The puzzled uncertainties of the “Academy,” the successors to Plato (“We can’t be sure whether the gods exist, but we’d better keep the civil religion going just in case”) were giving way, in some newer teaching, to a vision of an upstairs/downstairs world such as the picture sketched by the biographer and philosopher Plutarch in the generation after Paul. For Plutarch, the aim of the game was eventually to leave the wicked realm of space, time, and matter and find the way to a “heaven” from which pure souls have been temporarily exiled and to which they would return in everlasting bliss.
Plutarch and his philosophial vision
