It is from the biassed statements of such “adversaries,” probably, that the learned Oxford translator of Plato's Dialogues came to the conclusion that:
That which was truly great and truly characteristic of him [Plato], his effort to realise and connect abstractions, was not understood by them [the Neoplatonists] at all [?].
He states, contemptuously enough for the ancient methods of intellectual analysis, that:
In the present day ... an ancient philosopher is to be interpreted from himself and by the contemporary history of thought.[18]
This is like saying that the ancient Greek canon of proportion (if ever found), and the Athena Promachus of Phidias, have to be interpreted in the present day from the contemporary history of architecture and sculpture, from the Albert Hall and Memorial Monument, and the hideous Madonnas in crinolines sprinkled over the fair face of Italy. Prof. Jowett remarks that “mysticism is not criticism.” No; but neither is criticism always fair and sound judgment.
La critique est aisée, mais l'art est difficile.
And such “art” our critic of the Neoplatonists—his Greek scholarship notwithstanding—lacks from a to z. Nor has he, very evidently, the key to the true spirit of the Mysticism of Pythagoras and Plato, since he denies even in the Timæus an element of Oriental Mysticism, and seeks to show Greek Philosophy reäcting upon the East, forgetting that the truth is the exact reverse; that it is “the deeper and more pervading spirit of Orientalism” that had—through Pythagoras and his own initiation into the Mysteries—penetrated into the very depths of Plato's soul.
But Dr. Jowett does not see this. Nor is he prepared to admit that anything good or rational—in accordance with the “contemporary history of thought”—could ever come out of that Nazareth of the Pagan Mysteries; nor even that there is anything to interpret of a hidden nature in the Timæus or any other Dialogue. For him,
The so-called mysticism of Plato is purely Greek, arising out of his imperfect [pg 013]knowledge[19] and high aspirations, and is the growth of an age in which philosophy is not wholly separated from poetry and mythology.[20]
Among several other equally erroneous propositions, it is especially the assumptions (a) that Plato was entirely free from any element of Eastern Philosophy in his writings, and (b) that every modern scholar, without being a Mystic and a Kabalist himself, can pretend to judge of ancient Esotericism—which we mean to combat. To do this we have to produce more authoritative statements than our own would be, and bring the evidence of other scholars as great as Dr. Jowett, if not greater, specialists in their subjects, moreover, to bear on and destroy the arguments of the Oxford Regius Professor of Greek.