Plato (Collins)/Chapter 7

by Clifton Wilbraham Collins

CHAPTER VII.

RELIGION, MORALITY, AND ART.

"Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays possessing little heat, are spent in creating beauty."—Lecky, Hist. of Morals.

 

In his famous picture of the School of Athens, Raphael has represented Plato as looking up towards heaven, while Aristotle has his eyes intently fixed upon the earth; and Goethe has endorsed the idea expressed in this painting. "Plato's relation to the world," he says, "is that of a superior spirit, whose good pleasure it is to dwell in it for a time. . . . He penetrates into its depths, more that he may replenish them from the fulness of his own nature, than that he may fathom their mysteries."^[1] Certainly the most careless reader cannot help being struck by the persistency with which Plato dwells upon his favourite thought, that this life is only the first stage of an endless existence, that death is the release of soul from body, which the wise man welcomes with joy, and that philosophy itself is but a "meditation of death," or "the resembling, so far as is possible, of man to God."^[2] In fact, disce mori may be said to be the text of Platonism. Perhaps, he says in the Gorgias, Euripides was right, and our life here is after all a death, and our body is the tomb or prison of the soul.^[3] And in the same spirit in which Socrates bids Crito not to be too careful about his burial, Plato prohibits in his "Laws" expensive funerals—"for the beloved one whom his relative thinks he is laying in the earth has but gone away to complete his destiny." The soul, he reiterates, really makes each of us to be what he is, and the body is only its image and shadow, and after death all that is divine in us goes on its way to other gods.^[4] Man himself is nothing more than a puppet or plaything of the gods, acting his part on the stage of life with more or less success, and "with some little share of reality."^[5]

His view of human nature, and of man's limited powers of knowledge, is best illustrated in his own famous allegory of the Cave, in the seventh book of the "Republic."

"Imagine," says Socrates, "a number of men living in an underground cavernous chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the entire length of the cavern in which they have been confined from their childhood, with their necks and legs so shackled that they are obliged to sit still and look straight forward, because their chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them, and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners, with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit their wonders. . . . Also figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this wall, and carrying with them statues of men and images of other animals wrought in wood and stone and all kinds of materials, together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and, as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and others silent."—D.

"This cave," Socrates continues, "is the world, and the fire that lights it is the sun, and these poor prisoners are ourselves—

'Placed with our backs to bright reality;'

and all sights or sounds in this twilight region are but the shadows or echoes of real objects. And as sometimes a prisoner in this cave may be released from his chains, and turned round, and led up to the light of day; so may our souls pass upwards from the darkness of mere opinion, and from the shadowy impressions of sense into the pure sunlight of eternal truth, lighted by the Idea of Good—in itself the source of all truth and beauty."

But "What is the Good?" Plato tells us, truly enough, that it is what all men pursue under different names,—deriving its existence, seeking its reality, yet totally unable to explain its nature; and he compares it in a parable, as we have seen, to the sun which illuminates the eternal world of Ideas, but as to its own essential nature he leaves us still in the dark. The philosophers in his State will know it, he says, for their souls will be enlightened, but he does not know it himself; and although the knowledge of it is bound up with the existence of his State, and is the culmination of his system, all that he does is to "conduct us to the chamber where this precious and indispensable secret is locked up, but he has no key to open the door."^[6]

Sometimes, indeed, he personifies this supreme Idea, and, as in the "Timaeus" and "Philebus," abstract goodness is merged in the concrete God. But even here, his conception of Deity rises far above the jealous and sensitive occupants of Homer's Olympus, who were immortal beings with mortal passions and sympathies, strongly attached to persons and places, and sharing in all the hopes and fears of their worshippers. A Christian writer could hardly frame a more exalted idea of divinity than that which Plato has expressed in many of his Dialogues. With him the Deity is a being of perfect wisdom and goodness, all-wise and all-powerful, ruling the world which he has created by the supremacy of His reason. He can be only known to us through some type or form; but let none suppose that He would put on a human shape by night or by day, to help a friend or deceive a foe: for, being perfect goodness in Himself, such a change could be only for the worse; and, being perfect truth, He hates a lie either in word or in deed.^[7]

