Jonathan Ekene Ifeanyi
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| Plato |
It is common these days to hear the
“educated” assert with arrogant pride that “Christianity arose from an
ancient and ignorant people who didn’t have science.” Eric Hyde
rightly responded to this:
“Indeed, those ancient, ignorant
people who believed in the virgin birth of Christ must have believed it because
they did not possess the knowledge of how babies were born. Goodness. The
virgin birth of Christ was profound and of paramount concern to the ancients
precisely because they understood that conception was impossible without intercourse.
Ancient man considered the virgin birth miraculous, i.e., impossible without
divine action (and at the time most people scorned the idea), and the same
could be said with every miraculous story in Scripture.
“Indeed ancient people did not have
the Hubble telescope, but they were able to see the night sky in full array,
something almost no modern person can claim (thanks to modern lighting which
distorts our ability to see the full night sky). On average, ancient people
lived much closer to nature and to the realities of life and death than many of
us moderners.
“In terms of a living relationship
with these things the ancients were far more advanced than we are today, and
this relationship is essentially the nature of religious inquiry. If people lack
religious speculation today, maybe it is because they spend more time with
their iphones and Macs than with nature. Maybe.
“But the claim that Christianity was
viable in the ancient world because it was endorsed by wide spread ignorance is
a profoundly ignorant idea. Christianity arose in one of the most highly
advanced civilizations in human history. The Roman Empire was not known for its
stupidity. It was the epicentre of innovation and philosophical giants. I WOULD
WAGER THAT IF A COMMON PERSON OF TODAY FOUND HIMSELF IN A PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATE
WITH A COMMON PERSON OF FIRST CENTURY ALEXANDRIA, THE MODERNER WOULD BE UTTERLY
HUMILIATED IN THE EXCHANGE.”
A similar charge is sometimes brought
against Plato by the pagan philosophers of our day. You wonder why? Because
Plato’s philosophy—unlike that of Greek philosophers such as the Stoics,
Epicurus and others—is said to “resemble” Christian doctrine! Voltaire, the
celebrated atheist, ridiculed the Greek philosopher “who invented Christianity
without knowing it”—meaning that what people like St. Augustine taught as
Christian doctrine were “borrowed” from the works of Plato! In 1931, late
American literary critic John Jah Chapman in his work Lucian, Plato and
Greek Morals attacked Plato ferociously. Plato’s celebrated
dialectic turns out to be merely a species of equivocation, a pretty and
ingenious game of verbal shift and quibble, the object of which was, again,
entertained (that is, by Christian thinkers).
The attacks against
Christianity—coming from both atheists and freethinkers—are expected, of
course. However, only a deaf and dumb “philosopher” or “critic” can deny the
truly pre-eminence of Plato among virtually all western philosophers and
indeed, that he is truly indisputably the “King of thought”, as some have
rightly described him. As the English philosopher, Alfred Whitehead rightly
puts it, “All philosophy is a footnote to Plato”.
“Platonism and anti-Platonism were
matters exclusively determined by the disinterested decision of individual
scholars, due allowance being made for their personal predilections and
temperament. But without commitment to a throughgoing-deterministic theory of
intellectual history, we must remind ourselves of the unblinkable fact that by
no miracle of immunity has Platonic scholarship remained untouched by the
deeper currents of historical change,” writes late Ronald Levinson, an
internationally renowned American philosopher who focused in his work on
Plato, Professor of philosophy in the University of Maine.
Plato’s philosophy contains two
principal elements, moral and metaphysical. To the views of Socrates on the
nature of virtue, he added certain metaphysical conceptions—on the nature of
God (though explicit theology is never very prominent in Plato), the soul, and the
relation of God to the world, with which Socrates did not concern himself.
Below, taken from St. Augustine’s work De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, Book
VIII, Chapters 4-9, is Augustine’s judgement of Plato and the Platonists—the very reason why
pagan thinkers of our days are ranting! For some good reasons, Augustine ranked
Plato and the Platonists above all the rest of Greek philosophers.
