Posted on 09/24/2003 11:25:56 PM PDT by betty boop
This shift of attention to the individual psyche marks a decisive, revolutionary break with the characteristic habits of thought of the ancient world, the cosmological consciousness, which conceived of man mainly in terms of his connections to units larger than the individual, and envisioned a cosmos filled with gods. For Plato’s life-long meditation on the psyche – the human soul -- was deeply implicated in his speculation on the nature of the divine, which radically departed from the Hellenic people’s myth of the gods. Psyche also was the basis of Plato’s life-long meditation on “the best possible” political order.
Platonic thought can probably best be understood as a kind of spiritual autobiography. Great philosopher that he was (perhaps the greatest), Plato was not a “system builder”; he did not propound any positivist doctrine on any subject at all.
This aspect of Platonic thought is difficult for the modern imagination to grasp; for when we moderns think of a “philosopher,” we think of an intellectual who investigates propositions about truth and draws conclusive answers about the objects of his investigation. The philosopher then assembles his insights into systematic form allegedly useful in telling us about the real nature of things. (Plato called this sort of thing “philodoxy,” – love of transitory opinion -- the specialty of the Sophists, his adversaries. He would not call it “philosophy” – love of wisdom. This issue, however, is beyond the scope of the present essay.)
Although Plato is usually classed as an Idealist, his own instinct in philosophizing was uncompromisingly Realist, in the sense that he knew that certain questions can never be “closed” in principle. For the truth of existence, of Reality, is the object of zetesis -- of a search or quest -- that cannot be completed by any human being in the time of his own existence. Rather, it is a quest engaging all mankind proceeding through countless generations. Plato could point out the way. But the student must engage in the quest by and for himself, and understand it as he experiences it, according to his love for divine things.
On that note, we turn now to the consideration of psyche proper. Plato conceived of the individual human being as psyche-in-soma: an eternal soul incarnated in finite bodily existence.
The soul has a characteristic structure, a hierarchy of dynamic forces: the rational element, whose ordering power is sophia, wisdom; the spirited, whose ordering power is andreia, or manly virtue/courage; and the appetitive, whose ordering power is to “feel the pull” of physis, or bodily nature. The well-ordered soul is the healthy integration of the three forces, giving each its proper role and function.
In addition to elaborating a hierarchy of forces in the soul, the Platonic meditation also elaborates its hierarchical “structure”: At psyche’s “summit” is nous, intellect; followed by the conscious mind – including feeling, sensation; and “at bottom,” the unconscious mind, with its root in the “depth” of the soul, in which the soul’s “ground of being” can be found.
I’ve used a lot of quotation marks in the above passage for a reason. To use language like this is to intend as reified objects what are really processes on-going in the soul. We aren’t speaking of “thing-like objects” here. Processes aren’t things at all. But they are real all the same.
With that caution in mind, we have, so far, a “force field” and a “structure” for the soul, and importantly, the suggestion that the soul ought to be well-ordered.
And so the question arises: By what criteria does the soul order itself? And why would it even want to order itself?
To answer such we questions, we have to remember that the Platonic speculation maintains the immortality of the soul. The soul coming into bodily existence, however, does not remember its pre-existence at all; for at its birth into the present existence, the “circuits of the brain” become “deranged,” so the soul cannot remember anything about its life prior to its birth in this one. So it comes as a shock to the soul to discover that its body will die someday. The anxiety is acute, for the soul does not yet realize that its life is not dependent on the body, and is not destroyed with the body.
It is here (The Republic) that Plato inserts a drama in which the soul must act, the Pamphylian myth.
In the myth, “dead souls” – that is, souls separated from the body at physical death – receive reward or punishment according to their conduct in life, the bad souls going to their suffering beneath the earth, the good souls to their blessed existence in heaven. Then, after a thousand years, all the dead souls are brought into the Judgment of Lachesis, the daughter of Ananke (Necessity). And there the dead souls must draw their several lots and choose their individual fate for their next period of incarnated existence:
| Ananke’s daughter, the maiden Lachesis, her word: Souls of a day! Beginning of a new cycle, for the mortal race, to end in death! The daemon will not be allotted to you; but you shall select the daemon. The first by the lot, shall the first select the life to which he will be bound by necessity. Arete has no master; and as a man honors or dishonors her, he will have her increased or diminished. The guilt is the chooser’s; God is guiltless. |
Now a soul that had just spent one thousand years in purgative punishment in the netherworld would be most anxious to choose his daemon rightly, lest at the conclusion of the next life, he find himself returned to the suffering below for another thousand years. On the other hand, the blessed souls do not necessarily make better choices than the purged souls. And they are just as liable to wind up in punishment in the next round if they do not choose wisely.
But choose they must, and thereby bind themselves to their fate over the next cycle of life and death. A soul’s only guide in the choice is the character it had acquired during its preceding life. The choice is free, but the wisdom to make a good choice may be deficient. Under the circumstances, the best course would be to make the best choice one can, and then follow Arete – Virtue. To “diminish her” – to dishonor her call to justice, temperance, courage, love of wisdom, zealous search for true being – is to incur culpable guilt. The daemon is there to warn the soul when it wanders from Arete, endeavoring to push the soul up into the light.
