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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
What does Plato have to do with the Christian faith? Quite a bit, it turns out. In ways that might surprise us, Christians throughout the history of the church and even today have inherited aspects of the ancient Greek philosophy of Plato, who was both Socrates's student and Aristotle's teacher. To help us understand the influence of Platonic thought on the Christian faith, Louis Markos offers careful readings of some of Plato's best-known texts and then traces the ways that his work shaped the faith of some of Christianity's most beloved theologians, including Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Dante, and C. S. Lewis. With Markos's guidance, readers can ascend to a true understanding of Plato's influence on the faith.
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FROMPLATOTOCHRIST
How PlatonicThoughtShaped theChristian Faith
For my brother George
With memories of many late-night talks about
God, man, and the universe
Contents
PREFACE
BY TITLING THIS BOOKFrom Plato to Christ I do not mean to suggest that it can only be profitably read by Christians. I hope it will be read by people of all religious backgrounds, or no religious background, who share my (and Plato’s) love for beauty, hunger for goodness, and passion for truth. I do, however, mean to suggest that the works of Plato can be most profitably read on two simultaneous levels: as works of genius in their own right and as inspired writings used by the God of the Bible to prepare the ancient world for the coming of Christ and the New Testament. Plato, to my mind at least, is the greatest of all philosophers—the culmination of the best of pagan (pre-Christian) wisdom, a wisdom that challenges the mind as much as it fires the imagination and that leaves the soul yearning for more. Though he lacked the direct (or special) revelation afforded to Moses, David, Isaiah, John, and Paul, Plato was nevertheless inspired by something beyond the confines of our natural world. Along with such Greco-Roman sages as Aeschylus, Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil, Plato glimpsed deep mysteries about the nature of God and man,1 the earth and the heavens, history and eternity, virtue and vice, and love and death that point forward to the fullness of the Judeo-Christian worldview.
I am aware that such a reading of Plato and his work may seem bizarre at best and anti-intellectual at worst to the modern, post-Enlightenment mind, but we should not forget that many of the finest thinkers of the past—men like Origen, Augustine, and Erasmus—held just such a view of Plato and his fellow proto-Christians. The very reason that Aristotle and Virgil could serve as forerunners and guides to the two greatest repositories of medieval Catholic learning (the Summa theologiae and the Commedia) was because Aquinas and Dante understood that their pagan mentors had access to a wisdom that transcended their time and place. Though they believed that man was fallen both in body and in mind, they also believed that man was created in God’s image and still retained the mark of his Creator. True, our reason, conscience, and powers of observation were corrupted by the fall, but they still operated and could afford us limited knowledge of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
Indeed, so sure was Boethius that fallen man retained, under the wider umbrella of God’s grace, the capacity to grope after that which is real (see Acts 17:27) that he attempted, in his Consolation of Philosophy, to embody Christian ethical principles while yet strictly confining himself to the wisdom achieved by such pagan thinkers as Plato and Aristotle. Chaucer, author of the third great repository of medieval Catholic learning (Canterbury Tales), clearly believed Boethius’s attempt was successful, for his Knight’s Tale strikes the same literary-philosophical stance: pointing forward to the fuller Christian revelation while limiting its characters to beliefs accessible to the pre-Christian world. And most of those beliefs Chaucer borrowed directly from a book he translated into Middle English: the Consolation of Philosophy.
Let me be clear: I shall be treating Plato as a bona fide source of wisdom. Though I shall in no way abdicate my responsibility to measure, test, evaluate, and critique, my primary posture vis-à-vis Plato will be that of a student learning at a master’s feet. Plato was a genius, a vessel through whom much beauty, goodness, and truth was ushered into our world. He was neither flawless nor free from error, but he shone a light that we would do well to attend to—especially if we desire to move up the rising path toward those things that are really real and truly true.
If we read Plato in this spirit, then I believe we will be changed by what we read. We will come to see our world and the next through different eyes; we will reevaluate the worth of things that we once thought dear and perhaps even alter the trajectory of our lives. Plato’s dialogues are fun, and the great master is not above tweaking the noses of his readers, but let no one think that they are mere pastimes for idle college students (or professors!). Plato is about serious business, and we should be as well.
Though Plato helped teach the Western world that knowledge is something that should be sought for its own sake rather than as a utilitarian method for achieving power and wealth—a teaching foundational to all liberal arts institutions—he did not consider philosophy to be merely an end in itself. Philosophy properly pursued and wrestled with should lead to a higher and greater end—the contemplation of what Plato called the Good and later Christian theologians called (after Plato) the Beatific Vision. The purpose of Plato’s dialectic is not to teach us to play mental games but to propel us forward on the road to greater wisdom and insight. Though Plato the pre-Christian did not know that Truth is ultimately a Person (see John 14:6), he sought it as tenaciously and passionately as Solomon or John or Paul. Let us do the same.
