Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [206]
RASC: Apocalypticism and the Immortality of the Soul Compared
IN APOCALYPTICISM, the heavenly journey accomplishes many things but it can be summarized as confirming that God’s cosmos does indeed operate on moral principles, even though the enemies of God and the oppressors of the sect may appear to be powerful and arrogant. The expected end will arrive with its attendant resurrection of the dead and judgment of sinners, though there are no specific texts in the Hebrew Scripture until Daniel that describe resurrection in detail. The visionary himself in his altered state becomes a kind of eschatological verifier, going to heaven to see what is in it. We must not forget that the ecstatic journey to heaven is also a widely experienced and fully legitimate part of the classical heritage.31
The way in which altered states of consciousness verified the notion of the immortal soul was different, though the effect was similar. The notion of the “psyche” as the “essence” of a person was archaic in Greece, though we have seen that there were several competing notions for the location of life. In the philosophical tradition, it slowly and progressively took over as the religious formulation of human identity. For Plato and Aristotle the soul contained a number of faculties, including keeping the body from decomposing and serving as the seat of intellect. For us all these are properly corporeal faculties, explained by various faculties of the body, leaving us with a sense that the soul refers only to our psychic lives. But for the early philosophers there were much wider issues, as Erich Rohde makes clear:
What the Ionic philosophers in connection with the rest of their cosmology had to say about the soul of man did not for all its striking novelty bring them into direct conflict with religious opinion. Philosophy and religion used the same words to denote totally different things; it could surprise no one if different things were said about quite different objects.
According to the popular view, which finds expression in Homer, and with which, in spite of their very different estimate of the relative values of body and soul, the religious theory of the Orphics and other theologi also agreed-according to this view the “psyche” was regarded as a unique creature of combined spiritual and material nature that, whatever it may have come from, now dwells within man and there, as his second self, carries on its separate existence, making itself felt when the visible self loses consciousness in dream, swoon, or ecstasy…. In the same way, the moon and stars become visible when no longer obscured by the brighter light of the sun. It was already implied in the conception itself that this double of mankind, which could be detached from him temporarily, had a separate existence of its own; it was no very great step from this to the idea that in death, which is simply the permanent separation of the visible man from the invisible, the latter did not perish, but only then became free and able to live by and for itself.32
Similar claims are made about the soul as are being made about apocalyptic ascent, though they provide evidence for a different view of the afterlife. There would have been no need to validate and justify new texts, which promise resurrection as resurrection was not a concept to be proven. Once the soul could be shown from experience to separate from the body and return, as in an ecstatic trance, then the rest of the Platonic theory also gained probability.
Our Accounts of Consciousness and the Soul
THE PLATONIC proof for the immortality of the soul depends on