What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

So far, the course of Greek philosophy has led us to the side of science, to the constitution of the world, to the immensity of space, to the physical construction of animal and vegetable life, to the problem of the duration of the universe, to the dreams about its origin. Regarding all this as natural philosophy (to use an obsolete but convenient expression), there remains another orb of Greek speculation which took rise with Socrates, passed on through Plato and Aristotle to the Stoic and Epicurean schools, and even illumined with its setting rays the old world passing into the night of the Dark Ages. Two things, says the philosopher Kant, impress me always with their peerless majesty—the starry heaven above, and the Moral Law within. It is this latter aspect of human philosophy, bound up as it is on the one side with profound metaphysic, on the other with ordinary practical life, that I must now speak. But here, where the material is large, and our evidence very complete, it is not expedient that I should detain you at any length. It may be new to some of you that Parmenides or Leucippus have been the fathers of modern systems; but none of you will doubt for a moment the colossal influence of Plato and Aristotle upon modern thought.

You must beware of exaggerating the revolution in philosophy produced by Socrates and the Sophists. It may indeed be true in their case that they despised scientific speculation, and did not care to make researches into the constitution of the universe. Gorgias even erected into a theory his scepticism regarding the reality of our knowledge, and wrote a famous tract on the impossibility of knowing anything; and he was by no means the only nihilist in the course of Greek philosophy. But when we come to Plato, we find high physical speculation, we find high theories of the universe, we find all the learning of his predecessors woven into his system, or utilised by way of illustration. The ideas of the Pythagoreans in particular, influenced him constantly, and his advocacy of a training in geometry, which may, more than people think, have shaped the curriculum of modern public schools in Europe, is Pythagorean in spirit.

But in spite of this strong recommendation, it does not appear that Plato himself made any advances in that science. His aim was for the moral reform of the individual, and with him of society, by metaphysical and ethical training. He had a higher opinion of the value of education than even the modern democrat, or English Radical, who imagines that by infusing knowledge into the masses, you can make them equal to the classes in refinement and in the amenities of life. But Plato’s education was intended strictly for the ruling minority; he did not think the artisan or the labourer fit for this high privilege, and in all his ideal schemes, he set up either the exceptional man as a monarch (in the Politicus), a small oligarchy of guardians (in the Republic), or a fixed code of strict Laws, with severe penalties for any violation or even questioning of them—all clearly aristocratic forces,—as the safeguards of society. And in spite of all these ethical safeguards, he did not believe that any state, even if ideally constructed, would last for ever, but that it must live through a youth and a maturity and ultimately reach the decrepitude of age.

I will not revert to the political speculations of Plato, which belong to another part of my subject. My present concern is with his theology and his metaphysic. Is it any wonder that the early Christian thinkers, such as Saint Augustine, delighted in him and called him the Attic Moses? In his Republic he goes so far as to propose for his ideal state the expulsion of Homer and the other Epic poets, and the establishment of a loftier creed, as necessary for pure and sound morals. The true deity must be one, and the author of all good. He must be free from all disturbance of passion or caprice, without love or jealousy, without pride or interest. Any defects there may be in the world are due, not to his want of benevolence, but to his want of omnipotence in controlling the necessities of things, or perhaps rather because no being, omnipotent or not, can possibly be conceived as reconciling absolute contradictories.

It may, for example, be better and nobler for the creation that beings should exist which have a free will of their own and which are not like machines controlled by invincible necessity. But if they have indeed free will, how is it possible they should not go wrong, and cause evil in the world as the outcome of their liberty? Yet if this be the cause of evil in the world, it implies a higher and better state than one of perfect order, with the ideas of virtue and merit expunged from existence.

Plato goes further than any but the highest Christian theologians when he declares the Moral Law to be eternal and immutable, and to be binding even on the Author of the universe. In other words, the great mediæval controversy,—whether God does a thing because it is right, or whether a thing must be right because God does it,—this controversy is solved in the sense of what the Cambridge Platonists have called Immutable Morality. If such be the obligation under which even the Deity acts, it is an obvious corollary that nothing in the conduct of men is comparable to justice, nothing in dignity equal to the obeying of the Moral Law, without any regard of consequences. Nay more, to be punished for wrong-doing is far happier and better than to escape the consequences, and so to miss the great lesson that crime brings with it misery as a just consequence. Accordingly, a clear knowledge of moral principles is of the first moment to all men, and in Plato’s day it was often a more difficult problem to choose the right course, than to follow it when discovered. This is the meaning of those many researches into the proper connotation of terms expressing moral ideas. What is justice, what is temperance, what is chastity, what is holiness? On all these, there was little difficulty in showing by discussion that the popular notions were vague, and often self-contradictory. The first step to a purer life was to understand its conditions, to bring the intellect, as well as the will, to bear upon the conduct of men. Hence a man who felt no difficulty in doing his duty, when he once saw it plainly before him, might well say with Socrates and with Plato, that virtue was knowledge, that right living was a science, and that therefore a high education was the necessary condition of a noble character.

This attitude is foreign to the morals of Christianity, which accepts the child and the ignorant as better fitted for salvation than the wise and prudent. But such a theory, like that of a primitive Church where the members had all things in common, may be very practical at the opening of a revolution, yet may afterwards be found impracticable. It was not merely owing to its supposed corruption and decadence that the Mediæval Church came to ignore that poverty and equality of all Christians which we find at Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles. There is an aristocracy among men which no system of religion, of morals, of politics can ignore without disastrous consequences, and that is the aristocracy of intellect. This was the lesson which Plato taught in every page, and this it was which made him speculate upon the nature of the soul, and its relation to the Author of the universe, and to the knowledge of things higher and deeper than mere ordinary experience.

It was only gradually that he arrived at his conviction of the immortality, or rather of the eternity of the soul; probably it was suggested to him by the mystics and theologians among the Greeks. But in his dialogue known as the Phædo, he has discussed this now accepted belief with all its difficulties. In the person of Socrates, he has courted all the objections, and has endeavoured to show on metaphysical principles that the soul, being a perfectly simple active principle, distinct from, and superior to, the body, will not pass away with the death of its tabernacle but will exist hereafter, as it has existed, from eternity to eternity. The late Erwin Rohde, a critic not at all favourable to revealed religion, says, I think with great truth, that “no human teacher has ever done so much as Plato to extend this belief,” which has produced not only the noblest spiritual life, but also the noblest poetry. You know it in your English poets, best of all perhaps in the sober Wordsworth—

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

And again: