Become Like the Angels

6. Preexistence of Souls

[145] Chapter 6 Preexistence of Souls After examination of Origen’s view of the “higher soul” and “lower soul,” in relation to his philosophical contemporaries and predecessors, it remains to outline a cosmic “history” of the soul, to trace its role in Origen’s grand vision of salvation history. This history begins for Origen not in this life but in a previous, preexistent state. The Middle Platonic tradition had a long history of speculation about such a state, beginning in the writings of Plato himself, and Origen draws extensively from the vocabulary and concepts of this tradition. Yet Origen’s view of the preexistent state is vastly different from that of the philosophical schools, inasmuch as his is framed primarily by the theological concepts of God and creation, divine providence and justice, and the Trinity. For Origen, the preexistent state was not Plato’s supracosmic world of Ideas, nor the Middle Platonic realm of eternal, disembodied divinities. It was, rather, the prehistory of the Bride of Christ, the creation of a Trinitarian God through his own providential wisdom. Preexistence in Plato Plato’s view of the preexistent state is almost entirely conveyed to us in mythical form, making its actual philosophical content difficult to discern. Yet by tracing references to the preexistent state through Plato’s dialogues, we can discern certain features that stand History of the Two Souls [146] out readily. As we shall see below, Plato associates the soul’s preexistence with the realm of the eternal Ideas, to which it is related due to its epistemological mode of functioning. From this relationship arise certain qualities that the preexistent souls share with the eternal Ideas, several of which will be assessed below. The doctrine of the soul’s preexistence happens into Plato’s early dialogues almost by happenstance, always on the periphery of his anthropology but never central to it.1 It “happens” simply because preexistence is the only way of explaining Plato’s epistemological doctrine of innatism, or “recollection,” which is central to his philosophical system.2 (Preexistence does become more and more central to Plato’s system as his dialogues progress, it seems, and in his later dialogues it is rarely left out of the picture.) Both the Meno and the Phaedo argue, based upon the observation that teaching is a form of “midwifery,” that the soul must have had a previous existence in the World of Ideas in order to possess innate knowledge of them.3 He adds to this another argument from the “law of opposites”: that the cosmos operates cyclically and life could come only from that which was formerly alive.4 In these dialogues very little is actually said by way of a description of such a primordial, preexistent state. Little more could be expected, of course, since the experience of this state would require abstracting all that is bodily from our present experience, certainly an impossible feat, so the most that we are given is through the genre of mythology.5 1. See G.M.A.Grube, Plato’s Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1935), 123–24. “The myth [of the preexistent soul] is an addendum, not an argument. At least until in his later dialogues immortality followed from premises he had by then worked into his philosophy , Plato was inclined not to treat the belief in it as the main argument for, but only as an added inducement to, the good life.” 2. For Plato’s doctrine of recollection, see Dominic Scott’s Recollection and Experience : Plato’s Theory of Learning and Its Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Nicholas P.White, Plato on Knowledge and Reality (Hackett Publishing, 1976); Norman Gulley, “Plato’s Theory of Recollection,” Classical Quarterly (1954): 194– 213; O.Balaban, “The Paradox of the Meno and Plato’s Theory of Recollection,” Semiotica 98 (1994): 265–75. 3. Meno 81–86; Phaedo 73–95, e.g. 4. Phaedo 69–72. 5. “We cannot hold it against Plato, any more than we held it against Hamlet, that [147] Preexistence It is enough, though, at this stage, to note that this hypothetical preexistent state connects the soul to the Ideas, with which it possesses a natural kinship. This kinship is demonstrated by the soul’s present mode of knowledge: given that the objects of knowledge (Ideas) are immaterial, so must be the soul, based on the principle that “only like knows like.”6 So run the typical arguments...