Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

Will Justice Be Done? The Rise of Postmortem Rewards and Punishments (Part 1)

There were obvious problems with the concept of Hades imagined in thewritings of Homer. If everyone has the same fate after death—whether noble orlowly, righteous or wicked, valiant or cowardly—then where is justice? Doesn'tthis life, in the end, make any sense? Isn't good behavior to be rewarded and evilpunished? Won't I get a better hereafter than the brutal tyrant who tortures andkills for his own sadistic pleasure, or even that obnoxious fellow who lives acrossthe street?We have seen some hints of what we might call "differentiated" afterlives evenin Homer. Three particularly wicked sinners are punished forever, and a veryfew individual humans, or semi-humans, related to the gods are rewarded. Thisdierentiation is far more pronounced in Virgil's Aeneid, which portraysfantastic rewards for the upright and horrible punishments for sinners. In thecenturies between Homer and Virgil, more than any other thinker and writer, itwas Plato who developed the notion of postmortem justice for both the virtuousand the wicked.Plato himself did not invent the idea of rewards and punishments in theafterlife. He was building on earlier views, as he himself tells us. But it was Platowho most inuenced later thinking, leading ultimately to the views of heavenand hell that developed centuries later in the Christian tradition.The Afterlife in PlatoThe twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that theentire European philosophical tradition consisted of "a series of footnotes toPlato."1 Among Plato's long-enduring contributions to Western thought, onestands out as unusually signicant for later understandings of the afterlife: hisview of the immortality of the soul, as articulated especially in the dialogue wehave already examined, the Phaedo.Today, when people reect on the distinction between body and soul, theytend to think of the body as a material, visible object but of the soul ascompletely immaterial and invisible. It cannot be experienced by our senses inany way. Many ancient thinkers did not see it quite that way. In part that isbecause they lived long before the writings of the seventeenth-centuryphilosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes passed on to Westernposterity the dualistic idea that body is made up of matter but the soul isinherently immaterial. Before his time, however, it was believed that the soul wasindeed material, but of a vastly dierent kind of material from the realities wenormally encounter through our senses.2In this older view, shared by many Greeks and Romans, some materialentities are rather coarse and rough, and susceptible to sense perception—including rocks, trees, lions, and human bodies. But other material is very muchmore rened—literally ner—and therefore of higher quality. The soul is madeup of that kind of material. It may be raried "stu" but it is still stu. That canhelp explain some of the paradoxes you may have already noticed in ourdiscussions of the afterlife. If souls are completely immaterial in the modernsense, how can they have material sensations? How can they experience physicaltorment or pleasure if they have no physical qualities? How can souls in theafterlife see, hear, taste, smell, or feel either pain or pleasure if they have no eyes,ears, tongue, nose, or nerve endings?In modern understandings of the afterlife, that continues to be a realproblem—and believers in postmortem rewards and punishments therefore haveto come up with additional explanations for how, in the afterlife, God allows orforces people to feel bodily pleasure or pain without a body. Many of theancients would have had fewer problems with the paradox, because they believedthe soul was made up of real substance. It may be rened, but it is still substance.That's why in Hades the shades can be seen.But why can't they be touched? Why can't Odysseus hug his mother? It isbecause the stu of the soul is far more rened than the coarse stu that makesup the human body. This makes sense even in our post-Cartesian understandingof "stu." Your hand is rmer "stu" than either air or water, and so can passthrough them. Since air and water, on the other hand, are less rm, they cannotpass through the hand. For some ancient Greeks the soul was more rened thanthe body, and so Odysseus's and Aeneas's arms pass right through the stu. Butsince the soul is still made of stu—highly rened as it is—it can hear, taste,speak, and so on. And that's why souls can feel pleasure and pain, and, afterHomer, experience heaven and hell.In the Phaedo the coarse material of the body is said to die but the renedsoul is immortal and so lives on. And so Socrates says at one point that death isnothing other than "the release of the soul from the body" (Phaedo 64e). Or, asPlato says in another of his works, the Laws:What gives each one of us his being is nothing else but his soul, whereas the body is no more than ashadow which keeps us company. So 'tis well said of the deceased that the corpse is but a ghost; thereal man—the undying thing called the soul—departs to give account to the gods of anotherworld, even as we are taught by ancestral tradition—an account to which the good may lookforward without misgiving, but the evil with grievous dismay. (Laws, Book 12, 959a–b)3This is an unusually interesting passage. For one thing, it seems to put theviews of Homer in complete reverse. For Homer, the "real person" was theembodied esh; 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 isto be sloughed o and left behind. Moreover, once that happens, when the soulleaves the body, it goes o to either a happy or a miserable fate.What are these blessed and awful fates awaiting the person after death? WhenPlato discusses the ultimate fate of the soul, most commonly he shifts from hislogical discourse to regale his readers with myths. Plato admits that his talesabout the afterlife are in fact myths: stories meant to convey deeper truths. Theyare not literally true. They portray truths that are dicult to put into rational,logical discourse. Similar to what we have already seen in other texts, thesePlatonic myths are less about what really happens after death than about howsomeone should live in the present. Plato's overarching concern is not to