Justice Comes to The Afterlife

 

From Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife - Bart D. Ehrman

Socrates (470 BC – 399 BC)

“For let me tell you, gentlemen, that to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not. It is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a person, but people dread it as though it were the greatest evil, and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable.” (Apology 29a–b) 

Socrates goes on to give his own view of what happens at death: “Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything, or, as we are told, it is really a change—a migration of the soul from this place to another” (Apology 40c). 

Socrates doesn’t think either option is fearful—quite the contrary: both are attractive and to be embraced. On one hand, if at death the person becomes unconscious, it will be like a very deep, dreamless sleep. And who does not enjoy that? In that case “death must be a marvelous gain”—the best rest and relaxation anyone has ever had (Apology 40c). 

If it is the alternative, the removal to the realm of the dead where others also reside, “what greater blessing could there be than this?”

“I am willing to die ten times over if this account is true” (Apology 41a). Moreover, as he points out with a twinkle in his eye, he assumes that in this other world no one will ever be executed for crimes against the state, since “they are now immortal for the rest of time, if what we are told is true” (Apology 41c).

If it is true that death brings you into the presence of those who came before (and he is not at all sure it is; in fact, he rather doubts it), then that would be a tremendous good, and death is nothing at all to fear but something to embrace. And for Socrates, the alternative is good as well—a deep and lasting sleep with no pains, worries, or concerns, nothing to bring any disturbance of any kind. 

For Socrates it is obvious that, since only the body is destined to perish, the soul is the more important of the two, requiring by far the greater care and attention.

When people die, Socrates says, their guardian spirits take them to the place of judgment, where they undergo the “necessary experiences” as long as required to rid them of their impurities. Souls that are impure are shunned by everyone in this other world and wander about “in utter desolation until certain times have passed.” But those who are pure and sober enjoy “divine company”

Socrates then goes into detail about various postmortem fates reserved for different kinds of persons.  (Phaedo 113d – 114c) People who have lived a “neutral life” -  that is not being overly righteous or wicked - go to a place of purification, the Acherusian Lake, , where the are both punished for their sins and rewarded for their good deeds. Others who are great sinners, judged to be incurable, such as murderers, are sent off to Tartarus, never to be released. Those who have committed lesser sins, for example, violence against their parents. I sent it to Tartarus for a year before being regurgitated into the Acherusian Lake, where they shout out to those they have killed or harmed.  “Only if, and when their victims agree, can they be released from their torment. Finally, those who have live lives of surpassing holiness are released at death and pass up to the pure realm above. “And of these such as have purified themselves sufficiently by philosophy live thereafter altogether without bodies”

After detailing the myth, Socrates, hedges again; “Of course no reasonable person ought to insist that the facts are exactly as I have described them, but that either this or something very like it is a true account of our souls and their future habitations.” That is, his description largely figurative. 

What is literal is the meaning conveyed by the myth?  One should live a life of virtue, and that will bring its own reward. Wickedness leads only to misery.

  

Plato (428 BC – 348 BC)

In the centuries between Homer and Virgil, more than any other thinker and writer, it was Plato who developed the notion of postmortem justice for both the virtuous and the wicked.

It was Plato who most influenced later thinking, leading ultimately to the views of heaven and hell that developed centuries later in the Christian tradition.

“If what is immortal is also imperishable, it is impossible that at the approach of death soul should cease to be. It follows from what we have already said that it cannot admit death, or be dead…” (Phaedo 106b).

“Then it is as certain as anything can be, Cebes, that soul is immortal and imperishable, and that our souls will really exist in the next world” (Phaedo 106e–107a).

Whatever we think of death—whether it brings extinction or a life beyond—we do not need to face it with terror. Plato’s ultimate point is that there is nothing to fear.

 

The Stuff of the Soul

Why can’t Odysseus hug his mother? It is because the stuff of the soul is far more refined than the coarse stuff that makes up the human body. This makes sense even in our post-Cartesian understanding of “stuff.” Your hand is firmer “stuff” than either air or water, and so can pass through them.

In Plato’s book Phaedo, the coarse material of the body is said to die but the refined soul is immortal and so lives on. And so Socrates says at one point that death is nothing other than “the release of the soul from the body”

What gives each one of us his being is nothing else but his soul, whereas the body is no more than a shadow which keeps us company. So ’tis well said of the deceased that the corpse is but a ghost; the real man—the undying thing called the soul—departs to give account to the gods of another world.

