Chapter VII: Appendix: I (bibliographies) 361 (5)

The greatest spokesman of this time was Euripides. Although he was the younger contemporary of Sophocles, who outlived him by a few months, Euripides belongs to a new age. The former represents imperial Athens of the age of Pericles, the latter the Athens of the Peloponnesian War. Born of a family apparently well-to-do he certainly received a liberal education. Politics and society seem never to have attracted him to active participation in them, but the intellectual life of his time he shared to the full; and more than any extant writer of his day, he shows that he felt the force of the movements which were transforming Athenian thought. It has been aptly said that in Sophocles the poetical course of traditional religion culminated; in Euripides we have for the first time the poetic and philosophical development fully combined. He was a profound thinker, troubled by the most difficult problems of humanity, and approaching tradition with the liberal frankness of the new age. Yet we must always bear in mind that he was a dramatic poet, not a systematic theologian or moral teacher. Again and again fidelity to his art made him put sentiments into the mouths of his characters which must have been abhorrent to him. Nor have we any right to search for some hidden meaning in his plays. Yet after all allowances have been made, we cannot doubt that in his dramas he frequently expresses his personal views on politics, morals, and religion, which were quite at variance with the views of tradition.

Toward the gods of the current mythology no one could have been more frankly sceptical or scornful than he. As Nestle, a German critic, has pointed out, the basic principle of his attacks is found in his verse:

εἰ θεοί τι δρωσιν αἰσχρόν, οὐκ εἰσὶν θεοί.[167]

If the gods do aught that is base, then they are not gods.

That is, as the same critic says, for Euripides “God and sin are mutually exclusive terms.” Sophocles held the same belief, yet his point of view was wholly different, as is shown by his verse:

αἰσχρὸν μὲν οὐδὲν ὧν ὑφηγοῦνται θεοί.[168]

Nothing to which the gods lead men is base.

That is, whatever the gods do is good no matter how it may seem to man. There is then a fundamental difference between the two tragedians: the elder has faith to believe in the righteousness of the traditional gods, the younger is ready to throw tradition over. The unreasonableness and immorality of popular beliefs and the baffling existence of evil in the world Euripides could not reconcile with a faith in the existence of all powerful and just beings such as he held the gods must be, if they exist at all. His firm conviction that divinity, if it have any existence, must be absolutely just, explains the poet’s boldness in holding up to scorn the popular notions. In the Hippolytus he exhibits the goddess of love in a shameful light, and makes Artemis join with the innocent hero of the play in condemning her.

Indeed throughout the tragedy the traditional beliefs are treated with powerful irony. When Phaedra is filled with shame at the passion for her step-son with which Aphrodite has inspired her, the nurse tempts her to yield, quoting ancient tales of the celestials’ amours as examples:

Whoso have scrolls writ in the ancient days,
And wander still themselves by paths of song,
They know how Zeus of yore desired the embrace
Of Semele; they know how radiant Dawn
Up to the gods snatched Cephalus of yore,
And all for love; yet these in Heaven their home
Dwell, neither do they flee the face of Gods,
Content, I trow, to be love’s vanquished ones.
Thou—wilt not yield?[169]

* * * * *

Nay, darling, from thy deadly thoughts refrain,
And from presumption—sheer presumption this,
That one should wish to be more strong than Gods.
In love flinch not; a God hath willed this thing.[170]

But Phaedra dies by her own hand rather than yield to the goddess’s design. The innocent Hippolytus, second victim of divine injustice, cries out as he dies:

Innocent I, ever fearing the Gods, who was wholly heart-clean
Above all men beside,—
Lo, how am I thrust
Unto Hades, to hide
My life in the dust!
All vainly I reverenced God, and in vain unto man was I just.[171]

What greater condemnation of the traditional gods could there be than this!