THE PATH AHEAD
My dialogue with Plato’s dialogues begins with a close look at the influence that Socrates, the sophists, and the Presocratics exerted on the thought and practice of Plato. Socrates, for all his passion and genius, was, I will argue, the kind of thinker who was better at asking questions than providing answers—the ideal type of thinker, that is, to inspire his star pupil to take up the mantle of his master and move forward toward the formulation of answers. The Presocratics, on the other hand, paved the way for Plato by laying down a riddle for which Plato would provide, in the pre-Christian world, the most original and influential solution.
After the first chapter, which includes a quick overview of Plato’s early Socratic dialogues, I put my full focus on the great dialogues of Plato’s middle period, including Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Phaedo, and Timaeus. It is in these dialogues that Plato’s mature voice is heard in all its beauty and majesty and where his most lasting ideas find their fullness of expression. As Republic is his best and most fully realized work, I devote all of chapter two to following Plato as he explores the nature of justice both in the individual and in the governments that individuals construct. I focus in particular on how Plato, through the voice of Socrates, disproves the commonly held belief that the unjust man is happier and more successful than the just man, proposes a course of education that will produce leaders of great philosophical insight, contrasts the ephemeral nature of worldly pursuits with the lasting value of contemplation, and redefines the nature of religion, society, and the arts.
Republic is perhaps most famous for its haunting allegory of the cave; however, it is not the only Platonic dialogue to make use of a well-told myth for the sake of illustration and illumination. Indeed, nearly all of Plato’s middle dialogues contain memorable allegories that point to some aspect of the journey toward truth. It is the burden of chapters three and four to survey the wisdom contained in these richly imaginative myths and discover how they work together to provide a multifaceted picture of the internal struggle that impels some toward the beast below and others toward the heavens above.
With chapter five, I move past Plato’s middle dialogues to consider the crowning achievement of his later years, a dialogue titled Laws that, like most of his other later dialogues, does not use Socrates as its mouthpiece. In this partial reworking of Republic, we encounter again the central issues of education, virtue, and the arts that continued to trouble, challenge, and fascinate Plato to the end of his life.
In chapter six, I take a slight step backward to consider a Platonic dialogue that stands firmly in between Republic and Laws, a dialogue that, though much shorter than the other two, deserves a chapter to itself—not only because of its inherent brilliance but also because it was the only dialogue of Plato to be widely available throughout most of the Middle Ages. I speak, of course, of Timaeus, a Platonic work that is less a dialogue than an extended myth, an account of creation that bears striking similarities to Genesis 1 and that, of all Plato’s dialogues, contains the most powerful foreshadowings of Christianity.
I have titled this book From Plato to Christ, and, in keeping with that title, I consider in part two Plato’s influence on later Christian authors. To set the stage, I offer in chapter seven a Christian reading of Plato’s myths that seeks to assess, from the point of view of the Christian faith, how close the pre-Christian Plato came to glimpsing higher biblical truths. I argue that there are a number of key elements of Plato’s philosophical and spiritual vision that can not only be reconciled with those of Christ but can actually increase and empower the spiritual life of the Christian humanist who desires to drink from those two streams (the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian) that flow from Athens and Jerusalem and meet together in Rome.
In chapter eight I begin my analysis of Plato’s influence on Christian writers with a reading of a strange and wonderful book by an early church father that makes a spirited and courageous—if at times heterodox—attempt to filter the vision of Plato through a Christian lens. His name is Origen, and I argue that his book On First Principles successfully balances a firm belief in the essential doctrines of Christianity with a free and contagious spirit of inquiry that calls back from his grave the author of Republic.
After this long effusion on Origen, I offer a series of shorter chapters that trace Plato’s influence through the early church, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic age, and the twentieth century. In chapters nine and ten, I survey the influence of Plato on three key figures in Eastern Orthodoxy (Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Palamas) and Western Catholicism (Augustine, Boethius, and Dante). All six of these writers found ways to strengthen their own Christian faith and vision by meditating on the truths revealed in Plato.
Chapter eleven begins with a close look at the work of a chief architect of the Reformation and Renaissance, Erasmus, who chose not to follow Luther into Protestantism but who found ways to carry the legacy of Plato into the areas of spiritual growth and political justice. From Erasmus, I move to the father of Enlightenment and modern philosophy, Descartes, whose Platonic methods helped keep him, I argue, closer to Christianity than the philosophers who followed in his wake. Finally, I consider how the great Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrestled with Plato in his influential theories of the imagination.
In chapter twelve, I turn to the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis, to assess how his radically creative yet fully orthodox views on the nature of choice, sin, and heaven represent a perfect fusion of Platonic thought and Christian doctrine.
The book concludes with a bibliographical essay of books by and about Plato that have influenced my own thoughts and that should prove accessible to a general readership.
A NOTE ON TRANSLATION
FOR THE SAKE OF CONSISTENCY, all passages from the dialogues of Plato are quoted from the translations of the great Victorian classicist Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893). Still accurate and highly readable, Jowett’s translations capture the beauty and complexity of Plato’s syntax, reminding us that the philosopher who kicked the poets out of his ideal republic was himself one of the finest prose poets of all time.
