Imagining the Soul E-Book

Rosalie Osmond

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 483

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

Basing her approach on historical sources, Rosalie Osmond explores the way the soul has been represented in different cultures and at different times, from ancient Egypt and Greece, through medieval Europe and into the 21st century.

Leseprobe

IMAGINING THE

SOUL

A HISTORY

ROSALIE OSMOND

First published in 2003 BY SUTTON PUBLISHING

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Rosalie Osmond, 2003, 2013

The right of The Author, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9486 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Preface

Introduction

ONE

The Idea of the Soul:

Classical and Early Christian Images

TWO

The Soul as a Beautiful Woman

THREE

The Soul in Conflict

FOUR

The Soul at Play

FIVE

The Soul is Like . . .

SIX

The Soul at the Time of Death

SEVEN

The Immortal Soul: Doomsday and Beyond

EIGHT

The Soul in the Modern Age

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Preface

I have been fortunate during the writing of this book to have been surrounded by friends, colleagues, and family who have been not only sympathetic but actively helpful in many ways. What follows is not complete, but merely an acknowledgement of the most significant contributions.

Cora Portillo spent countless hours translating the two Spanish plays, which do not exist in any other English translation, and I am profoundly grateful. Dr Richard Axton of Christ’s College Cambridge helpfully drew my attention to the articles on the appearance of souls on the stage by Meg Twycross. Jeannie Cohen was my constant source of reference for queries about matters classical, and read and commented on the typescript in its entirety. Professor Donald Cross suggested the opening quotation from Browning, and read the complete text with his usual scrupulousness. At an early stage of my research the Revd Charles Pickstone drew my attention to The Spiritual in Art, which proved an important resource for the section on modern images of the soul.

As for my family, my three adult children were all interested in the progress of the book (having lived through this at closer quarters before), but special mention must be made of Adrian, who suggested a number of references I would probably not have picked up by myself. Oliver, my husband, seems to have put almost as much work into this book as I have. Indeed, to enumerate everything he has done might lead his colleagues and parishioners to conclude that he must be neglecting his spiritual duties!

I am also indebted to the library staff who have been helpful in my research, particularly the librarians at the British Library, Cambridge University Library, and also Acadia University Library, which was my chief resource for work during the summer.

Finally, I must thank the staff at Sutton and particularly my editor, Christopher Feeney, who has been unfailingly helpful and patient. Above all, he has allowed me to write the book I wanted to write. This leaves me with a huge responsibility, but, as any author knows, it is also a rare privilege.

Upper Kingsburg, Nova Scotia

August 2003

Introduction

Your business is to paint the souls of men—

Man’s soul, and it’s a fire, smoke . . . no, it’s not . . .

It’s vapour done up like a new-born babe—

(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)

It’s . . . well, what matters talking, it’s the soul!

Robert Browning, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’

Human beings are imaginative creatures – that is, creators of images. Language and abstract thought may appear to be our unique characteristics, but our impulse for giving concrete form to abstractions, not only in our thoughts but in art and literature, is just as essential. Much of the time we instinctively think in pictures. Nowadays we probably do not envisage Dürer’s full-blown allegorical figures when thinking of Melancholy or Hope, but we may well visualize a colour or an associated form or object. Sometimes these will come from very personal experience, sometimes from centuries of use.1

So it is with the soul. While it has nearly always been defined as spiritual and invisible, it has with equal consistency been imagined as visible, a concrete entity. What is fascinating is the variety of imagined forms this soul takes in different periods and contexts. Sometimes it is a beautiful woman (or, more unusually, a man); at others it is a sexless and childlike being. It can take on non-human forms as well – those of bird, butterfly, even grasshopper.

These variations in the portrayal of the soul are not capricious or arbitrary, but evidence of its infinite complexity. Each depiction is intimately connected to the varying role the soul plays, and these portrayals reveal much about its contrasting aspects. In turn these multiple roles and guises that the soul takes on tell us much about our deepest fears and desires. Our fear of death, our hope for some kind of immortality, our need of help and guidance through life – all are exposed in the ways we imagine the soul. To lose the soul has been seen as the ultimate human tragedy. Whether it is Faust (who sells his soul for knowledge) or Bart Simpson (who sells his for money), a ‘soulless’ being is portrayed as doomed, in this life as in the next. So Faust, once he has made the bargain of giving up his soul for knowledge, does not go on to gain the wisdom he has desired but spends his power in devising cheap, childlike tricks.

Why should this be the case? Why do we need to posit a soul at all? The basic answer probably lies in the visible inadequacies of the body. For people who did not have our modern understanding of the mechanics of the brain and its interaction with the rest of the body, the soul was necessary as a kind of ghost in the machine, an animating principle that gave life to the body. Death was seen as the departure of this animating principle.

The inadequacies of the body, however, extend beyond this. It is visibly changeable and transient. From the moment of birth the human form is in a state of flux; it develops and then decays. As Jaques in As You Like It succinctly puts it, ‘And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe | And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.’ We have always found this mutability deeply disturbing and have tried to devise ways of countering it. So against this constantly changing body we have set the soul, which we view as changeless.

This changeless soul provides us with a sense of permanent identity that follows us through life, regardless of what accidents may occur to the body. We need to see a person who is paralysed, suffers a debilitating illness or, less dramatically, who loses some of the beauty or physical stamina that defined his or her youth as ‘just the same’, ‘not changed at all, really’. In this sense, the soul is the essential person.

