Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [142]
His description is more apt than he could possibly have imagined, as we would be like fish out of water if we were to but stick our heads above the tiny precious oxygenated atmosphere in which we live. We would see worlds that were until lately beyond our imaginings; but they would impress us with the value of our endangered, tiny environment in which we live our precarious existence, no bigger than a speck of dust when placed in astronomical distances that characterize our universe. This was not what Plato saw when he rose to these heights. From the perspective of the eternal heavens where the ideas reside, the corruptible earth is a puny failure and deserves nothing but our fond farewell. Indeed, the Hellenistic world was convinced that the hereafter would be far happier than the world we live in. In this, it was rather closer to what the mass of humanity has believed about our short and painful lives over the millennia.
Actually many Greeks came to believe that life was not worth the effort, a sentiment more poignant when we realize it was the aristocracy with their rare and exquisite leisure who said this, not the poor serf or slave whose life was constant drudgery. Only the privileged have privilege of being bored. Sophocles proclaimed that it is best never to have lived:
Never to have been born at all:
None can conceive a loftier thought!
And second-best is this: Once born,
Quickly to return to the dust. (Oedipus at Colonus, 1218ff.)
Though this was a cynical statement of a man whose life had been a terrible trial, it was not his final thoughts on mortality, it came to fit the mood of late antiquity more and more. Plato felt that the soul would be better off in the realm of the ideas than on this imperfect earth, with all its tribulation. In the Phaedrus, Plato suggested that humans are reincarnated for the purposes of discipline, askesis, in order to purify the soul by affliction. In the Symposium, Plato described the process of ascent as one of intellection, learning by progressive stages of abstraction, to appreciate abstract good, in and of itself. By this process of intellection, and the ascetic processes necessary to perfect it, the soul ascends to heaven again and, with luck, never has to be reincarnated again. All of this presumes that life is a vale of tears to be transcended. Even in the most comfortable life we are still confronted with death, separation from loved ones, un-happiness, and unfulfillment.
After Plato, the Greek world took the notion that the isles of the blessed are in the sky seriously. If the soul is immortal, it must return to the immortal realm. When Socrates says his famous last words: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius, make this offering to him and do not forget,” he was stating that he was healed from the sickness of life; he needed to give a thank-offering to the god of health for having been healed. True health lies in correctly grooming the deathless soul, not in overly coddling the hapless body. Physical education was important only to maintain a neat house for the soul.
According to Plato, there is a kind of judgment of the dead, as he relates in the Phaedrus. Souls are first incarnated, and:
… on the termination of their first life, brought to trial; and, according to their sentence, some go to the prison-houses beneath the earth, to suffer for their sins, while others, by virtue of their trial, are borne lightly upwards to some celestial spot, where they pass their days in the manner worthy of the life they have lived in their mortal form. But in the thousandth year both divisions come back again to share and choose their second life, and they select that which they severally please. And then it is that a human soul passes into the life of a beast, and from a beast who was once a man the soul comes back into a man again. For the soul which has never seen the truth at all can never enter