Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [356]
But Augustine’s anthropology takes him even further beyond classical dualism. As he leaves man’s freedom, the soul’s integrity, and traditional education behind, he also leaves behind the cosmic architecture of the late Hellenistic universe and the resonances that culture had established between God’s relation to the physical universe and the soul’s relation to the body. No longer, for Augustine, is the human being a miniature map of the cosmos. That world, with its hairline fractures between orders of being and its twin fault lines dividing man, neatly, between soul and body, could not speak to the infinitely more complicated man of Augustinian anthropology-the man through whose soul ran the ancient fault line arising from the sin of Adam.97
With his doctrine of the embodied fulfillment of time, Augustine avoids the Greek philosophical notion that the soul merely discorporates and finds its final fulfillment. There is an immortal soul but it will be punished at death. Augustine never sees a return to the body as a return to bodily pleasures in the apocalyptic end, as would a Zoroastrian or a Jew (or a Muslim). All earthly pleasure is purged away. It is the body of an angel to which the faithful return, to contemplate God more completely.
The result is an interesting synthesis: The soul is immortal but only in the intermediate state. At the last judgment, it shall be judged again. Only the elect shall return to the perfected body at the end of time. There, it is most fully itself for the soul is not fully an individual. The synthesis is, in a way, a systematic description of the pictures of the last judgment in the Christian apocrypha, combining a notion of a soul that survives death with a final judgment.
This synthesis may not be as satisfactory intellectually to us as is the synthesis of Gregory. (If the soul is not fully individual, then it is not fully the same as the original person on earth.) But we live in a different world than Augustine. Augustine represented the forceful partnership of the civil authority with the church and provided the synthesis most in line with the desired, new unification of the Christian Roman Empire. That is part of the importance of Augustine; the church seized upon his thought because it so thoroughly supported the orthodox position. The state seized upon his thought because it gave it the justification to demand higher allegiances from its inhabitants. But minority groups not part of the Christian synthesis, like the Jews, were forced into very subservient roles. Many were forced out, murdered, or converted and eventually left the territory controlled by Roman Christendom. Those who remained were constantly stripped of their rights as individuals and communities.
In her chapter entitled “The Politics of Paradise,” Elaine Pagels summarizes Augustine’s effect on church tradition by the articulation of a strong doctrine of Original Sin:
Instead of the freedom of the will and humanity’s original royal dignity, Augustine emphasizes humanity’s enslavement to sin. Humanity is sick, suffering, and helpless, irreparably damaged by the fall, for that “Original Sin,” Augustine insists, involved nothing else than Adam’s prideful attempt to establish his own autonomous self-government. Astonishingly, Augustine’s radical views prevailed, eclipsing for future generations of western Christians the consensus of more than three centuries of Christian tradition.98
Personally, Augustine gave up his longtime mistress, with whom he had fathered children; then he gave up a very promising Christian marriage with a socially prominent