give thegeography and temperatures of heaven and hell but to show people how theyshould live in the present life as they pursue virtue and truth for the well-beingof their souls.4Plato's Basic MythThe most straightforward statement of Plato's myths comes to us in the Phaedo.As always happens, in the back-and-forth Socrates hedges on the literal characterof this myth by saying, "This is what we are told." The fact that Plato doesn'tsubscribe to the word-for-word accuracy of the account is shown by the fact thatin dierent dialogues he actually tells dierent myths—for example, in theGorgias and the Republic. But all his myths move toward the same point: thesoul that is virtuous is rewarded and the one that is wicked is punished. The taleshe tells about the afterlife are therefore meant to convey something he thinks istrue in the present life. People should live virtuously, concerned not for thepleasures of the body but for the good of the soul.Here is the myth from the Phaedo. When people die, Socrates says, theirguardian spirits take them to the place of judgment, where they undergo the"necessary experiences" as long as required to rid them of their impurities. Soulsthat 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 andsober enjoy "divine company" (Phaedo 107c).5Socrates then goes into detail about various postmortem fates reserved fordierent 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 ofpurication, the Acherusian Lake, where they are both punished for their sinsand rewarded for their good deeds. Others who are great sinners judged to beincurable, such as murderers, are sent o to Tartarus, never to be released. Thosewho have committed lesser sins—for example, violence against their parents—are sent 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 whentheir victims agree can they be released from their torment. Finally, those whohave lived lives of surpassing holiness are released at death and pass up to thepure realm above. "And of these such as have puried themselves suciently byphilosophy live thereafter altogether without bodies."After detailing the myth, Socrates hedges again: "Of course, no reasonableperson ought to insist that the facts are exactly as I have described them, but thateither this or something very like it is a true account of our souls and their futurehabitations." That is, his description is largely gurative. What is literal is themeaning conveyed by the myth: one should live a life of virtue, and that willbring its own reward. Wickedness leads only to misery.The Myth of ErSuch teachings are embodied in more explicit myths in Plato's other writings.The most famous is the Myth of Er, which comes at the very end of Plato'slongest dialogue, the Republic, a work which sets out at length Plato'sunderstanding of the ideal state. Plato believed that the political state should bedesigned to help people live optimally through a life of philosophy. The idealstate was therefore to be led by a group of philosopher-kings who promoted livesthat were good, just, and virtuous. After spending many, many pages laying outwhat that utopian state would be like, Plato ends his dialogue by moving fromlogical discourse to myth, in this case a myth that entails a near-death experience.In its immediate context, the function of the myth is to show that people need towork to live good and just lives (Republic 613a–b). It is by the "practice ofvirtue" that a person can be "likened unto God so far as that is possible" (613b).The rewards for righteous living are great during life—and even greater afterdeath (614a). That is what this "tale" is to convey.6The myth is about a man named Er, a brave warrior from Pamphylia, who isslain in battle but who revives twelve days later on his funeral pyre. After comingback he tells his near-death experience. When Er died, his soul went from hisbody and came with a large company of others to a mysterious region that hadtwo openings side by side in the sky and two others in the earth. Judges weresitting between these openings and were sending souls either up above throughone of the holes in the sky or down below though a hole in the earth, dependingon whether they were just or unjust. Er was an exception. He was told that hewas to be a messenger to people back on earth of what took place in these placesof judgment.The other two holes—one coming from above and the other from below—were for souls returning from one fate or the other. Dirty and dusty soulsappeared out of the lower hole and pure and clean ones from the upper. All ofthese went together o to a meadow as if to a festival, and there they regaled oneanother with the stories about what they had experienced over the past onethousand years, one group wailing and lamenting their horric experiencesbelow and the other reveling in the fantastic pleasures they had enjoyed above.All the sins that had been committed in life by the souls in the underworld werepunished ten times over; the good deeds of the pure souls were correspondinglyrewarded. But the worst of sinners—tyrants and others guilty of great crimes—were not allowed to leave the place of punishment even after a thousand years.Instead, "savage men of ery aspect" bound them, threw them down, ayedthem, dragged them over thorns, and hurled them into Tartarus (616a).After the souls had spent seven days in the meadow telling each other whatthey had experienced during the preceding millennium, they were taken toanother place where the divine Fates resided. All souls now were to be sent backto earth to live again in new incarnations, as either humans or beasts. Lots werecast and according to which was drawn, the soul could decide its next life. Somesouls 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 choseto become animals. A full range of choices was possible.As might be expected, those souls that had suered most under the earthwere circumspect in their choice. Among them, those who chose lives of wisdomchose best. They would be rewarded later. Once all the choices were made, thesouls were directed to drink from the River of Forgetfulness before enteringtheir new bodies. Er was not allowed to drink, but he returned to life, notknowing how, to tell the tale.Socrates concludes the myth by drawing its lesson:And so... if we are guided by me we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduringall extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousnesswith wisdom always and ever.... And thus both here and in that journey of a thousand years,whereof I have told you, we shall fare well. (Republic 621d)It should be clear that Plato does not literally believe the myth he has just toldany more than he believes there was a historical Er who actually had a near-deathexperience. He calls the tale a "ne story" and admits that anyone listening tohim will probably think the story is a "myth." For him the tale is "true," but notliterally true. It is true in the sense that it conveys the truth that people shouldprefer to suer injustice than commit it, that they should actually be goodinstead of simply seeming to be. In short, the myth of Er is about how we shouldlive: focused not on the body and its desires, passions, and pleasures but onvirtue, justice, and wisdom.It should be stressed, however, that to make his points about how to live,Plato employs common conceptions, with his own twists, of what will happenafter death. That shows that even if he invented this particular myth of Er, he isnot making up the idea of postmortem rewards and punishments on which it isbased. He is using an understanding of the nature of the afterlife that wouldhave been perfectly believable to a Greek audience in the fourth century BCE.This understanding is embedded in numerous other writings of Greek andRoman antiquity, and we can probably assume that whatever Plato thoughtabout their literal truth, they were accepted by many or even most people at thetime.Going to the Underworld with AristophanesSometimes authors express these views of the afterlife with dead seriousness. Atother times they are recounted with a lively sense of humor. There have alwaysbeen thinking people who are not afraid to laugh at death, one of whom wasPlato's older contemporary, the very funny comic dramatist Aristophanes (circa450–circa 388 BCE). Of direct relevance to our interests here is one ofAristophanes's most humorous plays, The Frogs, an account of a descent to theunderworld—not by a mere mortal but by the god Dionysus, along with hissidekick slave Xanthias. The play obviously involves satire, but for satire to beeective it needs to spoof views that are widely held. Some of the play'sdescriptions of life below therefore would certainly have resonated with many inthe play's audience.There is a very serious undertone to this funny play, connected with theimmediate context within which it was produced. At end of the fth century,Athens was experiencing a very serious political and military crisis at the climaxof the Peloponnesian War, and was desperately in need of leadership and sageadvice. Thus the plot of the play: Dionysus wants to go to the underworld tobring back from the dead the greatest tragic playwright to provide the necessarydirection to the state, possible only from the lips of one of its great intellectualgures. Dionysus proposes to interview the two leading candidates: Aeschylusand Euripides, known still today, along with Sophocles, as the great dramatistsof the fth century. The second half of The Frogs is taken up with the interviews.But the rst half is about the trip to Hades and what Dionysus and Xanthiasnd there.As almost always happens—as we have seen with both Odysseus and Aeneas—the journeyer needs some instruction about how to contact the dead in theirplace of residence. And so the play begins with Dionysus and Xanthias paying avisit to Heracles, the demigod who, for one of his famous Twelve Labors, hadhad to make a descent to Hades. Heracles tells them how to get there and whatto expect when they arrive. They will nd places of punishment and blessing.The former will include "the Great Muck Marsh and the Eternal River ofDung."7 These will be the abodes of "pretty unsavory characters ounderingabout." Specically, such punishments will be reserved for those who havewronged a guest (thought to be an unforgivable sin for much of antiquity), notpaid a young partner in pederasty (pederasty itself was widely approved of, butthe elder partner needed to take care of the youth), struck one of their parents,or committed perjury.Other punishments are not specied in this allusive text, although at onepoint the judge of the dead, the divine Aeacus, mistakenly thinks that Dionysusis Heracles making a return journey and, oended at what Heracles did the rsttime—when he stole the hellhound Cerberus—threatens to "have you ungover the cli, down to the black hearted Stygian rocks, and you'll be chased bythe prowling hounds of Hell and the hundred headed viper will tear your gutsand the Tartessian lamprey shall devour your lungs and the Tithrasian Gorgonscan have your kidneys." A variety of creative and horrifying torments awaitedthose on the wrong side of divine justice.On the other hand, before embarking, Dionysus and Xanthias are told theywill also nd a bright and happy place, with "plantations of myrtle, and happybands of revelers, men and women, tripping around and clapping their hands."These are said to be the "initiates," by which Aristophanes means people whohad been inducted into what scholars commonly call the "mystery cults." Theseare religions that had become increasingly popular in Greek antiquity, whichrequired initiation into the secrets of the god or goddess; those initiated wouldenjoy a particularly intimate relationship with the divine being and beguaranteed a much improved situation in the afterlife.When Dionysus and Xanthias arrive at the place of blessing, they do indeednd a group of initiates singing their joy:Let us hasten to the meadow, where the roses are so sweet,and the little flowers grow in profusion at our feet;with the blessed Fates to lead us we will laugh and sing and play,and dance the choral dances in our traditional way.Oh to us alone is given, when our earthly days are done,to gaze upon the splendor of a never-setting sun;for we saw the holy Mysteries and heard the god's behest,and were mindful of our duty both to kinsperson and to guests.Obviously this is far better than dwelling forever in the Muck Marsh or theRiver of Dung. But it is striking that such ecstasies are reserved not for thosewho focus on philosophy and the good of the soul rather than the pleasures ofthe body, as in Plato, but for those who have been initiated into a mysteryreligion.