@The Pixie
On to chapter 4 - Will Justice Be Done?
The overall scope is obvious. The Greek philosophers, like the later pharisees juxtaposed to the sadducees, began contemplating the unfairness of an equally meted out afterlife for all, even if it was not much of an afterlife at all. Between Homer, and its differentiation of punishment and reward after death for only the worst and the best of people, and the later Aeneid that outlined the growing egalitarian sentiment that all must be judged for their lives here and end up in either Hades or Elysium, we have Plato formulating dialogues about it long before Christianity. all of this with very stark descriptions of the places, Hades and Elysium - and the pain and pleasure involved in ways reminiscent of the Apocalypse of Peter.
So how could punishment or pleasure be meted out without bodily sensation? It’s an odd dilemma. On one hand the Homeric attitude is that the body is the life, the experience, the worthwhile reality, and what is left after death is shadow. Plato comes along and turns that and says the soul, or what was deemed the shadow is the important aspect of being and the physical life is just the shadow. But yet to mete out afterlife rewards and punishments, something physical must exist. Most of the ancients thought that if a soul existed, it must have material to either punish or reward. The dilemma for Christians becomes the belief that God, the source of eternal breath, is immaterial, and the body?.... ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Here a reattachment to a (new) body becomes important. How else are we to be rewarded or punished? This process of bodily reattachment at some point in the process of final outcomes was introduced by the ancients in the previous chapter
(Aeneid) and here with the mythos of a man named Er, ... so they seem to have solved it and Christianity took them up on it.
Other interesting parallels to Christian thinking:
- In the Phaedo, Socrates outlines purgatory for those folks who are not so bad... just need a little polishing up.
- Aristophanes toys with the afterlife concept of a bright and happy place where “
initiates” enjoy intimate relationships with the divine, not for a life well led, but as a result of joining a mystery cult... membership and belief in the cult view is all that is required..... the rest is
grace.
- Roman satirist Lucian writes of a wild journey where he and his companions take a sea cruise, like Jonah is required to do, and get swallowed by... what?.... yes,
a whale.
- Epicurus the skeptic, resonates mostly with me. A believer that the essence of a person completely dissipates at death. Other than the sketchy metaphysics of Epicurus, he takes my negative view of these beliefs as bad for society at large, having people live in supernatural fear, striving for a strained pure life above that which they actually are, causing many unhealthy personal and social psychological ills and pathologies. An obvious one would be requiring priests to be celibate against the very foundation of their inescapable physical beings. A healthy engagement with life as it presents itself is the key.
- The biblical
tip of the hat to the Epicurean - The book of Ecclesiastes.
I start to see where the authors of the Bible were doing much, in my mind, to include, and continue, yet make their own, like a music artist doing a cover tune in their own style, very common threads of Hellenistic thought, not direct revelations from God.
I really liked the ending epitaph of an obvious Epicurean...
non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.
