Chapter 7 - Eschatology

Summary

The eschatological myths are our only source for Plato’s views on the condition of the soul outside of the body. Rather than interpret them as literal accounts of the afterlife, this chapter argues that they result from the appropriation of traditional religious themes in an attempt to portray symbolically the condition of the disembodied soul, which cannot be the object of discursive knowledge. Each myth takes up the themes of the dialogue in which it is found, creating a myth that reflects in the form of images, the philosophical theories presented in the body of the dialogue, acting as a symbolic mirror for the condition of the soul as portrayed in the dialogue. The last dialogues see an eclipse of eschatological imagery, due in part to their highly technical nature, in part to Plato’s desire to merge the two sources of his eschatology: the cosmological account of reincarnation, which provides the “scientific” foundations for the immortality of the soul, and the accounts of post-mortem punishments, which serve an ethical-political function. Thus, in the Timaeus we find a wholly naturalized eschatology, deprived of supernatural trappings, in which the condition of the soul is perfectly mirrored in the condition of the body-soul complex as a whole.