The religion of Plato

Front matter

a CORNELL

3 UNIVE". y

DATE DUE

Preface

In the Preface to my Platonism I said that my purpose in publishing that work was to lay the foundation for a series of studies on the origins and early environment of Christianity and on various modern revivals of philosophic religion. Four years have passed since those lectures were delivered and printed, and the project which then stood rather vaguely before me has taken more definite shape. My plan now is that the series — or better, perhaps, the core of the series — should consist of four volumes. Of these the first is presented herewith; the second will deal with the Hellenistic philosophies, principally Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism ; the third will be on Christianity, and the fourth will contain a number of essays on fundamental questions raised in the course of the foregoing studies.

As I have already observed, and may have to observe again, my intention is not at all to compose a history of Greek philosophy or of Christian dogma ; the work in these fields has been done thoroughly and repeatedly. Nor am I concerned with ultimate origins. No doubt, to take the present volume, an exposition of Plato's sources would be interesting and would throw a clarifying vi PREFACE

light on some of his religious ideas ; but this field also has been well covered, notably by Erwin Rohde. Somewhere one must start, some restriction one must accept ; and the inclusions and limitations imposed on the task here begun are determined by the fact that it is undertaken with a very definite thesis in view. Just what that thesis is it may be well to state at the outset in the fewest possible words.

My belief then is that Greek literature, philosophic and religious, pagan and Christian, from Plato to St. Chrysostom and beyond that to the Council of Chalcedon in 451 a. d.., is essentially a unit and follows at the centre a straight line. This body of thought I call the Greek Tradition, since the main force in preserving it intact while assimilating large accretions of foreign matter was the extraordinary genius of the Greek speech. The initial impulse to the movement was given by a peculiar form of dualism developed by Plato from the teaching of his master Socrates. The great Hellenistic philosophies — Epicurean, Stoic, and Neoplatonic — were attempts, each on a different line, to reconcile the dualistic inconsistency in the nature of things, as we know them, by forcing our experience into the Procrustean bed of reason. And each of these philosophies, it may be said here, by its rationalistic rejection of the paradox in the nature of things only succeeded at

PREFACE vii

the last in falling into grosser paradoxes of logic and ethics. Christianity, on the contrary, notwithstanding its importation of a powerful foreign element into the tradition, and despite the disturbance of its metaphysical theology, was the true heir and developer of Platonism, truer than any of the pagan philosophies. And by the side of the orthodox faith, as set forth in the Creed of Nicea and the Definition of Chalcedon, there ran a succession of heresies which endeavoured, each again on its own line, to reconcile the paradox of the two natures and one person of Christ by methods curiously resembling the monistic rationalism of the heretical philosophies, if I may so call them.

It is this tradition, Platonic and Christian at the centre, this realization of an immaterial life, once felt by the Greek soul and wrought into the texture of the Greek language, that lies behind all our western philosophy and religion. Without it, so far as I can see, we should have remained barbarians; and, losing it, so far as I can see, we are in peril of sinking back into barbarism. Unfortunately the direct tradition passed in the East into the keeping of a people who had no strength of heart and mind to maintain it, and, roughly speaking, with the death of Chrysostom, the virtue had at last gone out of it ; then Greece came to an end. But in the West viii PREFACE

the tradition met a different fate. There it was taken up by a people of stronger nerve, who showed in religion the same faculty of assimilation as they had shown in pure literature, and who passed the inheritance on to the vigorous young races of the North.

