When Souls Had Wings: Pre-mortal Existence in Western Thought

BYU Studies Quarterly Volume 50 | Issue 4 Article 8 12-1-2011 When Souls Had Wings: Pre-mortal Existence in Western Thought Jesse D. Hurlbut James L. Siebach David B. Paxman Dana M. Pike Terryl L. Givens Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq Recommended Citation Hurlbut, Jesse D.; Siebach, James L.; Paxman, David B.; Pike, Dana M.; and Givens, Terryl L. (2011) "When Souls Had Wings: Premortal Existence in Western Thought," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 50 : Iss. 4 , Article 8. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol50/iss4/8 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the All Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in BYU Studies Quarterly by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact , . Hurlbut et al.: When Souls Had Wings: Pre-mortal Existence in Western Thought BOOK REVIEW PANEL Terryl L. Givens. When Souls Had Wings: Pre-mortal Existence in Western Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. On October 13, 2011, BYU Studies sponsored a program reviewing Terryl Givens’s important Oxford book on the idea of the premortal existence of souls in various lines of Western philosophy and religion. Because this first volume of its kind covers literature from so many different civilizations, the editors of BYU Studies saw no way to do this book justice without involving a panel of reviewers from several disciplines. After portions of Robert Fuller’s forthcoming review in Church History were read, the program proceeded with reviews, responses, and open discussion. The following is based on that program. • Review by James L. Siebach— Philo, Augustine, and Classical Varieties When Souls Had Wings is an engaging, expansive survey of the idea of the premortal soul in the Western intellectual tradition. The book seeks to unfold the idea’s “explanatory power” (5) in resolving certain problems in theology, in philosophy, and in human experience. In this review, I will rummage, by no means exhaustively, through the book’s introduction and chapters 2 through 5, asking questions about the author’s historiographic assumptions and about the potency of the explanatory power of preexistence. In his introduction, Givens defines premortality very broadly. Versions of premortality range from a soul as “a fully self-aware moral agent” to merely “raw material” used in God’s creation, yet Givens sets out to “encompass the entire range and variety of beliefs that trace the origins of individual identity to some kind of nonphysical state before birth” (4). Likewise, Givens attributes to the concept of the preexistent soul extraordinary philosophical and psychological power. “Such belief structures, like all enduring myths 136 Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2011 BYU Studies 50, no. 4 (11) 1 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, Iss. 4 [2011], Art. 8 Review of When Souls Had Wings V 137 and paradigms,1 persist because of their explanatory power.” And, like all successful paradigms, the concept of preexistence can “rationalize the incongruities and traumas of existence” or simply explain “why things are the way they are.” It is clear that Givens endorses the view that the concept is enduring because it is “more effective than others in the interpretation of human experience.” The concept of a preexistent soul has been used throughout history to explain other difficulties, such as “the human yearning for transcendence and the sublime,” “the frequent sensation of alienation,” “the moral sense common to humanity,” “the human ability to recognize universals,” “unevenly distributed pain and suffering,” “the uncannily instantaneous bonds between friends and between lovers,” and “the necessary precondition for a will that is genuinely free and independent” (5–6). As if resolving so many existential crises were not sufficient—can the concept knit a sweater?—the explanatory power of the idea of preexistence also resolves certain theological conundra. Givens explains, for example, that traditional Christian explanations of the soul’s origin at conception or birth are fraught with metaphysical and moral problems. “If the soul originates with the body . . . then why does it not perish with the body?” And, “If God creates the soul afresh in every human, how can it be imperfect, as a soul of fallen nature necessarily is? If it is created pure and innocent, how and when does it come to acquire the burden of Adam’s sin and guilt? And what justice can there be in immediately consigning a purely created spirit to the incubus of guilt, sin, and fallenness?” (2). True, traditional Catholic or Protestant theological explorations of the soul’s origin are fraught with moral and metaphysical difficulties, yet the concept of a preexistence introduces other perplexities: Isn’t it still a problem that preexistent spirits from the presence of God enter physical bodies, yet humans are still so inclined to sin and fallenness? If a preexistent soul enters a body, why should parents, with power to create a body only, assume responsibility for anything other than bodily development? Why does a human person require so long a time to mature, the preexistent soul seeming so passive during early physical and cognitive development? Of course, clarifying such difficult questions—along with a persuasive articulation of how a preexistent soul influences the moral deliberation of the person— would make any book a bestseller. 1. Ordinarily, a single concept or belief cannot function as a paradigm. A paradigm is, most properly, a model of reality, and so implies a rich, structured network of beliefs. Givens doubtless intends, in calling the concept of preexistent souls a paradigm, to include the larger worldview logically associated with the concept, such as with Neoplatonic Christianity. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol50/iss4/8 2 Hurlbut et al.: When Souls Had Wings: Pre-mortal Existence in Western Thought 138 v BYU Studies Chapter 2 is a useful review of early Greek views regarding the soul’s always-existent, ungenerated, indestructible, and individuated “spirit entity.” Givens’s reading of Plato is subtle and sufficiently discriminating to note, for example, that Plato’s own commitments to the various arguments he put forward for premortality are tenuous. He sometimes presented the idea in the context of a myth, and the doctrine was often merely instrumental in philosophical exercises. In Plato’s Meno, Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus, belief in the soul’s preexistence is useful in order to motivate human beings to live by the assumption that philosophical knowledge is attainable and that the philosophical life is the best of all possible lives. It is debatable whether Plato continued to hold the same views about the soul’s immortality. (Aristotle never found the idea persuasive.) The Parmenides is a dialogue in which Plato subjects his own metaphysics to relentless cr (...truncated)