Many religions, especially Christianity, extend this assurance of immutability and consistent identity beyond the present life. The soul is the part of us that not only remains the same here and now, but survives death and guarantees us immortality. Of all human desires this need to believe that there is something beyond our natural human span seems to be the most persistent, evident from the burial practices of the ancient Egyptians to modern attempts to freeze the corpse for some doubtful posterity. Quite simply, while we have difficulty in imagining an eternity, we cannot accept the alternative – an absolute end.

The soul also expresses other human traits. One such trait is our difficulty in experiencing ourselves and our acquaintances as a unity rather than as a series of impressions and emotions, some of which occur simultaneously and are conflicting. I remember well the superb organist who played for me Bach’s ‘Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel Hoch”’, then immediately turned around on the organ bench and spewed out his vitriolic hatred of the people in the small town where he lived. We are constantly engaged in an internal dialogue with ourselves. Whether we see this in moral terms as a battle between a ‘good’ soul and a ‘bad’ body or simply in terms of conflicting desires that pull us in opposing directions, the dualism of body and soul has provided both a dramatic framework and an explanation for this observable characteristic within ourselves.

The soul also provides an explanation for our conviction that at times we need and receive guidance from something other than a bodily source. In this instance the soul that gives guidance may be that of the individual concerned, or it may be the soul of another, alive or dead. Thus in the Paradiso, Dante’s beloved Beatrice, after her death, serves him as interpreter and guide. In this guise the soul becomes closely associated with other incorporeal beings such as angels, and its imagined appearance changes accordingly.

All of this might appear to argue that the soul is a construct of our own devising, shaped to fulfil our deepest needs. This may be the case. However, it could equally be argued that our deepest needs, persisting over the recorded history of mankind, suggest the reality of the soul, since it is the very thing that most fully satisfies them.

This book is neither a critical examination of philosophical theories concerning the soul, nor is it an argument from a particular ideological point of view for the existence or otherwise of the soul. Rather, it is about different ways we have imagined the soul in art and literature from the Greeks to the present day, and what this tells us about ourselves.

To understand the history of our imaginings about the soul it is necessary to have some knowledge of the literature and philosophy that helped form them. The first chapter, therefore, is a discussion of the development of ideas about the soul in Greek, Egyptian, and medieval Christian philosophy and literature, with particular reference to those beliefs that have influenced our visualization of the soul.

After this, the chapters are arranged not according to the chronological development of ideas about the soul but according to differing perceptions of it in life, at the time of death, and after death. The second chapter shows the soul as a beautiful woman – a guide during life on this earth. In the next chapter we look at expressions of conflict and division within the soul and between the soul and the body, also in life. The fourth chapter displays the soul as a character in drama – a genre that necessarily depicts it in a visible and active way. While similes and metaphors for the soul are necessarily scattered throughout the book, Chapter 5 looks at some of these and their significance in a more structured way. In Chapter 6 we move from the soul as we visualize it in life to the soul at the time of death, when it separates from the body and takes on a life of its own. Our conception of what happens is viewed from different historical perspectives, ranging from that of the Middle Ages through to that of the spiritualists of the nineteenth century. Chapter 7 follows the soul through the process of the Last Judgment to its state of immortality – whether blissful or tormented. The final chapter returns to the chronology of the first and looks at modern philosophical and scientific concepts of the soul and its portrayal in the art and literature of the present day.

This is a book about the soul within the Western tradition. While there is occasional reference to other traditions and religions, there is no pretence of universality. If the Middle Ages and early Renaissance figure largely in my discussion, this is because it was during those periods that concerns about the soul were most dominant.

And what of the imagination, that faculty that I claim enables us not just to conceive of a soul but to picture it as well? At its most basic level, the imagination is our capacity to make images (pictures) in our mind. This is the sense in which Aristotle chiefly describes it. These pictures in our minds may be merely copies of the real world recreated from memory, but frequently they are not. Unlike pictures that are transmitted directly from the physical world to our brain, we can change and manipulate them. I am unlikely ever to see the head of a man on the hairy body of a goat, or a woman with snakes for hair, but I am quite capable of imagining these things and an infinite variety of others. The ancient Greeks did so. Indeed, one view (not the most prevalent one) argues that in prehistoric times ‘soul’ referred to the visual image of objects that man could retain in his memory, an ethereal copy of the real world abstracted from sense experience that could be magically manipulated.2 Things in themselves might not always be under the control of primitive man, but images of them could be. According to this view, the imaginary, the visual, was the essence of man’s concept of the soul from the beginning.

As long as imagination was closely linked to the picture-making faculty of man and the senses, it was bound to be judged inferior to reason. For us, however, imagination suggests much more than merely picturing and manipulating the objects sense presents to us. By the late Renaissance, writers such as Francis Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne gave it a much more exalted status. Bacon saw it as the faculty by which we rise above reason to the knowledge that comes through revelation. ‘The divine grace uses the motions of the imagination as an instrument of illumination . . . which is the reason why religion ever sought access to the mind by similitudes, types, parables, visions, dreams.’3 Browne too insists that imagination can go where reason cannot follow.

