by Stephen Cave
This Athenian philosopher, working some four hundred years before Jesus preached, developed a theory of the soul that was to prove very attractive to the Christian mind. Plato was the first person in the West to clearly defend the claim that the soul was the essential part of us—the true self—and that it was by nature immortal. In keeping with his broader philosophy, he argued that the physical body was only an imperfect imitation of the true person. Like other physical things, the body was subject to change and, ultimately, destruction. The soul, on the other hand, belonged to the unchanging realm of the divine—it was incorruptible and therefore eternal.
However, this heavenly immortality still had to be earned. In a view that sounds to modern ears remarkably Eastern, Plato suggested unworthy souls would be reincarnated into new bodies. In order to attain a more glorious immortality, one had to do what Plato did: contemplate the true, the good and the beautiful. Developing your intellectual side in this way strengthened your soul and brought it closer to the divine, ultimately allowing it to soar free from bodily existence.
Plato brought the idea of the soul out of the obscurity of the magico-religious mystery cult and into the realm of rational discourse. His belief in the soul was not the product of some mystical experience but was a philosophical theory, based on reasons and arguments available to all. By virtue of having a soul, each of us, he claimed, was intrinsically immortal: no complex rites or miracles were required to make us live on or rise again.
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FOR many later defenders of the Christian faith, this account of immortality was irresistible. We saw previously that early Christianity depended for its success on the promise of the physical resurrection of the dead. The dominant view in the Mediterranean lands at the time was that people had a soul, but few were so confident as the Greek philosopher that it would fly up to join the divine; most expected instead the joyless underworld portrayed in Homer. They were therefore very receptive when St. Paul and his fellow missionaries promised the imminent arrival of a paradise on earth, which believers would enjoy as fully and physically as they do the pleasures of this life.
But that paradise did not prove to be quite so imminent as Paul had hoped. As one generation of martyrs followed another, the graves filled up without a Second Coming in sight. Christian thinkers were therefore challenged to come up with a plausible account of where the dead were supposed to be, what they were doing while waiting for the End Times to come and what would ensure that the risen faithful were really the same people as those who died. As we have seen, these proved to be hard questions to answer. But the promise of the afterlife was so central to Christian teaching that it could not be allowed to stand or fall with the problematic Resurrection Narrative. Some shoring up was therefore needed, and Plato held the answer.
The process was a natural one. The missionary zeal of the early believers, with their promise of eternity in paradise, proved enormously powerful. They won so many followers that over the course of the fourth century, Christianity became first accepted, then encouraged, then finally the established religion of the Roman Empire. No longer did the new faith have to fight to distinguish itself from the Greek and Egyptian mystery cults or the sects of other apocalyptic preachers. Now Christianity was in a position of power from which it could afford to pick and choose the best insights of the pagans to strengthen its own story, and converts from the intellectual classes of Greece and Rome brought their formidable learning to bear on the theological conundrums of the day.
The most famous of these converts was the towering figure of St. Augustine, a well-to-do Roman citizen and highly educated philosopher in the classical tradition. As a young man he explored a number of religions and philosophies and led a hedonistic life, famously praying, “Lord, give me chastity and self-restraint, but not yet.” But eventually, under his mother’s guidance, he converted to Christianity in 387 CE, just as it was becoming the official religion of the empire. His genius in applying his philosophical training to Christian doctrine made him probably the most influential theologian in history.
Augustine accepted the biblical story of our bodies physically rising from the earth when the last trumpet sounds, but he believed that we each have a soul too. Both body and soul were essential for a fully human existence, he believed, but—as Plato suggested—the soul was the better part of us, associated with our intellect and conscience. Most importantly, it would live on and preserve our identity after death. Then when the End Times arrived and the graves were opened, the body would rise again to be reunited with the soul; only then could the complete person lead a full afterlife—whether with the saints in heaven or burning forever in the fiery lakes of hell.
Although Augustine found room for the body in keeping with Christian tradition, he favored the Platonic ideal of an eternity of intellectual contemplation over fleshly pleasures. Body and soul would be reunited, but there was little bodily fun to be had in his idea of heaven. Women would be given back their bodies, complete with all their female parts, but he believed that these would not arouse lust in heaven’s menfolk—rather, on seeing such beauty, men would applaud the wisdom and goodness of God. After his conversion, Augustine himself had become ascetic and celibate, and this was what he promoted as properly Christian.
Plato’s theories rescued Christianity from the problems of the resurrection-only narrative: the persistence of the same single soul from the living person, through bodily death, to the resurrected person ensured that it really was the same person throughout. There was no risk that it would be a luckless replica who was being punished on the sinner’s behalf.
