The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity

by Clifford Herschel Moore

Socrates became the father of many philosophic schools. His pupils naturally differed from one another in the emphasis which they gave to this or that side of their master’s teaching and in the ways in which they combined his doctrines with principles laid down by earlier thinkers, but all agreed in this, that they directed their attention to man as the center of thought and inquiry. From this time ethics and religion became the dominant themes of philosophy. Our subject bids us confine our attention to the greatest of these pupils, Plato.

Plato was born at Athens in the year 428/7 b.c. of an ancient family, which was related to the law-giver Solon. After being educated in the best Athenian fashion, he attached himself to Socrates in his twentieth year, when the latter was already about sixty years old, and he continued to associate with his master for ten years until the latter’s condemnation and death. Probably he was not one of the inner circle, but he tells us that he was present at his master’s trial and with other followers of Socrates was prepared to go bondsman, if a fine were inflicted. Sickness prevented him from sharing in the discussion of the last day, which is related to us in the Phaedo. After Socrates ’ death, Plato was absent from Athens for about twelve years, residing first in the neighboring city of Megara, where his association with Euclides, one of Socrates’ oldest pupils, must have contributed to the development of his own philosophy. Later in southern Italy, if we accept the traditional account of his travels, he had an opportunity to study more closely in their home the Orphic-Pythagorean systems and doctrines, many of which no doubt he had often heard Socrates discuss. At Syracuse in Sicily he won over Dion, the young brother-in-law of the tyrant Dionysius. The latter, however, found his moral teachings offensive, seized him, and had him offered for sale as a prisoner of war in the slave market at Aegina. But a friend, Anniceris, bought him and set him free. When Plato’s other friends wished to repay to Anniceris the money he had spent, the latter refused, and the sum was used to purchase a grove sacred to the hero Academus, in which Plato opened a philosophic school. There, save for the interruptions caused by two journeys to Sicily, he continued to teach for about forty years, dying in 347 b.c. at the age of eighty.

To this school came pupils from almost every part of the Greek world. The chief subjects studied were the various branches of mathematics—including of course astronomy and harmonics,—and dialectics, by which is meant “the art of question and answer, the art of giving a rational account of things and of receiving such an account from others.” The distinctive methods employed were those of analysis and division which Plato seems to have developed so far that the invention of the former was actually, but erroneously, attributed to him. The purpose of analysis was to secure an explanation or proof of a proposition; that of division was to arrive at a proper classification or division of the object under consideration. Plato’s instruction was evidently given in considerable part by lectures, of which his hearers took notes; there was also scientific research on the part of the pupils who worked out the problems or difficulties set them by their master. Nor were these researches wholly mathematical and astronomical, for there is good reason to believe that studies in natural history were also pursued. Indeed, Aristotle, for twenty years a member of the Academy, must have had opportunities here to carry on those researches which interested him most in the early part of his life. But whatever the studies, the purpose was to lead the pupils to the discovery and contemplation of Reality, of Being, of the fundamental and permanent as against the individual and transitory phenomenon. Of Plato’s lectures we know virtually nothing; his Dialogues represent those parts of his doctrine which he wished to give to the outside world; it is probable that they in no sense adequately reproduce his teachings to his disciples.

How much of his philosophy Plato received from his master Socrates, how much he developed for himself cannot now be determined. Socrates left no writings; we know him only from the writings of others, and above all from the dialogues of Plato. There he is the chief spokesman, who leads his associates along various paths toward truth; and certainly no pupil ever built a nobler monument to his teacher than Plato did. Among modern scholars there are many views as to the extent of Plato’s debt to his master: one extreme wing, which has many adherents, would limit the Socratic elements in the Platonic doctrine to the ethical interest, the search for universals, and the dialectic method; the other wing, of which the eminent English Platonist Burnet is the chief representative, would attribute to Socrates practically everything found in the dialogues which Plato wrote before he began his teaching in the Academy. Indeed Burnet holds that Plato’s chief purpose in the earlier dialogues was to set forth the life and teaching of Socrates; he therefore claims that the “doctrine of ideas,” with all its consequences, and much besides, are purely Socratic, taken over by Plato in developed form. Few of us can accept either of these extreme views; it seems more probable that the truth lies between, that Plato learned much relating to “ideas” and their Pythagorean origins from his teacher, just as he derived from him his ethical interest and his method. But to reduce the brilliant pupil to a mere reporter of his master’s views with little philosophy of his own until he was past forty, is quite incredible, and such a procedure has no proper warrant. When speaking of Socrates in my previous lecture I avoided this question, for a discussion of it there would have been unprofitable and confusing; and even now for convenience I propose to treat that part of Plato’s philosophy which immediately concerns us as if it were wholly his own, begging you, however, to keep in mind always that undoubtedly much in germ or developed form was derived directly from Plato’s chief teacher. Furthermore I must ask you to remember that Plato had been given to poetry when a youth, and that although he renounced the practice of the art, he remained a poet in spirit to the end of his life; all his thoughts were touched with poetry, enlivened with humour, and fired with religious zeal. He was a consummate literary artist, and a man of many sides. It was natural therefore that he should nowhere set forth a crystallized system of philosophy such as a less imaginative and duller person might have done; he was apparently a man who grew through all his eighty years. The result is that in spite of the fact that we may properly speak of “the unity of Plato’s thought,” we find in his works variety, variation, and even contradiction. The requirements of our present situation, however, force us to consider our themes categorically, though that procedure is somewhat unfair to Plato.