By the time of the nineteenth-century Romantics, imagination had largely severed its connection with orthodox religion and become the source of poetic inspiration. Coleridge makes a famous distinction between what he calls fancy, the Primary Imagination, and the Secondary Imagination. Fancy can collect and rearrange images and meanings that have been fixed in the mind by the image-making faculty, the Primary Imagination. But Fancy is limited to reassembling these things according to what Coleridge calls ‘the law of association’. The Secondary Imagination, in contrast, can creatively re-form the world, giving us poetry, and endowing objects with value – qualities such as love, awe and imagination – which they do not intrinsically possess. This imagination is a god-like faculty, far above reason, creative in itself.4

So we imagine the soul. Whether we have also created it is open to speculation.

ONE

The Idea of the Soul: Classical and Early Christian Images

What do we say about the soul, then?

Plato, Phaedo, 79b

When we think of the soul it may be as one of two distinct things – our essential self in this life, made up of our desires, will and power of reason, or that part of us that survives death and is immortal. We may not even be conscious of these as quite different things, because for the last two thousand years we have thought of them as a single entity, the person, embodied while we are alive and disembodied after death. But this single entity, both individual and immortal, was not how the idea of the soul began.

Primitive people could never quite believe that the physical – either in themselves or in nature – was all there was. Animistic ideas, that saw everything in nature as possessed of a soul, were common among our earliest ancestors. But quite what they meant by the ‘soul’ in nature – or even whether different peoples meant remotely the same thing – is not at all clear.

The simplest view is that, for primitive people, nature was ‘ensouled’ in the sense that it was endowed with feeling and purpose not totally dissimilar to that which human beings feel. Oddly enough, it seems easier for us to imagine things as endowed with sense and will than as completely inanimate. We still find this idea in certain children’s stories and fairy tales, where not just animals but trees, rivers and even rocks may speak to the hero, and help or hinder him in his quest. The Romantics’ feeling of communion with nature has links to this primitive past, as do certain strands of modern ‘green’ philosophy. In these ways we still retain some connection with the ‘ensouled’ primitive world, but our understanding is necessarily impressionistic and incomplete. It is only from the time of written records that we can begin to have a reasonably clear idea of what people meant when they spoke of the soul.

The Egyptians placed tremendous importance on the burial of the dead. The pyramids are a surviving testimony to the need for a grandiose dwelling for the person after death. But did this necessarily indicate a belief in a soul or an afterlife that we would recognize? They conceived not of a single soul but of ‘souls’ in various guises. One of these was the ka-soul. This soul could be either a vital force associated with breath, or a double of the individual. It could also mean one’s personality or intelligence. These diverse ideas about soul are all developed in important ways in later Greek thought.

It is the ba-soul (or heart soul) of the Egyptians that comes nearest to the concept of the soul that survives death. Significantly, this soul has a clear visual identity. It is pictured as a human-headed bird, thus combining the idea of a surviving human identity with the notion of free flight. Winged creatures – birds, butterflies, bees – are all among the earliest images of the soul. Yet the Egyptian ba, though it is winged and leaves the body at the time of death, does not travel far but remains nearby. This shows the extent to which the Egyptian notion of the life after death could never really divorce itself from the physical. In fact, one of the functions of the ba-soul was as an agent to reintegrate the dead person into a whole being. It could also mediate between the living and the dead, bringing funerary gifts from the earth’s surface down into the deep tomb for the use of the dead.1 The functions of the ba-soul are in essence physical, designed to help preserve the body and person in his/her totality. In this they are perfectly consistent with everything else we know about the Egyptian attitude to death with its emphasis on mummification, the preservation of the body. Life after death would ideally be not that different from the good life before death. Funnels from the surface down to the dead in the tomb facilitated the giving of food and water to the dead and emphasized the physicality of the Egyptians’ ideas. There is no indication that they had a concept of the soul as an entity capable of surviving alone after death.

No one is certain of the precise route the image of the ba-soul took, but we do know that, as a visual concept, it migrated from Egypt to ancient Greece. Here it took on a new and less physical role in keeping with the general Greek belief that death involved a radical severance of soul and body. Thus, while in its new context the ba-soul became one of the pre-Socratic visual images of the soul,2 that does not mean that the Greeks in general took over Egyptian beliefs concerning the life after death. Quite the contrary! It is the Greeks who have given us the first ideas of a soul that is separable from the body and can survive death independently of the body.

‘THE SOUL HAD WINGS IN HOMER’

Memorable images that convey particular ideas of the soul begin in ancient Western literature with Homer, the author to whom the two great epics of the ancient world, the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in the late eighth century BC, are attributed. The tale of the Trojan War and the subsequent account of the homeward journey of one of its greatest heroes, Odysseus, provide ample descriptions of death, ceremonies for the dead and, in the case of the Odyssey, a journey to the Underworld as well. In the story that Homer is telling, of course, we do not find a consistent system of thought, but the hopes and dreams of a people.

The common Greek word that we associate with the soul is psyche. Today we connect it with feelings, with our whole interior life as its incorporation into the word ‘psychology’ shows. But this meaning would have been totally incomprehensible to Homer. In Homer psyche means only two possible things. First, it is the life lost at death and then, in Hades, it is a shade or phantom.

Other words are used to express the elements of man that feel and think during life. For the most part, these are words that also signify a part of the body, thereby showing the close connection the Greeks of the eighth century BC perceived between emotions and bodily states. Two such words are kradie, and phrenes. Kradie, which is the anatomical heart, also means courage, or a combination of courage and wrath. Phrenes, which is identified with the breast, is the seat of deep emotion.3 (Later in Greek thought, the location of phrenes migrates to the head, which perhaps says something about changing notions concerning where emotion is generated.) It is difficult for us today to be certain whether this identification of body parts with emotion indicates that the early Greeks actually believed that the emotion was produced by the particular part of the anatomy, or whether it was rather another example of the desire to make the abstract concrete – to personify the emotion by linking it to a body part.