The combined Resurrection/Soul Narrative remains the official doctrine of many Christian denominations, in particular the Catholic Church, defended by theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages to the German professor Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. But in reality, the importance of the resurrection element of the story slowly withered—if souls of the departed are already experiencing their postmortem fate, whether in heaven, hell or purgatory, then being rejoined with their bodies seems at most a formality. For most Christians today, the soul alone is the route to immortality.
THE SOUL OF OUR CIVILIZATION
THE rise of the soul in Christianity is therefore a fascinating story of how one immortality narrative came to supplement and indeed largely replace another within a single religious movement. Of course, belief in a soul is both older and more widely spread than Christianity alone, and its attractions lie not only in filling in the gaps left by the Resurrection Narrative. Indeed, the appeal of the soul hypothesis runs deep: it speaks to an idea of ourselves as noble, transcendent and unique, an idea that plays strongly to our will to immortality, neatly resolves the Mortality Paradox, and as a consequence has been enormously influential—shaping, as the historians of ideas Raymond Martin and John Barresi put it, “the entire mind-set of Western civilisation.”
The Mortality Paradox arises because we observe objectively that our bodies will eventually fail and die, yet subjectively we cannot conceive of ourselves not existing. We therefore seek belief systems that can explain away the apparent fact of death and permit us to believe that it is not really the end. The Soul Narrative accomplishes this perfectly: it denies that the failing body is the true self, identifying the person instead with exactly that mental life that seems so inextinguishable. For believers in the soul, it is our very capacity to look beyond our corporeal being to imagine different bodies, different times, different worlds and ultimately the divine that proves that our true self must transcend the physical.
The claim that we are each of us fundamentally a soul therefore resolves the Mortality Paradox. But more than that, it connects each of us to what we believe is finest in the universe. For Plato, the soul was that part of us that could partake of truth and beauty in their unchanging reality. For the Christians, it is a spark of God, made in his image and capable of communion with him. This narrative is telling us that we are each par
t divine, something celestial and transcendent. It transforms the Mortality Paradox from a duality in our perception of death into a duality at the heart of our nature: not only do we seem part mortal and part immortal, but also part beast and part angel, part creaturely and part godly. Many poets and thinkers have seen this duality as the very essence of man. And of course, the story tells us that it is the angelic, the godly, the immortal that triumphs.
We saw earlier that ritual could create a sense of union between a person and his or her god and was fundamental to early religion. Such union would be achieved during elaborate rites, which would culminate in the participant experiencing a brief moment of what the anthropologist Ernest Becker called “cosmic significance.” But the Platonic soul idea makes such complex ceremony redundant: it claims that we are by our very nature a spark of the divine and therefore by our very nature immortal. All we must do is live up to this nature—foster this better side of us, whether through contemplating philosophical truths or loving our neighbors.
This is a very gratifying story. It is a fine and effective antidote to the fear of death. But it also tackles the additional anxieties that spring from the view of ourselves inherent in the first half of the Mortality Paradox—the view that we are ephemeral creatures. The psychoanalysts realized that this not only causes death anxiety but also undermines our self-esteem and sense of the meaningfulness of life. It suggests that we are no more significant than other animals—than the worm or snail that briefly live their mean, functional lives before being crushed by an indifferent nature. All our questing for heroism and transcendence fights against this view, but the Soul Narrative simply explodes it: it claims that each one of us is essentially very special indeed—an immortal in the making. We are each of us born cosmically significant.
The way the Soul story has been adopted by the Abrahamic religions further bolsters the sense of individual cosmic significance of their believers. The soul is associated with consciousness and the life of the mind—the internal voice that we each have. And this internal voice, as a gift of the divine, is therefore able to communicate directly with its creator. St. Augustine, for example, having argued for the view of the soul as intellect, emphasized the importance of using this faculty to build a personal relationship with God. Simply by willing this communication in prayer, whether out loud or as internal monologue, each of us could and should enter into dialogue with the Almighty.
This communication has since become the basis of the Christian experience. But it is worth dwelling for a moment on the extent of the self-importance implicit in this view: once the gods were remote and capricious, only to be reached through complex rituals. Now suddenly the one true God is always on call; on the one hand, he is the Creator of the Universe, the lord of all, omnipotent and omniscient, he who sent the great flood to destroy a sinful humanity. Yet on the other hand, he wants to hear your every wish, regret and foible; all you have to do is think it, and he is there, all ears. The most powerful being there ever could be, dwarfing kings, presidents and prime ministers, is apparently interested in you.
Ernest Becker described this as “the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven.” From this new perspective, every man, woman and child, each one of the billions, is special and important, with a role to play in God’s great drama and loved by him personally and individually.
The extraordinary claim that the creator of the universe knows and cares for each one of us has over the past two millennia become commonplace, almost a truism of the religious worldview. It is not unique to Christianity but has become a central feature of all the Abrahamic religions, especially Islam. In the places where religious conversions are still common—for example, prisons or programs for alcoholics and drug addicts—these narratives successfully offer to the convert a cosmic significance otherwise unattainable in a life regarded socially as a failure.