Let us then first examine the central thought of Plato’s philosophy—the “doctrine of ideas.” Developing the doctrines of earlier philosophers, especially those of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, Plato held that the world is dual. In it is the phenomenal world visible to us, which includes all natural objects and those made by man, a transient and unreal world which we know only through our senses. But beside it, or rather behind it, is another world invisible but permanent and real, which can be grasped only by the reason. This is the world of ideas. Yet the two worlds are not separate, for the world of the senses owes its existence wholly to its dependence on the world of ideas. To understand Plato’s view we must consider in an elementary way what he meant by “ideas.” The words which he uses (εἶδος, ἰδέα) signify “form,” and in logic are used in the sense of “class,” “kind,” “species,” “the general principle for the classification of objects.” The translation “idea” is traditional, and there is no adequate reason for preferring “form” or any other English equivalent. Now Plato’s statement that the world of phenomena depends on the invisible world of ideas seems at first sight paradoxical, for by it he means that the individual tree, book, desk, chair, good man, or whatever you please, is not the real being at all, but that the ideas of tree, book, desk, chair, and goodness alone possess reality. It may be made plain by an illustration which shall be Plato’s own. At the beginning of the tenth book of the Republic Socrates and Glaucon are conversing together. The master wins Glaucon’s assent first to the proposition that although there are many beds and tables in the world, there are only two ideas, one of a bed, the other of a table. He then goes on to show that the workman makes a bed or table by shaping his material according to the idea of a bed or a table, but that he does not create the ideas themselves. That is done by God who is the real maker of the real bed, that is, of the idea of a bed. The carpenter makes only the particular bed which owes its temporary existence to the eternal idea—the real bed—which is in Nature, in the mind of God. Or if Plato should appear before us tonight, he might say, “Suppose we take a dozen books of different sizes and different shapes and appearance, how do we recognize that these diverse objects are all books?” Then when we hesitated to give an answer, as we probably should, he would reply, “It is because each one of these individual books partakes of the idea of book. The idea is present in the individual example and thereby gives the individual its existence; the individual depends therefore on the idea, not the idea on the individual. If this dozen, or indeed if all the books in the entire world were to be destroyed, the idea of book would still remain, and new books could be made by causing the materials, out of which books are constructed, to partake of the idea of book. That is, all individual books are transitory, impermanent, unreal; the idea of book is permanent, eternal, it alone has reality; and all individual things, therefore, exist, so far as they have any real existence, only by partaking of the ideas. So all things come into being and owe their existence to sharing in the eternal ideas.”

We should be unjust to Plato if we thought that he regarded this doctrine as a perfect explanation of the relation between the visible and invisible worlds. Far from holding such a view he himself evidently held it to be a “guess at truth,” which served to show in its way that there is a permanent reality behind the phenomena of the visible world and a truth which is beyond sense. Indeed Plato is very conscious of troublesome questions which arise in connection with the doctrine, and in three dialogues—his Philebus, Parmenides, and Sophist—he endeavors to meet some of these questions, and there he offers admirable criticism of his own views.

With reference to the source of the doctrine, as I have said above, we cannot tell how much Plato derived from Socrates or how much he developed for himself. Socrates was evidently always searching for universals, trying to determine what goodness is in itself in contrast to the goodness embodied in a good man, what are virtue, courage, and such qualities. The teacher or the pupil may have extended the ideas, the universals, to include all things, even the humble articles of furniture which are the examples in the Republic. But in any case by this doctrine of “ideas,” “forms,” Plato secured a basis for reality, a means of attaining absolute knowledge in contrast to that relative knowledge, which according to the Sophists was the utmost which man could attain. Plato would have quite agreed with Protagoras that if the senses were our only avenues to knowledge, then indeed man would be the measure of all things and his knowledge would be limited to the transient phenomenal world; that is, he could have no knowledge of reality; but by apprehending through our reason the ideas—that is, the realities—on which the phenomenal world depends, we can gain genuine knowledge and free ourselves from subjection to mere opinion.

Plato also teaches that there are various grades of ideas, some being subordinate to others; the highest of all is that of the Good, identified by him with the Beautiful. This supreme idea is at once the cause of all existence and knowledge, and comprehends within itself all other ideas; as the sun in the visible world, so in the world of true knowledge the Good “is the universal author of all things right and beautiful, itself the source of truth and intelligence.” It is the Absolute, the universal Reason, God.[190]

We have seen that Plato sets the world of ideas apprehended by reason over against the world of phenomena, known to us through our senses. The latter world is material, the former immaterial. This concept of the immateriality of ideas was something new in philosophy. Anaxagoras had thought his formative principle (Νοῦς), as his predecessors had thought theirs, to be as material as the “seeds” out of which all things were made; but Plato developed an immaterial, an ideal world, wherein are found all cause and all reality.

Now the Platonic ideas are apprehended by the human intellect. What are the consequences of this fact? It must follow that man’s reason has a nature similar to that of the ideas; like them it must belong to the world which is above the senses; and with them it must partake of the Absolute. But Plato shows that the ideas are eternal and immortal, and draws therefrom the logical conclusion that man’s intellect, his reasoning soul, likewise knows no creation and is free from death.