IV.

From the fact that Jesus was acquainted with the sect of the Essenes, it would be erroneous to conclude that he drew his doctrine from that of that sect, and that, had he lived in another milieu, he would have professed other principles.

Great ideas never burst forth suddenly. Those that rest upon truth always have precursors who partially prepare the way for them. Then, when the time comes, God sends a man with the mission of summarizing, coordinating, and completing the scattered elements, of gathering them into a body of doctrine; 3 in this way, the idea, not arising abruptly, finds upon its appearance spirits disposed to accept it. Such was what happened with the Christian idea, which was foreseen many centuries before Jesus and the Essenes, having as its principal precursors Socrates and Plato.

Socrates, like the Christ, wrote nothing, or, at least, left no writing. Like the Christ, he suffered the death of criminals, a victim of fanaticism, for having attacked the beliefs that he found established and placed real virtue above hypocrisy and the simulacrum of outward forms; for having, in a word, combated religious prejudices. Just as Jesus, whom the Pharisees accused of corrupting the people with the teachings he imparted to them, he too was accused, by the Pharisees of his time—for there have always been such in every epoch—of proclaiming the dogma of the unity of God, of the immortality of the soul, and of the future life. Just as we know the doctrine of Jesus only through what his disciples wrote, of that of Socrates we have knowledge only through the writings of his disciple Plato.

We have deemed it fitting to summarize here the most salient points, in order to show their concordance with the principles of Christianity. To those who consider this parallel a profanation and claim that there can be no parity between the doctrine of a pagan and that of the Christ, we will say that the doctrine of Socrates was not pagan, since its aim was to combat paganism; that that of Jesus, more complete and more refined than the former, has nothing to lose from the comparison; that the greatness of the divine mission of the Christ cannot be diminished; that, moreover, this is a fact of History, which no one will be able to erase.

Man has reached a point where the light emerges of itself from beneath the bushel. He is mature enough to face it directly; so much the worse for those who dare not open their eyes. The time has come to consider things in a broad and elevated manner, no longer from the petty and narrow point of view of the interests of sects and castes.

Furthermore, these citations will prove that, if Socrates and Plato foresaw the Christian idea, in their writings we also encounter the fundamental principles of Spiritism.

Summary of the doctrine of Socrates and of Plato.

I. Man is an incarnated soul. Before its incarnation, it existed united to the primordial types, to the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful; it separates from them upon incarnating, and, recalling its past, is more or less tormented by the desire to return to it.

One cannot state more clearly the distinction and independence between the intelligent principle and the material principle. And, moreover, the doctrine of the preexistence of the soul; of the vague intuition that it retains of another world, to which it aspires; of its survival of the body; of its departure from the spiritual world, to incarnate, and of its return to that same world, after death. And, finally, the germ of the doctrine of the fallen Angels.

II. The soul goes astray and is troubled when it makes use of the body to consider any object; it grows dizzy, as if it were intoxicated, because it attaches itself to things that are, by their nature, subject to change; whereas, when it contemplates its own essence, it directs itself toward what is pure, eternal, immortal, and, being itself of that nature, it remains bound there, for as long as it can. Its wanderings then cease, since it is united to what is immutable; and it is this state of the soul that is called wisdom.

Thus, the man who considers things in a down-to-earth manner deceives himself, from the material point of view. To appraise them justly, he must see them from on high, that is, from the spiritual point of view.

He, then, who is in possession of true wisdom, must isolate the soul from the body, in order to see with the eyes of the Spirit. This is what Spiritism teaches. (chapter II, no. 5.)

III. As long as we have our body and the soul finds itself plunged into that corruption, we will never possess the object of our desires: truth. Indeed, the body raises a thousand obstacles for us by the necessity in which we find ourselves of attending to it. Moreover, it fills us with desires, with appetites, with fears, with a thousand chimeras and a thousand follies, so that, with it, it becomes impossible for us to be judicious, even for an instant. But, if it is not possible for us to know anything purely, while the soul is bound to the body, one of two things: either we will never know the truth, or we will know it only after death. Freed from the madness of the body, we will then converse, it is lawful to hope, with men equally freed, and we will know, by ourselves, the essence of things. This is the reason why true philosophers train themselves in dying, and death seems to them, in no way, fearsome. (Heaven and Hell, part 1, chapter II; part 2, chapter I.)

Here is the principle of the faculties of the soul obscured by reason of the bodily organs and that of the expansion of those faculties after death. But it is a question only of souls already purified; the same does not occur with impure souls.

IV. The impure soul, in that state, finds itself oppressed and sees itself once again dragged toward the visible world, by horror of what is invisible and immaterial. It then wanders, it is said, around monuments and tombs, near which gloomy phantoms have already been seen, such as must be the images of the souls that left the body without being yet entirely pure, which still retain something of the material form, which makes it possible for human sight to perceive them. They are not the souls of the good; they are, however, those of the wicked, which find themselves forced to roam through those places, where they drag with them the penalty of the first life they had and where they continue to roam until the appetites inherent in the material form with which they clothed themselves lead them back to a body. Then, without doubt, they resume the same habits that during the first life constituted the object of their predilections.