This is a radical departure from older worldviews that make mortals the playthings of a pitiless fate. In the polytheistic preChristian religions of Greece, Rome and the Middle East, the gods were indifferent at best, cruel, abusive and deceitful at worst. Cosmic significance could only be attained through the heroic deeds of men like Achilles and Odysseus, or through mastering the elaborate rites of the mysteries. But such worldviews offered only partial satisfaction of our will to immortality; little surprise, then, that they gave way to that version of the Soul Narrative that makes eternity our birthright.
THIS narrative has proved irresistible, even to those who do not accept its religious framework, and it has so suffused the modern—particularly Western—worldview that we can hardly imagine an alternative. This influence is the principle of individualism—the primary worth of each and every individual—which has come to be the supreme value throughout large parts of the world.
The full consequences took time to emerge: as the influential French anthropologist Louis Dumont wrote, it was “a transformation so radical and so complex that it took at least seventeen centuries of Christian history to be completed.” Scholarly consensus is that this transformation arose from the unique combination of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion. Dumont’s account of this development runs like this: initially, spiritually minded people discover their individual self by turning away from the collective that is society and defining themselves solely in relation to the divine. This can be seen in the spiritual traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, and also in early Christianity: Jesus of Nazareth basically taught that we should leave our families and societies and wait humbly for the coming apocalypse. Outside of the distractions of society, a Christian could realize himself or herself as an “individual-in-relation-to-God.”
Christianity’s otherworldliness, however, began to be challenged when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Although in the form of the monasteries it maintained a tradition of those who spurned mainstream society, increasingly it was forced to find a way of permitting the millions of people who were suddenly within its purview some way of being both Christians and ordinary citizens. Dumont records two leaps forward in this reconciliation: in the eighth century, when the church accepted its active role in the political sphere, and then in the Reformation, when the individual believer powerfully reasserted his or her direct relationship to God.
It was Martin Luther, of course, in the early sixteenth century who initiated this second revolution, though it had been simmering for centuries. Each of us has an immortal soul with a direct line to God, he argued, and therefore each of us is a sovereign moral agent who must freely choose whether or not to put his or her faith in Christ. This was a call for religious freedom, but Christianity was too embedded in the surrounding culture for its effects to remain contained in the spiritual realm. The assertion that each individual was equal before God quickly led to demands for economic and politic al liberties, causing revolutions both in thought and on the streets. In Dumont’s terms, the individual as opposed to society had become the individual within society.
Individualism, with its belief in the absolute value and autonomy of the person, is therefore the political expression of the Soul Narrative. All ethical and political systems are grounded in some conception of what it is to be human. The claim of the Soul Narrative that each of us is a spark of the divine, and therefore sovereign unto him or herself, was a radical view of human nature that, once allowed to permeate social and political thinking, had far-reaching and dramatic implications. We were not merely one of the tribe, not merely Olaf-the-ax-maker, son of Olaf-the-ax-maker and latest in a long line of Olaf-the-ax-makers, not merely a weak body fated to briefly flourish and die like a spring flower. We were individuals, and as such deserved rights, equality, freedom and democracy.
The ethics of the soul reached its finest expression in the famous words of the
American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To most people in history, these truths would have been anything but self-evident. Indeed, to an ancient Roman patrician, a medieval serf, or an Indian “untouchable,” they would have seemed self-evidently false—as they would have to the slaves kept by those free citizens of the new America. But once the view that each human being has a unique, immortal essence is brought into the social realm, then all the rest—eventually—follows.
After spreading beyond its religious origins this view acquired a secular vocabulary: the word “self” has now taken over from “soul,” but it expresses the same essential idea that each of us has an irreducible core that makes us unique and special. Although this claim has been under steady assault for a century—from psychoanalysts and deconstructionists, behaviorists and neuroscientists—it continues to be the dominant philosophy of our age. Capitalism and consumerism, with their emphasis on economic autonomy, are dependent upon it, as are the political ideologies of human rights and liberal democracy, not to mention the modern cults of self-actualization and self-discovery.
The Soul Narrative, which is so successful at satisfying the will to immortality, has therefore provided the principal values of our civilization—even for those who long since abandoned its more mystical overtones. Ernest Becker, following the psychoanalyst Otto Rank, recognized that individualism and the aggrandizement of the self are not only products of this narrative but a continuation of the same quest for immortality. Whether or not we literally believe we have a soul that will go to heaven, the cosmic significance we ascribe to ourselves as unique individuals reassures us that we transcend mere biology. It convinces us that we are each special, possessing “infinite worth” as Dumont put it—not like the anonymous animals that live and die in their millions around us. In pursuing the cult of the self—building careers, actualizing our potential and acquiring ever more things—we are creating a myth of immunity to extinction.