THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL
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This is Part 9 of an 11-Part Series
Extracted from Chapter Two of my book The Seven Gates of Soul
Previous posts in this series include:
The Fear of Death in Early Cultures
The Fear of the Soul’s Journey After Death
Toward a Cyclical Conception of Death as a Part of Life
The Cyclical Worldview and the Release From Suffering
Extracting the Myth of Immortality From Its Cyclical Roots
The Embrace of Personal Immortality in the East
The Quest for Immortality in Early Chinese Shamanism
Plato's Influence on Western Concepts of Immortality
The belief in a more personal form of immortality was given tremendous philosophical momentum in the West four centuries before the birth of Christ in the teachings of the Greek philosopher, Plato. Plato taught within a couple centuries of the time frame that the Upanishads and the Tao Te Ching were being written, thus signaling a synchronistic global shift toward an embrace of personal immortality that took different forms in different cultures over the course of two to three centuries. In Egyptian tradition, the concept of immortality was rooted in a mythological association of the ruling pharaoh with the immortality of Horus – an association that hardly applied to the common Egyptian. Even after the ritual procedures for guaranteeing immortality became more widely available, immortality was still construed as the privilege of the few who could afford it. It was through Plato’s indirect adaptation of Egyptian ideas that immortality became understood in the West as inherent in the very nature of the soul itself, and no longer something that needed to be attained. This development marked a huge paradigm shift from which, in my opinion, we have yet to recover.
Building on arguments put forth by Pythagoras and Socrates, and influenced heavily by the Orphic tradition, Plato considered the soul to be of divine origin, preexistent (existing before it entered the body), and immortal (Norman Melchert, The Great Conversation: An Historical Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 143-144). Plato did not deny that the soul was bound to the body for the duration of this life, but he felt this association to be a burden that would thankfully dissolve at death. Like the Orphics, he considered the body "an impediment which... prevents the soul from attaining to truth...” (p. 110). In advising his students about how best to handle the soul’s experience of embodiment, Plato suggested that the soul should indulge its bodily appetites to the minimum extent necessary for the continuance of life, while constantly monitoring the body’s pull upon the soul through the use of reason. The true philosopher, as Plato put it in the Phaedo, made his life a practice for death because he knew that after death, the soul would be free of its imprisonment in the body and would return to the realm of Spirit from whence it had come (pp. 103-116).
According to Plato, there were four arguments (attributed to Socrates and set forth in the Phaedo) for thinking that the soul survives death (116-152). First, like the plant-based cultures of prehistory, he observed that the processes of nature are cyclical, and reasoned that this also applied to human life and death. Second, Plato believed that what we call "learning" was really a process of remembering, and through circular reasoning argued that if so, we had to have been here before and would probably be here again. Third, since the soul could perceive the Ideas, or Forms – Truth, Beauty, the Good, that in his theory underlay all of manifest creation, and were unchanging and eternal – then the soul had to exist on the same level of reality that they did. Fourth, since Plato considered the opposites to be antithetical and utterly distinct from one another, he concluded that the soul, which brings life to the body, could not participate in death.
Of course, it is Spirit that brings life to the body, not soul, but this is exactly the confusion that Plato passed on to the emerging western religious traditions of his day. Soul, as we are discussing it here, is the life of Spirit within the body, not the source of its own existence. While Spirit is every bit as eternal and immortal as Plato argued, the life of Spirit within the body – the embodied soul – is a temporary, mortal condition.
The eager intermingling of cultures around the Mediterranean sea, during the centuries preceding and following the birth of Christ, allowed Greek philosophy in general and Plato’s ideas about the immortal soul in particular to assert a profound influence upon the development of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought. From the mid 2nd century CE, Jewish and Christian thinkers began articulating their ideas in the broader, more contemporary intellectual context provided by Greek philosophy (James L. Christian, The Wisdom Seekers: Great Philosophers of the Western World, Vol. 1, pp. 213-216). Stoic philosophers emphasizing duty and ascetic practices appealed to some early Christians, but there were also problems with the Stoic belief in corporeality (i.e. the idea that both God and the soul were bodies of refined substance) and its embrace of pagan pantheism. Plato’s ideas were much more in keeping with early Christian thought, and provided the philosophical foundation for Christianity that would lend credence to its influence within academic and other spheres of power throughout the Greco-Roman empire. Plato’s influence also spread to the Muslim world from 800-1000 CE, when Islamic scholars translated a number of dialogues and Neoplatonic treatises into the Arabic languages ("Philosophical Schools and Doctrines," Encyclopedia Brittanica, Vol. 25, pp. 903-904).