Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

by Erwin Rohde

§ 2

Plato had not always given his assent to the belief in immortality. At any rate, it must have remained very much in the background of his thoughts and his belief in the days when he still regarded the world from the point of view of a slightly more developed Socraticism. Not only at that period (in the Apology) does he make his Sokrates go to his death without the most distant approach to a belief in the undying vitality of his soul, but also in the first sketch of his Ideal State—a sketch made while the influence of the Socratic view of life still prevailed with him—the belief in immortality is omitted and even excluded.[8] It seems as if Plato did not reach the higher conception of the nature and value of the soul, its origin and destiny reaching out beyond all temporal limitation, until the great change which came over his philosophy had been completed. The world of ever-changing Appearance manifesting itself to the senses in perpetual flux and efflux—this in its inessential, unseizable unreality he abandoned to the criticisms of Herakleitos. But above it, in accordance with his own deepest longings and, as it seemed, implied as its real object by the Socratic search itself after [465] conceptual knowledge, stood a world of unchangeable Being without beginning or end, to which all the appearances of this lower world owed such reality as they possessed. “Being” itself, the totality of the Ideas, remained uncontaminated with “Becoming” and passing away; remained the highest goal and supreme aim standing high above all that aspired to it, or felt a longing for its complete and unlimited fullness.[9] This everlasting reality holds itself aloof from the stream of appearance and is not to be grasped within that stream; it is not manifested in the deceitful ever-changing perception of the senses, nor yet in the Opinion that is based upon them; it can only be apprehended, without any assistance from the senses, by the pure intuition of the Reason.[10] This world of everlasting self-identical Being exists outside the thought and knowledge of man, but it first reveals itself to man in the activity of his own thinking;[11] and at the same time there is revealed to him a higher power than the mere capacity to abstract the unsubstantial general conceptions from the multiplicity of experience—a power that is the highest capacity of the soul, enabling it to voyage out beyond all experience and with infallible knowledge[12] to soar of its own independent power upwards to a transcendental world of permanent and essential reality. The highest capacity that belongs to man, the soul of his soul, is not enclosed within this world that surrounds his senses in its restless flood. Like the objects that are the last goal of its study the soul itself is raised to where it can for the first time find a form of activity worthy of its natural powers. It achieves a new distinction, a priestlike dignity, as an intermediary between the two worlds to both of which it belongs.

The soul is a pure spiritual essence; it contains nothing within it that is material, nothing of the “place” where Becoming is shaped into a distant resemblance to Being.[13] It is incorporeal and belongs to the realm of the “invisible”, which in this immaterialist doctrine counts as the most real of all, more real than the most solid matter.[14] It is not one of the Ideas; on the contrary it seems to partake in one of the Ideas—that of Life—only as other appearances share in their Ideas.[15] But it stands nearer to the whole world of the everlasting Ideas than anything else that is not itself an Idea; of all the things in the world it is “most like” to the Idea.[16]

But it has also a share in Becoming. It cannot simply remain with the Ideas in unaltered other-world transcendence. It has its origin indeed in that other world beyond Appearance. It was from the beginning, uncreated[17] like the Ideas and like [466] the Soul of the World to which it is akin.[18] It is “older than the body”[19] to which it must link itself; it does not come into being at the same time as the body, but is only drawn down from its spiritual state of being into the realm of matter and becoming. In the Phaedrus this “fall into birth” appears as the necessary result of an intellectual “fall” which takes place within the soul itself.[20] In the Timaeus, however, with its study of the general life of the whole world-organism, the animation of the living creature has now to be explained as arising out of the plan—not from a failure of the plan—of the Creator.[21] The soul thus seems to be destined from the beginning to give life to a body. It is not only the knowing and thinking element in a world of inanimate things, it is also the source of all movement. Itself in motion from the beginning it bestows the power of movement upon the body with which it is associated; without it, there would be no movement in the world, and no life either.[22]

But though enclosed within the body it remains a stranger to the body. On its side it has no need of the body and is not conditioned by it. It remains independently associated with it as its mistress and leader.[23] Even in their united existence there is a great gulf fixed between the soul and all that is not soul;[24] body and soul never fuse into one, however closely they may be bound up with each other. And yet the body and its impulses have the power to influence profoundly the immortal being that dwells within it. By its union with the body the soul can be made unclean; “diseases” such as folly and unrestrained passion come to it from the body.[25] It is not beyond the reach of change like the Ideas, to which it is akin without being of their nature; on the contrary, it can degenerate entirely. The evil influences of the body penetrate to its inmost being; even in its everlasting, immaterial, spiritual nature it can derive something “corporeal”[26] from such a sinister partnership.

It is bound to the body by influences of a lower kind which attach themselves to the pure power of knowledge that alone is proper to it. At the outset of his speculations Plato, like other thinkers before him,[27] had thought of the different capacities of the soul, alternately in conflict or alliance with each other, as “parts” of unequal rank and value, bound up together within the soul of man.[28] Even in the previous life of the soul, in the other world, the reasoning power of the soul is, according to the Phaedrus, already coupled with “Temper” and “Desire”; it is these in fact which drag down the soul into the realm of the material; and the three parts still [467] remain indissolubly united in the everlasting life which awaits the soul after its release from the body.

But in proportion as the philosopher extends and elevates his conception of the soul, and as he becomes more convinced of its eternal destiny and vocation to a life of unending blessedness in a realm of unchangeable being, the more impossible does it seem to him that this candidate for immortality in the realm of the everlasting Forms can be a composite amalgam of elements capable of being resolved again by division and analysis[29]—that the reasoning faculty can be for ever united with Effort and Desire, which perpetually threaten to drag it downwards into materiality. The soul in its true and original nature is now for him simple and indivisible.[30] Only with its enclosure in the body does the everlasting, thinking soul, whose tendency is towards the eternal, acquire impulses and desires[31] that have their origin in the body and belong to the body,[32] that only adhere to the soul during the period of its earthly life, that with their separation from their immortal associate will pass away, since they are themselves mortal and such as perish with the body.

The soul, to which sense-perception,[33] feeling, emotion, and desire are only added from outside, is in its own imperishable nature nothing but pure capacity of thought and knowledge—with which indeed the power to will that which is conceived in thought, seems to be directly associated. It is destined for the “other” world, for the intuition and undistorted reflection in its consciousness of the immaterial essences. Banished to this earth amid the restless change and alteration of all being, and not uninfluenced by the forces of bodily life, it must endure a brief exile here.[34] Not unscathed does it leave behind it, in death, its ill-assorted companion, the body.[35] Then it goes into an intermediate region of bodiless existence in which it must do penance for the misdeeds of its life on earth, and free itself from their effects.[36] After that it is driven away once more into a body and transported to a fresh life upon earth, the character of which it chooses for itself in accordance with the special nature that it had evolved in its earlier incarnation upon earth.[37] Though no organic connexion exists between them, yet there is a certain “symmetry”[38] between the individual soul and the body that is lent to it.

Thus, the soul lives through a series of earthly lives[39] of the most varied character; it may even sink so low as the animals in the course of its incarnations.[40] Its own merits, the success or failure of its conflict with the passions and desires of the [468] body, decide whether or not its lives shall lead it upwards to a nobler type of existence. Its task is plain: it must free itself from its impure companions, sensual Lust and the darkening of the powers of Reason. If it can succeed in this it will find once more the “way upwards”[41] which at last leads it into complete immunity from renewed incarnation and brings it home again into the kingdom of everlasting untroubled Being.