Not only is the principle of reincarnation clearly expressed here, but also the state of the souls that remain under the yoke of matter is described just as Spiritism shows it in evocations.

Still more: in the passage above it is said that reincarnation in a material body is a consequence of the impurity of the soul, while purified souls find themselves exempt from reincarnating.

Spiritism says nothing else, adding only that the soul, which made good resolutions in erraticity and which possesses acquired knowledge, brings, upon being reborn, fewer defects, more virtues, and intuitive ideas than it had in its preceding existence. Thus, each existence marks for it a progress, intellectual and moral. (Heaven and Hell, part 2. Examples) V. After our death, the genius (daimon, demon), which had been assigned to us during life, leads us to a place where all those who must be conducted to Hades gather, to be judged. The souls, after having been in Hades for the necessary time, are led back to this life in multiple and long periods.

It is the doctrine of guardian Angels, or protector Spirits, and of successive reincarnations, following intervals of erraticity that are more or less long.

VI. The demons occupy the space that separates Heaven from Earth; they constitute the bond that unites the Great Whole to itself. The divinity never entering into direct communication with man, it is by the intermediary of the demons that the gods enter into commerce and converse with him, whether during waking or during sleep.

The word daïmon, from which they made the term demon, was not, in Antiquity, taken in the bad sense, as in modern times. It did not designate exclusively malevolent beings, but all Spirits, in general, among whom stood out the superior Spirits, called gods, and the less elevated ones, or demons properly speaking, which communicated directly with men.

Spiritism also says that Spirits populate space; 3 that God communicates with men only by the intermediary of the pure Spirits, who are charged with transmitting his wills; 4 that Spirits communicate with them during waking and during sleep.

Put, in place of the word demon, the word Spirit and you will have the Spiritist doctrine; put the word angel and you will have the Christian doctrine. VII. The constant preoccupation of the philosopher (such as Socrates and Plato understood him.) is to take the greatest care of the soul, less with regard to this life, which lasts no more than an instant, than with a view to eternity. Since the soul is immortal, would it not be prudent to live with a view to eternity?

Christianity and Spiritism teach the same thing.

VIII. If the soul is immaterial, it must pass, after this life, to a world equally invisible and immaterial, just as the body, decomposing, returns to matter. It matters greatly, however, to distinguish well the pure soul, truly immaterial, which feeds, like God, on science and thoughts, from the soul more or less stained with material impurities, which prevent it from rising toward the divine and retain it in the places of its sojourn on Earth.

Socrates and Plato, as one sees, understood perfectly the different degrees of dematerialization of the soul. They insist on the diversity of situation that results for them from their greater or lesser purity. What they said by intuition, Spiritism proves with the innumerable examples that it sets before our eyes. (Heaven and Hell, part 2)

IX. If death were the complete dissolution of man, the wicked would gain much from death, for they would find themselves freed, at the same time, from the body, the soul, and the vices. He who furnishes the soul, not with strange ornaments, but with those that are proper to it, only he will be able to await tranquilly the hour of his departure for the other world.

This amounts to saying that materialism, by proclaiming nothingness after death, annuls all ulterior moral responsibility, being, consequently, an incentive to evil; that the wicked man has everything to gain from nothingness.

Only the man who has stripped himself of vices and enriched himself with virtues can await tranquilly the awakening in the other life.

By means of examples, which it presents to us every day, Spiritism shows how painful it is, for the wicked man, to pass from this life to the other, the entrance into the future life. (Heaven and Hell, part 2, chapter I) X. The body keeps well imprinted the traces of the cares of which it was the object and of the accidents it suffered. The same occurs with the soul. When stripped of the body, it keeps, evident, the traits of its character, of its affections, and the marks that even all the acts of its life left. Thus, the greatest misfortune that can befall man is to go to the other world with the soul laden with crimes. You see, Callicles, that neither you, nor Polus, nor Gorgias could prove that we should lead another life that is useful to us when we are on the other side. Of so many diverse opinions, the only one that remains unshakable is that it is better to receive than to commit an injustice and that, above all, we must take care, not to seem, but to be a man of good. (Colloquies of Socrates with his disciples, in prison.)

Here we encounter another capital point, confirmed today by experience:

that the unpurified soul keeps the ideas, the tendencies, the character, and the passions that it had on Earth.

Is this maxim not entirely Christian: it is better to receive than to commit an injustice? Jesus expressed the same thought, using this figure:

“If anyone strikes you on one cheek, present to him the other.” (chapter XII, no. 7 and 8.)

XI. One of two things: either death is an absolute destruction, or it is the passage of the soul to another place. If everything must be extinguished, death will be like one of those rare nights that we pass without dream and without any consciousness of ourselves. However, if death is only a change of abode, the passage to the place where the dead must gather, what happiness to find there those whom we knew! My greatest pleasure would be to examine closely the inhabitants of that other abode and to distinguish there, as here, those who are worthy from those who believe themselves to be such and are not. But, it is time for us to part, I to die, you to live. (Socrates to his judges.)

