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

by Erwin Rohde

§ 2

At the outset of this period, and illuminating a long stretch of it with the light of his genius, stands the figure of Aristotle. In what this master di color’ che sanno had to say of the soul’s nature and destiny two voices are distinctly audible. The soul, he instructs us, is that which in a living and organic physical body brings the potentially existing to actual existence. It is the form to the body’s matter, the culmination of the capacities of independent life residing in the particular body. Bodiless and immaterial itself, it is not the outcome of the mixture of the various parts of the body; it is the cause, not the resultant, of the vital functions of its body which exists for the soul’s benefit as its “instrument”.[4] It dwells within a natural organism and though it is itself unmoved it moves that organism as the source of its growth and nourishment, of its desires and locomotion, of its feeling and perceiving; while in the higher organisms it acts as the combination of all these faces. It is as little to be thought of as separate from the body—its own body—as the power of vision is in separation from the eye or as its shape from the moulded waxen image.[5] Theoretically, indeed, it is possible to distinguish between body and soul, but actually and in the animated organism they cannot be distinguished. When the living creature dies the matter of which it was composed loses it special adaptation to a purposeful organism, and this adaptation was its life; without it there can be no independent “Substance” (οὐσία).[6] The Form, the functional power of the once living organism, its “soul”, has no longer any independent existence.

This is the voice of Aristotle the physicist when he is speaking from the standpoint of a physical doctrine which includes the study of the soul “in so far as it occurs not without matter”.[7] Aristotle the metaphysician takes us further. In the soul of man, besides the vital powers of the organized individual, there lives a spiritual being of more than natural character and origin, the “Mind”—“that in us which thinks and conceives”.[8] This thinking mind is not bound to the body and its life.[9] It does not come into being with the creation of the human organism which is completed by the addition of Mind. It has no beginning and was uncreated from eternity:[10] it enters into man at his creation “from without”.[11] Even while it lives within the body it remains unmingled with the body and its powers and uninfluenced by them.[12] Enclosed within itself it lives its separate life as something quite other than the “soul” (of which it is nevertheless called a “part”[13]) and separated from it by a gulf. Comparable with the God of Aristotle’s world it transcends what might be called its “little world”,[14] the living human organism. It influences that organism without being influenced in turn. It is akin to God; it is called the “divine” in man.[15] Its activity is the same as that of God.[16] God—pure substance, unlimited, highest, everlasting actuality—is absolute and perpetually operant thinking.[17] All practical activity, doing and creating, is far removed from God.[18] So, too, the “Mind” is entirely occupied in thinking (though here there is some alternation perhaps between the potential and the actual).[19] It grasps, in an intuition of the intellect that is beyond failure and error,[20] the “unmediated” first principles, the first and highest concepts, immediately certain and not deducible from still higher concepts, from which all knowledge and philosophy is derived.[21]

In its association with the body and its “soul” this thinking Reason lives as “the ruling”[22] element over both—not, however, as the “realization” of this particular individual creature. The Mind is indeed said to be that which the individual man “is”,[23] and without the addition of Mind the man could not exist, but the special and personal character belonging to the individual is not to be found in this reasoning Mind.[24] Mind is totally devoid of distinguishable qualities and is identical in every case where it appears; it is invariably foreign to the separate and individual character of the man to whom it is added, and hardly seems to be his peculiar property.

When death occurs the thinking “Mind” is not involved in the destruction which overtakes the human organism with which it was associated. Death does not affect it. Like everything that is without beginning it is indestructible.[25] It returns again to its separate existence. Like the great World-Mind, God, and in company with it—for it has not sprung from God and does not merge again into God—the individual Mind of man continues in unending life.[26] It [495] disappears now into impenetrable darkness. The separate existence of the Mind is beyond not merely our perception but our conceiving as well—persisting for itself alone, Mind has no mental activity, no memory and no consciousness; indeed, it is impossible to say what special qualities or activity can be attributed to it beyond the simple predicate of existence, of being.[27]

In the doctrine of this thinking Mind which is associated with the human soul “from without” and never merges into it, of its pre-existence from eternity, its kinship with God and its imperishable life after its separation from the human organism—in all this Aristotle preserves a mythological element taken from the dogmatic teaching of Plato.