In Chapter 4 Augustine says that
Plato’s opinions are sometimes favourable to the true religion, which our faith
takes up and defends, and sometimes contrary to it, “as, for example, in the
questions concerning the existence of one God or of many, as it relates to the
truly blessed life which is to be after death.” Philosophers who followed Plato
and who are said to have manifested the greatest acuteness in understanding
him, did entertain such an idea of God as to admit that in Him are to be found
the cause of existence, the ultimate reason for the understanding, and the end
in reference to which the whole life is to be regulated.
In Chapter 5 St. Augustine criticises
ancient polytheism (polytheistic gods such as Jupiter, Juno, Saturn, were
actually human beings who were later deified!) and those who championed it.
(The main religious belief of the majority of people in today’s world—namely
that all the world religions are equally true and are approved by
God—is actually worse than ancient pagan belief). Theologies which championed
polytheism, argues Augustine, must give place to the Platonic philosophers, who
have recognised the true God as the author of all things, the source of the
light of truth, and the bountiful bestower of all blessedness. So also must the
philosophers who supposed the principles of all things to be material—such as
Thales, Anaximenes, the Stoics, Epicurus and others—yield to the Platonists who
recognised the one true God.
In chapter 6 he argues that the
Platonists exalted above other philosophers in fame and glory because they saw
that no material body is God, and therefore they transcended all bodies in
seeking for God. They saw that whatever is changeable is not the most
high God, and therefore saw also that, in every changeable thing, the form
which makes it that which it is, whatever be its mode or nature, can only be through Him who
truly is, because He is unchangeable. The Platonists’ ability to think better
about God ranks them above the rest of the philosophers.
The Stoics and especially the
Epicureans—“who attributed to the bodily senses the faculty of discriminating
truth...”—are indeed the predecessors of today’s materialists. In Chapter 7
Augustine writes: “I often wonder, with respect to this, how they can say
that none are beautiful but the wise; for by what bodily sense have they
perceived that beauty, by what eyes of the flesh have they seen wisdom’s comeliness
of form?” The Platonists, on the contrary, were able to distinguish
“those things which are conceived by the mind from those which are perceived by
the senses, neither taking away from the senses anything to which they are
competent, nor attributing to them anything beyond their competency. And
the light of our understandings, by which all things are learned by us, they
have affirmed to be that selfsame God by whom all things were made.”
Diverse ancient philosophers held
diverse opinions, both concerning the good of the body, and the good of the
mind, and the good of both together. In Chapter 8 Augustine argues that
they must all give place to the Platonic philosophers who have not affirmed
that a man is blessed by the enjoyment of the body, or by the enjoyment of the
mind, but by the enjoyment of God. Plato also determined the final good to be
to live according to virtue, and affirmed that he only can attain to virtue who
knows and imitates God,—which knowledge and imitation are the only cause of
blessedness. “Therefore he did not doubt that to philosophize is to love
God, whose nature is incorporeal. Whence it certainly follows that the
student of wisdom, that is, the philosopher, will then become blessed when he
shall have begun to enjoy God.”
Finally, in Chapter 9 Augustine holds
that philosophers who held that God is both the maker of all created
things, the light by which things are known, and the good in reference to which
things are to be done; that we have in Him the first principle of nature, the
truth of doctrine, and the happiness of life—and they were the Platonists of
course—represent “the closest approximation to our Christian position.”
Excerpts below:
De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos
(Liber VIII)
S. Augustinus
Chapter 4: Concerning Plato, the
chief among the disciples of Socrates, and his threefold division of philosophy
 |
“Si
ergo Plato Dei huius imitatorem cognitorem amatorem
dixit
esse sapientem, cuius participationsit beatus, quid opus
est
excutere ceteros? Nulli nobis quam isti propius accesserunt.”
—“If, then, Plato defined the wise man as one
who imitates, knows,
loves this God,
and who is rendered blessed through fellowship with
Him in His own
blessedness, what need is there to examine the
other
philosophers?” (Saint Augustine).
|
Chapter 5.—Theological Questions are
to be discussed with the Platonists rather than with any other philosophers,
whose opinions must be counted inferior.