Psyche itself was not linked with a specific body part, but it is linked etymologically with the Greek psychein, to blow or breathe. This meaning is suggested in Homer when the psyche leaves the body in a swoon and returns afterwards:4

The darkness of night misted over the eyes of Andromache.

She fell backward, and gasped the life breath from her . . .

And about her stood thronging her husband’s sisters and the wives of his brothers

and these, in her despair for death, held her up among them.

But she, when she breathed again and the life was gathered back into her,

lifted her voice among the women of Troy in mourning.

(Iliad, xxii. 466–7; 473–6)5

The breathing out of the psyche in a swoon or in death is a concept familiar to us, and is, as we shall see, closely associated with pictures of the dying man breathing out his soul as a small body in medieval pictures. But in Homer’s time there was another word for breath as well. This was thumos, and it was thumos that was also frequently described as leaving the body at death. Thumos, unlike psyche, was also clearly a part of the living body and, like phrenes and kradie mentioned above, was also associated with emotion – in this case with joy, fear and grief. The thumos was the warm, vital element of life that is extinguished by death, and the psyche ‘the cold evanescent quality of death and extinction itself’.6 There appears to be a stage (as there is in physiological reality), when the prospect of death cannot be reversed but is inevitable, and this, in Homer, is pictured by the soul reaching a point of no return on its journey out of the body via the mouth: ‘a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted | nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier’ (Iliad, ix. 408–9).

Interestingly, once death has occurred the thumos is heard of no longer. It has been essentially a part of the body, and when the body dies it disappears. The same is not true of the psyche. As a ‘free’ soul, it must leave the body, but it does not cease to exist. Rather it becomes the wraith-like surviving part of the individual in the Underworld.

There are two completely identical passages in the Iliad describing death, the first the death of Patroclus and the second that of Hektor:

He spoke, and as he spoke the end of death closed in upon him,

and the soul fluttering free of his limbs went down into Death’s house

mourning her destiny, leaving youth and manhood behind her.

(Iliad, xvi. 855–7 and xxii. 361–3)

The imagery here is very suggestive. The soul (psyche) ‘flutters’ as it frees itself from the limbs of the dying man, implying a flying, bird-like creature. Unlike the warm breath, the thumos, it does not disappear but leaves the body to go down into Death’s house. Thus we can see the transition from the living soul or life force that controls the body in life (though not endowed with many of the qualities we would attribute to the soul today) to the free soul, existing independently of the body, transformed into a shade in the Underworld.

The other significant thing to note in this passage is that there is no suggestion of joy or happy release in it. The psyche that is changed into a shade in Hades is a rather poor creature, ‘mourning its destiny’, not to be remotely compared with the felicitous souls who will later enjoy the Christian heaven. Nothing good can be expected in the future. The good things, youth and manhood, have been left behind with the end of earthly life. In his famous descent to Hades in the Odyssey, Odysseus meets the shade of his mother. It is a disastrous encounter, as he is appalled to find that she will not wait for him so that they may ‘throw [their] dear hands | Round each other and take pleasure in cold lamentation’ (Odyssey, XI. 211–12). To this plaint she replies with sorrow and resignation, indicating that it is not her personal will, or even her personal fate, that dictates the limitations of their meeting:

But this is the rule for mortals, whenever one dies.

No longer do the sinews hold the bones and the flesh,

But the mighty power of burning fire subdues them

When first the spirit has abandoned the white bones,

And the soul, flying off like a dream, flutters.

(Odyssey, XI. 218–22)7

Again, the image of ‘fluttering’ reinforces the notion of a bird-like entity, but in combination with ‘dream’ suggests also something wraith-like and insubstantial.

This raises one of the fundamental problems for anyone discussing the soul, which persists down to the present day. As a philosophical concept, it may be immaterial and invisible, but if it is to be pictured in art or visualized in literature, then the abstract must, to some extent, become concrete. Pictures on Greek vases from the fifth century (much later than Homer, but still pre-Socratic) flesh out the suggestive but vague images of Homer. They depict the soul as a tiny winged body, sometimes bearing incense to welcome the dead, congregating in swarms around Charon in the Underworld, or hovering over the head of a body mourning at its grave.

There is yet another way in which the souls of the dead are shown in early Greek art – the image of the eidolon. This, while clearly also a picture of the dead, is not usually found in Hades but appears, rather like a ghost, in earthly places that are particularly associated with the dead person on earth. Perhaps because of this closer connection with the dead as they were in life, it is more physical than the winged psyche and resembles the dead person in some detail. Between death and burial or cremation, the soul may remain in this form near its body, as various illustrations on Greek vases show.8 But while these eidoloi may resemble the living in general physical characteristics, they are shades, not concrete beings. Even more significantly, they lack the psychological qualities associated with the parts of the living body and its vital qualities. Once the soul has passed into the Underworld, its existence, as the passage spoken above by Odysseus’ mother shows, is very limited indeed. Here it cannot even speak without drinking blood, which gives it temporarily some of the powers of a living being. At other times, souls are described as squeaking like bats as they fall away from the rock to which they cling (Odyssey, XXIV. 4–9).