Yet if the Latin genius assimilated much, it also adapted; and the tradition, as it comes to us through this medium, assumed a new ethos at the first, and in the centuries since the separation of East and West it has received accretions which threaten the integrity of its foundation. I do not mean that religion has gained nothing by its transmission through the Latin mind; a certain note of character and worldly wisdom it wanted, and these Rome and her heirs could give. Nor would I belittle the intellectual achievement of the great doctors of the western Church and the western schools in the Middle Ages and since the Renaissance. But withal I am convinced that in certain important matters the Latin, and I may add the Teutonic, mode of thought has perverted the stream of philosophy and religion, and that the need of the modern world becomes daily more urgent to make a return to the purer source of our spiritual life. This does not imply that we should forget all the secular learning of the intervening ages, or that we should cease to be ourselves, if that were possible ; but it does recognize

PREFACE ix

in the Greek Tradition something which we must recover if religion is not to disappear and leave our existence dismally impoverished, something without which our wisdom may become vanity , and our science a bondage. "We now are turn- 1 ^ ing," says Dr. Foakes Jackson in his History of the Christian Church, "from the great men whose writings made the Christianity of the Middle Ages and of the Reformation, from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, from Luther and Calvin, to the Greek thinkers, St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Cyril, to help the religious difficulties of a scientific age." I would broaden Dr. Jackson's statement by regarding this eastward movement as the culmination of a half-conscious tendency of the English Church from the time of the Reformation; and I should like to modify it by including Plato with the masters of eastern theology. \/

The volume now offered, as I have said, is the first of four which are designed to constitute a single connected treatise. The preceding volume, Platonism, may be taken as an introduction to the series, and in the main it fulfills that office suitably enough; but, owing to the fact that when it was written the larger project of the series was not clearly formed, some things are included in it which belong more properly to the body of the work, and some things are omitted which might x PREFACE

naturally be expected in an introduction. That must be my apology if any reader is annoyed by what may seem unnecessary repetitions in these two books on Plato.

The narrowing of time and the chances of life are a warning that I should be well content if these four volumes, which I have called the core of the series, are brought to completion. But still "a dream cometh through the multitude of business," and a man's "heart taketh not rest in the night" — which, the Preacher adds, "is also vanity." Already other subjects, on the fringe of the projected circle, are pressing upon my attention. A volume on the tragedians would offer an opportunity to fill out the background to Plato's religious ideas ; a special study of Clement of Alexandria, with translations of passages from his works duly selected and arranged, would elucidate the relations of Platonism and Christianity; essays on the Cambridge Platonists and the Tractarians of Oxford might furnish an interesting illustration of the never fully realized trend of Anglican thought. But these things lie on the lap of the gods ; and now I remember the prayer of Marcus Aurelius : "The work of philosophy is simple and modest, let me not be drawn away into vain pomp of words."

As a control upon the discussion of the various aspects of Plato's religion, it has seemed advisable

PREFACE xi

that the reader should have actually before him a translation of the passage on which in each case the argument is chiefly based. Thus chapter ii, introducing the topic of philosophy, gives the hypothetical paragraphs of the second book of The Republic; chapter iv contains the theological excursus that forms the tenth book of the Laws; chapter vii epitomizes the myth of creation from the Timaeus; and chapter x is from the general preamble in the fourth and fifth books of the Laws, dealing with worship and the religious lif e. If there is a more heart-breaking task than the attempt to convert Plato's Greek into English, I do not know it, and any one who has tried his hand thereat will understand my regret that it was not permissible to print from Jowett or some other of the standard translations. As it is, I have borrowed words and phrases pretty freely from my predecessors. In general my version follows the original closely. The only liberty I have allowed myself is to omit, without indication, the scattered bits of talk that break the continued flow of the argument, or, in a few cases, to incorporate a question or reply into the main discourse. This procedure has involved the occasional neglect of a term of address. Omissions of a larger nature are indicated.

In conclusion a sentence or two regarding the footnotes. Some of these, more indeed than I xii PREFACE

like, are controversial. They must be excused by the necessity, as I am bound to see it, of clearing Platonism of the false metaphysical interpretations that have been clustering about it since the days of the so-called Neoplatonists. As for the rest of the notes their aim, when not mere references, is to keep constantly in view the main thesis of this book as a member of the series, viz. that the religion of Plato is not an isolated phenomenon but an integral part of the great Tradition. It may be that I should have attained my object better if the quotations in the notes also had been turned into English; but something, I felt, ought to be conceded to those readers who cherish the speech of Plato and Paul and Chrysostom^and for other readers the sight of the unfamiliar letters may serve as a provocative reminder that our spiritual and intellectual inheritance is still intrinsically Greek.

