Josef Pieper (1904–1997)

Josef Pieper explores a fascinating but often neglected aspects of Platonic philosophy. These are the spiritual themes of the Greek pagan thinker, which also provide some striking parallels with Christian eschatology (the study of man's final end as it is achieved in the afterlife). While Socrates, the chief interlocutor or character of Plato's dialogues, is often ironic, paradoxical and even at times irreverent, Pieper notes that there was one point one which he was strikingly assertive and even "dogmatic." This was on the subject of death and judgement in the hereafter.

As Pieper says of Plato's descriptions of the soul after death: "The reward [of the good] is to dwell on the islands of the blessed. Punishment, like guilt, is in two forms. The guilty who can be healed are led to a place at which, for a time, they 'do penance' and 'purify themselves of their wrongdoing.' And so, when we speak of a 'place of purification' and 'purgatory' we are using Plato's own words. Those who through their crimes have incurred guilt which cannot be healed undergo... an unending, eternal punishment...."

Plato famously rejected the popular mythic conceptions of Greek religion, as found in Homeric legends. He criticized the idea of amoral deities and an afterlife conceived as a gloomy, shadowy underworld. For Plato, myth is not an historical or scientific chronicle, yet it remains morally and psychologically true. It describes an objectively real fact of human existence. Pieper calls it "a story played out between the realm of the gods and the realm of men."… (more)