There is a suggestion in the speech of Odysseus’ mother, quoted above, that the funeral rites, cremation or burial, help the soul on its way to this Underworld. Patroclus appears to Achilles after his death to beg him to bury him for this very reason:

The souls, the images of dead men, hold me at a distance,

and will not let me cross the river and mingle among them,

but I wander as I am by Hades’ house of the wide gates.

(Iliad, xxiii. 72–4)

Despite the phantom existence that awaits the dead in Hades, it is still better than lingering in the no-man’s-land between life and death, and as such is to be desired. But in comparison with life – life of any kind – it is a poor substitute:

I would rather serve on the land of another man

Who had no portion and not a great livelihood

Than to rule over all the shades of those who are dead.

(Odyssey, XI. 489–91)

In summary, what we find in Homer is, first of all, a number of ‘souls’ connected with psychological activity in life that are seen to be closely associated with body parts. This gives them a certain concrete and visual quality. However, these ‘souls’ that govern feeling and thinking during life are not linked in any precise way with the psyche that appears only as it is about to be lost in death and survives as a shade in the Underworld. This psyche may retain some of the physical attributes of its body in life, but only in an attenuated and insubstantial form. And it does not possess, as it did not in life, anything of the psychological essence of the person. Even in this most limited state, it is not necessarily immortal. It will only survive as long as the memory of its possessor survives in the minds of the living. This clearly presents the famous with a more optimistic prognosis than those ‘who have no memorial’!

There is no real connection between the individual soul in life and the surviving soul in death; consequently, the notion of individual immortality in any meaningful way does not exist. The Homeric soul shows the beginnings of a resistance to annihilation at the time of death, but there is no optimism about the quality of the survival for the individual. All this begins to change in the succeeding centuries.

THE SANCTIFICATION OF THE SOUL

As early as Hesiod’s Works and Days (early seventh century BC), there is the suggestion of a more optimistic scenario for men after life on earth. In Hesiod the best among the race of Heroes (those who died in the wars at Thebes and Troy) are rewarded not by dying absolutely and being sent to Hades as shades (a view of the afterlife not likely to encourage heroism in battle), but by being translated to the Isles of the Blest where they live ‘with no sorrow on their spirit . . . beside the deeply swirling Ocean, prosperous heroes for whom the grain-giving field bears honey-hearted harvest ripening three times a year . . .’.9 Significantly, these Heroes are not really souls since they have been translated to the Isles of the Blest without dying, and the emphasis on the physical delights of their life reinforces the idea that they are enjoying an eternity not dissimilar to a life they might ideally have hoped to enjoy on earth. The physicality of their state suggests an Egyptian influence, but the precise way in which this may have come to Greece is uncertain.

As well as the favoured heroes who lived in the Isles of the Blest, Hesiod also imagined an enviable eternity for those who had lived in the Golden Age, that morning of the world when life was perfect.10These survived after death as daimones, souls ruling the earth in the service of the gods. Those who lived in the Silver Age also survived, but they were consigned to rule in the Underworld. Unlike the daimones that appeared near their mortal haunts and tombs at the time of Homer, these souls functioned as minor deities, capable of influencing events in their appointed sphere under the direction of the higher gods. This controlling aspect is retained in our modern word ‘demon’, spirits who act out the will of the devil, though the original daimones were not wicked. Still it would be a mistake to equate either the immortal heroes or these daimones with anything we (or even Plato) might understand by ‘soul’. They were only immortal by special dispensation, not by nature, and they were not necessarily connected with personhood in life.

It is through the influence of the Orphic and Dionysian cults and the consolidation of much of their teaching in the person and teachings of Pythagoras (sixth century BC) that the process of what I shall call the ‘sanctification’ of the soul begins to take place. Up to this point the soul was essentially a life force that left the body at death, but lacked any unique moral or even psychological qualities. This began to change in the sixth century with the arrival in Greece of various religious cults.

Orpheus was a mythical figure whose cult began in Thrace (now parts of modern Greece and Bulgaria), outside the centre of the Mycenaean world. This northern origin suggests that he may originally have had connections with the shamans of Siberia and the East.11 A shaman is a kind of magician capable of leaving his body and having remarkable adventures outside it. He can communicate with the gods and also with the spirits of the dead. In the case of Orpheus, his remarkable powers were attributed to his extraordinary musical ability – probably a rationalization of raw magic by Greek civilization. In the late sixth century he was further Hellenized by being made a son of Apollo and a Muse.12

For our purposes, the most significant thing about Orpheus is the way in which he is shown as conquering death, emerging immortal from all earthly disaster. Dismembered by a group of Thracian women, his head continued to sing, thus proving his essential survival. When he lost his beloved Eurydice to the Underworld, he courageously went down after her, and again his music had such power that Pluto agreed to allow Eurydice to return to the world with him. The one condition was that he must not look back at her following him. Alas, he did so, and she was lost forever. Nevertheless, he had descended to the Underworld and emerged unscathed. In the Tarentine mysteries (fifth century BC) Orpheus’ cithara is able to save every initiate from the horrors of death and help him find paradise.13 These and many other exploits mark him out as a conqueror of death, one who possesses the secret of immortality. The initiates into his cult believed that through an ascetic lifestyle, denial and abstinence, they too could be purified and attain eternal life.14

Just as important as the stories associated with Orpheus himself are the large body of Orphic texts that claim him as their origin, but which are mostly much later than the sixth century. Here we enter murky waters. In the first place, Orpheus is a mythical figure who actually wrote nothing and, in the second, the very large collection of writings attributed to him have no common authorship at all. They are ‘Orphic’ simply by virtue of their attribution. Much later he is being cited as the authority for various doctrines about the soul, including that of its imprisonment in the body, in the works of Plato and Aristotle.