P. E. M.

Princeton, N. J.,

Contents

PAGE

Preface v

I. The Components of Religion 1

II. Translation from The Republic,

Book ii 22

III. Philosophy: Justice and the Soul. . 37

IV. Translation of Laws X 75

V. Theology: The Being of God 107

VI. Theology: Providence and Justice . 137

VII. Translation from the Timaeus. . . . 167

VIII. Mythology: The Creation 198

IX. Mythology: The Problem of Evil. 232

X. Translation from Laws IV and V. 262 ^

XI. Religious Life: Worship (278)

XII. Religious Life: The Ideal World. 309

Appendix A 340

Appendix B 345

Appendix C 350

Chapter I The Components Of Religion

The subject of the present volume is the religion of Plato as part of a great spiritual adventure of the ancient world from the death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon just eight centuries and a half later. This movement, despite large importations from without, was essentially a product of the Hellenic mind; but its record comes to us in two languages, Greek and Latin, whose genius was strikingly different. One of the peculiarities of the Greek tongue is its richness in distinctions where often it lacks terms to gather these distinctions under a common head. And nowhere is this peculiarity more marked than in the subject we have to consider; for, strange as it may seem, Greek has no expression for the general idea conveyed by the word ''religion," which we take from the Latin. The nearest approach to it perhaps is eusebeia, or theosebeia; but the meaning of these terms is rather "piety," an aspect of religion, than religion in the more comprehensive sense. No word, or combination of words, can be found in the language of Epicurus, or of Plato and St. Athanasius, to carry the exact equivalent of "religion" in the tremendous line of the Epicurean poet of Rome : Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. On the other hand it is equally true that Latin, strong in generalizations but poor in distinctions, had no native resource for discriminating the main components of what is really a complex phenomenon, and for terms to designate these was obliged to borrow from its sister speech. If "religion" is Latin, "philosophy" and "theology" and "mythology" are Greek.

Now this linguistic difference corresponds to a deep-seated divergence in ways of thinking. That is not to say that the Latin mind was totally incapable of analysis; Latin did in fact adopt the Greek terminology for the various components of religion, and so handed them on to us. Nor does it follow that, because the Greek language possessed no definite term for religion, therefore the Hellenic mind was completely insensible to the generalization lying behind diversity. Such an inference would be unwarranted, for an idea may be operative although there be no single word available to express it. But it is true that these traits of the Latin and the Greek languages are indicative of an original bias or emphasis in the mind and temper of the two

• peoples, and that a language tends to preserve

such a bias or emphasis among its inheritors. We can see this in the fact that, even apart from other modifications introduced by the temper of Rome, primitive Christianity as it is presented in the Latin Fathers gives the impression of an unanalysed experience of the whole soul, whereas in the Greek Fathers it is comparatively easy to keep in view the strands of which that experience is composed. Undoubtedly, so far as religion is a matter of character and the will, it happens that power has been transmitted with the Latin unity of conception; but it is at least a question whether such gain in power has not been at the expense of clear thinking. 1 The driving force of religion would seem to be connected with something unanalysable at its heart ; its surest defence against critical attack, on the contrary, may be found in a more intellectual comprehension of its structure. And so, in an age of sceptical criticism, if we care to recover our inheritance of faith, it may

t An illustration of the danger inherent in this tendency to generalize without regard to distinctions may be found in the authorized version of James i, 27: "Pure religion and undented before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." St. James is defining thrSekeia, "religious worship or usage," which is not coterminous with the Latin religio; and to take his words as a definition of religion in toto, as they are often taken today, leads to a deplorable impoverishment of the spiritual life.

be advisable to look beyond the Latin sources, on which our western world has mainly depended, to the Hellenistic Fathers of the Church, and beyond them to the earlier thinkers of Athens, to Plato first of all. By this process we may be able to get a clearer understanding of what is universally valid in religious experience, and to separate the deciduous overgrowth from what is still of vital importance for us in the Greek Tradition.