I have also chosen to limit myself to Jowett because of the accessibility of his translations to the average reader. As well as being available in a number of different inexpensive editions from such publishers as Modern Library (Selected Dialogues of Plato), Anchor (The Republic and Other Works), and Dover (Six Great Dialogues), the complete translations of Jowett can be read for free online either at Project Gutenberg1 or at The Internet Classics Archive.2 Finally, those who own a Kindle can download the complete Jowett Plato for a nominal fee.
As for the referencing of my quotes, rather than using page numbers from a specific edition, I use the standard Stephanus numbers. These numbers are taken from the page and section numbers of the 1578 edition of Plato’s complete works by Stephanus (Henri Estienne). As nearly all editions of Plato today, regardless of the publisher or translator, include the Stephanus numbers in the margin or (less helpfully) at the top of each page, these numbers will allow readers to locate the passage I am quoting no matter what edition they have in their library.
Finally, although all my quotes are taken from Jowett, in my bibliographical essay, I share with the reader a number of more recent translations and editions that I have found to be helpful.
SOCRATES, THE SOPHISTS, AND THE PRESOCRATICS
LET ME BEGINwith what may seem a strange admission. Though I love Plato above all philosophers, if all we had of Plato were his early Socratic dialogues (for example, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and Euthydemus), I would hardly rank him in the top echelon of philosophers. Still, these dialogues, with their abrupt endings and seeming inability to provide answers, stand as necessary stepping stones to the great dialogues of Plato’s middle period (Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, Gorgias, Meno, and Protagoras). They are stepping stones in at least three ways: (1) they seem to present the thought and approach of the historical Socrates rather than that of his precocious pupil, Plato; (2) they build a methodological (dialectic-driven) and theoretical (definition-based) framework on which Plato’s mature philosophy rests; and (3) they strip away the many, the partial, and the false to make room for the one, the full, and the true.
TRUTH AS REVELATION
If I were to buy an old house that had fallen into a woeful state of disrepair, my attempts at restoration would have to be carried out by means of a two-step process. Before covering the chipped and faded walls with new, vibrant paint, I would have to expend considerable time and energy stripping off the old paint and filling in the holes with putty. Likewise, before laying down expensive Carrara marble, I would first have to do the backbreaking work of ripping up the torn and stained carpets and removing the moldy pads and rusty tack boards. Neither the stripping nor the ripping makes for glamorous work, but the work must be done if the house is to reach its pinnacle of beauty.
With the skill of a master painter and the precision of a master stonemason, Plato built a glorious palace of philosophy, but he could only do so because his teacher, Socrates, had done the hard work of preparing the walls and floors. Philosophy, as Plato practiced it, meant a search after Wisdom: not after those thousand-and-one little systems that compete for supremacy in the marketplace of ideas, nor those relativistic, man-made opinions that masquerade as divinely revealed standards, but that one and eternal Truth that transcends our ever-shifting world, that abides and endures.
Unfortunately, such a search, difficult at any time and place, was rendered even more difficult by the sophists, teachers for hire who, by instructing the sons of the wealthy in the methods of logic, rhetoric, and oratory, guaranteed them success in the economic and political life of the polis (city-state) of Athens. Unlike Socrates, who believed in divine standards of behavior and belief, the sophists as a group considered ethical actions and philosophical truths to be relative: something that shifted from polis to polis.
Socrates set as his limited, humble philosophical goal, not the reaching of that capital-T Truth to which Plato dedicated his life, but the clearing away of all those sophistical, small-t truths that make it impossible for students or their teachers to catch even a faint glimpse of Truth. In this world of shifting shadows in which we live, it is nearly impossible to peer through all the many veils of untruth to catch sight of that faint glimpse—impossible, that is, unless we can first find a way to dispel the shadows.
I often assure my students that if they will just concentrate harder and focus their minds more firmly that the meaning of what they are reading will emerge and become clear to them. What I am telling them, in effect, is that the knowledge they are seeking is already there, hidden and embedded in the work they are studying. If they can only strip away what is preventing them from seeing it, the knowledge will be released, and they will reap the fruits of their labor.
If they seem skeptical, I back up my assurance with a well-known anecdote from the Renaissance that is most likely apocryphal but that nevertheless conveys a great truth. When asked, the story goes, how he could create a sculpture as perfect as his David, Michelangelo replied that when he first stood before the single piece of (flawed) marble that would yield his masterpiece, he saw David, simple and whole, in the midst of the stone. After that moment of vision, he needed only to chip away all the marble that was not David.
Like the statue of Israel’s messianic king, Truth is not so much something that we build up to as something we dig down to. The philosopher who would seek after truth must be a miner, one who burrows down through layers of error and illusion to uncover the truth that lies at the heart of the mine. Or, to switch the metaphor without switching its meaning, he must be like a mountaineer who climbs through layers of mist and cloud to reach the seemingly inaccessible peak of Mount Everest. Or, to switch it once again, like the high priest of Israel pushing his way past a series of increasingly thick veils until he reaches the ark of the covenant that lies at the center of the holy of holies. The journey to the bottom, the top, or the center is finally the same journey, for its telos (its goal and its purpose) is the same: to reach the First Principle, the Essential Origin, the Transcendent Truth.
