Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1998, Blaðsíða 167

Death, Jesus, Derrida
attests to a similar state of mind. Also here may be noted the collective spirit
over against individual interests. Hades, umbrated with hopelessness, is the
place of death into which enters the soul deprived of its (living) human facul-
ties, mindless and out of breath.8 You run, if anything, only into still more
colorful descriptions of appearing dead people as if in a transparent body,
“etSwXov,” sometimes even covered with scars and wounds.9
If collective mentality is characteristic of these ancient cultures, it would
have to have been a disparagement to a taxonomist like Plato. In a strictly
classified society the equal destiny of death becomes the utter predicament
of juxtaposing free and enslaved individuals, just and wicked, the wise and
scomful. The strive for excellence in virtue, “ápeTf|,” in the gardens of go(o)d
becomes an objective that most are not expected to accomplish in a lifetime
but through a circle of reincarnation that is the fate of the immortal soul.
Indeed, the material world is but a fierily ground to be escaped through an
improved perception of eternal truth(s) to which the soul is linked because
of its affinity with go(o)d:
There is one way, then, in which a man can be free from all anxiety about the
fate of his soul—if in life he has abandoned bodily pleasures and adornments, as
foreign to his purpose and likely to do more harm than good, and has devoted
himself to the pleasure of acquiring knowledge, and so by decking his soul not
with a borrowed beauty but with its own—with self-control, and goodness, and
courage, and liberality, and truth—has fitted himself to await his journey to the
next world (Phaedo 114d-e).10
Thus, the ideal and invisible was to replace the obvious: the body deprived
of any real function for an immortal and all powerful soul in a cycle where
death is but a praeambula to trials of your accomplishments so far.* 11
8 Vide Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, Published for the Center for
Hellenistic Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) 70-124, praesertim
82-108.
9 Cf. Bremmer, ibid., 76-82.
10 Text in Ioannes Bumet, ed., Platonis Opera, Vol. I, Tetralogias 1-11 Continens, Oxford
Classical Texts (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1900) 57-118. Translation in Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the
Letters, With Introduction and Prefaratory Notes, 2nd printing with corrections, Bollingen
Series LXXI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963) [1961] 95.
11 On the issue of corporal versus incorporeal, vide R. Renehan, “On the Greek Origins of
the Concepts Incorporeality and Immateriality,” GRBS 21/2 (Summer 1980) 105-138; on
Plato, praesertim 127-132.
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