Now, what we are dealing with here, it would seem, is… the reorientation of a mind from a kind of twilight to true daylight – and this reorientation is an ascent to reality, or in other words true philosophy. (VII, 521c)
The first model of ascent is seriously transcendental. It contrasts this world with that which is to come, or rather, that which is available to the elect. It takes seriously St Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 13:12, that ‘now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’. On this view Plato did pretty well, in fact about as well as someone who was not given the Christian revelation could do, by way of understanding the illumination offered by ascent to the transcendental world. This is the Plato transmitted to Europe by so-called ‘middle Platonists’ such as the contemporary of Christ, Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus), then further by Plotinus in the second century, and that became folded into Christianity, notably by Augustine and Boethius, in the fourth and fifth centuries. It is the Plato of the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who was president of Lorenzo de Medici’s Florentine Academy and believed that Plato should be preached in the churches of Florence alongside the Bible. It is Plato of the so-called ‘Cambridge Platonists’ of the seventeenth century, a group of Cambridge theologians and philosophers looking for a bulwark against the rising tide of science and secularism (represented by Hobbes). It is usually described as ‘Neoplatonism’, but that is a recent categorization, and the Neoplatonists thought of themselves as no more than good Platonists. It was, however, Plato interpreted as offering a cosmology, an account of the entire structure of creation. In it, the Form of the Good becomes the creating and sustaining power at the centre of the universe, the eternal and unchanging source of energy and light. Below this pinnacle are successive ‘hypostases’ or levels of creation. Logos is one of them. It is the Word, the creative power expressed in law, the guiding principle of the cosmos and so in effect God’s Word, the instrument of creation. It gives the underlying forms or archetypes behind the visible world, and this in turn affords us only a shadow far removed from them. Poor old matter and humanity, as contaminated with material existence, come very low in the ladder of creation.
A first-century Jewish philosopher from Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, is pivotal in the assimilation of Platonism and Christianity, and not only Christianity but Judaism and later Islam. For Philo, God is almost totally unknowable, indeed unnameable and beyond comprehension by ideas. The relation between human beings and God therefore needs mediation, and here logos or the Word functions as the intermediary, parallel to Plato’s world of Forms or archetypes, allowing the adept at least an ascent towards the inaccessible pinnacle of unity with God. Philo allowed himself allegorical interpretations of the Judaic scriptures, bringing their message as closely as possible into harmony with this version of the Platonic worldview. Platonism thereby became the background philosophical underpinning of the theologies of the monotheistic religions.
This role is handsomely acknowledged by Augustine, who thought that Platonists had some conception of God as the ‘cause of existence, the principle of reason and the rule of life’ – all things grasped by the initiate who has finally seen the Sun.1 Augustine was joined by other churchmen who thought that Plato was ‘but Moses in Attic Greek’, and clearly regretted that they had not been around to baptize him. He was, unfortunately, denied the Christian revelation (and the Judaic and Islamic versions). But Platonists, it was felt, could have become Christians with the change of a few words and phrases.
Not that all was sweetness and light. For while it may have suited the theologians of Christianity to make Platonism into its backbone, the cracks in this unity are actually all too apparent. The eternal principle of Plato and Plotinus is not the caring, all-too-human, God of Judaism and Christianity, which itself is a magnification of human emotions such as love or pity, or in fiercer versions, anger and jealousy. It is more a principle than a person, an impersonal source of the cosmos. It is not a fatherly, caring, all-too-human creator. It could not conceivably itself become incarnate. So in the way of things, Christianity eventually decided it could defeat Platonism, and conceal its theological debt to it. The congregations did not need Plotinus’s abstract principle of illumination. They did not want an illumination reserved for those who have studied mathematics for ten years and dialectic for five. They wanted consolation, forgiveness, a target for intercessionary prayer, and the other emotional props and indulgences of popular religion. The leaders wanted to feed their own watchdogs of guilt and sin, and the profitable monopoly they enjoyed on the search for redemption. At almost the same time as Augustine was composing The City of God, the Christian patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril, egged his flock on to murder the Neoplatonist and mathematician Hypatia, an act which contributed to his acceptance as a Doctor of the Church by Leo XIII in 1883. It took a very elevated mind to reconcile paganism and the Church, and no popular religion can flourish by privileging the elevated mind.
As a generalization, we could say that Plato’s transcendentalism appeals to people who feel themselves to be strangers in this world. The first sentence of Porphyry’s life of his teacher, Plotinus, tells us that Plotinus seemed to be someone ashamed of being in a body. Indeed, this shame was the core of the Platonic rejection of Christianity, which it otherwise closely resembles. As Porphyry forcibly put it: ‘How can we admit that the divine became an embryo, and that after its birth, it was wrapped up in swaddling clothes, covered with blood, bile, and even worse things?’ But in either its Christian or its more abstract, more elevated Platonic form the thought that the soul is only accidentally, and temporarily, burdened with the mess, pain and appetites of bodily existence can be both a consolation and a spur to asceticism, to withdrawal from worldly concerns into private contemplation. If this contemplation is also interpreted as unity with the divine, acquaintance with the principle underlying the whole cosmos, so much the better.