The original title of the last book of the Bible is Apocalypse, a Greek word that means, literally, “uncovering.” Translated into Latin, the word becomes “revelation” (re-veiling, which is to say, unveiling). It may at first seem odd that the most obscure and cryptic book of the Bible should bear a title that means “uncovering.” Wouldn’t “covering” more accurately describe the effects of reading John’s great prophecy? But the book is aptly named. The reason Revelation seems so strange to us is that we are not used to gazing directly on eternity. Through the power of revelation, John rips away the veils of time and space, allowing us to peer into the divine, supratemporal workings of history.
Unless the philosopher be trained in the almost mystical art of uncovering, of stripping away the veils until truth is revealed in all its glory and splendor, he cannot hope to approach the deeper recesses of wisdom.
IN SEARCH OF DEFINITIONS
It was, I believe, Plato’s lifelong mission to lift our vision from the small-t truths of our shadowy world to the capital-T Truth that dwells beyond, on the other side of the door. But what part exactly did Socrates play in this process? Although, it is not possible to disentangle with complete accuracy the thought of Socrates from the thought of Plato, I would argue, on the basis of the differences between Plato’s early and middle dialogues, that Socrates prepared the way for Plato by doing the “grunt” work of clearing away the accretion of false idols and notions that prevent us from apprehending Truth. Socrates achieved this clearing-cleansing by means of a vigorous question-and-answer dialectic. But what did he use as the jumping-off point for his dialectic? Or, to borrow an image from Archimedes, what was the fulcrum that allowed Socrates to move the world of philosophy?
Even a cursory reading of the early dialogues will make the answer to that question immediately apparent. Socrates’s fulcrum was the humble but persistent search for the definition of such key virtues as courage (Laches), friendship (Lysis), self-control (Charmides), and goodness/beauty (Hippias Major). By asking, and asking, and asking again what courage is—not just a particular form or example of courage but courage itself—Socrates set philosophy on the road to Truth. In time, Plato would follow the definition trail, and it would lead him upward to the Forms. Socrates’s goal, I would argue, was more limited and preparatory. Rather than construct a metaphysical system, or locate the absolute origins of all things, Socrates pushed his interlocutors, especially those of a sophistical bent, to question any definition that could not account for a host of conflicting particulars. By doing so, Socrates sought to stem the relativism that he perceived in the thought and arguments of the sophists.
It is surely significant that in most of the early dialogues, Socrates is portrayed in dialogue, not with his friends and disciples—as he is in most of the middle dialogues—but either with the sophists or with those who are sympathetic to them and their teachings. Further, though Socrates conducts himself in a friendly, genial fashion, a strong subtext of competition with the sophists and their disciples ever simmers beneath the surface, even if it is often, and entertainingly, diffused through the exchange of barbed witticisms.
Granted, Plato may have presented his teacher in conflict with sophistry as a way of defending him from the charge of being a sophist himself—a charge that was leveled against him in Aristophanes’s anti-sophist comedy, Clouds, and that led to his trial and execution in 399 BC—but the portrait makes good historical sense. Both Socrates and the sophists practiced philosophical debate, and both used question and answer, but they differed in the way they used the dialectic and in their ultimate goal. And that dual difference not only gives the early dialogues much of their interest and tension but also explains why Socrates, and not the sophists, deserves to be honored as the father of philosophy.
In the defense he gave at his trial (immortalized in Plato’s Apology), Socrates questions, tests, and examines one of his accusers (Meletus) to determine who it is that benefits the youth of Athens. The Greek word for such a process of cross-examination is elenchus, and it was used by the sophists as well as by Socrates. In Socrates’s hands, elenchus proved invaluable as a system for wiping the slate clean, for eliminating wrong knowledge and erasing wrong definitions. For the sophists, on the other hand, it was more often a tool for tripping up one’s opponent and wearing down his stamina. Indeed, in the hands of a wily and aggressive sophist, elenchus often gave way to eristic. Taken from Eris, the Greek goddess of discord whose golden apple set the gods against each other and ignited the Trojan War, eristic connotes a more polemical, disputatious kind of debate that makes heavy use of verbal tricks and rhetorical badgering. Socrates rarely engages in full-blown eristic, though, like the sophists, he does make frequent use of questionable logic—particularly false analogies and the either/or fallacy—to push the dialectic in the direction he wishes it to go.
Admittedly, when Socrates uses poor logic or pushes an argument so far that it threatens to topple into illogic, he does come quite close to being guilty of one of the charges brought against him at his trial: of making the weaker argument the stronger. Still, in such instances, intention and motive are everything. In contrast to most of the sophists with whom he debates, when Socrates takes an illogical or even an eristic turn, he does so not because he cares only about winning the argument or because he is hungry for power or money, but because such missteps are often necessary in the search for truth. Though the end—the reaching of a true definition, or at least the clearing away of false ones—does not justify a conscious distortion of logic or a flagrant manipulation of one’s opponent, it does provide a proper impetus and reward for philosophy.