There was a time when he had been a complete Platonist precisely in his doctrine of the soul. In his youth, like other members of the Academy, he had yielded[28] to the fascination of clothing in artistic and perfected language brilliant fantasies about the origin, nature, and destiny of the soul—the divine daimon[29] inhabiting the mortal frame of man. Later, however, it seemed inconceivable to him that “any soul may inhabit any body”.[30] He could only conceive of the “soul” of the individual man as a realization of the life of this entirely distinct and physical organism, to which it is indissolubly bound as the purpose and form of the particular instrument. All the vital powers as well as appetite, perception, memory, and reflective thought, appeared to him merely as the modes of activity manifested by the animated body which is itself unthinkable apart from its “soul”. And yet he still preserved a relic of the old dualistic opposition between the body and the independent substantial soul—the same conception of the soul, in fact, as that which Plato had himself, in the later period of his philosophical development, alone retained. This was as the contemplative Mind which is occupied in apprehending the highest truths in intellectual intuition; and this mind is, according to Aristotle, not to be included in the “soul”, but to be separated from it as a special being that has descended from the heights of divinity and has been coupled with the soul from without and for its limited period of life. The origin of this conception of a reduplicated soul is plain: it is derived from memories of Plato and beyond that from theological doctrine which was itself in the last resort but a spiritualized restatement of primeval popular fancies of the psyche that dwells in the living body. But though he took over the doctrine he did not take over the special sense that [496] the theologians had given to it: he omitted both the conclusions they drew and the exhortations they based upon it. We hear no more of the “purification” of the divine Mind within mankind. It has nothing impure or evil in it nor can any breath of pollution affect it from without. The effort towards the “other world” of purity, the denial and rejection of its earthly partner the living body, are foreign to the “Mind” of Aristotle.[31] It has no impulse to “deliverance” or self-emancipation; it knows of no peculiar task that points beyond this world. The presence of this “separable” Mind in the living man is an assured fact, and nothing more: no purpose in life is deducible from it. The fact itself seemed to be evident from the power that man possesses of grasping immediately a highest form of knowledge that is beyond demonstration, not as the result of the mental activity of his soul, for the apprehension is prior to the soul, but by means of a higher spiritual faculty, a special intellectual being that seemed to proclaim its presence and existence within man in this way. It is thus by way of a theory of knowledge not of a theological doctrine that we arrive at the distinction between “Mind” and “Soul”. But the doctrine thus reasserted was in reality nothing but the old doctrine of the theologians. This “Mind”, too, seems to the thinker to be a being akin to God. The pure contemplative existence, a life consisting in the contemplation of the final objects of intuition is counted as a privilege of the divine and of all divine beings, as the true purpose of vital energy and of its manifestation; and in the description of this state the sober reserve of his lecture style seems to be uplifted and almost illuminated with the warmth and brilliance imparted by a genuine glow of personal experience.[32] This pure activity of contemplation, finding its deepest satisfaction in itself, belongs to the divine in man—to the Mind; its whole life lies in this. This activity, however, the Mind performs and finishes in this life, while it is united with the body and the body’s “soul”. There is nothing left that can be thought of as forming the content of the life and activity of the Mind in its separate existence after the completion of its period of life on earth. Mind and the man with whom it is associated can hardly have a very urgent desire for that emancipation in “another world” which is thus left blank and without content for our thought. The thought of immortality cast in this form could no longer possess any real value or ethical significance for man.[33] It arises from a logical deduction, from metaphysical considerations, not [497] from a demand of the spirit. It lacks not only the distinctness that might have appealed to the senses and given direction to the imagination, but the power (or the intention) of playing a leading part in the conduct or direction of life on this earth. There is no inspiration in this doctrine—not even for the philosopher, though it was to him and his activity and his efforts that the picture and panegyric of “Mind”, the philosopher in man, had really referred.

It was quite possible to abide by the teaching and philosophy of Aristotle, directed as it was to the observation and interpretation of the things of this world, while abandoning the advanced post of the doctrine of Mind—that Being which has sunk to the level of this world from the other world of divinity, which separates itself, with the death of man, once more to everlasting divine life though hardly to a continuation of individual existence. On this point in particular free discussion of the master’s teaching maintained itself in his school: some, and by no means the weakest, of Aristotle’s successors denied altogether and in every form the doctrine of immortality.[34]