160 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
With all due respect to a revered philosopher, Wittgenstein's
thinking in this matter was in fact no more Hebraic than it was
Greek; indeed, it was no more Hebraic than it was Chinese,
Aleut, Tasmanian, Argentine, or Venusian. He was speaking
utter nonsense. But he was also, one has to note, a victim of the
sort of conventional thinking about ancient Judaism, Graeco-
Roman antiquity, and early Christianity that was dominant in
his time and that, alas, probably remains dominant in ours. It
is the sort of silly picture of the remote past that makes pos-
sible specious distinctions between the "Greek" and the "bibli-
cal" views of things, as if the religious and intellectual cultures
of the ancient world were something like competing corpo-
rations or opposed systems of political ideology, hermeti-
cally sealed against one another. It is also, invariably, a picture
that conforms more to our modern fantasies about the past
than to the actual historical and textual evidence that schol-
ars rely upon. In reality, the idea of eternal perdition for the
wickedest of souls, in a place of unending suffering, appears
to have been a Greek notion - mythological, religious, and
philosophical-before it ever took (shallow) root in Jewish
thought; it is certainly also an idea of only the most dubious
"scriptural" authenticity. Plato's Phaedo, for example, contains
a far more unambiguous theory of perpetual damnation than
does any text found in the Bible. The spiritual vision common
to the pagan world in which Christianity was born accom -
modated an immense range of speculations and beliefs and
doubts regarding the nature and destiny of the human soul;
but only a very few systems of religious thought were wholly
free of terrifying opinions concerning what lay ahead for the
reprobate or spiritually deluded. Platonism, the mystery cults
of the time, Orphic sects, Neo-Pythagoreanism-apparently
all of them could imagine some very dreadful fates indeed