Some of the most interesting writings attributed to Orpheus are those dating from the late sixth or early fifth century BC to the first century BC known as ‘theogonies’. They are primarily accounts of the creation of the world but, significantly, they incorporate a large amount of material about that other god who was the source of a major cult – Dionysus.

The cult of Dionysus is closely associated with that of Orpheus, and as with the Orphic cult there is uncertainty as to whether it derived from shamanism in the north or from Egypt or Crete. Like the Egyptian god Osiris, and like Orpheus, Dionysus died and came back to life again, thus showing that there was some essence that could survive the death of the body.

His story, as told in the theogonies, is that he was born in Crete, the son of the god Zeus and Kore (or Persephone), who was herself the daughter of Zeus by his union with Demeter (a little incest never troubled the Greek gods). The young Dionysus, thus doubly descended from Zeus, spent his first five years on Mount Ida, protected by the dancing Kouretes. When Dionysus was five, Zeus announced that he was the new king of the gods. This roused the Titans, an older generation of gods who had already been displaced by the younger Zeus, to furious jealousy. They whitened their faces with gypsum to disguise themselves, and tricked the young Dionysus away from the protection of the Kouretes with a mirror and other baubles attractive to a child. When they had him to themselves they slashed him into seven pieces, which they boiled, roasted and ate. Only his heart and bones were not destroyed. The bones were interred by Apollo on Mount Parnassus, and Athena took the heart, still palpitating, to Zeus, who from it gave life to a new Dionysus.15

Several features of this account are important for our understanding of the changing idea of the soul. The first is the death and resurrection motif, which must imply the existence of an element in the individual that can survive death while remaining essentially the same. Indeed, the adherents of the Dionysian cults went far beyond the mere fact of the survival of a soul or essence of the individual after death. They saw the soul in life as a captive god, which could be released in an orgiastic dance and united with the god Dionysus himself.16 The kind of abandonment that this worship involved further differentiates the cult of Dionysus from the more ascetic Orphics, however tangled their histories otherwise may be.

What is new and significant about the Dionysian understanding of man is that the soul has moved from being a mere pale survival of earthly life to being an entity with a divine connection. If it can leave the body in a state of ‘ecstasy’ during life, then perhaps it can hope for such a state eternally once it is freed of the body for good by death. But it still is not ‘soul’ in the fullest modern or even Platonic sense, because it does not contain those attributes of the individual that make him/her unique. It may be moving towards becoming the immortal soul, but it is not yet personal.

Another aspect of the story of Dionysus comes later to have a significance that it probably did not have in the understanding of those who composed the original theogonies. After Dionysus was killed by the Titans, Zeus vented his rage by destroying them with a thunderbolt. Then, from the ashy residue, he created a new race of mortals, from which present-day man is descended. However, given that the Titans had just consumed the god Dionysus, this ash was composed of both earthly and heavenly elements. Later interpreters (notably the Neoplatonist, Olympiodorus the Elder, who lived in the fifth century AD) used this as an explanation and justification of man’s dual nature, which was therefore seen as both earthly and heavenly in its very origins. Thus in Dionysus we see the beginnings both of the idea of an independent and immortal soul and also of the opposition of this soul to an earthly and recalcitrant body.

Both Orphic and Dionysian ideas – and much more besides – come together in the partly real, partly mythical figure and writings of Pythagoras. A great deal is believed about Pythagoras; little is actually known. If Orpheus was a practical musician, bringing about magical results by his lute-playing, Pythagoras was a theoretical one. Music, he discerned, is produced on a stringed instrument by vibrations that vary in speed and hence pitch according to the length of the string producing them, and when different vibrations in the right mathematical proportions are produced simultaneously, we find the result harmonious and pleasing. More generally, this means that musical harmony is related to mathematical proportion. And, if harmony and proportion are the key elements of music, the highest earthly art, may they not also be the key to the soul? In linking this mathematical and musical insight to the soul, Pythagoras indicates that the soul possesses qualities of agreeable proportion and harmony. This is a quite new way of thinking about soul. Suddenly it becomes an entity in its own right, with independent properties, rather than a poor fragment of and substitute for the body it has left. This is clearly related to the Dionysian idea of the soul as a captive god, but the Pythagorean soul is an ideal harmonious substance by virtue of its very own nature.

This combination of what we might call scientific and mathematical observation and mysticism can be explained by Pythagoras’ background. From the Dionysian cults he took the idea that the soul is immortal and separable from the body. But Pythagoras grew up in Ionia, before fleeing to southern Italy in 532 BC, and in Ionia he was influenced by a group of philosophers, collectively known as the Milesians, who took a very different approach to reality from that of the Orphics and Dionysians. These thinkers, among whom Thales and Anaximenes were prominent, were interested in the nature of reality in this world – what composed matter, what produced life – rather than exclusively in religious ideas of purification and ecstasy. When they thought of the soul, they considered it too as having some link to physical reality. Anaximenes, for example, saw the soul as embodying self-propelled motion in much the same way as the air that imbues the universe is self-propelled.17 So along with the more mystical and ‘religious’ ideas of the Orphics and Dionysians, Pythagoras incorporated the more practical approach of the Milesians.18 The analogy between the soul and music, according to which it represented divine proportion and harmony, brought together in a satisfying whole both religion and mathematics.

