Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [141]
For Socrates, humans can even be reincarnated as animals: “Those, for example, who have carelessly practiced gluttony, violence, and drunkenness are likely to join the company of donkeys or of similar animals” (81e). Surely Apuleius’ Metamorphosis, which relates such a transformation in detail, was partly inspired by these lines. Almost all Church Fathers (excepting Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) denied that the soul has more than one earthly life to live because it seemed to blunt individual moral responsibility for any specific action.
The issue of justice is very much the central concern of the last part of the Phaedo. For Socrates, proper thinking and behavior creates its own reward; improper thinking and behavior creates its own punishment. Only by proper thinking can one gain the reward-which is stopping the chain of the soul’s continual rebirths into this world. In a sense, life was considered punishment, full of pain and suffering, compared eternally to living as a disembodied soul (which can suffer no pain) in the afterlife. So the process of self-perfection implies a justice that operates as a pure mechanism of nature-a moral universe, in which human reward and punishment are built in, very like karma. “Metempsychosis,” the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul from body to body, is obviously the result of penalties in past lives which must be reconciled for the soul to find rest in the Elysian fields. It does not imply suffering after death. Indeed, Plato appeared to be somewhat ambivalent on the notion of retribution. In the Republic, Plato represents a kind of Orphic doctrine of retribution by means of Adeimantus:
Musaeus and his son (Eumolpus) endow the just with gifts from heaven of an even more spirited sort. They take the righteous to another world and provide them with a banquet of the saints, where they sit for all time drinking with garlands on their heads, as if virtue could not be more nobly rewarded than by an eternity of intoxication…. When they have sung the praises of justice in that strain, with more to the same effect, they proceed to plunge the sinners and unrighteous men into a sort of mud-pool in the other world, and they set them to carry water in a sieve. (2.363 c-d)44
Although this is a satire on the teaching of Musaeus and Eumolpus, who were the legendary teachers of Orphism, one must not think that Plato completely denied any rewards and punishments after death. To the contrary, he suggests that justice and retribution do exist, though he can not demonstrate it with the same self-assurance as he achieves in proving the immortality of the soul. The process of the soul’s perfection is itself a reward while reincarnation is punishment enough. Rather, the particularly graphic notion of being immersed in mud seems to be more like what Plato thought about life in this world.
At the end of the Phaedo, Socrates narrates his own understanding of how humans can come to this wider perspective on life, through a heavenly ascent to the outer limit of our world:
Our experience is the same: living in a certain hollow of the earth, we believe that we live upon its surface; the air we call the heaven, as if the stars made their way through it; this too is the same; because of our weakness and slowness we are not able to make our way to the upper limit of the air; if anyone got to this upper limit, if anyone came to it or reached it on wings and his head rose above it, then just as fish on rising from the sea see things in our region, he would see things there and, if his nature could endure to contemplate them, he would know that there is the true