In the Hercules Hera drives the hero mad and makes him the slayer of his own innocent children, all because of the goddess’s jealousy of Zeus. Small wonder that Hercules cries when the truth is brought home to him:

To such a Goddess
Who shall pray now? who, for a woman’s sake
Jealous of Zeus, from Hellas hath cut off
Her benefactors, guiltless though they were.[172]

The hero refuses to find any consolation for his woes in the suggestion that the gods too have sinned and suffered for their wrongs—“if minstrel legends be not false.” Whereat he exclaims:

I deem not that the Gods for spousals crave
Unhallowed: tales of Gods’ hands manacled
Ever I scorned nor ever will believe,
Nor that one God is born another’s lord.
For God hath need, if God indeed he be,
Of naught: these be the minstrels’ sorry tales.[173]

This play then like the Hippolytus is a condemnation through Hera and Zeus of the whole system of gods.

In these sentiments there is something more than direct defiance of tradition. Euripides does not, like Pindar, refine away the baser elements of legends; or, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, obscure the uglier features of the ancient mythology. On the contrary, constrained by his profession as dramatic poet to draw his themes from the dark tales of gods and heroes in a mythological age—tales whose immorality was wholly hateful to him—he accomplishes his purpose by showing these gods and heroes on his stage engaged in actions and prompted by motives which are so base as to destroy the spectator’s regard for beings of such a sort, and to win the onlooker’s sympathy for the mortal victim against the higher power. To the shameless natures of the gods the poet bluntly gives fitting characterizations: he names them cruel, vengeful, treacherous, licentious.

Euripides is no less iconoclastic in dealing with current religious practices; there is none that escapes his scorn. Sacrifices and votive offerings seem to him unworthy of true gods. The folly of popular wonder at the riches of temples is brought out in a fragment of the lost Philoctetes, in which the hero sarcastically bids his hearers see how even the gods prize gain, and therefore men should not hesitate to get profit and thereby make themselves equal to the gods.[174] That it is not the size of the gift, but piety which secures the favor of just Heaven, is the lesson of another couplet.[175] Temples and statues, and all the sacred privileges attached thereto are treated with equal disregard for tradition; and the sacred institution of blood-vengeance is most emphatically condemned. For the common trust in omens given by dreams and the flight of birds he has only ridicule. So in the Tauric Iphigenia when Iphigenia learns from Orestes that her brother lives, she cries:

False dreams, avaunt! So then ye were but naught.[176]

To which Orestes answers:

Ay, and not even Gods, whom men call wise,
Are less deceitful than be fleeting dreams.
Utter confusion is in things divine
And human. Wise men grieve at this alone
When—rashness?—no, but faith in oracles
Brings ruin—how deep, they that prove it know.[177]

The condemnation of the interpreter of signs given by birds is made the more effective in the Phoenissae by putting it into the mouth of the seer Tirisias:

Who useth the diviner’s art
Is foolish. If he heraldeth ill things,
He is loathed of those to whom he prophesies.
If pitying them that seek to him, he lie,
He wrongs the Gods.[178]

In the Iphigenia at Aulis Achilles bitterly asks, “What is a seer?” and answers his own question, “A man who speaks few truths and many lies.”[179] Even prayer is sometimes regarded as of doubtful aid, although naturally Euripides’ characters often appeal to the Gods.

At times, too, the poet is more openly atheistic or agnostic with reference to the popular religion. The most striking illustration is found in the prayer which he puts into the mouth of Hecuba, the Trojan queen:

O Earth’s Upbearer, thou whose throne is Earth,
Whoe’er thou be, O past our finding out,
Zeus, be thou Nature’s Law, or Mind of Man,
To thee I pray; for treading soundless paths,
In justice dost thou guide all mortal things.[180]

You will observe that although this prayer rejects all current polytheism, it is far from denying the existence of a divine power—rather it maintains in poetic language the existence of such a principle—the reason of the universe which shows itself in nature as law and in the mind of man as reason. This pantheism finds expression elsewhere in his poetry. In illustration I will quote two fragments. The first identifies divinity with all embracing ether:

Seest thou the boundless ether there on high,
That folds the earth around with dewy arms?
This deem thou Zeus, this reckon one with God.[181]

The second identifies god with the intelligence which pervades the world:

