Borrowed from Moses

No one should be surprised that Plato believed Moses about the eternity of God. You will find him, in a veiled and mysterious way, handing over the true knowledge of things — the knowledge that stands next in order after the God who really exists — to the prophets. Discussing certain first principles in the Timaeus, he wrote this: [a]

“This we lay down as the first principle of fire and of the other bodies, working by probability and necessity. But the first principles behind these, God above knows, and so does any man he loves.”

And which men does he think God loves, if not Moses and the rest of the prophets? He had read their prophecies, and, having learned the teaching about the judgment from them, he announces it like this in the first book of the Republic:

“When a man begins to think he will soon die, fear comes over him, and worries that had never entered his head before. The old stories about what goes on in Hades — that whoever has been unjust here must be punished there — used to be laughed at; now they torment his soul with the fear that they may be true. Whether it is the weakness of age, or because he is now nearer to the other world, he looks at them more closely. So he becomes full of anxiety and dread, and begins to call himself to account and ask whether he has wronged anyone. The man who finds many wrongs in his life keeps starting up out of his sleep the way children do; he lives in terror, with nothing ahead to hope for. But the man who knows of no wrong he has done has sweet hope as his constant companion, a good nurse to his old age, as Pindar says. Pindar put it beautifully, Socrates: ‘Whoever leads a life of holiness and justice — sweet hope goes with him, the nurse of his old age, cheering his heart; for she has great power over the changeable mind of mortals.’”

That is what Plato wrote in the first book of the Republic.

And in the tenth book he wrote out plainly, in so many words, what he had learned from the prophets about the judgment — though not as something he had learned from them. Because he was afraid of the Greeks, he presented it as something he had heard from a man killed in battle; he thought the story worth inventing. The man was about to be buried on the twelfth day and was already lying on the funeral pyre when he came back to life and described the other world. These are Plato’s own words: [d]

“He said he was there when one man asked another where the great Ardiaeus was. This Ardiaeus had been ruler of a city in Pamphylia, and had killed his aged father and his elder brother and done many other unholy things, so the report ran. The man who was asked replied: ‘He is not coming, and he never will come here. Among the other terrible sights, we saw this one too. We were close to the mouth of the pit and were about to come up into the open air, having been through everything else, when we suddenly caught sight of him, and of others as well, most of them tyrants — though there were also private men who had committed great crimes. Just when they thought they were about to go up, the mouth would not let them. It bellowed whenever one of the incurably wicked tried to climb out before he had paid the penalty in full. Then men who looked fierce and fiery stood close by, and when they heard the roar they took some of them and led them off. But Ardiaeus and the rest they bound hand and foot, threw down on their faces, flayed, and dragged out along the road, tearing them on thorns and telling everyone standing there why they were suffering it — that they were being led away to be thrown into Tartarus. Of all their many fears, he said, the greatest was that the mouth would bellow as they went up; for if it stayed silent, each one of them went up most gladly. Such were the punishments and torments; and the rewards, he said, were the opposite of these.’”

It seems to me that Plato learned from the prophets not only the teaching about the judgment but also the teaching about the resurrection, which the Greeks refuse to believe. Nothing shows more clearly that he held the resurrection than his saying that the soul is judged together with the body. How else could Ardiaeus and the rest have suffered such punishment in Hades, if they had left their bodies behind on earth — head, hands, feet and skin? Nobody is going to claim that the soul has a head and hands and feet and skin. Plato met with the testimony of the prophets in Egypt, accepted what they teach about the resurrection of the body, and so teaches that the soul is judged in the company of the body.

And it was not only Plato. Homer as well, who came by the same knowledge in Egypt, said that Tityos was punished in the same way. This is how Odysseus speaks to Alcinous when he is telling of his questioning of the dead: [e]

Plainly it is not the soul that has a liver, but the body. In the same way he describes both Sisyphus and Tantalus as undergoing their punishment with the body.