In this conception of the Deity, Plato does but represent the tendency of Greek religion towards "Monotheism." Long before his time, all the deeper thinkers had ceased to believe in the old mythology. Even the sober piety of Herodotus had questioned some miracles and rejected others; and the keen common-sense of Thucydides had applied the historical test to the "Tale of Troy," looking upon it as a political enterprise, and accepting the catalogue of ships "as an authentic muster-roll."^[8] Then Euemerus had allegorised these myths; and Palæphatus had softened them down into commonplace narratives of actual facts: thus the wings of Dædalus became a swift sailing vessel, the dragon which Cadmus slew was King Draco, and the dragon's teeth were the ivory of commerce. And philosophy had aided this progress of rationalism. More than a century before Plato, Xenophanes had pointed out the discrepancies involved in the popular mythology, and had declared emphatically that there was "one God, not to be compared to mortals in form or thought—all eye and all ear—who without effort rules all things by the insight of his mind." So again Empedocles had recognised, amidst the crash of warring elements, one holy impalpable Spirit, whom none could come near, or touch, or see; and even Anaxagoras, with all his materialism, had paid homage to a sovereign Mind which ruled the universe.

"But," says Professor Maurice, "there lay in the very heart of the faith of the Greek a seed of unbelief which was continually fructifying."^[9] While many clung with unwavering faith to the religion of their fathers; while a few (as we have seen) professed a purer and higher belief than mere anthropomorphism;—there were others who, though they rejected the ancient myths, accepted nothing in their place: and the Sophists seem to have encouraged this increasing tendency to atheism among the younger and more sceptical spirits of this age. Prodicus maintained that men in olden times had deified whatever was of use to them: thus wine was promoted into Bacchus, and bread was dignified with the name of Ceres. Critias, again, declared that the gods had been invented by some crafty statesman to secure the obedience of his subjects; and one daring sceptic of this school, Diagoras of Melos (subsequently banished from both Sparta and Athens for his impious theories), had thrown a wooden statue of Hercules into the fire, saying that he might go through his thirteenth labour in the flames.

In the tenth book of the "Laws"—written, as has been said, in his declining years Plato makes a bold stand against this growing impiety of his day. It springs, he says, from, one of three causes; from utter atheism; or, second, from Epicurean apathy—the feeling that the gods exist, but never trouble themselves about mankind; or, thirdly, from superstition—the gods both exist and care, but you can pacify their anger by sacrifice. Heretics, in his ideal city, are to be punished by solitary confinement or by death, and the heaviest vengeance of the law is to light on the wolf in sheep's clothing—the impious hypocrite who dares to use his priestly garb to further his own ambitious or criminal ends. And then he gravely takes the sceptic to task, and justifies the ways of Providence.^[10] "Do not" (he says, almost in the very words of the Psalmist) "the heavens declare the glory of God?" Does not the universal testimony of mankind teach us that a God exists? And woe to the rash and presumptuous youth who presumes to charge the Deity with indolence or neglect, merely because he sees the wicked in prosperity, and handing down their power to their children after them. God is no unskilful workman, but in His wisdom has taken thought for all things, both small and great. Each part of the creation has its appointed work and purpose, and all the parts work together to some common end. What is best for one portion is therefore best for the whole. It is impious, indeed, to think that this fair creation around us could have been the work of nature or chance; or, again, that matter could have existed before mind. Such doctrines will sooner or later meet with their reward.

