I failed today? What good have I done today? What did I do today that I should not have done?
So much for transmigration, but the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence does not allow the soul to inhabit a variety of forms during different life cycles: there is no progress or regress because the same cycle of life is lived over and over again. Welcome to Groundhog Day! Such an endless repetition is not very attractive to those human beings who love progress and variety. If people have to live the same damn life over and over again, may we thank the god of ignorance that we do not know we are stuck in a rut! On the other hand, if that is all there is, an endlessly repeated life may very well suffice for anyone who truly loves life, no matter how happy or miserable that life might be.
Progressively inclined predecessors to Christian thinkers allowed for a vicious wheel of existence, but they claimed that the aspiring soul can break the law of cycles, fly off on a tangent and progress to a favored X, or to infinity, or to eternal death i.e. nothingness. Certain renowned escapees might periodically return to save the rest of mankind from time to time, just as heavenly bodies return over immense tracts of time, at the end of a great year equivalent to a thousand centuries according to our world clock. Periodic correspondences between heaven and earth were posited by the astrologers: conflagrations would occur when the planets are in Cancer, floods when in Capricorn; fire at the summer solstice; water at the winter solstice. And then all the cycles might be subject to single, cosmic cycle. Perhaps, as the Stoics supposed, the universe, a sphere surrounded by an infinite void, is burned up by a central fire, and then the whole cycle recurs again, exactly as it did before, again and again, ad infinitum.
The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence was not necessarily inferred from astronomical observations of the boring revolution of spheres, for life on earth also has it regularities. If the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence was in fact held by the Pythagoreans, as Eudemus supposed, Chaldean astrology, nevertheless, had little known influence on their philosophy. Theophrastus, fellow-pupil of Eudemus, even expressed astonishment at the "sham-science" of Babylon.
The Stoics did not believe in the transmigration of souls; they faced the world as conscientious stalwarts and stoically accepted the fatalistic Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence. A moral man conducts himself morally despite the external repetition of sets of circumstances of the world. For them, morality was a human thing originating not in distant stars but in the family, tribe and clan.
Christians especially demand an alternative to circularity: they wanted some sort of trajectory. And Christian theology rejects the transmigration hypotheses. The idea that a man's soul might take an animal form, say that of a pig or chicken, perhaps because the deceased ate ham sandwiches or chicken salads, is particularly repugnant to meat-eating Christians. They also rejected the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence because it postulates not moral progress but rather a simultaneous resurrection of innumerable souls in identical bodies at the death/birth of each one of them. Whatever exists is not good enough for the ascetic spiritualist: he must have something better, something good; and, in time, good requires a pre-existent evil. That is, Christians want immediate personal salvation if not moral progress on this Earth, so that the soul may survive and not perish with the body.
Naturally, the secular or evolutionary “progress” of a species may occur despite or even because of the extinction of individual lives—the birth-death-birth cycle may be conducive to the production of a variety necessary for survival in changing circumstances. Alcamaeon of Croton, the so-called father of physiology, opined that man is godlike because he is always moving by virtue of a vital force or spring that puts both body and mind in constant, progressive motion towards the ultimate goal of individual life: death. Life is not cyclical, he said: "Men perish because they are unable to join their beginning to their end."
Although Christianity rejects metempsychosis, Pythagoras himself was much admired by Christians. Ambrose, for instance, believed Pythagoras was a Jew, and placed him as a great authority, somewhere between Moses and Plato. Yet Augustine of Hippo held that cyclic repetition is incompatible with the Christian spirit. He rejected the recurring cycles mentioned by Aristotle, and insisted that creation and salvation are unique, unrepeatable events. Wherefore we have a history, in the sense of progress.
We might suppose that time started with the creation of the universe and is independent of the motion of its bodies hence is not derived from their movement. Absolute time, or time without or independent of events, is a subject we may delve into elsewhere since we cannot make momentary sense of it, time-bound as we presently are. But Augustine, relying on “sacred and infallible Scripture,” reasoned that, since there is no time without change, and that in God there is eternity without change, we cannot say that the God “created the world after a space of time had elapsed unless we admit, also, that previously some creature had existed whose movements would mark the course of time.” Therefore it may be assumed that nothing had been made before heaven and earth were created in order; that is, something was created from nothing. “Undoubtedly, then, the world was made not in time but together with time…. The fact is that the world was made simultaneously with time, if, with creation, motion and change began.” (City of God)
Nothing is perfected by time. Suffice it to say that evolutionary progress with its utter extinction of individuality is not the kind of progress desired by Christians, and perhaps by no one else if they carefully consider themselves. We believe individuals would be personally and permanently saved from suffering the vicissitudes of time, each having been born individual. But that is the so-called original sin for which they are bound to suffer in one way or another unto utter salvation from every division. That is why they fight unto death for peace. That is why they form groups to kill one another for the sake of unity. In other words, individuals would be saved from the consequences of individuality, yet endure, in eternity, which has no duration. Anyone would live forever without impedance if only he could, but absent resistance he would not be individual or divided: he would be a god beyond comparison. And he would undoubtedly take the form of a man if any form at all, for he would hardly want to appear as ‘god’ spelled backwards.
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