In the following chapters I propose to study the religion of Plato first under the three aspects of philosophy and theology and mythology, and then as a composite whole; but as a preliminary it may be well to take a hasty survey of the changing fortune of these terms in the course of their ancient history.

It is natural that philosophy, as standing for what was most presumptuously Hellenic and pagan, should have had the most diversified career. Among classical writers, from the beginning or from a very early period, the word acquired a double sense, practical and theoretic. At one time it might denote merely an unreasoned discipline or way of life, as, for example, in the speech composed by Lysias to be spoken by an uneducated cripple before the Senate of Athens : "For this, I think, is the aim and philosophy of all the afflicted, that they may live under their misfortune with as little discomfort as possible." 2

z For the Cripple 10.

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Between this ethical use of the word and its higher, more theoretical sense the interval is bridged over by such a thought as the following from Marcus Aurelius: "What then can help us on our way? One thing, and one alone, philosophy; which is to keep the spirit within us (ton endon daimona) inviolate and free from scathe." 3 From this it is an easy step to Plato's consummation of wisdom in self-knowledge, and to that "philosophy of the soul" which is a recog- Republic nition of its diviner potentiality.

The mediator between classical and Christian writers was Philo the Jew, a contemporary of Jesus, who made it the business of his life to reinterpret the Mosaic scriptures in the terms of Platonic Idealism, yet would not hesitate on occasion to speak slightingly, even contemptuously, of Plato in his desire to establish religion on a basis other than merely human wisdom. 4 To Philo, the Hebrew mystics of his own day were in possession of a higher truth than the wisest of the gentiles had been able to reach by means of their uninspired philosophy. As secular studies con-

s Meditations ii, 17.

* See particularly, in his De Vita Contemplativa (which with Conybeare I hold to be authentic), the account of the life of study and fasting led by the sect of Therapeutae in Egypt, and the contrast he draws between their modest Sabbathday pannychides and the banquets of the Greeks as described in the Symposia of Plato and Xenophon.

tribute to the acquisition of philosophy, whose servants they are, so, he says, philosophy is but the contributary and handmaid of that divine wisdom (sophia) with which religion really begins. Philosophy, for purely human reasons, may teach the control of the passions and the governance of the tongue, and these indeed are desirable in themselves, but they become a more solemn and holy matter when practised for the honour and good pleasure of God. 5

To the earliest Christian writers, the so-called Apostolic Fathers, philosophy was virtually nonexistent. Their immediate successors, upon whom first fell the task of justifying the faith intellectually, were in too precarious a position to make concessions to their most dangerous rivals, and among the Apologists of the middle decades of the second century the prevailing note is hatred and abuse of Greek philosophy. 6 Justin is more generous than the others; but the real change comes with Clement of Alexandria, whose life-work in the Christian field was much like that of Philo in the Jewish, an effort to enrich religion with the spoils of Platonic Idealism

6 De Oongressu Eruditionis Gratia 79. — Yet elsewhere, notably in the De Vita Contemplativa, »; Trarpwi <f>i\ocro(pl.a is for him the purest wisdom of religion. All these words are used now loosely, and now strictly.

e See, for instance, Tatian §§2, 25, 32; Athenagoras 11; Theophilus of Antioch iii, 3-8.

while still maintaining that revelation had brought a higher kind of wisdom to mankind. In his use of the word philosophy Clement is not consistent. Sometimes it designates for him a merely negative training in logic which will enable the believer to expose the errors of a hostile sophistry ; at other times it is a moral discipline, chastening the will and preparing the heart for the reception of truth; while again it is adopted boldly as a synonym for the revealed truth. 7 But in the main Clement follows the Philonic scheme of a progress from secular studies to philosophy and from this to divine wisdom, 8 although his sophia has acquired a more definite content than the Jew's, being now the perfect and self-sufficient doctrine of the Word, the power and wisdom of God displayed in the economy of salvation. 9

Later, when their rivals have been beaten from the field and are no longer a serious menace, the Doctors of the Church can afford to forget the appropriation of the word philosophy to pagan