By the end of Hippias Major, Socrates has come close to bullying his interlocutor into admitting that good persons commit crimes deliberately while bad ones do so involuntarily. However, when Hippias refuses to agree with this conclusion, Socrates ends the dialogue with these genial words: “Nor can I agree with myself, Hippias; and yet that seems to be the conclusion which, as far as we can see at present, must follow from our argument. As I was saying before, I am all abroad, and being in perplexity am always changing my opinion. Now, that I or any ordinary man should wander in perplexity is not surprising; but if you wise men also wander, and we cannot come to you and rest from our wandering, the matter begins to be serious both to us and to you” (376b-c). Socrates may play rough, but his ultimate goal is always the same: to faithfully follow the argument wherever it leads.
C. S. Lewis, arguably the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, made honest and effective use of the Socratic dialectic/elenchus to ferret out and defend doctrinal truths and theological first principles in such works as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles. During his college years, however, when he was a confirmed atheist, he more often used the tools of philosophy as a way to show off or to gain prestige or simply to pass the time. One of the key turning points on his long road to faith occurred when Lewis overheard one of his Christian friends and one of his students discussing Plato. As he listened, he realized, in a flash of illumination, that they were discussing philosophy as if it really mattered, as if what they read could cause them to change their beliefs and even their behaviors. For the first time in his life, the sophistical Lewis encountered, face-to-face and in the flesh, a nobler, ultimately more satisfying reason for studying and engaging in philosophical debate.1
Socrates, in Plato’s early dialogues, is spurred on by a desire to formulate definitions that can delve the true, essential meanings of spiritual, intellectual, ethical, and political virtues, not merely as a linguistic end in itself but as a spur to understanding and embodying those virtues. The goal is a high one, and it laid the groundwork for Plato’s grand metaphysics, and yet, there is something vaguely unsatisfying about the early dialogues. Though they are dramatically robust, and though they make important strides toward truth, they are flawed both by their strained logic and by the frustrating fact that Socrates never arrives at the definition he sets out in search of. As a result, one comes away from them interested and even edified, but neither awed nor inspired.
Indeed, my contention that Socrates played the more “negative” role of demolishing false systems and definitions while Plato played the more “positive” role of constructing true systems and definitions rests primarily on the failure of the early dialogues to achieve the kind of philosophical clarity that one encounters in the middle dialogues. As I shall argue in the next chapter, one can even identify the exact moment in the Republic when Socrates presses past the kind of impasse that would have ended an early dialogue to propound new definitions and systems that can account for the true and transcendent nature of justice. Although, again, the evidence is not sufficient to afford conclusive proof, I would argue that it is in that transitional moment that we can discern the shift from teacher to pupil, from Socrates to Plato.
Most of the early dialogues begin with a chance meeting between Socrates and a group of young men who respect, even if they disagree with, him and who are eager to engage him in conversation. The meetings are generally linked to topical events like the Peloponnesian War—often as a way of exonerating Socrates from the later extreme behavior of his young followers (especially the far-right Critias and the far-left Alcibiades)—but they quickly devolve into a debate over the definition of words. Though Socrates’s opponents will, at times, gain the upper hand, especially when they resort to eristic, Socrates always finds a way to get back on top and control the parameters of the debate. One by one, he eradicates false definitions that either fail to account for all the particulars or that contradict themselves. He does so insistently, relentlessly, until all the definitions put forth by society or the sophists—they inevitably turn out to be the same—have been exposed as inadequate, and then—and then—the dialogue ends!
Though skilled at exploding false definitions, Socrates never seems willing or able to give a full definition of his own. On the one hand, this failure is linked to the famous (or infamous) claim that he makes in his apology, that his wisdom resides not in his knowledge but in the fact that he, unlike the sophists, knows that he does not know: “He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing” (Apology 23b). On the other hand, it suggests that Socrates had a firm understanding of his vital but limited role as a philosophical gadfly (to borrow the seriocomic image he uses of himself and his teaching methods in Apology 30d-31b). Most of the early dialogues end in an impasse—the Greek word is aporia, or waylessness—but it is a creative impasse that spurs the reader forward on his own search for truth.
Ironically, Jacques Derrida and many of his deconstructionist heirs have taken to themselves the word aporia to embody their belief that absolute truths and transcendent principles do not exist—and that even if they did, they could not be reached, known, or communicated by human beings.2 I call this ironic, because deconstructionism stands in relation to our (post)modern world very much as sophistry did to the culture of ancient Athens. Though much variety exists among modern deconstructionists and ancient sophists, both groups ultimately taught that the pursuit for absolutes circles back on itself, yielding a set of theological or philosophical or ethical or aesthetic principles that shift, often radically, from polis to polis and culture to culture. Aporia ends the debate by exposing as naïve the search for meaning in the creeds we recite or the books we read or the commandments we follow.
Not so the aporias of Socrates, which are more like the paradoxes of Jesus: they can, and will if we let them, trouble us into wisdom. Far from rendering the quest for truth a dead end, they stand guard at the doorway of philosophy, keeping away those who are not willing to have their beliefs and behaviors altered by that quest. Rather than leave us stranded in a relativistic universe, they point forward toward real standards of right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice. And, beyond that, toward the unity of truth and the unity of virtue—toward eternal, unchanging touchstones of thought and action that remain constant, no matter the polis.
