I. Interest Centered in Origin, Nature, and Destiny of Soul
1. SUPREME ATTEMPTS TO INTERPRET RIDDLE OF LIFE
Like Socrates before him, Plato’s interest concerning man centered in the origin, nature, and destiny of the soul. His own stream had its inspiration from the Socratic fountain. But he could not rest until he had developed those concepts, and had given them life, form, and direction. He felt that he must meet the prevailing skepticism and unravel the secrets of the grave—according, of course, to his pagan concepts.CFF1 560.1
And in Plato the soul’s dignity, vitality, the independence of the body, the divine origin of all, propitiation, judgment, and moral reward for all surely reach their loftiest pagan expression. As a result the Platonic dialogues reveal the supreme attempt of sheer unaided human reason to interpret the riddle of life and immortality.CFF1 560.2
With Plato, however, philosophy took on a remoteness from practical concerns, and became absorbed in pure intellectualism, divorced from everyday life. In this he differed from Socrates, who was a man of the people. But Plato stood aloof from the world, “absorbed in transcendental dreams and abstractions,” as someone has put it. He was an aristocrat, with disdain for the opinion of the masses. So he left the opportunities of public life that would inhibit freedom of thought and action.CFF1 560.3
2. IMPACT ON JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
Though Plato was a pre-Christian pagan philosopher, beyond question no single man did so much to change the religious concept of the multitudes beyond his day, first in Jewry, then in time in Christendom, first in Catholic circles, and finally in Protestant ranks. He was more eminent than either Socrates or Aristotle in creating and setting the immortality pattern of the future and in redirecting the current of human thought concerning the nature and destiny of the soul.CFF1 560.4
He was the inheritor of the old mythical concepts of Homer and Hesiod, and of the Orphic searchings into the mysteries of the universe, wherein men were considered emanations of the deity. And he drafted freely upon the metaphysical speculations of the lyric poets. But under Plato, theogony became theology, and speculation became dogma.CFF1 561.1
Plato’s writings exerted a tremendous influence not only upon Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero, and Plutarch, and as noted on Philo and the Neoplatonists, but especially on early Church Fathers like Origen. He also profoundly affected Augustine. As a consequence, throughout the Middle Ages, Platonic concepts achieved a permanent place in Latin Christianity.CFF1 561.2
The Renaissance led to a revival of interest in Plato. In the sixteenth century there was steady Platonic emphasis on religion in England, under John Colet, John Fisher, and Thomas More. And in the seventeenth century the Cambridge Platonists urged the return of theology to the Platonic philosophy platform as an antidote to “controversial aridities” of contemporary Calvinism and the secularism of Thomas Hobbs.CFF1 561.3
Strong Platonic influences were also present among various English theologians of the nineteenth century, such as Benjamin Jowett, F. D. Maurice, and Charles Kingsley. On the other hand. Protestant orthodoxy on the Continent, with its distrust of natural reason, was generally hostile to Platonism.CFF1 561.4
It should be added that Plato’s twenty-four works range from 22 pages to 418, in their modern printed form. The bulk of his writings are in dialogue form, the Athenian mode of discussion, often setting forth Socrates as the principal spokesman, with various pupils or critics taking part in the discussion — the dialogue usually being named after a leading pupil. These we will examine.CFF1 561.5
3. BACKGROUND AND ESSENCE OF PLATO’S IMMORTAL-SOULISM
Plato was definitely influenced by the Orphic Mysteries and Pythagorean and Zoroastrian concepts. These all met, and were fused into his complex doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the distinction of soul and body, and the identification of soul with mind. This placed his immortality thesis on a new footing.CFF1 562.1
The Platonic doctrine is first and last a doctrine of the persistence of the soul. According to Plato, immortality is a quality inherent in man, a consequence of his nature. All of Plato’s logic and imagination were spent in proof of this one postulate—at whatever cost to other concepts. He sustained it by arguing the soul’s desire and capacity for knowledge, its simple and invisible nature (then its threefold and complicated nature), its essential and invisible character, the power of reminiscence, the “circle of nature,” and suchlike.CFF1 562.2
With this came the inevitable and inseparable dogma of transmigration—the existence of the soul in a particular body as a punishment for the sins of a previous incarnation. And the doom of its sins in the present body was its descent into other bodies and the postponement of its final deliverance. To Plato immortality and pre-existence were absolutely inseparable.CFF1 562.3
4. PRESENT LIFE ONE EPISODE IN ENDLESS SEQUENCE
Since the soul is immortal, our present life is, he held, only one episode in its endless history. If this be so, the soul must long ago have learned everything, and needs only to be “put in mind” of something temporarily forgotten. This was his doctrine of recollection. Knowledge is recollection—remembering what the soul knew before birth. Thus:CFF1 562.4
“The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue and about everything” (81c). CFF1 562.5
Truth, Plato averred, is eternal. And since truth exists only as apprehended by the mind, therefore the mind, or soul, must be eternal. In Meno, Plato acknowledges the immortality thesis as springing from poetic myth. That is attested from the way it is introduced by the expression “poets and priests”—“which is the regular way of introducing a myth.” CFF1 563.1
5. THREE MAIN ARGUMENTS OF INDEFEASIBLE IMMORTALITY
We may summarize Plato’s three main arguments for the immortality of the soul as the postulates of:CFF1 563.2
a. Rebirth—Living souls come from the dead, and the dead from the living. The soul born into this world is one that has come back from the other world to which the soul goes at death. The body is simply the instrument that the soul uses while here—so there is a double journey.CFF1 563.3
b. Recollection—Knowledge of a former stage of existence is retained by the soul after the death of the body in this cyclical recurrence. The soul was fully intelligent before it was embodied. Therefore the soul is something divine, and in no danger of dissipation. Indefeasible immortality and indestructibility (as well as pre-existence) follow as a matter of course.CFF1 563.4
c. The “Idea” concept—The keynote of Platonic philosophy is this theory of “ideas,” that reality belongs not to the individual material thing (a tree, a man, this book), but to the antecedent idea of the tree, man, or book. The tangible things are, he held, but fleeting and perishable, mere copies of the “form” or “idea,” which abides in changeless unity forever. And to recover this is the sole object of knowledge.CFF1 563.5
But at best Plato’s contentions were only a surmise, a hope, a conjecture that there must be something beyond the grave—at least for the souls of a noble few. Dr. R. H. Charles, also stresses the important fact that— “the immortality of the soul never became a part of the national [Greek] creed, but remained the peculiar property of individual theologians and philosophers.” CFF1 563.6
Generality of acceptance was to come to certain groups later. But it was not shared by many contemporaries. Now let us trace the unfolding story.CFF1 564.1