According to Socrates, those who lived on Earth find one another after death and recognize one another.

Spiritism shows that the relations established among them continue, in such a way that death is neither an interruption nor the cessation of life, but a transformation, without break of continuity.

Had Socrates and Plato known the teachings that the Christ spread five hundred years later and those that Spiritism now spreads, they would not have spoken otherwise.

There is in this, however, nothing to surprise, if we consider that the great truths are eternal and that the advanced Spirits must have known them before coming to Earth, where they brought them; 5 that Socrates, Plato, and the great philosophers of those times may well, afterward, have been among those who seconded the Christ in his divine mission, chosen for that end precisely because they found themselves, more than others, in a condition to understand his sublime lessons; 6 that, finally, it may be that they now form part of the pleiad of Spirits charged with teaching men those same truths. XII. One must never repay an injustice with another, nor do harm to anyone, whatever the damage they may have caused us. Few, however, will be those who admit this principle, and those who disagree on this subject will do nothing more, without doubt, than devote to one another mutual contempt.

Is this not the principle of charity, which prescribes that evil not be repaid with evil and that one’s enemies be forgiven?

XIII. It is by its fruits that the tree is known. Every action must be qualified by what it produces: qualified as bad, when from it comes evil; as good, when it gives rise to good.

This maxim: “By their fruits the tree is known,” is found many times repeated textually in the Gospel.

XIV. Wealth is a great danger. Every man who loves wealth loves neither himself nor what is his; he loves a thing that is still more foreign to him than what belongs to him. (chapter XVI)

XV. The most beautiful prayers and the most beautiful sacrifices please the divinity less than a virtuous soul that makes efforts to resemble it. It would be a grave thing if the gods dispensed more attention to our offerings than to our soul; if such were the case, the most guilty could obtain that they become propitious to them. But, no: truly just and upright are only those who, by their words and acts, fulfill their duties toward the gods and toward men. (chapter X, no. 7 and 8.)

XVI. I call a vicious man that vulgar lover, who loves the body more than the soul. Love is everywhere in Nature, which invites us to the exercise of our intelligence; even in the movement of the stars we find it. It is love that adorns Nature with its rich tapestries; it bedecks itself and fixes its abode where flowers and perfumes are found. It is also love that gives peace to men, calm to the sea, silence to the winds, and sleep to pain.

Love, which is to unite men by a fraternal bond, is a consequence of this theory of Plato on universal love, as a law of Nature.

Socrates having said that “love is neither a god nor a mortal, but a great demon,” that is, a great Spirit that presides over universal love, this proposition was imputed to him as a crime.

XVII. Virtue cannot be taught; it comes by gift of God to those who possess it.

It is almost the Christian doctrine on grace; but, if virtue is a gift of God, it is a favor, and then one may ask why it is not granted to all.

On the other hand, if it is a gift, it lacks merit for him who possesses it.

Spiritism is more explicit, saying that he who possesses virtue acquired it by his efforts, in successive existences, stripping himself little by little of his imperfections.

Grace is the force that God grants to the man of good will to expunge himself of evil and practice good. XVIII. It is a natural disposition in all of us to perceive our own defects much less than those of others.

The Gospel says: “You see the straw that is in your neighbor’s eye and you do not see the beam that is in your own.” (chapter X, no. 9 and 10.)

XIX. If physicians are unsuccessful, treating the greater part of maladies, it is because they treat the body, without treating the soul. Now, the whole not being in good condition, it is impossible for a part of it to fare well.

Spiritism furnishes the key to the relations existing between the soul and the body and proves that one reacts incessantly upon the other. It thus opens a new path for Science. By showing it the true cause of certain afflictions, it provides it with the means of combating them. When Science takes into account the action of the spiritual element in the economy [read: in the organism], its failures will be less frequent.

XX. All men, beginning in childhood, do much more evil than good.

This sentence of Socrates touches the grave question of the predominance of evil on Earth, a question insoluble without the knowledge of the plurality of worlds and of the destination of the terrestrial planet, inhabited only by a minimal fraction of Humanity. Only Spiritism resolves this question, which is found explained further on, in chapters II, III, and V.

XXI. You will be judicious by not supposing that you know what you are ignorant of.

This is directed at those who criticize that of which they do not know even the first terms.

Plato completes this thought of Socrates, saying: “Let us try, first, to make them, if it is possible, more honest in their words; if they are not, let us not concern ourselves with them and let us seek nothing but the truth.

Let us take care to instruct ourselves, but let us not insult one another.” It is thus that Spiritists must proceed with regard to their contradictors of good or bad faith.

Were Plato to live again today he would find things almost as in his time and could use the same language. Socrates too would encounter creatures who would mock his belief in Spirits and who would qualify him as mad, as well as his disciple Plato.

It was for having professed these principles that Socrates saw himself ridiculed, then accused of impiety and condemned to drink hemlock.

So true is it that, raising against themselves the interests and prejudices that they wound, the great new truths cannot establish themselves without struggle and without making martyrs.