Thee, self-begotten, who in ether rolled
Ceaselessly round, by mystic links dost blend
The nature of all things, whom veils enfold
Of light, of dark night flecked with gleams of gold,
Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end.[182]

The last three passages show how the poet’s mind was filled with the philosophic thought of the day. In identifying divinity with the ether he was apparently giving poetic expression to the views of his contemporary, the philosopher Diogenes of Apollonia, whom he must have known at Athens. Diogenes followed Anaximenes in making “Air” (or the “Ether”) the basic element of the world, but advanced beyond his predecessor in attributing to “Air” intelligence and movement—indeed he held that it could only be conceived as intelligent; and he further said that this intelligent “Air,” which was the cause and, by virtue of its intelligence, the director of all things, seemed to him to be god. In the mind of man therefore the divine principle shows itself as intellect, in nature it is law. But in Hecuba’s prayer there is a higher conception of god than even this—the divine reason is also world-ruling Justice: Justice and God are one. This identification in a sense is as old as Hesiod, but Euripides conceives of Justice not as the daughter of Zeus but as identical with the cosmic reason, immanent in all things, forming and directing all things. When the poet speaks of Justice in ways more natural to the ordinary man, he combats the current notion that Justice dwells in heaven where men’s sins are recorded in a book; rather, he says, she is here on earth with men, unseen but seeing all.[183] Yet he never carried out this idea and reconciled it with the actual moral condition of the world and the undeserved sufferings of mankind. The problem of evil and doubt constantly vexed him; neither faith nor reason gave him rest:

When faith overfloweth my mind, God’s providence all-embracing
Banisheth griefs: but when doubt whispereth ‘Ah but to _know_!’
No clue through the tangle I find of fate and of life for my tracing:
There is ever a change and many a change,
And the mutable fortune of men evermore sways to and fro
Over limitless range.[184]

On death and the possibility of a future life Euripides again gives us no consistent views. He thought that men fear the great transition from inexperience with it; but he found some comfort in the fact that death comes in obedience to nature’s universal law, and therefore should cause no alarm.[185] Still he felt that the possibility of life beyond the grave gave no certainty of joy, for many, like Macaria in the Heraclidae, might say:

If in the grave aught be:
But ah that naught might be!—for if there too
We mortals who must die shall yet have cares,
I know not whither one shall turn; since death
For sorrow is accounted chiefest balm.[186]

Sometimes he expresses or hints at the view that our souls return to the air or ether from which they sprang.[187] Again he uses the Homeric pictures of a cheerless other world. Once he refers to the Orphic doctrine in the cryptic utterance, “Who knows but life be death, and death be reckoned life below?”—verses which Plato and other philosophers were to interpret after him.

If space allowed, we might gladly dwell on Euripides’ sympathy with human poverty and suffering, on the hints he gives that he perceived the common brotherhood of man. In his noble ideals of womanhood he surpasses his contemporaries. Above all these matters it is important for us with our present interest to note that more than once the tragedian seems to wish to inculcate the truth that the standard of morality among men was far superior to that of the traditional pantheon. No other poet of his age sets forth the true nobility of man so perfectly as Euripides.

The last play of the long list he wrote was the Bacchae. Composed in Macedonia, it was first produced at Athens after the poet’s death. As was fitting for a tragedy written in the home of Dionysus, the drama deals with the Dionysiac possession, enthusiasm, the “divine madness,” on which the Greeks ever set high store. No play has so baffled interpretation. Some scholars think it a recantation; others vigorously deny it. Personally I am inclined to hold with Adam that Dionysus in the play “stands for the spirit of enthusiasm in the ancient Greek meaning of the word,” and that the principal lesson of the drama is to be found in the verse, “Not with knowledge is wisdom bought”[188]—that is, reason is not all in man, but there is something greater—enthusiasm, inspiration.[189]

From what we have been considering thus far, it is evident that Euripides’ spirit was primarily iconoclastic; there can be no question that he contributed to the decay of the ancient beliefs and that he helped drive the Olympians from their thrones in the minds of thinking men. For fifty years he openly uttered his criticisms in the theater at the high festival of Dionysus before the quick-witted Athenians. The effect must have been great, for no poet enjoyed more widespread popularity.

