Concept
reading Plato
Plato has been claimed by almost every later age in its own image. Each took from him what it needed and quietly left the rest, so that the philosopher who comes down to us is often a portrait of his readers. Two such portraits have been especially powerful — and especially partial.
From early on, Christian thinkers found in Plato a pagan who seemed almost to prophesy their faith. Justin Martyr counted Socrates — who died for the truth against the gods of the city — among those who had lived by the divine Word before Christ; Augustine judged the Platonists nearer to Christianity than any other school. It is easy to see why. Plato's transcendent Good beyond being, his immortal soul, his distrust of the body and the senses, his single divine craftsman in the Timaeus — all could be read as foreshadowings of the Christian God, soul, and heaven.
But this was a creative assimilation, not a faithful likeness. It set aside everything irreducibly Greek and polytheist in Plato: the many gods he names and prays to, the transmigration of souls, the divine madness, the cult and myth woven through every dialogue. Socrates did not die for one God but in obedience to Apollo of Delphi and to his own guiding daimonion.
The Enlightenment and much of modern philosophy refashioned Plato again — this time as the great rationalist: founder of logic and ethics, the theory of Forms a sober metaphysical hypothesis, the dialogues so many exercises in argument. The myths were treated as ornament, the religion as the residue of a superstitious age, to be filtered out so that the 'philosophy' might stand clear.
This, too, fastens on something real — Plato argues with unmatched rigour, and the dialectic is his glory. But it amputates half of him. For Plato, reasoning was never the end but the ladder: the argument climbs toward a vision that argument alone cannot reach.
Read whole, Plato is a religious thinker in the Greek grain — heir to Pythagoras and the Orphic mysteries as much as to the reasoners of Ionia. The soul is immortal and reborn many times (metempsychosis); learning is recollection of what the soul once beheld; philosophy is a purification and a 'practice of death' that readies the soul to ascend. And the summit of his thought is not a proof but a seeing — the sudden vision of Beauty itself at the close of the Symposium, told in the very language of the Eleusinian Mysteries; the Good glimpsed beyond being as the eye beholds the sun; the soul winged by the divine madness of love to rejoin the gods in their procession across the heavens.
This is why, for the thousand years from the Old Academy to the closing of the schools, Plato was read not as a rationalist nor as a proto-Christian but as a theologos — a teacher of divine things, the master of Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, whose Neoplatonism is in large part simply Plato's own mysticism drawn out and made explicit. None of this is hidden between the lines; it stands in the open, in his own words. The passages below let the pagan Plato speak for himself.
PLATO SCROLL