That Homer had been in Egypt, and worked much of what he learned there into his own poem, Diodorus — the most respected of the historians — makes clear enough. He says that while Homer was in Egypt he learned that Helen had received from Polydamna, the wife of Theon, a drug that “puts an end to all grief and anger and makes a person forget every trouble,” and had brought it home to Sparta. And Homer says that Helen used that drug to put an end to the grieving of Menelaus, which the presence of Telemachus had brought on. He also called Aphrodite “golden” from what he had seen in Egypt: he had seen the temple there called the temple of Golden Aphrodite, and the plain named the plain of Golden Aphrodite.

And why am I bringing this up now? To show that the poet carried over into his own poem a great deal of what stands in the divine writings of the prophets. The first thing he took over was what Moses recorded as the beginning of the creation of the world. Moses wrote, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” — and then the sun, and the moon, and the stars. Homer learned this in Egypt, and was so taken with what Moses had written about the making of the world that he made up a scene in which Hephaestus put a kind of picture of the world’s creation on the shield of Achilles. This is what he wrote:

He also arranged for the garden of Alcinous to keep the likeness of Paradise, and by that likeness he made it always in bloom and full of every fruit. This is what he wrote:

Are those words not an obvious, unmistakable imitation of what Moses, the first prophet, said about Paradise?

And if anyone wants to know something about the building of the tower by which the men of that day imagined they would get into heaven, he will find a close enough imitation of it, put as an allegory, in what the poet says about Otus and Ephialtes. He wrote of them:

The same holds for the enemy of the human race who was thrown out of heaven, the one the sacred writings call the Devil — a name he got from his first act of slander against man. Anyone who looks at the matter carefully will find that although the poet never once uses the name “the devil,” he does name him from his worst act. He calls him Ate, and says he was hurled out of heaven by their god, exactly as if he had a clear memory of the words the prophet Isaiah spoke about him. He wrote this in his own poem:

And when Plato says that form is the third original principle, after God and matter, he plainly took the suggestion from nowhere but Moses. He got the word “form” from what Moses wrote, but he was never taught by those who had been initiated that without insight into the mystery it is impossible to understand Moses’ writings clearly. Moses wrote that God spoke to him about the tabernacle in these words: “And you shall make for me, according to everything I show you on the mountain, the pattern of the tabernacle.” And again: “And you shall set up the tabernacle according to the pattern of all its furnishings; that is how you shall make it.” And a little later: “So, then, you shall make it according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.” Plato read these passages, and, not taking what was written with the insight it needs, concluded that form has some separate existence of its own before the thing the senses perceive. He often calls it the pattern of the things that are made — because Moses’ writing about the tabernacle said, “According to the form shown you on the mountain, so you shall make it.” [m]

He was misled in the same way about the earth and the heaven and man, since he supposes there are “ideas” of these as well. Moses wrote, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth,” and then added the sentence, “And the earth was invisible and unformed.” So Plato took the words “the earth was” to mean an earth that already existed, since Moses said, “And the earth was invisible and unformed”; and he took the earth in “God made the heaven and the earth” to be the earth we perceive with our senses, which God made according to the form that already existed. He thought the same about the heaven: the heaven that was created — which Moses also calls the firmament — was the creation the senses perceive, while the heaven the mind perceives was that other one, the one the prophet meant when he said, “The heaven of heavens belongs to the Lord, but the earth he has given to the children of men.” [n]

And the same with man. Moses first mentions the name “man,” and then, after many other created things, tells of the forming of man: “And God made man, taking dust from the earth.” So Plato concluded that the man first named in that way existed before the man who was made, and that the one formed out of earth was afterwards made according to the form that already existed. That man was formed out of earth Homer, too, had found out from the ancient and divine history, which says, “You are dust, and to dust you will return” — and so he calls the lifeless body of Hector dumb clay. Condemning Achilles for dragging Hector’s corpse after his death, he says somewhere:

And somewhere else he brings in Menelaus, speaking to men who were not taking up Hector’s challenge to single combat with the eagerness they should have shown:

dissolving them, in his violent anger, back into the first stuff they were formed from. All this Homer and Plato learned in Egypt from the ancient records, and then wrote down in their own words.