On the positive side Euripides offers no system of religion or of morals. Indeed, he seems never to have arrived at any complete unity in his thought. But he is stimulating now, and in his own day unquestionably goaded men to reflection, just because he raises so often fundamental questions—the questions which reflecting men were asking then and have been asking ever since—questions which are never wholly answered, but which always demand an answer. The stimulating character of his dramas makes him indeed one of the great religious poets of the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[154] _Thuc._ 2, 43-44.

[155] _Frgg._ 14-16.

[156] _Frg._ 11.

[157] _Frg._ 18.

[158] _Frgg._ 23-26.

[159] _Frgg._ 1, 2, 30, 31, 40-42; cf. 57, 67, 90.

[160] _Frgg._ 14, 15, 29, 32, 41, 128.

[161] _Frg._ 1.

[162] _Frg._ 4.

[163] _Frg._ 5.

[164] _Frg._ 25 = 1 Nauck^2, pp. 770 ff.

[165] _Apol._ 28 E.

[166] _Apol._ 30 A.

[167] _Frg._ 292, 7.

[168] _Frg._ 226, 4.

[169] _Hipp._ 451-459.

[170] _Hipp._ 473-476.

[171] _Hipp._ 1365-1369.

[172] _H. F._ 1307 ff.

[173] _H. F._ 1341 ff.

[174] _Frg._ 794.

[175] _Frg._ 946.

[176] _I.T._ 569.

[177] _I.T._ 570-575.

[178] _Phoen._ 954-958.

[179] _I.A._ 956 f.

[180] _Tro._ 884-888.

[181] _Frg._ 941.

[182] _Frg._ 593.

[183] _Frgg._ 151, 255, 506.

[184] _Hippol._ 1102 ff.

[185] _Frgg._ 757, 816.

[186] 592 ff.

[187] _Hel._ 1014 ff.

[188] 395.

[189] Adam, _Religious Teachers_, p. 316.

V

PLATO AND ARISTOTLE

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.

However he is not content to let the matter rest on this argument alone, but he supports the doctrine of immortality by many proofs, as in the Phaedrus where Socrates explains: “The soul through all her being is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal; but that which moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move, ceases also to live. Only the self-moving, as it never leaves itself, never ceases to move and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides.”[191] In the Phaedo[192] he represents Socrates as offering a number of different arguments to his questioning friends. One of these is that by which he first proves that souls exist before they are domiciled in our bodies, for recollection implies a previous existence, and since men can recall and recognize things which they have never seen or been taught in their present existence, it follows that they have been born with this knowledge, so that what we call learning is after all only a recollection of ideas gained in a previous existence. Socrates concludes his argument with the question: “Then may we not say, Simmias, that if, as we are always repeating, there is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all things; and if to this, which is now discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them, finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possession—then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, there would be no force in the argument?” To this his hearers give ready assent. In the Meno this same argument is very adroitly drawn from the realm of mathematics.[193] An untutored slave is made to “recollect” that the square of the hypothenuse of an isosceles right-angled triangle is equal to twice the square of one of its sides. This is the doctrine of recollection to which Wordsworth has given beautiful expression in his familiar lines:

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;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

But as Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo point out, this doctrine only shows that the soul existed before the body; it does not prove that the soul is immortal. Socrates therefore goes on to prove this further point, largely by showing the simple and unchanging nature of the soul which is like that of the ideas, and he therefore concludes that since it cannot admit of change, it must be free from death. Again he argues that since the soul can rule and use the body as it will, it must be anterior to the body and hence have an eternal and never ending existence.[194] The final and apparently most convincing proof to Plato’s mind, in spite of its dialectic character, is that the notion of life cannot be separated from the soul, for the soul is that which gives life; therefore since a dead soul is an impossibility, we must agree that the soul is immortal.[195] To follow out in detail the other arguments would occupy too much time now, interesting as it might prove. Indeed if we were to rehearse all of Plato’s proofs of the immortality of the soul, we should run through practically the entire gamut of the arguments which have ever been offered. His frequent return to the subject indicates the importance which he gave to the belief.