The daemon might be thought of as the mediator or agent of cosmic spiritual substance in the soul, a little spark of the divine in man. Plato’s symbol for the divine substance is the Agathon, the Good.
The Agathon is utterly transcendent, so immanent propositions about it cannot be constructed in principle. Yet the soul, in an act of transcendence, may have a vision of the Agathon, of its eternally divine goodness, purity, beauty, truth, and justice. Such experiences of transcendence inform the soul, building up its just order by fortifying the Arete in the soul.
Thus the soul is drawn upward into the light of the vision of the Agathon, and participates in the divine life so far as that is possible for a man.
It is important to bear in mind that the Agathon is not God. Though Plato often refers to the One God “Beyond” the world of created things, and “Beyond” the generations of the intracosmic gods (the gods of the Age or Chronos, subsequently replaced by the Olympians under the rulership of Zeus), and strongly suggests that the Logos of divine Nous is the ordering principle of the Cosmos, he does not elaborate. That elaboration had to wait for the Revelation of Christ.
For Plato, the vision of the Agathon was the basis of the idea of the human family, of a common shared humanity, of the idea of the brotherhood of mankind. As Eric Voegelin noted (Order and History, Vol. III, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1957), “The understanding of a universal humanity originates in the experience of transcendence; and the ineffable kinship of men under God revealed in the experience can immanently be expressed only in a myth of descent from a common mother or father….”
In this, Plato seems to anticipate St. Paul’s one body of Christ, interjecting the idea that, despite their differences, all men are equal as brothers in the sight of God.
For Plato, the daimon-mediated tensional suspense of the soul “in between” (metaxy) its cosmic ground in the “depth” of the soul and its extracosmic height in a transcendental “beyond” in the one God, was the site and sensorium of human spiritual reality. The form of the metaxy might be seen as a faint foreshadowing of the mediating process of Christ in the salvation and perfection of the soul, uniting souls to the Father through Himself, as declared by Christian revelation, most clearly in John’s Gospel.
It is possible to imagine that there are certain seed ideas in Plato that could not come into full bloom until Jesus Christ irrupted into human history four centuries after Plato’s death.
And man is unique among creatures, for he alone possess nous; and thus is capable of being drawn to the paradigm of divine Nous -- to the contemplation of divine things. Thus man is uniquely capable of ordering his soul according to the divine paradigm, in justice and in love. And by a process of transcendence, to attain wisdom, freedom, and true Being in the contemplation of the divine Idea, the Agathon.
I sometimes get far afield on tangents, I would be interested in what you think about my larger point that man is motion.
I really believe this because any description of "man" will attempt to classify him as a "thing" w/ certain properties. Invariably there are exceptions and contradictions to any system, no matter the degree of detail or sophistication. A living man cannot be pinned to the matte like some exotic butterfly (and thank God for that). Man's fluidity is his saving grace, it has saved us countless times from the genius of other men.
Like when a scientist looks at a photon expecting to see a wave he sees a wave, and when he expects to see a particle he sees a particle, so too does a philosopher's expectations color his findings--because we are many these things. We're a lion and a mouse and a hero and a louse. We're a that, a this, an it , a thing, a movement and a monument. And we're all these things at the same time, all the time.
Because of this multi-fluidity an analogy like "i towards I" can sometimes strike a resonance. I truly believe the more we eccentricize our oscillations towards God the more resonance we find in reality. That is; the more we look to God the more God reveals to us.
In a certain sense, although man has "a nature," it seems to me that he is unclassifiable, as you suggest and for the reasons you suggest, Pietro. Man is simultaneously in one sense "motion," and in another sense "essence," or perfect "stillness" (I think the latter is how God, Who knows all things completely, sees us).
In other words, as the Greeks would have it, man is simultaneously "becoming" and "being." I guess this is the deal man gets for existing at the "intersection of time and timelessness," the preeminent quality of man as mediated by the soul.
On a different level, the analogy to man you give in the particle/wave duality of the physicist is a very apt idea -- two complementary aspects of a single phenomenon, the choice of which to consider being wholly in the "eye of the observer."
Thus depending on the observer, man can be "this" or "that." In other words, the observer will see what he's looking for -- yet neither the "particle" nor the "wave" aspect is a complete description of man.
Plus some observers, in viewing man, may "observe things" which are neither "particle" nor "wave," but some other construct that isn't "there" at all. Call this a type of psychological projection maybe. To expect to find a complete description of man in general or in the particular on the basis of any discrete observation is bound to be a reductionism. (Yet people have been known to make entire careers out of a reductionism like this.)
Man truly is an amalgamation of the glorious -- and the abject, of the saint and the sinner. He lives in the tension in between time and timelessness, the depths and the heights of the soul; and I believe that in that "oscillating" tension, the more man "eccentricizes [his] oscillations towards God the more resonance [he] finds in reality," and particularly the reality of what he is, in himself.
I wholly agree with you that the more we look to God, the more God reveals to us -- and that revelation is God's perfect Truth.
That's really false ... mirror --- reality check ?