7 Stramata I, xx, 100; xvi, 80; xxviii, 177; xxix, 182; et passim.

s See, for example, Stromata I, v, 30, where he simply paraphrases the passage of Philo's De Cong. Er. noted above. Origen has expressed the same notion, Philocalia xii, 1: "lv,' oirep </>acri cf>i\ocr6<f><i>y iratSts jrcpi yta/iiTplat Kal p.ov<TiKrjs, ypap.puxTiKrjs re Kal ptfropuajs KoX avrpovo/uas, uk avvtpi8u>v (fn\otrotf>Ca, rovd ypuis tlinap.iv Kal nepl avri/c <f)i\.ocro(piu.<: wpbt xpurriavurp.6v.

b Stromata I, xx, 100.

wisdom, and do not hesitate to usurp it for their special vocabulary. Thus, for instance, a popular moralist like Chrysostom can appeal to the philosophy of a mixed congregation almost in the manner of a Lysias addressing the Senate of Athens, while a theorist such as Gregory of Nyssa feels no need to apologize or explain when he refers to the whole Christian Sthos as a "high philosophy." 10 The word, in its progress among Christian writers from neglect to hostility, from hostility to condescension, and from condescension to lordly appropriation, has come a complete circle. Philosophy is no longer a humble preparation for a higher form of wisdom, as it was in Philo and, at times, in Clement, but is itself the norm of conduct and the supreme wisdom; it is not contrary to religion, but a part or aspect of religion. Yet still with this difference which clings to it from its long history, that in Christianity the perception of truth has become secondary to and dependent upon theological and mythological dogma, whereas to the pagan it was primary and free. This similarity and distinction will grow clearer, I trust, as we proceed.

Meanwhile, before passing to the other constituents of religion, it is important to observe a

10 For examples of this sliding use of the word see Chrysostom, In Mat. 186d, 187d, 190c, 235b, 238e, 252d, 273c, 328a, In Phil. 211d; Gregory, Oat. Or. 18 (with Srawley's note).

further distinction. In botn the classical and the late Christian writers the word philosophy, as we have seen, had a double application. At one time it was taken ethically, or practically, to designate a certain self-mastery in conduct, while at another time its sense is intellectual and seems to rise into the region of pure intuition. The point I would make is that no real inconsistency exists in this double aspect of the word, and that even when most theoretical philosophy still retains, in proper usage, something of its simpler, practical value; it implies always theory as concerned with actual life and as resting on a definite experience of the soul. In this way philosophy, as a study of the deeper and more inward facts of consciousness, was rightly contrasted with those encyclical, or secular, studies (grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, music, etc.) which are its handmaids; and, as still pragmatic in its method, it was distinguished with equal propriety, though perhaps not with equal regularity, from those bastard overgrowths of eristic, or metaphysics, which are its most inveterate enemies for the very reason that they so subtly resemble it.

In close connexion with the passage in which Philo sets forth the friendly place of philosophy between secular studies and the wisdom (sophia) that looks to the honour of God, he states in strong language the irreconcilable difference between true philosophy and the abuse of reason to which the name metaphysics may be restricted: "As among physicians the so-called word-cure offers no help for the sick — for diseases are cured by medicine and surgery and diet, but not by words — so in philosophy there are mere worddealers and word-catchers, who have no will or skill to heal the life filled with ailments, but from early youth to extreme old age are not ashamed to squabble over opinions and syllables, as if happiness lay in the endless and idle pursuit of terms, and not in improving character as the source of human life." 11

The same condemnation of the logomachy of metaphysics, as a caricature of genuine philosophy, is one of the constant topics of the later Christian philosophers. Clement of Alexandria returns to it again and again. 12 Gregory of Nazianzus puts the case bluntly in the introduction to his Theological Orations: "On what subjects and how far should we philosophize? On those subjects that are within our reach, and as far as the mental state and faculty of the hearer can follow." The whole trend of his argument shows how clearly he saw that the dead hand of

11 De Cong. Er. 53. "Word-cure,'' koyiarpda. I do not know to what particular sect of faith-healers the title is applied. But the term is not quite clearly defined by Liddell and Scott as associated with Galen's Xoytarpos, "a physician only in words." See Galen III, 145; VIII, 670.