A Paradigm Shift of Who A Person “Really” Is

For Homer, the “real person” was the embodied flesh; the departed soul was simply a shade, the shadow of a person. For Plato it is the soul that is the real person; the body is the gross material that is to be sloughed off and left behind. 

Plato admits that his tales about the afterlife are in fact myths: stories meant to convey deeper truths. All his myths move toward the same point: the soul that is virtuous is rewarded and the one that is wicked is punished. The tales he tells about the afterlife are therefore meant to convey something he thinks is true in the present life. People should live virtuously, concerned not for the pleasures of the body but for the good of the soul.

Plato’s “Myth of Er” is about a man named Er, a brave warrior from Pamphylia, who is slain in battle but who revives twelve days later on his funeral pyre. After coming back he tells his near-death experience. When Er died, his soul went from his body and came with a large company of others to a mysterious region that had two openings side by side in the sky and two others in the earth. Judges were sitting between these openings and were sending souls either up above through one of the holes in the sky or down below though a hole in the earth, depending on whether they were just or unjust.

After the souls had spent seven days in the meadow telling each other what they had experienced during the preceding millennium, they were taken to another place where the divine Fates resided. All souls now were to be sent back to earth to live again in new incarnations, as either humans or beasts. Lots were cast and according to which was drawn, the soul could decide its next life. Some souls chose to become the wealthiest and most powerful people, not realizing, apparently, as rather slow learners, that this would lead to punishment later. Others were thoroughly disgusted with the possibilities of human life and chose to become animals. A full range of choices was possible.

It should be clear that Plato does not literally believe the myth he has just told any more than he believes there was a historical Er who actually had a near-death experience. He calls the tale a “fine story” and admits that anyone listening to him will probably think the story is a “myth.”

He is using an understanding of the nature of the afterlife that would have been perfectly believable to a Greek audience in the fourth century BCE.

  

Epicurus (341 BC – 270 BC)

 Epicurus was ancient Greek philosopher and sage who founded Epicureanism, a highly influential school of philosophy.  He was an atomist and materialist.  His materialism led him to religious skepticism and a general attack on superstition and divine intervention.

He wrote:

“So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist.” (Diogenes Laertius, book 10, 125)

 For people who enjoy thinking about the glories of the hereafter, these notions will not seem to be particularly good news. But they are especially intended for those who fear the afterlife and live in dread of it. Epicurus insists there is nothing to fear. You won’t feel a thing and will not even know that you do not feel a thing.

 

Virgil (70 BC – 18 BC)

Publius Vergilius Maro usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. 

In the Aeneid, the characters Aeneas and the Sibyl are allowed passage across the Styx in the underworld. They pass the three-headed hound from hell, Cerberus, and encounter those who have died badly—that is, those who passed away in infancy, suicides, and lovers who died of broken hearts.

Now, in Virgil’s telling, most of the souls in Hades are either being punished for their sins or rewarded for their upright lives.

Aeneas and the Sibyl come to a fork in the road. The right path leads to Elysium, the place of eternal happiness, but “the left-hand path torments / the wicked, leading down to Tartarus, path to doom”

If one departs life without making amends for whatever sins have been committed, there is no turning back and are punished for them.

But some avoid the underworlds torments, and those who do so can expect glorious ecstasies 

Aeneas and the Sibyl find people engaged in sport, dance, singing, and feasting. Among them are soldiers killed while fighting valiantly for their country, pure priests, faithful poets, and “those we remember well for the good they did mankind”.

Then Virgil departs from Homer by introducing an innovation. Most of the souls in the underworld are destined to live again. Virgil endorses the idea of reincarnation.

Aeneas’s father tells him these are “the spirits / owed a second body by the Fates” (Aeneid, Book 6, lines 823–24). They are allowed to drink from the river Lethe (i.e., Forgetfulness: those who drink from it lose their memory) and are set free from their cares. But before that can happen, they have to pay for the sins they committed in their bodies.

There are obviously numerous similarities between the voyages to the afterlife of Homer’s Odysseus and Virgil’s Aeneas, but one cannot help but be struck especially by the impressive differences. Some six or seven centuries after the Homeric epics, Virgil does not populate Hades with shades that all experience the same boring and pleasure-free existence. He writes of hellish torments for some and heavenly glories for others.

There were obvious problems with the concept of Hades imagined in the writings of Homer. If everyone has the same fate after death—whether noble or lowly, righteous or wicked, valiant or cowardly—then where is justice? Doesn’t this life, in the end, make any sense? Isn’t good behavior to be rewarded and evil punished?