The Philosophers, and the Teaching of Plato

We ought, then, to aim at things that are within our power and do not exceed the capacities of our nature. For the persuasive pull of argument tends to draw most of us away from the truth of things. This has happened to many philosophers who busied themselves with reasoning and the study of nature. Whenever the greatness of the subject was beyond their powers of investigation, they turned to various devices that obscured the truth. Hence their differences of judgment and their quarrelsome opposition to one another’s teachings, and this in spite of their claims to wisdom. Hence, too, popular uprisings have broken out, and harsh sentences passed by those in power, who feared the overthrow of ancestral institutions, have destroyed many of the disputants themselves. [a]

Socrates, for example, carried away by his skill in argument, indulging his power of making the worse case appear the better, and forever playing with the fine points of debate, fell victim to the slander of his own countrymen and fellow citizens. Pythagoras, too, who laid special claim to the virtues of silence and self-control, was convicted of falsehood. For he told the Italians that the teachings he had received during his travels in Egypt, which the priests of that nation had made public long before, were a personal revelation to himself from God.

Last of all there is Plato himself, the gentlest and most refined of them all, who was the first to try to draw people’s thoughts away from the things of the senses to the things of the mind that are eternal, and who taught them to reach for higher contemplation. In the first place, he declared, truly, a God exalted above all being. But to him he also added a second, distinguishing them in number as two, though both have one perfection, and the second deity has his being from the first. For the first is the creator and governor of the universe, and plainly supreme, while the second, as the obedient agent of his commands, refers the origin of all creation back to him as its cause. In accordance with the soundest reason, then, we may say that there is one Being whose care and providence are over all things: God the Word, who has ordered all things. But the Word, being God himself, is also the Son of God. For by what name can we call him except this title of Son, without falling into the most serious error? For the Father of all things is rightly considered the Father of his own Word.

So far, then, Plato’s views were sound. But in what follows he seems to have wandered from the truth, for he brings in a multitude of gods and assigns each of them specific forms. This has given occasion to still greater error among the unthinking part of humankind, who pay no regard to the providence of the Supreme God, but worship images of their own making, fashioned in the likeness of human beings or of other living creatures. So it appears that the surpassing nature and admirable learning of this philosopher, tinged as they were with errors like these, were by no means free of impurity and base metal. And yet he seems to me to take back and correct his own words when he plainly declares that a rational soul is the breath of God, and divides all things into two classes, things of the mind and things of the senses: the one simple, the other made up of bodily structure; the one grasped by the mind alone, the other assessed by judgment and the senses. The first class, then, which shares in the divine spirit and is uncompounded and without matter, is eternal and inherits everlasting life. But the second, being wholly broken up again into the elements it is made of, has no share in everlasting life.

He further teaches the admirable doctrine that those who have lived a life of virtue, that is, the spirits of good and holy men, are enshrined, after their separation from the body, in the fairest dwellings of heaven. It is a doctrine not only to be admired but profitable too. For who can believe such a statement and aspire to so happy a lot without wanting to practice righteousness and self-control and to turn away from vice? In keeping with this doctrine, he represents the spirits of the wicked as tossed like wreckage on the streams of Acheron and Pyriphlegethon.