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metaphysics takes hold of the mind only when the soul has lost its birthright of self-knowledge and is driven to chase shadows in place of substances. He would have subscribed heartily to the saying of a modern divine who, like Milton, had "some not insignificant taste for the sweetness of philosophy," and was also well versed in the long vexations of metaphysical debate : "The genuine ground of all communion with the infinite having sunk away within us, all sorts of logical proofs, and logical disproofs, will quarrel together about primitive certainties that shroud themselves from both." 13

There is no serious difficulty in keeping the sphere of philosophy separate in our mind from the other two components of religion, and, so far as it is a matter of mere terminology, there would be no harm in emphasizing this separation by limiting the. word religion to designate the sphere of theology and mythology taken together as distinct from philosophy. That indeed was the actual usage of many Greek writers, and we too may find it convenient at times to employ philosophy and religion, after the manner of Philo, in this contrasted sense. It is a fact to be remembered also that philosophy, so understood, may be even antagonistic to religion. But generally, in the present volume at least, I propose

13 James Martineau, Essays I, 268. — See Appendix A.

to take religion in its broader scope as embracing philosophy as well as theology and mythology. These terms have a way now of gliding one into the other, and now of standing apart, as do the subjects they connote.

By theology I mean, as its etymology implies, the science of God, the consideration of His nature in itself. Here again we have to face the fact that the terminology at our command is a part of the popular language, and as such is commonly used without technical precision. Theology is often extended to include a contemplative, even a metaphysical, study of the whole field of the divine activity, and the poverty and fluidity of our vocabulary may justify on occasion this more general use of the word. But for the purpose in hand we have a right to limit its meaning to that part of religious theory which Gregory of Nazianzus had in mind when he gave to his orations against the Eunomians the distinctive title of Theological. His subject matter, with insignificant deviations, is strictly that to which I have limited theology in my definition, that is, the being and nature of God, here regarded, as would be inevitable with a Christian, in relation to the question of the Trinity as one Deity subsisting in three persons. And it is noteworthy that in his effort to unravel the perplexities of this paradox, Gregory, while never for a

• moment obliterating the boundaries between philosophy and theology, does not disdain to fall back upon the procedure and theorems of philosophy to elucidate his theology. So in his most eloquent passage on the divine vision, admitting that all we can see of God is only as it were the back parts, as beheld by Moses on Mount Sinai — only the indications of Himself which He has left behind Him in the wonder and majesty of the created world — confessing that the reve^ lation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit is no more than a clumsy translation into human speech of truths that surpass human understanding, Gregory compares the theologian who would approach Deity to the philosopher in Plato's allegory of the cave, who, brought from darkness face to face with the celestial world of Ideas, cannot endure to raise his eyes forthright to their ineffable glory, but must lower his gaze to their shadowy images and reflections." The ascent of philosophy and theology are thus, in Gregory's mind, parallel and may be taken one to illustrate the other; but their goal and object are not the same : one ends in the vision of the eternal Ideas, the other looks to the knowledge of God. Religion should embrace both.

Theology and mythology, especially in the Christian scheme, are never far apart, and in their

i*Or. Theol. ii, 3.

confines actually merge together. The ground on which they meet is the question of Providence. In its more general aspect, however, Providence, as an expression of the power and wisdom and justice of God Himself, would properly come under the range of theology; and so, as we shall see, it was treated by Plato. In Christianity the classification is complicated by the double role of one of the persons of the Trinity. Considered in relation to the Logos as creator and governor of the world, Providence remains fairly within the competence of theology ; but as carried out in the plan of salvation by the condescension of the Logos to human nature and His reassumption of human nature into deity it falls more specifically under the head of mythology. For mythology is just that part of religion which is concerned with the intermingling of the divine and the human spheres of being, whether made manifest by the appearance of the gods among men, or looked for in the extension of man's life into the world of the gods.