If, then, Plato defined the wise man
as one who imitates, knows, loves this God, and who is rendered blessed through
fellowship with Him in His own blessedness, what need is there to examine the
other philosophers? It is evident that none come nearer to us than the
Platonists. To them, therefore, let that fabulous theology give place
which delights the minds of men with the crimes of the gods; and that civil
theology also, in which impure demons, under the name of gods, have seduced the
peoples of the earth given up to earthly pleasures, desiring to be honoured by
the errors of men, and by filling the minds of their worshippers with impure
desires, exciting them to make the representation of their crimes one of the
rites of their worship, whilst they themselves found in the spectators of these
exhibitions a most pleasing spectacle,—a theology in which, whatever was
honourable in the temple, was defiled by its mixture with the obscenity of the
theatre, and whatever was base in the theatre was vindicated by the
abominations of the temples. To these philosophers also the
interpretations of Varro must give place, in which he explains the sacred rites
as having reference to heaven and earth, and to the seeds and operations of
perishable things; for, in the first place, those rites have not the
signification which he would have men believe is attached to them, and
therefore truth does not follow him in his attempt so to interpret them; and
even if they had this signification, still those things ought not to be worshipped
by the rational soul as its god which are placed below it in the scale of
nature, nor ought the soul to prefer to itself as gods things to which the true
God has given it the preference. The same must be said of those writings
pertaining to the sacred rites, which Numa Pompilius took care to conceal by
causing them to be buried along with himself, and which, when they were
afterwards turned up by the plough, were burned by order of the senate.
And, to treat Numa with all honour, let us mention as belonging to the same
rank as these writings that which Alexander of Macedon wrote to his mother as
communicated to him by Leo, an Egyptian high priest. In this letter not
only Picus and Faunus, and Æneas and Romulus or even Hercules, and Æsculapius
and Liber, born of Semele, and the twin sons of Tyndareus, or any other mortals
who have been deified, but even the principal gods themselves, to whom Cicero, in
his Tusculan questions, alludes without mentioning their names, Jupiter, Juno, Saturn, Vulcan,
Vesta, and many others whom Varro attempts to identify with the parts or the
elements of the world, are shown to have been men. There is, as we have
said, a similarity between this case and that of Numa; for the priest being
afraid because he had revealed a mystery, earnestly begged of Alexander to
command his mother to burn the letter which conveyed these communications to
her. Let these two theologies, then, the fabulous and the civil, give
place to the Platonic philosophers, who have recognised the true God as the
author of all things, the source of the light of truth, and the bountiful
bestower of all blessedness. And not these only, but to these great
acknowledgers of so great a God, those philosophers must yield who, having
their mind enslaved to their body, supposed the principles of all things to be
material; as Thales, who held that the first principle of all things was water;
Anaximenes, that it was air; the Stoics, that it was fire; Epicurus, who
affirmed that it consisted of atoms, that is to say, of minute corpuscules; and
many others whom it is needless to enumerate, but who believed that bodies,
simple or compound, animate or inanimate, but nevertheless bodies, were the
cause and principle of all things. For some of them—as, for instance, the
Epicureans—believed that living things could originate from things without
life; others held that all things living or without life spring from a living
principle, but that, nevertheless, all things, being material, spring from a
material principle. For the Stoics thought that fire, that is, one of the
four material elements of which this visible world is composed, was both living
and intelligent, the maker of the world and of all things contained in it,—that
it was in fact God. These and others like them have only been able to
suppose that which their hearts enslaved to sense have vainly suggested to
them. And yet they have within themselves something which they could not
see: they represented to themselves inwardly things which they had seen without,
even when they were not seeing them, but only thinking of them. But this
representation in thought is no longer a body, but only the similitude of a
body; and that faculty of the mind by which this similitude of a body is seen
is neither a body nor the similitude of a body; and the faculty which judges
whether the representation is beautiful or ugly is without doubt superior to
the object judged of. This principle is the understanding of man, the
rational soul; and it is certainly not a body, since that similitude of a body
which it beholds and judges of is itself not a body. The soul is neither
earth, nor water, nor air, nor fire, of which four bodies, called the four
elements, we see that this world is composed. And if the soul is not a
body, how should God, its Creator, be a body? Let all those philosophers,
then, give place, as we have said, to the Platonists, and those also who have
been ashamed to say that God is a body, but yet have thought that our souls are
of the same nature as God. They have not been staggered by the great
changeableness of the soul,—an attribute which it would be impious to ascribe
to the divine nature,—but they say it is the body which changes the soul, for
in itself it is unchangeable. As well might they say, “Flesh is wounded
by some body, for in itself it is invulnerable.” In a word, that which is
unchangeable can be changed by nothing, so that that which can be changed by
the body cannot properly be said to be immutable.