When, in his Apology, Socrates questions Meletus as to which Athenians improve the youth, he pushes him into an aporia. By the time Socrates is done with him, Meletus has made the ridiculous claim that all the politicians and citizens of Athens, except Socrates, have a salutary effect on the young men of the city. Once the absurdity of this conclusion has had time to settle in the minds of the jury, Socrates unwinds the aporia by arguing that there are, in fact, very few people who make the young better while most do them harm, or at least no good (Apology 24c-25b). Socrates may play games with his opponents, but only as a way of exposing relativism and, by so doing, point back toward a center of meaning and truth.
THE PRESOCRATIC RIDDLE
Though I think it perfectly justifiable to call Socrates the father of philosophy, it must be understood that philosophy did not spring fully armed out of the mind of Socrates as Athena did out of the head of Zeus. The ideas and methods that would culminate with Socrates took a full century and a half (roughly 600–450 BC) to percolate through the ancient world. During the five or six generations before the golden age of Athens, a group of innovative thinkers from across the Mediterranean—most notably, Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Democritus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Thales—sowed the seeds of scientific and philosophical thought. We call them the Presocratics, not only because they precede Socrates chronologically, but also because they laid down a framework that would be both developed and critiqued by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Although one can profitably define Plato as a philosopher who chose to follow the mystical, numbers-driven, reincarnation-affirming theories of Pythagoras over the materialistic, methodological naturalism of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes (known collectively as the Milesians), I will here position Plato between the pluralism of Heraclitus and the monism of Parmenides. For it was Plato, rather than Empedocles, Anaxagoras, or Democritus, who came up with the most brilliant and enduring answer to the philosophical riddle of his day: Is the nature of reality plural or singular, changing or fixed, perpetual flux or unmoving perfection?
According to Heraclitus, we live in a world of ceaseless change. Nothing does or can remain the same. Indeed, the only constant in the universe is change itself. Far from existing in a state of static perfection, our universe is the battleground for a perpetual war among the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) and their qualitative pairs (hot and cold, dry and wet). Though this elemental strife was constant and fierce, Heraclitus viewed it as a positive and creative one. In fact, to help illustrate this cosmic paradox, Heraclitus used the twin images of the bow and the lyre to express how harmony can arise out of opposing, seemingly destructive forces. Just as an arch is held together by the very forces that would tear it apart, so Heraclitus saw the strife among the elements as an ultimately stabilizing one.3
Heraclitus’s vision, strange as it may sound, accords well with the world we perceive around us. The same cannot be said for that of Parmenides, who held, counterintuitively, that the universe is fixed and static and reality is one and unchanging. In the language of philosophy, Heraclitus’s position is referred to as pluralism, for it holds that the cosmos is composed of many different substances that are in motion. Parmenides, on the other hand, was a monist: the universe, he believed, is composed of a single uniform substance that does not move or change.
To make matters worse for commonsense thinkers like Heraclitus, Parmenides held that true knowledge rests on nature (physis in Greek) and is apprehended by speculative reason, while mere opinion rests on custom (nomos) and is perceived by the senses. Of course, Parmenides here uses the word nature not to refer to the material stuff we see around us with our physical eye but the ultimate nature of things that we can only perceive with our mind’s eye. To trust our senses, and the philosophical, theological, and scientific systems that rest on the foundation of the senses, is to trust folly. It is the things that we cannot see that are the most real, for they are eternal and unchanging.4
Among those who sought to solve the Presocratic riddle, Empedocles was perhaps the most bold and creative. Though he did not invent the theory of the four elements, Empedocles transformed it into a fully-worked-out system that influenced scientists and inspired poets for two millennia. Building on the work of the Milesians, Empedocles conjured a vast cosmic stage on which the ceaseless dance of the elements unfolds in all its power and glory. Like the endless systole/diastole of some giant heart, the elements move and flow and beat in a rhythm that makes life and growth possible. In the first movement of the dance, the force of strife tears apart earth, water, air, and fire; in the second, those same elements are welded back together by the force of love. The process is, as Heraclitus knew, one of continual motion and change, but the result is, as Parmenides theorized, one of stasis and perfection.5
In the very different cosmic scheme of Anaxagoras, the universe was composed, not of four distinct elements in a dance of love and strife, but of a chaos of tiny particles (or seeds) that are ordered by the universal mind (or nous). Anaxagoras, it seems, taught that these material seeds have always existed—that is to say, he agreed with Parmenides that matter is eternal and indestructible—but that their arrangement, à la Heraclitus, is in constant flux.6
Somewhere between Empedocles and Anaxagoras lies Democritus, who proposed a system similar to that of seeds plus nous, but who emptied nous of all purpose, intelligence, and consciousness. According to his scheme of things, all that exists in the universe are atoms and the void. By atom, Greek for “that which cannot be divided,” Democritus meant the smallest, most fundamental building block of matter; by void, he meant an empty space of nonbeing that Parmenides refused to allow into his monistic paradigm, where all is One and all is Being.7
PLATO’S SOLUTION
Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus all struggled valiantly to reconcile the two poles of the Presocratic riddle. But it would be Plato himself who would provide the West with its most glorious reconciliation of monism and pluralism—a reconciliation that set Western philosophy on a truly noble path. Though Plato’s solution would fuel some of the Gnostic heresies of the early church, it would also help orthodox Christian theologians to understand the true nature of earth and heaven, of time and eternity, and of spiritual growth. Indeed, his solution reads like a pre-Christian commentary on 2 Corinthians 4:18: “For the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
With great insight and ingenuity, Plato posited that both Parmenides and Heraclitus were correct. The seeming impasse between their teachings resulted from the fact that their monistic and pluralistic visions referred to two different worlds. Our physical, natural, material world, the world in which we live out our lives and that we perceive through our senses, is a world of constant change, flux, and decay. As our world ever strives for, but is ever unable to reach, perfection, Plato called it the World of Becoming. The ever-shifting nature of our flawed and broken world precludes our forming true knowledge about it; of it and its endless fluctuations we can only formulate opinions (doxa in Greek).