"God, as the old tradition declares, holding in His hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is, moves according to His nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of His end. Justice always follows Him, and is the punisher of those who fall short of the divine law. To that law, he who would be happy holds fast, and follows it in all humility and order; but he who is lifted up with pride, or money, or honour, or beauty—who has a soul hot with folly, and youth, and insolence, and thinks that he has no need of a guide or ruler, but is able himself to be the guide of others,—he, I say, is left deserted of God; and being thus deserted, he takes to him others who are like himself, and dances about in wild confusion, and many think that he is a great man, but in a short time he pays a penalty which justice cannot but approve, and is utterly destroyed, and his family and city with him. Wherefore, seeing that human things are thus ordered, what should a wise man do or think, or not do or think?"—J.

The perfection of man's existence, according to Plato, is to bring his nature as far as is possible into harmony with God; and this can only be done by cultivating the soul, which is the divinest part of us, and came to us from heaven long before our earth-born body.^[11] "Honour the soul, then," he says, in one of his homilies in the "Laws," "as being second only to the gods; and the best way of honouring it is to make it better. A man should not prefer beauty to virtue, nor sell his word for gold, nor heap up riches for his children; since the best inheritance he can leave them is the spirit of reverence. Truth is the beginning of all good; and the greatest of all evils is self-love; and the worst penalty of evil-doing is to grow into likeness with the bad: for each man's soul changes, according to the nature of his deeds, for better or for worse."^[12]

In more than one passage Plato combats the objection always raised against every system of Optimism—the existence of evil, which implies, according to the atheist, either a want of goodness in the Deity to allow it, or a want of power to prevent it. Practically, Plato refutes this argument in much the same language as a modern thinker might use. Evil in the creation does not imply evil in the Creator; its existence is part of a vast scheme of Providence: and because, with our limited faculties, we cannot discern the final cause or design of everything in nature (e.g., the poison of the rattlesnake), we have no right to say, therefore, that no such final cause exists. Listen again to Plato (speaking in the person of Socrates) in the "Theætetus."

"Soc. Evils, Theodorus, can never perish; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Of necessity, they hover around this mortal sphere and the earthly nature, having no place among the gods in heaven. Wherefore, also, we ought to fly away thither; and to fly thither is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like Him is to become holy, just, and wise. But, O my friend, you cannot easily convince mankind that they should pursue virtue or avoid vice, not for the reasons which the many give—in order, forsooth, that a man may seem to be good;—this is what they are always repeating, and this, in my judgment, is an old wives' fable. Let them hear the truth: In God is no unrighteousness at all—He is altogether righteous; and there is nothing more like Him than he of us who is the most righteous. And the true wisdom of men, and their nothingness and cowardice, are nearly concerned with this. For to know this is true wisdom and manhood, and the ignorance of this is too plainly folly and vice. . . . There are two patterns set before men in nature: the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched; and they do not see, in their utter folly and infatuation, that they are growing like the one and unlike the other, by reason of their evil deeds; and the penalty is, that they lead a life answering to the pattern which they resemble. And if we tell them, that unless they depart from their cunning, the place of innocence will not receive them after death; and that here on earth they will live ever in the likeness of their own evil selves, and with evil friends,—when they hear this, they in their superior cunning will seem to be listening to fools."—J.

And in the same spirit the first great "type" to which all legends must conform, in his ideal State, is that God is good, and is the author of good alone; the evil He suffers to exist for the just punishment of men. And therefore Plato will expunge from his new mythology all those false and debasing stories which Homer tells about the gods and heroes, with their violent passions, loves, and hatreds; where even the great Achilles is represented as insolent and cruel,—as slaying his captives, cursing the Sun-god himself, and dragging Hector's body round the walls of Troy. He will have no sensational pictures of the lower world, with all its horrors of Styx and Tartarus, and with the souls of the dead "fluttering like bats" in sunless caverns. And the music shall be simple and ennobling: he will banish the wailing Lydian and soft Ionian measures, and he will have only martial strains in the Dorian mood, such as Tyrtæus sang when the Spartans marched out to battle; and he will dismiss with honour from the State the charming and versatile poet who can assume all shapes and speak in all voices, and will take instead the rough but honest story-teller who will recite simple and useful tales.^[13]