Before we approach Plato’s ethical and religious views we must glance for a moment at his psychology, for on that depends in no small measure his moral system. In the fourth book of the Republic when discussing the different forms of government, Socrates is made to show that the soul has three parts or elements: the first is the divine or rational part (τὸ θεῖον, τὸ λογιστικόν) whose seat is in the head, the second, the courageous or passionate element (τὸ θυμοειδές) residing in the heart, and the third is the appetite (τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν) which belongs to the diaphragm or liver.[196] In the Phaedrus[197] this same division is set forth in a myth. Now when in an individual all three parts are in accord under the leadership of reason, whose orders are enforced by courage on appetite, the man is virtuous; but if appetite and courage unite against reason, discord results and the man is vicious. As the state is well ordered when harmony exists among its parts, so harmony of the soul, led by the reason, produces the virtuous human being. In the earlier dialogues the soul is evidently regarded as a unit, so that the parts are really forms or manifestations of the soul; all three are immortal. But in the Timaeus only the reason is immortal, the other parts being separable and bound to the body with which they die.[198] Now we have already seen that the soul, or at least its rational part, being divine and immortal, has an affinity for the eternal ideas and is endowed by a natural love for the true, the beautiful, and the good. It is therefore impelled toward the divine world of ideas by a natural passion, and this effort on the part of man’s reason is philosophy. The true philosopher then is the lover of truth and reality, who is absorbed in the pleasures of the soul so that he will hardly be conscious of bodily pleasure; indeed he will not think much of human life or even fear death.[199] The soul, however, in its effort to mount into the realm of the ideas, is held back by the body in which it is imprisoned and fettered in the world of the senses. Thus we find in Plato the Orphic belief that man has a dual nature, made up of a divine soul and a mortal hindering body. We shall presently see how he gave to the emotional belief of that sect a philosophic basis and so transformed it into a reasonable article of morality and religion.

Now we may consider Plato’s moral and religious views. The highest good for man, according to his teaching, is likeness to God—that is, the largest possible participation in the ideas of the Good which are in the Absolute. In direct proportion to the success of the rational soul in appropriating to itself these ideas, the man will practise justice and holiness, that is, be righteous; but inasmuch as the world of ideas cannot be apprehended by the senses, the rational soul of the philosopher must always try to escape from the world of the senses where evils dwell. As Socrates in the Theaetetus[200] assures Theodorus: “Evils, Theodorus, can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to the good. Having no place among the gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the mortal nature and this earthly sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise ... God is never in any way unrighteous—he is perfect righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is most like him.... To know this is true wisdom and virtue; and ignorance of this is manifest folly and vice.” The man, then, whose soul strives to become like God will inevitably be righteous. Plato’s philosophy thus results in practical morality.

Furthermore we are assured in the Republic that a seeker after righteousness will not be neglected by the gods, for Socrates there says:[201] “Then this must be our notion of the just man, that even when he is in poverty or sickness or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death: for the gods have a care of any one whose desire is to become just and be like God, so far as man can attain the divine likeness, by the pursuit of virtue.”

The path by which man is to attain to likeness of God, and so to freedom from his lower nature, is that of a noble asceticism which Socrates described to Simmias and Cebes the night before his own death:[202] “No one who has not studied philosophy and who is not entirely pure at the time of his departure is allowed to enter the company of the gods, but the lover of knowledge only. And this is the reason, Simmias and Cebes, why the true votaries of philosophy abstain from all fleshly lusts, and hold out against them and refuse to give themselves up to them, not because they fear poverty or the ruin of their families, like the lovers of money and the world in general; nor like the lovers of power and honour, because they dread the dishonour or the disgrace of evil deeds.”

“No, Socrates, that would not become them,” said Cebes.

“No indeed,” he replied, “and therefore they who have any care of their own souls, and do not merely live moulding and fashioning the body, say farewell to all this; they will not walk in the ways of the blind: and when philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence, and whither she leads they turn and follow.”

“What do you mean, Socrates?”

