In a letter to the author twenty-five years ago, James Parton wrote: “Read carefully over the dialogue, Phaedo. You will see what you will see: the whole Christian system and the entire dream of the contemplative monk.”
Phaedo deals chiefly with the soul—its nature and destiny. The following quotations are from the translation of Henry Cary, M.A., of Oxford:
Death is defined by Plato as “the separation of the soul from the body.”
“Can the soul, which is invisible, and which goes to another place like itself, excellent, pure, and invisible, and therefore truly called the invisible world, to the presence of a good and wise God, (whither if God will, my soul also must shortly go), can this soul of ours, I ask, being such and of such a nature, when separated from the body, be immediately dispersed and destroyed, as most men assert? Far from it.”
“If that which is immortal is imperishable, it is impossible for the soul to perish, when death approaches it.”
“When, therefore, death approaches a man, the mortal part of him, as it appears, dies, but the immortal part departs safe and uncorrupted, having withdrawn itself from death.”
After death, Plato says, the souls are conducted to a place where they “receive sentence and then proceed to Hades.”
If the soul “arrives at the place where the others are, impure, ... every one shuns it, and will neither be its fellow traveler or guide, but it wanders about oppressed with every kind of helplessness.... But the soul which has passed through life with purity and moderation, having obtained the gods for its fellow travelers and guides, settles each in the place suited to it.”
“If the soul is immortal, it requires our care not only for the present time, which we call life, but for all time; and the danger would now appear to be dreadful, if one should neglect it. For if death were a deliverance from everything, it would be a great gain for the wicked, when they die, to be delivered at the same time from the body, and from their vices together with the soul; but now, since it appears to be immortal, it can have no other refuge from evils, nor safety, except by becoming as good and wise as possible.”
Christ, it is claimed, “brought immortality to light.” Yet Phaedo was written nearly four centuries before Christ came.