Chapter 6.—The Platonists’ conception
of natural philosophy.
These philosophers, then, whom we see
not undeservedly exalted above the rest in fame and glory, have seen that no
material body is God, and therefore they have transcended all bodies in seeking
for God. They have seen that whatever is changeable is not the most high
God, and therefore have seen also that, in every changeable thing, the form
which makes it that which it is, whatever be its mode or nature, can only be through Him who
truly is, because He is unchangeable. They have transcended every soul and all
changeable spirits in seeking the supreme. And therefore, whether we
consider the whole body of the world, its figure, qualities, and orderly
movement, and also all the bodies which are in it; or whether we consider all
life, either that which nourishes and maintains, as the life of trees, or that
which, besides this, has also sensation, as the life of beasts; or that which
adds to all these intelligence, as the life of man; or that which does not need
the support of nutriment, but only maintains, feels, understands, as the life
of angels,—all can only be through Him who absolutely is. For to Him it is not one thing
to be, and another to live, as though He could be, not living; nor
is it to Him one thing to live, and another thing to understand, as though He
could live, not understanding; nor is it to Him one thing to understand,
another thing to be blessed, as though He could understand and not be
blessed. But to Him to live, to understand, to be blessed, are to be. They have
understood, from this unchangeableness and this simplicity, that all things
must have been made by Him, and that He could Himself have been made by
none. For they have considered that whatever is is either body or
life, and that life is something better than body, and that the nature of body
is sensible, and that of life intelligible. Therefore they have preferred
the intelligible nature to the sensible. We mean by sensible things such
things as can be perceived by the sight and touch of the body; by intelligible
things, such as can be understood by the sight of the mind. For there is
no corporeal beauty, whether in the condition of a body, as figure, or in its
movement, as in music, of which it is not the mind that judges. But this
could never have been, had there not existed in the mind itself a superior form
of these things, without bulk, without noise of voice, without space and
time. But even in respect of these things, had the mind not been mutable,
it would not have been possible for one to judge better than another with
regard to sensible forms. He who is clever, judges better than he who is
slow, he who is skilled than he who is unskillful, he who is practised than he
who is unpractised; and the same person judges better after he has gained
experience than he did before. But that which is capable of more and less
is mutable; whence able men, who have thought deeply on these things, have
gathered that the first form is not to be found in those things whose form is
changeable. Since, therefore, they saw that body and mind might be more
or less beautiful in form, and that, if they wanted form, they could have no
existence, they saw that there is some existence in which is the first form,
unchangeable, and therefore not admitting of degrees of comparison, and in that
they most rightly believed was the first principle of things which was not
made, and by which all things were made. Therefore that which is known of
God He manifested to them when His invisible things were seen by them, being
understood by those things which have been made; also His eternal power and
Godhead by whom all visible and temporal things have been created. We have said
enough upon that part of theology which they call physical, that is, natural.
Chapter 7.—The pre-eminence of the
Platonists in rational philosophy, or logic.
Then, again, as far as regards the
doctrine which treats of that which they call logic, that is, rational
philosophy, far be it from us to compare them with those who attributed to the
bodily senses the faculty of discriminating truth, and thought, that all we
learn is to be measured by their untrustworthy and fallacious rules. Such
were the Epicureans, and all of the same school. Such also were the
Stoics, who ascribed to the bodily senses that expertness in disputation which
they so ardently love, called by them dialectic, asserting that from the senses
the mind conceives the notions (ἒννοιαι) of those things which they
explicate by definition. And hence is developed the whole plan and
connection of their learning and teaching. I often wonder, with respect
to this, how they can say that none are beautiful but the wise; for by what
bodily sense have they perceived that beauty, by what eyes of the flesh have
they seen wisdom’s comeliness of form? Those, however, whom we justly
rank before all others, have distinguished those things which are conceived by
the mind from those which are perceived by the senses, neither taking away from
the senses anything to which they are competent, nor attributing to them
anything beyond their competency. And the light of our understandings, by
which all things are learned by us, they have affirmed to be that selfsame God
by whom all things were made.