“I will tell you,” he said. “The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the soul was simply fastened and glued to the body—until philosophy freed her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of every sort of ignorance, and by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her own captivity.” And a little later Socrates says: “The soul of the true philosopher thinks that she ought not to resist this deliverance (which philosophy offers), and therefore abstains from pleasures and desires and pains and fears, so far as she is able.”

Somewhat earlier in the dialogue Socrates had stated in still more emphatic terms the necessity of putting the body aside if man’s soul would attain real knowledge:[203] “For if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows—either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and shall hold converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth.” As the phrase, “until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us,” shows, man might not hasten the time of his release by his own act. And in other places, in familiar ways, Plato teaches that man may not desert the station where god has set him on guard until the command is given.

Finally in the Cratylus,[204] where Socrates in discussing the origin and nature of language indulges in some serious fooling in connection with the name of the soul (ψυχή), he says that he imagines that those who first gave the soul its name “psyche,” (ψυχή), wished to express the truth that the soul when in the body is the source of life, and gives the body the ability to breathe and revive, and that when this power fails the body, then it perishes and dies. As for body, he reminds his interlocutor that that word (σῶμα) is variously interpreted, some saying that it is the grave (σῆμα) of the soul, which may be regarded as in a tomb during this present life; and he adds that the Orphic poets were probably the ones who invented the name, for they had the notion that the embodied soul is suffering punishment for sin, and that the body is a prison in which the soul is incarcerated until the penalty of sin is paid. Likewise in the Gorgias[205] Socrates refers to the same Orphic idea and quotes a verse from Euripides: “Who knows whether life be not death and death life?” That is, this death in life is due to the body which tends to strangle the soul. Only when the reasoning soul has escaped from this tomb of the flesh can it really live. This is the reason why the true philosopher is always pursuing death in the sense that he is trying to free his soul, so far as may be, from the concerns of the body that it may enjoy life at its best.[206]

I have used Plato’s own words thus extensively for they set forth more eloquently than any words of mine the essential features of his doctrine. It requires no argument to show how great his debt to the Orphics and Pythagoreans was. But we cannot fail to see that he went far beyond his predecessors, for to their emotional belief in the immortality of the soul he gave an intellectual basis, by showing that the rational soul is of the same nature and substance as the Absolute, and therefore immortal and ever striving to apprehend the Absolute to which it belongs. In place of the external purifications and simple taboos which made up the Orphic course of life, Plato substitutes a noble discipline, reminding us of St. Paul—a discipline which has for its aim nothing less than the likening of man’s soul to God. When Plato teaches that man must begin his immortality here “by the practice of death,” we now see that he really means the practice of life; for life can only begin when the soul is released from its bodily tomb.

From the Orphics and Pythagoreans Plato adopted also the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. According to his view a thousand years—ten times the longest span of human life—elapsed between death and rebirth, during which the wicked received their ten-fold punishment and the righteous their like reward. When the time to return on earth came around, the souls were allowed to choose their new life as they pleased, only the wicked souls, “which had never seen the truth,” could not pass into the bodies of men. The choice made and their next destiny determined, the souls passed to the plain of Forgetfulness where each must drink of the river of Lethe; in the darkness of midnight there was an earthquake and thunderstorm, and the souls were driven, like shooting stars, to their birth. Ten thousand years were required to complete the round of rebirths and to allow the soul to return to its heavenly home. But the soul of a philosopher, “guileless and true,” might secure release after three rebirths if each time he had chosen the higher life. Some incurable sinners were not allowed to return to earth, but when their souls approached the mouth of the cavern which led to the upper world, the mouth gave a mighty roar and drove them back, while fiends tortured them with all the sufferings which a fertile imagination could devise. The path of salvation therefore lay in following righteousness and justice, in choosing the good, that is, in true philosophy. At the close of the Republic Socrates relates the vision of Er the Pamphylian whose soul returned with a report of the other world, and so concludes: “And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing.”[207]

With regard to the ultimate fate of the soul Plato is not wholly clear; but apparently he held that with the exception of those who had done unpardonable wrongs the souls of men, when their wanderings and rebirths were over and they had attained to purity, returned to God, to the universal reason; probably, however, he thought of their return as being without loss of individuality, for Plato lays so much stress on the individual soul that we cannot believe that he would have allowed it to lose its personality in the Absolute.

