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

by Erwin Rohde

§ 3

It is evident that in what he thus, clothing philosophy in the language of poetry, says of the origin, destiny, and character of the soul, which though beyond time is yet placed within time, and though beyond space is yet the cause of all movement within space—that in all this Plato is following in the track of the theologians of earlier times. Only in the poetry and speculative thought of theologi, not in any physiologists’ doctrine, did he find the conception, imaginatively expressed and pointing in the direction which he also followed, of a multiplicity of independent souls whose existence had been from all time and was not first begun in the material world with the creation of a living organism; of souls enclosed in the corporeal as though in a foreign, hostile element, which survive their association with the body, passing through many such bodies and yet preserving themselves intact after the destruction of each of those bodies, immortal, endless (for they are without beginning),[42] and alive from the very beginning of Time. The souls, moreover, have life as distinct, complete, and indivisible personalities, not as mere dependent emanations of a simple common Source of all life.

The theory of the eternity and indestructibility of the individual souls, of the personal immortality of the souls, is difficult to reconcile with more specifically Platonic doctrine—with the doctrine of the Ideas.[43] And yet it is undeniable that from the moment that he first adopted this theory—and adopted it, too, precisely in connexion with the philosophy of the Ideas—he adhered to it steadfastly and without deviating from its essential meaning. The process by which he arrived at it is not to be found in the “proofs” by which he attempts in the Phaedo to establish the truth of the soul’s immortality in which he himself already believed. Those proofs in reality do not prove what they are intended to prove (and what considered as a fact of experience is unproved and as an axiom necessary to thought is beyond proof); they cannot therefore be the reasons that led the philosopher to [469] hold his conviction. He has in fact borrowed this article of his faith from the creeds which already contained it. He himself scarcely conceals the fact. As authority for the main outlines of the soul’s history as given by himself he refers us almost apologetically, and as though excusing himself for not providing a philosophical proof, to the theologi and priests of the mysteries.[44] And he himself becomes the philosophical poet, completely and without concealment, when in imitation of the poetry of edification he, too, gives a picture of the soul’s sojourn in an intermediate station of its pilgrimage or describes the stages of its earthly existence[45] that lead the soul down even to the animal.

For such mythological expressions of the inexpressible the philosopher himself claims no more than symbolical truth.[46] He is fully in earnest, however, with the fundamental conception of the soul as an independent substance that enters from beyond space and time into the material and perceptible world, and into external conjunction with the body, not into organic union with it; that maintains itself as a being of spiritual essence in the midst of the flux and decay of the material world, though at the same time its pure brightness is overshadowed through this conjunction and must purify itself from the effects; that can disentangle itself,[47] even to the extent of complete severance from the embrace of the material and the perceptible. All that is essential in this conception he derives from the theologians, but he brings it into close relationship with his own philosophy which depends upon a conviction of the absolute opposition between Being and Becoming, and upon the dualistic division of the world into matter and mind—a dualism that applies also to the relations of soul and body and throughout the whole realm of Appearance. The soul which stands half-way between the unity and unchangeability of Being and the ever-varying multiplicity of matter has in this realm of fragmentary and subordinate validity, into which it is temporarily exiled, the power to reflect the Ideas and represent them in its own consciousness clear and unfalsified. The soul in its complete independence of sense-perception and of concepts derived from the senses is alone able to pursue the “Quest of Reality”.[48] In this pursuit the body with which it is associated is nothing but a hindrance and a serious one. The soul has a hard struggle against the tendencies of the body in spite of its independence and aloofness. Just as, in the creation of the universe, matter, though not a cause is at least a subordinate cause which by its influence and exigencies gives [470] various hindrances[49] to the “Mind” that shapes and orders the world, so, too, the soul finds in this ephemeral and inconstant Matter, with its stirring and tumultuous unrest, a serious obstacle to its own proper activity. This is the evil, or the cause of evil,[50] which must be overthrown in order that the mind may win its way to freedom and final rest and security in the realm of pure Being. Plato often speaks of the katharsis, the purification, after which man must strive.[51] He takes both the word and the idea from the theologians, but he gives it a higher meaning while yet preserving unmistakably the analogy with the katharsis of the theologi and mystery-priests. It is not the pollution which comes from contact with sinister daimones and from all that belongs to them, that is to be avoided, but rather the dulling of the power of knowledge and of willing what is known (regarded as a simultaneously created power) due to the world of the senses and its fierce impulses.[52] Man’s effort must be directed not so much to ritual purity, as to the preservation of his knowledge of the eternal from eclipse through the deceptive illusions of the senses; towards the concentration and gathering together of the soul within itself;[53] its withdrawal from contact with the ephemeral as the source of pollution and debasement.

