On Eternal Justice
Plato's Myth of Er and Man's Eternal Dilemma
[Greetings, friends, from Austin! I am fresh off another fantastic quarterly MetaMen retreat and prepping for two things here: (1) another (potential) Texas freeze; and (2) teaching my first class on Dante’s Inferno tonight. (If you want to join, there’s still time—just email me, and I will send you the outline!)
Because this Dante class overlaps with starting the second draft of my third book, I naturally find myself at this intersection of Dante and other classic authors. Last week, it was Boethius. This week, it’s Plato.
At the end of Republic (Book X), Plato tells the Myth of Er—a story of a fallen soldier getting a glimpse at the afterlife. It is that myth, its conception of Justice and insights on man’s eternal dilemma (which laid the foundation for Dante), that we devote the rest of this essay.]
Before Plato, the ancient world had Homer (and others) as guides on how things like justice worked in the world. Toward the end of the Iliad, there’s a scene where Achilles sees Priam weeping over the death of his son (whom Achilles killed) and offers these lines on how fates are determined:
Let us put our griefs to rest in our own hearts, rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning. What good’s to be won from tears that chill the spirit? So the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men live on to bear such torments – the gods live free of sorrows. There are two great jars that stand on the floor of Zeus’ halls and hold his gifts, our miseries one, the other blessings. When Zeus who loves the lightning mixes gifts for a man, now he meets with misfortune, now good times in turn. When Zeus dispenses gifts from the jar of sorrows only, he makes a man an outcast – brutal, ravenous hunger drives him down the face of the shining earth, stalking far and wide, cursed by gods and men.1
How, you might ask, does Zeus choose which jar to pull from? In Achilles’ view, he picks based on his subjective whim. Man can do all he wants to live a good life, Achilles says, but at the end of the day, our fate is not up to us—it’s up to whether Zeus woke up on the wrong side of the bed. In the world of Achilles, the only rule was “might makes right.” He who is stronger gets to make the rules.
Plato didn’t like that idea. He thought man should (and did) have a say over their final fate. Surely, Plato thought, choosing a life of vice or virtue comes with consequences. As a harsh critic of Homer throughout the Republic (going so far as to say that Homer was a dangerous poet and should be censored for his false ideas), Plato rejected the idea that Zeus had two jars and dispensed fates randomly. Plato believed, instead, in the idea of Justice—that one receives proportionate to one’s contribution (or lack thereof)—as one of the ideals existing in the realm of perfect Forms.
To illustrate his concept of the eternal Justice that governed the lives of man, Plato used the Myth of Er, which tells of a soldier thought dead who descends to the underworld and returns with a story of the afterlife to tell. Unlike the unordered underworld and Olympus of Homer, Er describes an afterlife where the just are rewarded and the wicked are punished.
Once upon a time he died in war; and on the tenth day, when the corpses, already decayed, were picked up, he was picked up in a good state of preservation. Having been brought home, he was about to be buried on the twelfth day; as he was lying on the pyre, he came back to life, and, come back to life, he told what he saw in the other world. He said that when his soul departed, it made a journey in the company of man, and they came to a certain demonic place, where there were two openings in the earth next to one another, and, again, two in the heave above and opposite the others. Between them sat judges who, when they passed judgment, told the just to continue their journey to the right and upward, through the heaven: and they attached signs of the judgments in front of them. The unjust they told to continue their journey to the left and down, and they had behind them signs of everything they had done. And when he himself came forward, they said that he had to become a messenger to humans beings of the things there, and they told him to listen and to look at everything in the place… But the sum, he said, was this. For all the unjust deeds they had done anyone and all the men to whom they had done injustice, they had paid the penalty for every one in turn, ten times over for each. That is, they were punished for each injustice once every hundred years; taking this as the length of human life, in this way they could pay off the penalty for the injustice ten times over.2
But this wasn’t the only rule in Plato’s Underworld. When Er asks the spirits guiding his journey of the fate of tyrants, he is shown another scene—a “terrible sight[].”
‘When we were near the mouth about to go up and had suffered everything else, we suddenly saw [the tyrant, Ardiaeus the Great] and others. Just about all of them were tyrants, but there were also some private men, of those who had committed great faults. They supposed they were ready to go up, but the mouth did not admit them; it roared when one of those whose badness is incurable or who had not paid a sufficient penalty attempted to go up. There were men at that place,’ he said, ‘fierce men, looking fiery through and through, standing by and observing the sound, who took hold of some and led them away, but who bound Ardiaeus and others hands, feet, and head, threw them down and stripped off their skin. They dragged them along the wayside, carding them like wool on thorns; and they indicated to those who came by for what reason this was done and that these men would be led away and thrown into Tartarus.’3
Tartarus, of course, is the deepest dungeon of torment and suffering where the Olympians caged the Titans for their rebellion. This is where the parallels to Dante and his Inferno become obvious. Just as Plato puts the most unjust next to the rebellious Titans in Tartarus, Dante casts condemned souls into the Inferno to live alongside Satan (who landed there as a consequence of rebelling against God).
If Plato introduced the idea of an ordered Underworld, where Justice and Order were the ruling principles, Dante continued on the work in the Divine Comedy. Throughout the nine circles of Dante’s hierarchical Hell, each level displays contrapassum (Latin for “suffer the opposite”), where punishments fit the crime precisely. What the sinners did in life, they become in death, with the game of self-deception stripped away. Biblically, this sentiment is seen in the Old Testament principle “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,” (Ex. 21:24), and in “By what things a man sinneth, by the same also he is tormented.” (Wis. 11:17). Dante’s Hell, like Plato’s Afterlife, is one of poetic justice.
In both the Myth of Er and Dante’s Inferno, we see something like the golden rule “do as you would be done by” played out as if it were not only an expression of how we ought to act but also an expression of how the universe actually works. We must do as we would be done by because we will have done to us what we did to others. If that weren’t the case, then there would be no such thing as Justice. At least not as something above the world of Achilles, where might makes right and the stronger get to mete out justice based on their subjective ideas of who deserves what.
Thus, we return to man’s eternal dilemma: will we be better off if we live a life of virtue or vice? To answer in favor of virtue imagines some benefit to body or soul (in this life or the next). Are Plato’s Myth of Er and Dante’s Inferno more than mere useful fiction, expressing something about the fundamental nature of the universe? Or are they, like religion, nothing more than “opiate for the masses?”
We can never know with perfect certainty which views are correct or what happens after life. That is one of the unfortunate features of life as a human being of limited perspective. Yet, while we cannot know exactly what life after life is like, we must first live this one. And what I know, from my experience, is that my life is infinitely better when I act as if Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Justice—God—exist. My life is infinitely more meaningful when I live by faith. When I move toward what’s noble, my spirit feels ennobled (as if it’s moving in the direction of Heaven); when I move in the opposite direction, my spirit registers an objection as if it’s descending into Hell.
This is why I, like Paul, “have hope in God”4 and, all things considered, believe the ideals we aspire to in this life are more than mere social constructs; I believe they are shadows of the reality of the next, pointing us to where we come from and where we’re headed.
I believe they are lights leading us home.
Iliad, Book 24, lines 610-622 (Fagles translation).
Plato, Republic, Book X, lines 614b-d, 615a-b (Bloom translation).
Plato, Republic, Book X, lines 615c - 616a (Bloom translation).
Acts 24:15.