Immortality (20 page)

In the next chapter, we will look at whether these billions of people are right. But first, we will look at how the soul emerged from the murky world of the mystery cult to become perhaps the most influential single idea in the history of Western civilization. We will look at how the Soul Narrative succeeds in flattering our aspirational side with its promise of transcendence and how it has given us a sense of self that has fostered individualism, democracy and the demands for rights, equality and freedom that have shaped the modern age.

Of all the narratives, the Soul should be best able to deliver an immortality worth having. It promises an eternal life that takes place in a fantastical realm—whether heaven or hell, the halls of Valhalla or the Isles of the Blessed. This has provided visionaries and poets with the chance to imagine an ideal afterlife, without the limitations of physical existence. In this chapter, we will examine some of these visions to see if they offer an eternity to die for.

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T
HE
idea of the soul is both ancient and intuitive. It claims that there is some part of you that is spiritual or immaterial in nature—and that this part is the
real
you. Being immaterial, this soul is not subject to decay and destruction like your physical frame, and so when your body dies, your soul can continue its journey—to the next life and immortality.

In dreams and visions, people of many cultures have had what seemed like the experience of floating free of their physical self to visit other places and times. They often regarded this as evidence that their real essence was some spiritual thing that can function independently of their fleshly frame. This incorporeal self goes by many names, with accompanying variations in the account: astral body, subtle body or etheric body; psyche, pneuma or mind; ghost or spirit. But wherever we find the belief that the real you is separate from your body and can outlive it, we have the Soul Narrative.

Many cultures ritualized these experiences of dreams and visions, enhancing their meaning as journeys to the spirit world, where wisdom and power were sought and natural limits could be overcome. But their ideas of the soul were not necessarily much like the ideas prevalent today. The Egyptians, for example, believed in two souls, which played subtly different roles in making up a human. Such notions of multiple or composite souls were common; to many ancient peoples it seemed obvious that such faculties as breath, consciousness, intellect and appetite were all essential to human life yet were nonphysical and therefore dependent on different spiritlike aspects of the self. As not all of these “souls” were immortal by nature, the postmortem life of the spirit was inevitably shadowy and incomplete.

In the Greek-speaking world, one movement in particular led the way in uniting these disparate elements of the self: the mystery cults, which we mentioned earlier as offering the participant a chance to become one with their deity. They believed their rituals would bring them a happy and full afterlife, in explicit contrast to
the dark and partial existence that awaited the uninitiated. Instead of going to dank, dark Hades, their souls would rise up to the stars to live with the gods. These cults were very influential in certain educated circles, and one thinker who came under this influence was Plato.

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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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.

T
HE
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 part 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.