Thus, even in this philosophic reinterpretation of ritual abstinence in terms of a spiritual release and emancipation, the effort after “purity” retains its religious sense. The world of the Ideas, the world of pure Being, to which only the pure soul can attain,[54] is a world of divinity. The “Good” as the highest of the Ideas, the loftiest pattern, the supreme aim to which all Being and Becoming tend, which is at the same time more than all the Ideas—the first cause of all Being and all knowledge—is also God.[55] The soul for which, in its desire and longing for the full being of the Idea, the knowledge of the “Good” is the “supreme science”,[56] enters hereby into the closest communion with God. The “turning away” of the soul from the many-coloured image to the sun of the highest Idea, is itself[57] a turning towards the divine, towards the luminous source of all Being and Knowing.

Thus exalted, philosophic inquiry turns to enthousiasmos.[58] The way which leads upwards from the lower levels of Becoming to Being, is discovered by means of dialectic, which in its “comprehensive view”[59] is able to unite the distracted ever-moving flood of multifarious Appearance into the ever-enduring unity of the Idea which is reflected in Appearance. Dialectic travels through the whole range of the Ideas, graduated one above the other, till it reaches the last and [471] most universal of the Ideas. In its upward course it passes by an effort of sheer logic through the whole edifice of the highest concepts.[60] Plato is the most subtle of dialecticians; he almost carries subtlety to excess in his eager pursuit of every intricacy of logic—and of paralogism. But he combined to a remarkable degree the cold exactitude of the logician with the enthusiastic intensity of the seer; and his dialectic, after its patient upward march step by step from concept to concept, at last soars to its final goal in a single tremendous flight, in which the longed-for realm of the Ideas reveals itself in a moment of immediate vision. So the Bacchant in his ecstasy saw divinity suddenly plain, and so too in the nights consecrated by the mysteries the epoptês beheld the vision of the Goddesses in the torch-lit glare of Eleusis.[61]

To this loftiest height whence a view is obtained of “colourless, formless Being, beyond the reach of every contact”, inaccessible to sense-perception, it is dialectic that shows the way; and dialectic now becomes a way of salvation in which the soul finds once more its own divine nature and its divine home. The soul is closely akin to godhead and like it[62]—it is itself something divine. The reason in the soul is divine,[63] and comprehends everlasting Being immediately by its power of thought. “If the eye were not sunlike, it could never see the sun”;[64] if the mind were not akin by nature to the good,[65] the highest of the Ideas, it could never comprehend the Good, the Beautiful, and all that is perfect and eternal. In its power of recognizing the eternal the soul bears within itself the surest proof that it is itself eternal.[66]

The “purification” by means of which the soul gets rid of[67] the defacement that has overtaken it during its earthly life reveals again the divine in man. Even on earth the philosopher is thus rendered immortal and godlike.[68] As long as he can continue in a state of pure intellectual knowledge and comprehension of the everlasting, for so long is he living, already in this life, “in the Islands of the Blest.”[69] By expelling all traces of the corruptible and the mortal in and about himself, he is more and more to “become like God”;[70] so that when it is at last set free from this earthly existence, his soul may enter into the divine, the invisible, the pure, the eternally self-identical, and as a disembodied mind remain for ever with that which is its kin.[70a] At this point, language that can only make use of physical imagery becomes totally inadequate.[71] A goal is set before the soul that lies outside all physical nature, beyond time and space, without past or future, an ever-present now.[72] [472]

The soul can escape out of time and space and find its home in eternity, without at the same time losing its own self in the General and Universal that stands above time and space. We must not inquire what sort of personality and individual distinctness can yet remain with the soul when it has cast off all effort, desire, sense-perception, and everything related to the world of change and multiplicity, to become once more a pure mirror of the eternal. Nor must we ask how it is possible to think of a spirit removed above space and time and all the multiplicity of matter and yet personal and separate in its personality.[73] For Plato the Souls live on as they had been in the beginning—individual beings conscious of themselves in a time that has no end and is beyond all time. He teaches a personal immortality.