He again attacks the poets in the last book of the "Republic;" and here the ground of offence is their imitation, which is (says Plato) two degrees removed from reality; for taking any object, such as a bed, there is first the ideal bed, created by the Deity, which alone has real existence; and then there is the bed made by the carpenter in the image of the first; and thirdly, there is the shadow of this image, which the painter or poet delineates in his picture or his poem, as it may be. "I have a great liking and reverence for Homer" (Plato continues), "who is the great master of all tragic poets—indeed from childhood I have loved his name; but I love truth better. And what has Homer done for us, after all? He has not given us laws, like Solon or Lycurgus; he has not given us inventions, like Thales and Anacharsis; nor has he founded a brotherhood, like Pythagoras; nor, again, has he taught us any of the arts of war and peace. If he had done any real good to men, is it likely that he would have been allowed to wander about, blind and poor? No;—all that he does is to give us a second-hand imitation of reality, to exalt the feelings which are an inferior part of our soul, to thrill us with pity or terror, and so render us unmanly and effeminate." "There are enough sorrows in actual life" (he says, later on, in the "Philebus"), without multiplying them on the stage or in fiction."

Though Plato was more of a poet than a philosopher himself, and in his writings was said to strike the happy medium between poetry and prose, he is always disposed to regard the poets, as a class, in the light of harmless enthusiasts, often the cause of much mischief, but hardly responsible for their actions. In an earlier Dialogue—the "Ion"—Socrates meets the rhapsodist of that name, and congratulates him upon having just won the prize for recitation at a public festival. "It must be a fine thing" (he says, with a tinge of irony) "to be always well dressed, and to study and recite passages from the prince of poets; but is Ion always master of his subject, and is his talent really an art at all? No" (Socrates goes on); "it must be inspiration—a magnetic influence, passing like an electric current from the loadstone of divine essence into the soul of the poet, and from thence into the souls of his hearers."

The simple-minded Ion is delighted at the idea of being inspired, and confesses that he does feel in a sort of ecstasy when he recites some striking passage—such as the sorrows of Andromache or Hecuba, or the scene where Ulysses throws off his rags, leaps on to the floor among the assembled suitors, and bends that terrible bow of his. "Then" (says Ion) "my eyes fill with tears, my heart throbs, my hair stands on end, and I see the spectators also weeping, and sympathising with my grief."

And the conclusion of this short but graceful Dialogue is, that the Deity sways the souls of men through the rhapsodist or poet, who is himself only the vehicle of inspiration, and knows little or nothing of the meaning of the glorious words which it is his privilege to utter.

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Plato's own view of poetry and art, then, is, that it should be pure, simple, and ideal—free from the sensational innovations of modern days; and he points with approval to Egypt, where certain forms had been consecrated in the temples, from which neither painter nor sculptor was allowed to deviate, and where for ten thousand years they had preserved their chants and the statues of their gods unchanged.^[14] The poet should not be left to his own devices; for bad music, like a bad companion, tends to corrupt the character: both the music and the words should be supervised by the magistrate, prizes for the best poems should be awarded by competent judges, and the moral of every lay or legend should be, that all earthly gifts—whether health, beauty, or wealth—are as nothing in comparison with a just and holy life. And in the "City of the Magnetes," where his own laws are to be promulgated, the following is to be the theme of the music consecrated by the State, and appointed to be sung by three choirs—children, youths, and men:—

"All our three choruses shall sing to the young and tender souls of children, reciting in their strains all the noble thoughts of which we have already spoken, or are about to speak; and the sum of them shall be, that the life which is by the gods deemed to be the happiest is the holiest;—we shall affirm this to be a most certain truth, and the minds of our young disciples will be more likely to receive these words of ours, than any others which we might address to them. . . . And those who are too old to sing will tell stories, illustrating the same virtues as with the voice of an oracle."—J.