One simple difference for Christianity ... if you go the way of Jesus Christ --- you won't have any self righteousness (( works - evolution )) left !
I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly, f.Christian. On the one hand, self-righteousness in every sense is something that Christianity abhors. On the other hand, I don't think Christianity requires that we forget that we are selves (souls), and created as selves to boot.
"God loves variety" is the main takeaway I get from being a participant and observer of His Created Reality. Would He create us as we are -- individual human souls -- if what He putatively wanted us to do was expunge our human individuality (i.e., erase His creative work), just to please Him?
Perhaps this is so. Though personally I doubt it, the fact remains none of us humans has any idea of, or access to, God's purposes or reasons. So I don't think there can be a final or definitive [human] answer to this question.
IMHO, to say as much is not in any way to undermine the Mystical Body of Christ, the holy church, the communion of Christ's disciples of all times and places. God's salvation was by means of Personal sacrifice, suffered and actualized "in living color" by Person. It was not accomplished by some kind of generic, anonymous, universal "Force."
If God would like us to be like Himself, then do you imagine He would prefer to contemplate his creature, Man, as a human puddle, than as a community of individual men who love Him, and are united in the spirit of friendship because of their love for Him?
That shouldn't be a problem. We are able to do certain things, and that is an indicator of what we should do. We were each given one or more talents, put them to work don't bury them, and time is limited for each individual. That's about all the purpose we need to know.
We can get beyond this into the area of what is still science-fiction and think about how we can cause the universe to avoid the heat death or the Big Rip. Perhaps that is our purpose: make the universe into something that will last forever, and maybe ourselves with it. Anyway, carry on and we may stumble into the answer.
You wrote:
Our works - evolution ... esp spiritual --- is an abomination to God ! ... Only Christ's righteousness is acceptable to God !
If you believe that faith is everything, and works count for naught, then you elaborate an ancient controversy. And so I suspect neither you or I have the answer to it.
If only Christ's righteousness is acceptable to God, then why did God sacrifice His Son to redeem mankind?
If God Himself submitted to this Sacrifice, then do you think He might possibly have had a more favorable "opinion" of mankind, His creature, than you seem to have? A Sacrifice made for the purpose of renewal and resumption of the "in the Beginning" divine/human communication that existed before Man fell -- and took the world with him?
What else could possibly "redeem mankind" other than Immanuel?
maybe you can come out of your shy shell here among friends, and let us know what you really think. hope so!
relax, I'm not going to accuse you of blasphemy, and your invitation on the other thread said that you welcomed all viewpoints.
There are indeed, "forerunners" of Christ, but they are found in the bible. Certainly, Isaac is one, Joshua is one, and Samson is one.
Perhaps you as a Christian, might want to consider Paul's biblical words as concerning philosophy --beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. Col 2:8 before you proclaim a Greek thinker as in the same mold as Jesus Christ.
Unless of course, your Jesus was just a man, a remarkable man,yes, yet a man
If only Christ's righteousness is acceptable to God, then why did God sacrifice His Son to redeem mankind?
God is all for good works; however, His standards are perfect. God's redemptive work and our works are really not related. Consider the following:
Isa 64:6
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.
KJV
2 Cor 5:21
1 He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
NASB
Thanks for the essay, BB.
I guess you could call a monastery a Christian utopia, but that is not really the spirit of Christianity. Christianity has always been about individual conviction, it's emphasis is on the individual, not the group.
For Plato, this mind had to achieve enlightenment. (Sound familiar?) It was all about the individual attaining its own godhood. This is exactly the opposite of Christianity, so for you as a Christian, to gush over Plato as a forerunner of Christ, is laughable, at the least, and irresponsible at best. Thank you
Resonance
On the basis of Genesis and what I have learned about cosmology and physics, I envision that the first element of creation (the big bang) was geometric and harmonic – which gave rise to wave functions and thus, energy, particles, etc. – the physical laws that make up the natural realm.
From Genesis 1 and the following verse we know that God spoke everything into being. We can even see sound waves in the cosmic microwave background.
On the other hand, I see man as much more than physical, and thus much more than resonance. Adamic man is unique because he has been given the breath of God (neshama):
Grace v Works
Certainly, I agree that we are saved by grace and not by works. If anyone could be good enough to get to heaven, then Christ died for nothing. That is the essential message of Romans 1-8. And it is summarized in Ephesians 2:8-9:
He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?
For we know him that hath said, Vengeance [belongeth] unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people.
[It is] a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. - Hebrews 10:26-31
But there are at least three different views of the significance. To the Calvinists, it cannot happen because a person who truly believes would never willfully defy the Word and thus the warning is to those who profess but do not truly believe. To the Arminians, it means a believer could and would lose their salvation for willfully defying the Word. And to others, the passages mean that a believer who willfully defies God will be burdened with extraordinary suffering in this life.
The bottom line is that professing belief on the one hand – and willfully defying the Word on the other – is a troubling situation per se. I sincerely, earnestly and urgently pray for anyone in such a predicament.
He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. - 1 John 2:4
With regard to enlightenment and Christianity, you might find the following verses helpful:
For [it is] impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put [him] to an open shame. - Hebrews 6:4-6
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