Forgotten Bricks

It amused me to note today, again, how selective humanity is in choosing what to remember and what to emphasize. I was looking up Plato’s views on the “simplicity of the soul,” which, I’d noted, reading another post, had come to be reduced, by twists and turns, to the simplicity of intellect. Now Plato’s doctrine of the soul’s immortality, based on its unity, immateriality, lack of any parts, and its invisibility is widely known, indeed has become a kind of token. But in the very same dialogue, the Phaedo, in which this conception of the soul is artfully developed, we also get the equally fascinating doctrine that souls pre-exist their births, that life results in death but that death generates life as well—a doctrine that Socrates explains by the analogy of sleep and waking, each generating the other. Ancient intellectual structures remain forever sound, as it were, but it is nevertheless possible to mine them for just those bricks and stones that fit a current fashion in architecture—while others are left untouched in their places. With Origen (185-254 AD), among the ancients, the notion of metempsychosis was still alive until purged from Christianity in the Second Council of Constantinople held in 553. That was at least one kind of fundamental change in the way doctrines of the soul had to be built in the future.