Pythagoras also saw a distinction, which in its later development was to become very significant, between matter (the ‘stuff’ of the world) and the things that limited and controlled this matter, such as shape and number. This, in embryo, is an idea that develops into the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. And in these later philosophers this division between form and matter becomes a distinction also between soul and body: form is identified with soul and matter with body. Pythagoras also sees a connection between the way in which number limits the limitless chaos of matter and the way in which ethical ideas limit human behaviour. We shall see later how this connection between form and morals, matter and lack of moral responsibility becomes important in thinking about body and soul.19 It is soul that is believed to impose moral restraints on body. The seeds of a great deal of later philosophy are found in Pythagoras’ teaching.

At the same time, some of Pythagoras’ ideas concerning the soul are based more exclusively on mysticism and his inheritance from the Orphic and Dionysian cults. The soul has a divine origin. Not only is it independent of the body, but it can exist in various different bodies. In other words, it can transmigrate from one body – human or animal – to another. An Homeric psyche is at once so bound up with its identity with an earthly person and at the same time so lacking in psychological qualities either of that owner or independent ones, that we cannot conceive of it moving to inhabit another body. But this is precisely what the Pythagorean soul is alleged to do. As late as the early seventeenth century the imprisoned Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night knows the correct answer to Feste’s question, ‘What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl?’ and replies, ‘That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’. Malvolio sees this notion as degrading to the soul, and continues, when asked his view of Pythagoras’ doctrine: ‘I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion’. What Malvolio does not realize, but we do, is that in the context of his age Pythagoras’ notion of the soul was a huge step forward in its ‘ennoblement’ rather than the reverse.

The notion of the transmigration of souls was almost certainly encouraged by various contemporary stories of people who left their bodies for a time to wander the universe and enjoy various adventures. Both Pindar and Herodotus tell the story of one Aristeas, who apparently dies, but who subsequently is seen in other locations. Pindar claims he had the gift of prolonged ecstasy (the ability to exist and experience things while out of the body but able to return to it at will), while Herodotus says he died. Either way, his soul was able to leave his body and live a life of its own.20

Not only can the soul separate itself from the body in Pythagoras’ philosophy; it is desirable that it should do so. We have met this idea already in Orphic and Dionysian thought. The difference in Pythagoras is that man can free his soul from the body and from the cycle of transmigration, which otherwise has no definite terminus, through pure thought. This purification, or katharsis, can be brought about through the agency of human reason. Mind itself is the purifier. It is then a short step from this idea, that thought can liberate the soul, to the concept that thought is part of, or belongs to the soul.21

Finally, the dualism that we saw implicit in the cult of Dionysus, where the believer, through orgiastic dance, can release his soul temporarily from his body in ecstasy, is reinforced in the philosophy of Pythagoras. Once soul and body are separated in this way, and the soul has the ability to dwell in different bodies, the foundations are laid for the separation of soul and body in religious thinking as well. And the distinction described above between the amorphous matter of the universe and number that Pythagoras believes gives shape and limit to this matter lays the foundation for a dualism in the broader universe as well. In the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle both these dualisms merge into a coherent philosophy.

I must end this discussion of Pythagoras with the kind of health warning attached to products of a slightly dubious nature. Pythagoras undoubtedly existed, but he became a repository or dumping ground for the disparate ideas of the age that seemed to cling to him and that he may or may not actually have held himself. Also, as I have indicated, we know of his ideas chiefly through the accounts of later writers such as Plato and Aristotle, and it is impossible to be sure whether what they recount are his own unadulterated views or the gloss others have put on them one hundred or more years later.

For our purposes, however, this does not matter. What does matter is the way in which the raw ideas of these earlier thinkers provided the material for the concept of the soul that was to follow. By the time of Pythagoras we have a soul that unites the element that gives man emotions and thoughts in life with that which survives death. Immortality is no longer the shadowy, anonymous existence envisaged in the poems of Homer but the endurance of something recognizable and individual.

PLATO AND THE IDEA OF THE SOUL

The first systematic account of the soul in Western thought is found in the writings of Plato. Here we are no longer extrapolating ideas from myth or poetry but dealing with logically reasoned accounts of the nature and function of the soul. Not that this means things suddenly become simple! First of all, in most of the dialogues Plato attributes the arguments to his teacher, Socrates. Secondly, possibly in part at least because the ideas in the earlier dialogues are genuinely those of Socrates while those in the later develop independently according to Plato’s own changing philosophy, there is no absolute consistency in the views expressed.

The Immortality of the Soul

About one thing there is complete certainty: the soul is immortal, and the human soul, in its immortality, retains what is essential of the person whose soul it has been in life. The dialogue in which this is most poignantly expressed is the Phaedo, the account of the last hours of Socrates’ life on earth. With complete equanimity, Socrates talks to his friends, arguing himself and them out of a fear of death because of his certainty that what is truly the self will survive.

