Immortality of the soul Part I. (Apologetics).

One of the most important teachings of the Catholic faith is that the human soul is immortal. It seems that all societies until the twentieth century have thought that there is a next life. At times there have been individuals or groups within these societies which denied this, but perhaps the first preponderantly this-worldly society was the Soviet one, in which the number of nonbelievers was much great than the number of believers.

Though belief in some kind of immortality has been so universal, some of the opinions about the nature of this life were strange. One chief reason for this is that, when the soul, the spirit, leaves the body, it is hard to believe that the new life of the soul is a full one, since the body has been such an important part of the human being. Most of the Greeks thought that the next life was a ghostlike existence, a half-life in "Hades". And there was no thought of it being happy. The Jews, too, until near the end of Old Testament times, had a similar belief: "The lot of all beyond the grave was to be the same, a weak and pale existence in Sheol separated from God; reward and retribution were to be in this world, with long life, a large family, riches, and prestige for the just man, and misfortune for the wicked" (Jerome Biblical Commentary, 1968, p. 557).

The Greek philosophers broke away from the gods of Greek religion and looked at the question of immortality without reference to them, though all the philosophers we shall consider taught that there are other gods, different from the traditional Greek ones. The leading schools were founded by Plato (427-347 B.C.), Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Epicurus (342-270 B.C.), and Zeno the Stoic (342-270 B.C.). Plato taught that the human soul is immortal, that the good are rewarded in the next life and the evil punished. He could teach this quite plausibly because he taught that the true human being is the soul, that the body is a prison, a tomb, a punishment for evil, and that thus in the next life the soul was freed from its constricting body. He also taught, however, that after a few thousand years souls returned to earth to live out another cycle of existence. So, while souls are eternal, their happiness or unhappiness in the next life is not lasting.

Aristotle did not see how the soul could be immortal since he could not see how it would be able to function after death without its body. Yet he still said that human beings should live morally good lives. Epicurus, the founder of the school of pleasure named after him, agreed with Aristotle that the soul is not immortal, and thus seemed to be more logical in saying that the purpose of life is not moral goodness but pleasure. (He was quite conservative however in his notion of earthly pleasure.) Zeno and his Stoic school taught pantheism, the doctrine that everything is God, that our souls are divine, and that at death they are swallowed up into the pantheistic divinity (a doctrine of immortality not really different from that of Epicurus, since at death we would cease to be human persons at all). Like Aristotle, the Stoics taught that we should live a strict moral life.

The only person among these four whom Christians could follow concerning immortality would be Plato, but they could not agree with his polytheism or transmigration. They could, of course, simply deny these teachings, but simple denial would not suffice for the teaching that man is his soul alone. It is true that for Christians the soul is wounded by Original Sin, but that is quite different from saying that we should not have bodies at all. Indeed, in Christianity, a punishment for Original Sin is death, which is the separation of the soul from its body. Thus in Christianity the body is good. Ultimately it is the dogma of the resurrection of bodies which helps to solve this problem.

But we must wait for the next article to show this. And also to decide whether the soul is immortal of its very nature, and whether this doctrine can be proven in philosophy, or whether we can be sure of it through revelation alone.

Father Kennedy is a priest of the Congregation of St. Basil and a long time student of philosophy.