Turning from these later parasites,[45] which live on their parent gods and yet tend to reduce them, we now revert to that happiness hereafter to which looks forward the epic knight that has not been tempted to ‘renounce’ desire.  In pantheistic passages he is what the later remodeller makes him.  But enough of old belief remains to show that the warrior really cared a great deal more for heaven than he did for absorption.  As to the cause of events, as was said above, it is Fate.  Repeatedly is heard the lament, “Fate (impersonal) is the highest thing, fie on vain human effort.”  The knight confesses with his lips to a belief in the new doctrine of absorption, but at heart he is a fatalist.  And his aim is to die on the field of battle, that he may go thence directly to the heaven that awaits the good and the brave.[46] Out of a long description of this heaven a few extracts here selected will show what the good knight anticipates: 

“Upward goes the path that leads to gods; it is inhabited by them that have sacrificed and have done penance.  Unbelieving persons and untruthful persons do not enter there; only they that have duteous souls, that have conquered self, and heroes that bear the marks of battle.  There sit the seers and gods, there are shining, self-illumined worlds, made of light, resplendent.  And in this heaven there is neither hunger, nor thirst, nor weariness, nor cold, nor heat, nor fear; nothing that is terrible is there, nothing unclean; but pleasing sights, and sounds, and smells.  There is no care there, nor age, nor work, nor sorrow.  Such is the heaven that is the reward of good acts.  Above this is Brahm[=a]’s world, where sit the seers and the three and thirty gods,” etc.

Over against this array of advantages stands the one great “fault of heaven,” which is stated almost in the words of “nessun maggior dolore,” “the thought (when one lives again on the lower plane) of former happiness in the higher life is terrible grief” (vs. 30), i.e., this heaven will pass away at the end of the world-period, when the Eternal draws all in to himself again (iii. 261); and the thought that one has been in heaven, while now he is (re-born) on earth, is a sorrow greater than the joy given by heaven.[47] One is reminded by the epic description of heaven of that poet of the Upanishads who describes his heavenly bliss as consisting in the fact that in that world “there is neither snow nor sorrow.”  The later version is only an amplification.  Even with the assurance that the “fault of heaven” is the disappointment of being dropped to earth again in a new birth, the ordinary mortal is more averse from the bliss of absorption than from the pleasure of heaven.  And in truth, except to one very weary of his lot in life, it must be confessed that the religion here shown in all its bearings is one eminently pleasant to believe.  Its gist, in a word, is this:  “If you feel able to endure it, the best thing to do is to study