We can never exactly tell how far Plato's views on religion are an echo of his master's, or how far they are his own original ideas. We have another description of Socrates and his teaching in Xenophon's "Memorabilia," and there, like Plato, he appeals to the excellence of the creation round him to prove the wisdom of the great "World-builder;" he recognises the all-pervading and invisible presence of the Deity; he exalts the dignity of man, only "lower than the angels" in the possession of an immortal soul; and he points to signs and oracles to prove how closely we may be brought into actual communion with God. But in other respects, if Xenophon can be trusted, he preached a far lower standard of morality—upholding, in fact, the utilitarian doctrines so strongly condemned by the Platonic Socrates in the beginning of the "Republic." "You should test an action," he is made to say, "by its advantages to yourself. Be just, because justice brings its own reward with it; be modest, because immodesty never pays in society; be brave, because you gain glory thereby; be true and faithful, because truth will bring you friends, the most useful of all possessions."^[15] If this was really the tendency of Socratic teaching, it is clear that Plato took far higher ground than his master. Nothing, in fact, could be further from his thoughts than to degrade Virtue into a mere calculation of the chances of more or less possible happiness.

And in the "Philebus" (one of his latest Dialogues), where the relative nature of pleasure and knowledge is analysed, Plato distinctly maintains that pleasures differ in kind as well as degree,^[16] the lowest being the mixed pleasures of the senses, and the highest and purest the mental enjoyment of music or mathematics. He also holds that wisdom is "ten thousand times better" than pleasure, since it alone satisfies the three criteria of goodness—beauty, symmetry, and truth; while, in the scale of perfection, pleasure is degraded by him to the fifth and sixth places.

The only one of Bentham's four "Sanctions"^[17] which he would allow to influence our conduct would be that described in his Myths—the rewards and punishments in a future world. Virtue per se is most excellent—being, in fact, moral health and strength, just as Vice is moral disease; and worldly advantages are not to balance our actions, or influence us in the choice between good and evil. Even in prayer, he maintains that a man should not, pray for gold, or honour, or children, but simply for what is good; and the gods will know best how to turn his prayer to his own profit. "The prayer of a fool," he says again, "is fraught with danger, and likely to end in the opposite of what he desires."^[18] In the same spirit he quotes (in his "Alcibiades, ii.") some lines from an old poet, which, should, he thinks, be the model for all prayers: "King Jove, give us what is good, whether we pray for it or not; and ward off what is dangerous, even though we pray for it." And the spirit of the prayer he declares to be worth more than any offerings a man can bring—just as the oracle of Ammon had declared the simple prayer of the Spartans to be worth more than all the sacrifices of Athens.

In one sense, Plato does not deny the "utility" of Virtue, any more than Cudworth or Butler would have denied it; and it is in this sense that we must take the famous sentence in the "Republic" which Mr Grote has prefixed as the motto to his three volumes: "The noblest thing that is said now, or shall be said hereafter, is, that what is profitable is honourable, and what is hurtful is base."^[19]

1. Quoted in Ueberweg's History of Philosophy, i. 103—English transl.
2. Phædo, 80; Theæt., 176.
3. Gorgias, 492.
4. Laws, xii. 959.
5. Laws, vii. 803.
6. Grote's Plato, iii. 241.
7. Republ., ii.
8. Grote's Greece, i. 333.
9. Hist. of Philos., i. 86.
10. Laws, x. 886.
11. We may compare with this Kant's famous saying, "On earth there is nothing great but Man; in Man there is nothing great but Mind."
12. Laws, x.
13. Rep., iii. 398.
14. Laws, ii. 660.
15. See Zeller's Socrates and the Socratic Schools, chap. vii.
16. The utilitarian maxims are: "Pleasures differ in nothing but in continuance and intensity" (Paley); "The quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry" (Bentham).
17. See his Introduction to Morals and Legislation, chap. iii.
18. Laws, iii. 688.
19. Rep., v. 457.