Naturally there is a problem, in this kind of theology as in others, for why the eternal principle, itself wholly good, should be responsible for a world, or descending succession of worlds, many of which are not at all good. Indeed, Christians found here a point of counter-attack against Neoplatonists: why would souls which had once inhabited the eternal world, the court of the king, leave such a blessed place and seek out ‘these terrestrial parts where they inhabit opaque bodies, intimately mixed with blood and humours, in sacks of excrement and unspeakable pots of urine’?2 It was not particularly strong ground on which to fight, since Christianity has exactly the same problem, of reconciling a world of sacks of excrement and the rest with the benevolent rule of an omnipotent and loving God. And Neoplatonists found a ‘reason’, if such vocabulary can be applied to something eternal and unchanging, for the principle of the cosmos to have issued in a universe with an admixture of imperfection. Not to have done so would have disrupted the principle that non-existence is the ultimate evil, so that whatever goodness could be responsible for, it must of necessity create. In human terms, anything else would argue ‘envy’ or a kind of mean spirit. Elaborated upon, this idea became that of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, the idea that the universe was a plenitude of every kind of possible created thing, from the highest to the lowest.3
In this picture, we are in the Cave at the beginning because of the fallen (physical, embodied) state of humanity. To begin the ascent out may take one’s own effort of will, properly directed by God’s word, or may represent an arbitrary act of God’s good grace. Either way the ‘rough steep slope’ to the world of sunlight becomes equated with salvation, and especially with a triumph over the body, conceived of as the locus of sensory pleasure, pain, desire, fear and suffering, sin and temptation. The final illumination, which for Plato is the triumph of understanding, reason and intelligence, is subtly reconfigured as the triumph of the purely ‘spiritual’ element of the soul, either temporarily, as in moments of mystical illumination, or permanently, as in salvation after bodily death.
From Plotinus through to adepts such as the early twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson, the religious Plato has consorted with the idea of mystical awareness of transcendence, an awareness, however, that is often achieved by a dark journey into the centre of the soul. By confronting the self and what it is, the adept gains freedom from its demands. The idea suggests a purely personal struggle, not a passive reception of doctrine, such as might be transmitted by a Church or a book. In turn, this explains why ‘dead’ Aristotelian logic was more associated with the Catholic Church, while Plato remains the champion of inner-light Protestantism whereby each pilgrim is responsible for his or her own salvation.
This idea in turn has affinities with another doctrine of Plato’s, albeit one more associated with another dialogue, Meno. Here Plato suggests that our innate knowledge is in fact a recollection of knowledge (not belief) gained in a previous state of existence, before birth. Christianity could not absorb that as it stands, since it denies the pre-existence of souls. But the doctrine could be tamed, as it were, into the belief that there is an ‘inner candle of the Lord’, a source of light within each of us, a private Platonic sun, visible after a path of redemption and purification.4 Recollection was much used, but similarly tamed, later on in England in the eighteenth century by the poets Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth. Each was enchanted by the idea of ‘the eclipsing curse of birth’ which permeated Wordsworth’s many celebrations of childhood, and especially his ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’, although probably each regarded it more as a charming idea than as a doctrine.5 It was sufficiently vague (but uplifting) to incorporate both a sentimental conception of childish innocence and the apparently conflicting view that innocence is not, as it might seem, mere ignorance, but itself a kind of superior knowledge, a recollection of transcendence such as the Platonic philosopher might possess, or the soul might look forward to re-establishing in eternity. Such an idea may be food for the poet, but it is not exactly a belief to which one could really assent.
The transcendental interpretation may have inspired religious minds, but it also draws the venom of philosophers who are not estranged from the world, and who despise those who are. The elevated mysticism of Plotinus is only to some tastes, and in any case it easily degenerates into mere transcendental twaddle, or the mumbo-jumbo and charlatanry of hermeticists, theosophists and other cultists. So far as Plato goes, however, the central problems are first that there is not a very close resemblance between the kind of education necessary for the Platonic elite, and the mystical illumination celebrated by the ascetic sage or saint who has turned his back on the world and the intellect alike. Whatever else the Platonic education demands, it clearly requires a deep immersion in mathematics and in dialectic or reason (and partly for military purposes, as is clear in VII, 525c). It is essentially an intellectual journey, although built on the foundation of a childhood steeped in harmony and proportion.
Second, there is the even more pressing problem of why anyone takes the reverse journey. Plato is clear that the philosopher, having exited from the Cave, must return and ‘apply’ his revelation to the business of governing the state. The question is, why should he do so, and still more, what has he discovered that qualifies him to do so? Plato is aware of this as a problem, of course. At VI, 500b, he insists on it:
The point is, of course, Adeimantus, that someone whose mind really is fixed on reality has no time to cast his gaze downwards on to the affairs of men and to enter into their disputes (and so be infected with resentment and malice).
So long as the emphasis is on transcending the worldly, this problem can have no answer. Perhaps it is fascinating enough, and even ‘revelatory’ of something, to contemplate the eternal and unchanging. But we still have no model for applying that unchanging and unvarying reality to the world of military tactics, politics and business, the world of resentment and malice. Why, then, return to the Cave, and what in any case do you bring with you? The Christian hermit contemplating his skull may have a sage and ‘philosophical’ attitude to mortal life and its problems, but he is scarcely a model for the well-ordered ruler of the state, even if we manage to tolerate or admire him on his own terms.