This account, I trust, for all its imperfections, is sufficient to indicate what a great advance Plato made in his concept of the spiritual life. Man’s reason is now made the means and agent of his spiritual ascent; the reasoning soul, by its own nature, strives to seek its own, and so finds its goal by virtue of its reason. The human will is not neglected in the Platonic system, but it is by no means made prominent. Man’s salvation is attained when the soul through the exercise of its reason has risen superior to its bodily prison, freed itself of the imperfections and evils which are necessarily associated with the body, and purified has attained to God’s likeness.

In the preceding discussion I have used the word God freely, but it may fairly be asked how far such use is justified, and furthermore whether Plato was a pantheist or a polytheist. It is indeed somewhat difficult to answer these questions, for in many passages he speaks of the gods in the plural after the common manner, and in the Timaeus he especially provides for a multitude of gods secondary to the Absolute; in many other places he speaks of the Divine (τὸ θεῖον) or simply God (θεός). Sometimes he seems to conceive of God as a living personality; again God is apparently only the impersonal idea of the Good. Yet in spite of the fact that his expressions range from polytheism almost to monotheism, considering the sum total of his thought, we are justified in speaking of his idea of God. At the same time we must always understand that his thought admitted many gods, subordinate to the Absolute and included in it.

But whatever the form of expression which he uses, Plato conceives of God as the giver of good alone. For him there is no deception or deceit in the divine; the chastening of man by God is always for the purpose of making man better, never to satisfy any punitive desire. The notion of “the envy of the gods,” which is so prominent in Aeschylus, Herodotus, and other writers of the fifth century, to Plato is abhorrent and inconceivable. Furthermore he makes the Divine, the idea of the Good, the measure of truth, not man, as Protagoras would have had him. His world therefore has a divine warrant of its validity; it is ordered by the mind of the good and just God, and not by the will of a debased divinity or by mere chance. Previous thinkers had made Justice the highest attribute of divinity; to this Plato added Goodness as the chief characteristic of God.

But in this discussion of Plato’s religious philosophy we have left one important subject untouched—the problem of evil. This was a question which a mind so acute and inquisitive as Plato’s could not finally avoid. Of the presence of evil in the world he was fully aware, and indeed he maintained that evils must always exist, for there must remain something antagonistic to the good; and since evils cannot exist in heaven the earth is their abode, from which man must try to escape.[208] On the source of evil, however, he touches only in the Statesman and the Timaeus;[209] in both the question is intimately connected with his theories of creation, which he sets forth in myth. But leaving aside the Platonic imagery, I will simply remind you that earlier in this lecture we saw that Plato conceived the world we know as dual—the phenomenal world known through the senses and the world of ideas apprehended by reason. Now the ideas alone have Being; but the phenomenal world is always in a state of Becoming, that is, of coming into being and of ceasing to be; it is both temporal and imperfect. Obviously there must be some principle, parallel in a way to the perfect and eternal ideas, such that it can receive them, and by its participation in them bring the imperfect sensible world into transitory existence. This principle is to Plato the material element. Now since he ascribes to the ideas alone real existence, that is, Being, the material principle must be Not-being. It is the negative substratum of all sensible phenomena, itself invisible, without form or characteristic, or in Plato’s words “the receptacle, and in a manner, the nurse of all generation” for, although itself formless, it is capable of taking on all the forms which the ideas may impose upon it. Plato himself could not avoid the difficulties which such a material substratum raises, and at times he is forced to speak as if it were something real in itself, having an existence beside the ideas. But his true notion seems to be that matter is mere negation, like the Aristotelian στέρησις, something which cannot be grasped by the intellect, as can the ideas, or perceived by the senses, as can the phenomenal world; it is identical with space. Of course when Plato talks about this negative principle, he inevitably speaks as if we could know something about it.[210]