Death is the separation of soul and body, but this is by no means a tragedy for the individual. The true philosopher is entirely concerned with the soul and not the body. The senses of the body are inaccurate and hinder the soul; therefore only when it is freed from the body can the soul attain truth. ‘So long as we keep to the body and our soul is contaminated with this imperfection, there is no chance of our ever attaining satisfactorily to our object, which we assert to be truth.’22

As in all the Socratic dialogues, other speakers (in this case Socrates’ friends who have gathered to bid him farewell before he dies) raise objections, thereby testing the truth of Socrates’ assertions. Cebes says men fear that when the soul leaves the body it may be ‘dissipated like breath or smoke, and vanish away, so that nothing is left of it anywhere’ (70 a).23 But Socrates gently ridicules this notion: ‘You are afraid, as children are, that when the soul emerges from the body the wind may really puff it away and scatter it, especially when a person does not die on a calm day but with a gale blowing’ (77 e). The soul that Socrates envisages is not this fragile.

The proofs for the immortality of the soul as set forth in Plato’s dialogues can be divided into four broad categories. I shall look briefly at three of them.

One argument is based on the theory of recollection. Souls come into this world with knowledge gained from their life in a previous, disembodied state. We first encounter this notion in an earlier Platonic dialogue, the Meno, where Socrates elicits certain mathematical proofs from a slave boy, who has never been taught them. From this Socrates concludes that the boy must have prior knowledge of these ideas, which he can therefore be brought to recollect. And from where else can this prior knowledge come, but from the soul having learned them in a pre-existent state? Therefore, the soul exists before it is born in the body, and what exists prior to birth will hardly disappear at death.

Another is found in the fact that the soul above all bears life. Life is the opposite of death, and since essential opposites can never exist in the same thing, the soul can never receive into itself what is the opposite of its essence. Thus the soul cannot admit of death, and therefore is immortal. The soul that follows reason and has in this life beheld the true and divine will not be scattered and blown away by the winds after death. Like the swan, who sings at its death, Socrates can face its prospect with positive joy. And in the Republic Plato cites the passage I have already quoted above from Achilles (‘I would rather serve on the land of another man | Who had no portion and not a great livelihood | Than to rule over all the shades of those who are dead’) with disapproval. Poets must speak well of the other world, and death must not be represented as something to be feared.24

A final, highly abstract proof of the soul’s immortality is found in a later dialogue, the Phaedrus. Here the soul is said to be self-moving – that is, the soul moves itself with no external assistance, unlike the body which cannot move itself but is moved from without – that is by the soul. What is self-moving must always have moved; it cannot have had a beginning. What has no beginning can never have an end. Therefore the soul must be immortal.25 It is worth noting that the initial premise here, that the soul is self-moving, is not itself proven but is taken to be self-evident. Also, the highly abstract, rhetorical language used in this passage is untypical of these dialogues and more reminiscent of the opening of the Gospel of John. And, indeed, Plato’s insistence on the immortality and absolute superiority of the soul provided a somewhat uncomfortable legacy for Christianity, as we shall see.

The Nature of the Soul

The soul in the early dialogues of Plato such as the Phaedo appears to be a unity, not divided into parts in any way. Conflict, when it occurs, is between the soul and the body, not between various elements within the soul itself. But by the time of the writing of the Republic things are not so simple.

The Republic is a work, as its title indicates, that at one level is about society and how it should best be governed. But Plato sees an intimate connection between the classes of people in society at large and how they should be governed and the little kingdom within man and how its elements are to govern themselves. In Chapter IV he speaks of two parts within the soul – a better and a worse. A man is his own master when the better part of the soul has the worse under control (IV. 431a). There must be more than one element in the soul, he argues, because otherwise how could conflict about the right course of action to pursue take place? Yet we know that such conflict is common. It is possible for a man to be thirsty and yet pulled back from drinking. So there must be both a rational element and an irrational appetite within the soul.

This alone does not explain everything, however. Sometimes we will give in to irrational desires even though we know they are not for our ultimate good. At others we follow reason and behave in our own long-term interests. So what makes the difference? To explain this Plato gives the soul a third element – the spirited element or will. It is this will that sides with either the higher soul (reason) or the lower soul (irrational appetite) and decides which will control our actions. Ideally it should always side with reason. ‘Does it not belong to the rational part to rule, being wise and exercising forethought in behalf of the entire soul, and to the principle of high spirit to be subject to this and its ally’ (IV. 441e). Thus the soul becomes a mini-state, with all the possibilities of both good governance but also of insurrection. The unjust soul is under a tyranny. ‘Being always perforce driven and drawn by the gadfly of desire it will be full of confusion and repentance’ (IX. 577e).

To illustrate the multiple soul and the perils that may beset it, Plato then presents us with a remarkable picture. Imagine, he says, that the soul is like a fabulous many-formed monster of antiquity. This beast has the heads of tame and wild animals that it can grow out of itself and transform at will. Now suppose that this many-headed beast joins to itself two other creatures – a lion and man, so that all three grow together into one. Finally, transform the outside of this multiple creature into the shape of the man alone, so that to the outside observer the man is all that there is. Now this strange being, unified to appearances, but multiple underneath, will naturally have different needs and desires. And for it wrongdoing will be to feed and strengthen the composite beast and the lion and to starve the man. Similarly, in doing good, the man will be given complete mastery over the whole creature, taking particular care to secure the lion as his ally in this enterprise (IX. 588c–589b). The meaning of this elaborate metaphor is clear. The man is the rational part of the soul, the many-headed creature is the multiple desires of our lower natures, and the lion is the powerful will, which can decide whether desire or reason will rule.

In the Phaedrus