Chapter 8.—The Platonists’
superiority in moral philosophy.
The remaining part of philosophy is
morals, or what is called by the Greeks ἠθική, in which is
discussed the question concerning the chief good,—that which will leave us
nothing further to seek in order to be blessed, if only we make all our actions
refer to it, and seek it not for the sake of something else, but for its own
sake. Therefore it is called the end, because we wish other things on
account of it, but itself only for its own sake. This beatific good,
therefore, according to some, comes to a man from the body, according to
others, from the mind, and, according to others, from both together. For
they saw that man himself consists of soul and body; and therefore they
believed that from either of these two, or from both together, their well-being
must proceed, consisting in a certain final good, which could render them
blessed, and to which they might refer all their actions, not requiring
anything ulterior to which to refer that good itself. This is why those
who have added a third kind of good things, which they call extrinsic,—as
honour, glory, wealth, and the like,—have not regarded them as part of the
final good, that is, to be sought after for their own sake, but as things which
are to be sought for the sake of something else, affirming that this kind of
good is good to the good, and evil to the evil. Wherefore, whether they
have sought the good of man from the mind or from the body, or from both
together, it is still only from man they have supposed that it must be
sought. But they who have sought it from the body have sought it from the
inferior part of man; they who have sought it from the mind, from the superior
part; and they who have sought it from both, from the whole man. Whether
therefore, they have sought it from any part, or from the whole man, still they
have only sought it from man; nor have these differences, being three, given
rise only to three dissentient sects of philosophers, but to many. For
diverse philosophers have held diverse opinions, both concerning the good of
the body, and the good of the mind, and the good of both together. Let,
therefore, all these give place to those philosophers who have not affirmed
that a man is blessed by the enjoyment of the body, or by the enjoyment of the
mind, but by the enjoyment of God,—enjoying Him, however, not as the mind does
the body or itself, or as one friend enjoys another, but as the eye enjoys
light, if, indeed, we may draw any comparison between these things. But
what the nature of this comparison is, will, if God help me, be shown in another
place, to the best of my ability. At present, it is sufficient to mention
that Plato determined the final good to be to live according to virtue, and
affirmed that he only can attain to virtue who knows and imitates God,—which
knowledge and imitation are the only cause of blessedness. Therefore he
did not doubt that to philosophize is to love God, whose nature is
incorporeal. Whence it certainly follows that the student of wisdom, that
is, the philosopher, will then become blessed when he shall have begun to enjoy
God. For though he is not necessarily blessed who enjoys that which he
loves (for many are miserable by loving that which ought not to be loved, and
still more miserable when they enjoy it), nevertheless no one is blessed who
does not enjoy that which he loves. For even they who love things which
ought not to be loved do not count themselves blessed by loving merely, but by
enjoying them. Who, then, but the most miserable will deny that he is
blessed, who enjoys that which he loves, and loves the true and highest
good? But the true and highest good, according to Plato, is God, and
therefore he would call him a philosopher who loves God; for philosophy is
directed to the obtaining of the blessed life, and he who loves God is blessed
in the enjoyment of God.
Chapter 9.—Concerning that Philosophy
Which Has Come Nearest to the Christian Faith.
Whatever philosophers, therefore,
thought concerning the supreme God, that He is both the maker of all created
things, the light by which things are known, and the good in reference to which
things are to be done; that we have in Him the first principle of nature, the
truth of doctrine, and the happiness of life,—whether these philosophers may be
more suitably called Platonists, or whether they may give some other name to
their sect; whether, we say, that only the chief men of the Ionic school, such
as Plato himself, and they who have well understood him, have thought thus; or
whether we also include the Italic school, on account of Pythagoras and the
Pythagoreans, and all who may have held like opinions; and, lastly, whether
also we include all who have been held wise men and philosophers among all
nations who are discovered to have seen and taught this, be they Atlantics,
Libyans, Egyptians, Indians, Persians, Chaldeans, Scythians, Gauls, Spaniards,
or of other nations,—we rank such thinkers above all others, and acknowledge
them as representing the closest approximation to our Christian position.
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