Living Fountains or Broken Cisterns: An Educational Problem for Protestants

by E. A. Sutherland

In order to understand the fertility of the seeds of pagan education, it is necessary to regard with care the master mind of that system, and this we find in Plato. Emerson, in his “Representative Men,” defines his position and the position of his philosophy in the pagan and in the so-called Christian world, making the teachings of this Greek, schooled in Egypt, crowd out the Word of God itself. He says: “Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.... The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk young man, who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation ( ... Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Coleridge) is some reader of Plato.”

That is saying that for twenty-two hundred years Plato and his educational system, known everywhere as Platonism, have taken the place of the Bible to the leading minds of the world. “Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,—at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories,” continues Emerson. “No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind. How many great men nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men,—Platonists!”

Then he gives a list of illustrious names who have stood for learning in the various ages of the world’s history, and continues: “Calvinism is in his [Plato’s] Phædo: Christianity is in it.” How little this writer knew of the power of the truth as given by Christ! Doubtless he formed his judgment from professedly Christian teachers. But he continues: “Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its handbook of morals, ... from him [Plato]. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads, and says, ‘How English!’ a German, ‘How Teutonic!’ an Italian, ‘How Roman and how Greek!’” And to show that the recognition of Plato is not stopped by the Atlantic, our versatile New England writer says: “Plato seems, to a reader in New England, an American genius.” Has the reader any suspicion that our American educational institutions may have recognized the universality of this master of philosophy, and adopted into their curricula his system of reasoning? One traces, without the aid of magnifiers, the thread of pagan philosophy throughout the American schools.

“As our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the table talk and household life of every man and woman in the European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have preoccupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every church, every poet,—making it impossible to think, on certain levels, except through him. He stands between the truth and every man’s mind, and has almost impressed language and the primary forms of thought with his name and seal.... Here is the germ of that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are all its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato.... How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to solve.”[38]

One ceases to wonder that, surrounded as was the Corinthian church by this philosophy and in daily touch with these ideas which have swayed the world, Paul wrote to it against accepting the philosophy of men in place of that divine philosophy which he and other apostles were preaching through the cross of Christ. “When I came to you, brethren,” writes the apostle, “I came not proclaiming the testimony of God with grand reasoning or philosophies, for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and He was crucified.... And my thought and my statement was not clothed in captivating philosophical reasons; but, in demonstrated spirit and power, so that your trust might not be in human philosophy, but in Divine power.”[39] “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elements [margin] of the world, and not after Christ.”[40]

Evolution the basis of Platonism.

Seeing, then, that the Platonic system of education has exerted, and is still exerting, such an influence over the minds of men, it behooves us to ascertain the basic principles of his system. What did the man believe, and what did he teach? Quotations have already been given showing that he is the father of modern philosophy. Emerson defines this philosophy. He says: “Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world.” All attempts, then, to account for the constitution of the world when a “thus saith the Lord,” is refused, is philosophy. And philosophy is Plato.

“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”[41] But Platonism is the mind trying to account to itself for the constitution of the worlds. How, think you, did the author of this philosophy go about to account for things which can be grasped by faith alone? “To Plato belongs the honor of first subjecting education to a scientific examination,” says Painter. Here began the laboratory studies which have been continued by Huxley, Darwin, and others. And thus from Plato Europe and America have gained their ideas of evolution. Plato brought these ideas from Egypt and Babylon, and the schools of to-day follow this man-made philosophy. Our men of intellect write text-books which they place in the hands of youth, teaching them to account for the constitution of the worlds according to the reasoning of men’s minds.