But there is another, higher world, Plato believed, where all exists in a state of eternal and changeless perfection. Knowledge of that invisible, nonphysical World of Being can only be gained through reason and contemplation. Plato explains the dichotomy succinctly in book six of the Republic: “And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence?” (508d; emphasis added).
Though the four elements dominate the physical dance of the World of Becoming, the true first principle (archē) can only be found in the World of Being. In our world, there is an endless variety not only of physical objects (chairs, desks) but also of abstract nouns (beauty, truth); these Plato referred to as “the many.” Only in the fixed, unchanging world above do we encounter the One or the Essence, the Originals (Chair, Desk, Beauty, and Truth) of which our chairs, desks, beauties, and truths are but pale, shadowy imitations. Plato referred to these originals as the Forms (or Ideas) and insisted that knowledge of them was not available to the senses. This too Plato expresses succinctly in Republic 6: “There is a many beautiful and a many good, and so of other things which we describe and define; to all of them ‘many’ is applied. . . . And there is an absolute beauty and an absolute good, and of other things to which the term ‘many’ is applied there is an absolute; for they may be brought under a single idea, which is called the essence of each. . . . The many, as we say, are seen but not known, and the ideas are known but not seen” (507b).
Parmenides was right to establish a dichotomy between reason/physis/knowledge on the one hand and senses/nomos/doxa on the other. What he did not realize was that the pluralistic world of our senses actually exists, though it is finally superseded by the monistic world that is only available to our reason. Thus, whereas Parmenides called for us to reject totally the data received by our senses, Plato called for us to lift our vision above the (real) shadows of our world to gaze on the absolute, naked truth of the Forms.
The divided line. To help explain, and incarnate, the two-tiered nature of the universe and guide his pupils on the journey upward, Plato goes on in Republic 6 (509d-511e) to construct a simple yet profound model of a divided line. The lower half of the line represents the World of Becoming. It is illumined by the sun and apprehended by the five senses, but it can only yield, at best, mere opinion. The upper half represents the World of Being. It is illumined by the Good—for Plato, the ultimate Form, which gives form and light to all the other Forms—and apprehended by reason; it alone yields true knowledge.
The lower half is further subdivided into physical objects and the shadows of those objects. Though the entire lower half is cut off from the kind of real insight that can be gained only by contemplation of the invisible Forms, the upper portion of the lower half nevertheless yields a kind of knowledge that can function as a first step toward higher truth. Thus, while the World of Becoming can afford only doxa, those who study objects themselves rather than the imitations of those objects are participating in a higher order of thinking. Sadly, for those who, like myself, have devoted themselves to studying the kinds of truth and beauty found in the imitative arts (fiction, poetry, drama, painting, and sculpture), Plato consigns all such manifestations of the creative mind to the bottom of the line; for they, like images in a mirror or reflections in water, are insubstantial and turn one away from reality toward illusion.
As Plato explains in Republic 10 (595a-597e), just as earthly chairs, desks, beauties, and truths are but shadows of the real Chair, Desk, Beauty, and Truth that dwell in the World of Being, so a painting of a chair or a sculpture of a desk or a poem about beauty or a drama about truth are themselves shadows of an earthly chair, desk, beauty, or truth. As such, artistic representations are imitations of imitations, twice removed from the Forms and thus doubly distant from the kind of Truth that we were created to contemplate. In our post-Romantic world, we tend to put a high premium on imagination. Plato, in sharp contrast, considered imagination to be the lowest order of thinking and the riskiest method for interacting with Beauty and Truth. It inevitably leads us astray from that which is really real and truly true.
