By David Carlin

According to the ancient Greeks, the differentia between gods and men is that the former are immortal, the latter mortal. This belief in human mortality, it should be noted, was not incompatible with another widely held belief, namely that the souls (or ghosts) of dead humans live a miserable underworld life in Hades. But this "life" was hardly entitled to be called living. It was the antithesis of immortality. Only the gods were truly immortal.

In time, however, certain teachers came along - the Orphics, the Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato, and others - who held that human souls too are immortal, or at least are capable of immortality. But given that immortality was the distinctive privilege of the gods, this was tantamount to saying that human souls are godlike; they're actual or at least potential gods.

That Socrates and certain others came to believe that humans are actual or potential gods means that they placed a very, very high estimate on the value of a human person. An Athenian contemporary of Socrates, older than himself by a generation, the tragedian Sophocles, gave classic expression to this sentiment when in his Antigone he wrote the famous choral ode that begins with the words:

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man. (Fitts & Fitzgerald translation.)

Given this high estimate of man, doesn't it make sense to believe that humans, like the gods, live forever? How weird it would be for God or Nature to bring so wonderful a being into existence and then, after a few days or years, utterly destroy him!

In the following centuries, this belief in the immortality of the human soul spread widely, though not universally, throughout the Roman world. And then along came Christianity, which confirmed the view that humans could become gods (though Christianity called them saints, not gods). The new religion also confirmed the other Greek belief, the dark belief in the eternal misery of Hades. Persons who had been virtuous in this earthly life would become gods/saints; persons who had been wicked would be sent to the inescapable prison called Hades.

Well, that was a long, long time ago. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And then, as the Empire dissolved, it remained for many centuries the religion of both Western and Eastern Europe. And when Western Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries split into Catholic and Protestant parts, both parties continued to believe that earthly humans are potential gods/saints - and potential devils as well.

But here we are today, in the 21st century. In a highly modernized country like the United States, many in our society, including especially those in our culturally elite sections, have repudiated the old religion and its belief in immortality. Of course, many ex-Christians have not yet repudiated Christianity by making an express verbal declaration; no, they remain nominal Catholics or Protestants; but, in effect, they've abandoned the old beliefs of their ancestors.

They continue to believe, based on empirical observation, that humans are capable of great goodness and great wickedness. But they no longer believe that good souls become gods/saints after death; nor do they believe that Hitler and Stalin go to Hell.

Now, if once upon a time the Greeks' exalted estimate of the value of the human person led, quite logically, to the belief that we humans have the capacity to become gods and to live, like gods, forever, what happens when we cease to believe in our immortality and godlike potential? Will we continue to have a very high estimate of the worth of an individual person?

Or will we think of humans as nothing more than biological entities, subject to death as are all other biological entities? Will we think of ourselves as things like birds and bees, flowers and trees, things of small worth that have their brief day and then vanish forever?

Will we inscribe tombstones for ourselves similar to ancient tombstones...