Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [143]
Plato gives the notion of judgment after death an enormous boost. Evidently, Plato was more positively impressed with Orphism than he suggests in his satire in the Republic. But note how much the issue of theodicy underlies his imaginative reconstruction. Just as the Persians used dualism to moralize their social universe into a cosmic ethical struggle, so too Plato moralized the universe by coding matter and form as antithetical opposites. However, by valorizing the body as the principle of identity, the Persians were affirming that sexuality and other bodily pleasures were of primary importance in this world, as well as the next. The Platonists, for their part, took the converse perspective. They said that sexuality is something to be left behind in death and ignored as much as was prudent during life, as a way of perfecting the mind for its higher purposes. Perhaps Plato said this as a corrective to the immense sexuality in which Plato’s world was drenched, as if to say that Plato only stressed “the golden mean.” Later Platonists became sure that all contact with sexuality was bad for the meditative life. Sexuality’s negative effects on ethics became more and more palpable until asceticism was the only intelligent lifestyle. But that was long after Plato.
Plato was no democrat, but ironically the Platonic innovation on the conception of afterlife tended to democratize the afterlife even more. Instead of the rare heroic term of short mortal fame, followed by eternal exile in Hades, as was sought by Odysseus, each person has immortality in his grasp by intellectual development. Everyone’s soul is, by following the intellectual life, making progress toward the goal of remaining in elysium, and can take several lifetimes to do it if necessary. Each life contributes to that progress. As we have seen, certain philosophically enlightened individuals could reduce the cycle of rebirths by living well as philosophers. But we all must take the same road to arrive at the same heavenly bliss. This, no doubt, would have surprised Socrates somewhat, as he had nothing but contempt for Athenian democracy. Evidently, they were opposed to the educated elite that he favored. Ultimately, this opposition may have cost him his life, though it was something he donated willingly.
It is precisely the problem of theodicy that occupies first place in the story of Er, the Pamphylian, mentioned in the Republic. Er proves the truth of Socrates’ reasoning by personal experience because he returned alive after twelve days of death and reports on the fortunes of souls in the hereafter.
“It is not, let me tell you,” said I, “The tale to Alcinous told that I shall unfold, but the tale of a warrior bold, Er, the son of Armenius, by race a Pamphylian. He once upon a time was slain in battle and when the corpses were taken up on the tenth day already decayed, was found intact, and having been brought home, at the moment of his funeral, on the twelfth day, as he lay upon the pyre, revived, and after coming to life related what, he said he had seen in the world beyond.” (Resp. 10.614 Bff.)45
Er then relates how he was chosen to be the messenger (angelos) to humanity to tell us what awaits in the other world. The story which he relates is one of punishments and rewards for those unrequited during their own life-those who had committed great wrongs were condemned to ten times the punishment in measures of one hundred years. The structure of this heavenly journey is clear. Those punished go into the earth. Those rewarded go to heaven, just as we have come to believe in the West. The central