In terms of our World of Becoming, the natural sciences are superior to the arts for they fix our senses on real objects that have real substance—even if those substances are finally shadows of the eternal Forms. By closely studying and analyzing our physical world, as the Milesians had so admirably done, one could progress from imagination (or conjecture) to belief. Still, until we spring across the central division into the upper half of the line, we cannot hope—as the Milesians wrongly hoped—to encounter first principles. Although the sun has the power to reveal to us the full nature of our physical, visible world, it cannot illumine those greater truths that transcend the capacity of our senses. To perceive the Truth that resides in the invisible (or intelligible) world, our mind’s eye must be illumined by the Good. Only then will we be able to move from imagination and belief to understanding and reason.
As Plato subdivides the bottom portion of the line, so he subdivides the upper portion as well. In the lower part of the upper half, he places the kind of thinking carried out by mathematicians like Pythagoras. Pythagoras’s study of triangles does not concern itself with the physical triangles that architects use to build temples or teachers draw in the sand to instruct their students. On the contrary, his concern is with the perfect Triangle that cannot be seen or tasted or touched or heard or smelled. Unlike the natural sciences, which work upward (inductively) from empirical observation, geometry works downward (deductively) from abstract principles (or givens) that define the eternal harmonies and balances of the cosmos.8
Still, Plato explains, though geometry works from givens, thus drawing it upward toward the Forms, it does not seek to reach those givens and contemplate them as ends in themselves. For that task, we must move from the mathematician to the philosopher—to the one who, like Socrates, uses the dialectic to ascend the ladder of truth toward what Plato himself called the Beatific Vision (Republic 7; 517d).
The allegory of the cave. Though I have tried my best to describe Plato’s divided line in clear, accessible terms, I confess that the abstract nature of the line makes it difficult to grasp and absorb. Of course, such difficulties are not unique to Plato. The principles and proofs of such brilliant philosophers as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant are equally, if not more, difficult to bend the mind around. Thankfully, Plato does not leave us stranded in the dark pit of philosophical abstraction but throws us a ladder by which we can mount to the light of understanding. How does Plato accomplish this bold feat? By shamelessly and unapologetically ignoring—indeed, contradicting—his warnings against the dangers of the poetic imagination. For the ladder that Plato throws us in Republic 7 (514a-517a) is a metaphorical one. With the poetic skill of a Homer or a Sophocles, Plato constructs a vivid allegory/myth—an unforgettable narrative that embodies and incarnates the philosophical principles laid out in his divided line. Once we read and experience Plato’s allegory of the cave, the nature of the divided line is made luminously clear, not only to our minds, but to our hearts and souls as well. With the mesmeric power of a showman-storyteller, Socrates/Plato exclaims:
And now let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. (514a-b)
The puppets, Socrates goes on to explain, are made in the shapes of humans and animals, trees and stones, and they move round and round in an endless, revolving succession. The fire casts the shadows of the puppets on the cave wall, and the prisoners, who have never known another world, take the shadows for reality. Indeed, most of them spend their lives studying the shadows so that they can predict when and in what order they will next appear. They even hold contests and award prizes, with the winners applauding themselves for their skills of observation and analysis.
Now imagine, Plato continues, what would happen if one of the prisoners should break his chains and turn to face the fire. At first he would be blinded by the direct light of the fire, but if he persisted in his attempts to see the truth of his situation, he would eventually be able to study the puppets themselves, whose shadows had once made up his entire reality. Imagine then that the escaped prisoner should struggle his way out of the cave into the upper air. As with the glaring light of the fire, the even more brilliant light of the sun would temporarily blind him from seeing the objects of the outer world. Eventually, his eyes would adjust, but, for the first few days, he would only be comfortable looking at the reflections of trees and stones in rivers and ponds. With renewed persistence, however, a day would come when he would be able to lift his gaze from pale images in water to gaze, first, on trees and stones, and then on the stars and the sky. “Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is” (516b).
The epic journey of the escaped prisoner is meant by Plato to parallel the journey of the philosopher who ascends through the four sections of the divided line. The shadows on the cave wall are like the arts: imitations of imitations, twice removed from the real men and animals and trees and stones that dwell in the real world above. Though we, like the prisoners, think that these shadows are reality, and accordingly devote our energies to studying them, they have but the slimmest connection to true reality. When the prisoner turns his gaze from the shadows to the puppets, he moves from the arts to the natural sciences—from reflections to actual physical objects that bear at least some relationship to the real objects of which they are imitations. A study of the puppets will afford him a sounder type of knowledge, though the presence of illusion will still be strong, and he will still be trapped in the subterranean realm of doxa.
Once he leaves the cave, however, he crosses the great divide from the World of Becoming to the World of Being. In the allegory, the fire in the cave represents the sun of our world, while the sun outside the cave represents the Good that illumines all things in the invisible, intellectual world. Only there, outside the cave, which corresponds to the perfect, unchanging world above the moon, will the prisoner see things as they really are. And yet even here, there are, as in the divided line, two distinct stages. The reflections in rivers and ponds are like the givens that mathematicians work with in their geometric proofs, while the actual trees, stones, and sky represent the Forms on which the philosopher fixes his gaze. Only by moving steadily from one stage to the next, from shadows to puppets to reflections to objects, can the initiate hope to lift his gaze from the cave wall to the sun.