Where else, if not from reading the writings of the prophets, could Plato have got the information he gives us, that Zeus drives a winged chariot through heaven? He knew it from these words of the prophet about the cherubim: “And the glory of the Lord went out from the house and rested on the cherubim; and the cherubim lifted their wings, and the wheels beside them; and the glory of the Lord God of Israel was above them.” Borrowing that idea, the grand-sounding Plato shouts out with enormous confidence, “Great Zeus, indeed, driving his winged chariot in heaven.” From what other source, if not from Moses and the prophets, did he learn this and write it? [r]

And where did he get the suggestion for saying that God exists in a fiery substance? Was it not from the third book of the history of the Kings, where it is written, “The Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire, a still small voice”? But these are things devout people have to take at a higher level, with deep and careful reflection. Plato did not attend to the words with the insight they need, and so said that God exists in a fiery substance.

And if anyone will look carefully at the gift that comes down from God on holy men — the gift the sacred prophets call the Holy Spirit — he will find that Plato announced it under another name in the dialogue with Meno. Afraid to call the gift of God “the Holy Spirit,” in case following the prophets’ teaching should make him look like an enemy of the Greeks, he admits that it does come down from God, but does not think it right to call it the Holy Spirit. He calls it virtue. [t]

In the dialogue with Meno, on recollection, he asks many questions about virtue — whether it can be taught; or whether it cannot be taught but has to be gained by practice; or whether it can be had neither by practice nor by learning, but is a natural gift in people; or whether it comes some other way — and then makes this statement in these very words:

“But if all through this discussion we have inquired and argued rightly, virtue must be neither a natural gift nor anything one can receive by teaching. It comes to those to whom it does come by a divine allotment.”

This, I think, Plato had learned from the prophets about the Holy Spirit, and he has plainly transferred it to what he calls virtue. Just as the sacred prophets say that one and the same spirit is divided into seven spirits, so he too calls it one and the same virtue and says it is divided into four virtues — determined at all costs to avoid mentioning the Holy Spirit, and yet stating clearly, in a kind of allegory, what the prophets said about the Holy Spirit. This is how he puts it near the end of the dialogue with Meno:

“From this argument, Meno, it appears that virtue comes to those to whom it does come by a divine allotment. But we shall know clearly about this — in what way virtue comes to people — when, as a first step, we have set ourselves to investigate, as a separate question, what virtue itself is.”

You see how he gives only the name “virtue” to the gift that comes down from above; and even then he thinks it worth asking whether it is right to call this gift virtue or something else — afraid to name it openly as the Holy Spirit, in case he should look like a follower of the prophets’ teaching.

And where did Plato get the information that time was created along with the heavens? He wrote this: [w]

“Time, then, was created along with the heavens, so that, having come into being together, they might also be dissolved together, if their dissolution should ever take place.”

Did he not learn it from the divine history of Moses? He knew that the creation of time got its original constitution from days and months and years. And since the first day, created along with the heavens, was the beginning of all time — for Moses wrote, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth,” and then immediately adds, “And one day was made,” as if he meant to name the whole of time by one part of it — Plato calls the day “time,” in case, by mentioning “the day,” he should lay himself open to the charge the Athenians would bring, that he was taking over Moses’ words outright. And where did he get what he writes about the dissolution of the heavens? Did he not learn that too from the sacred prophets, and think it was their teaching?

And if anyone looks into the subject of images and asks on what ground the men who first shaped your gods supposed that they had the forms of human beings, he will find that this too came from the divine history. Moses’ history, speaking in the person of God, says, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” Taking this to mean that human beings are like God in shape, they began to make their gods that way, supposing they were making a likeness from a likeness. [y]

But why, men of Greece, am I going through all this now? So that you may know that it is not possible to learn the true religion from men who could not write anything of their own — not even on the subjects that won them the admiration of outsiders — but only set out, by some allegorical device in their own books, what they had learned from Moses and the other prophets.