What Is Man?

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:

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.

The Great Hierarchy of Being

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.

Are you saying that believers have no responsibility for identifying and correcting bad behavior within, for example, the local church? We are not to deal with discipline issues at all?

I can't answer that question, HalfFull. I have no experience with this sort of thing, and have never thought about the propriety of a church community placing its members under observation and discipline for perceived sins. It's not for me to say how various duly-constituted church communities ought to conduct their own affairs.

In general, I think it's probably best just to leave people alone to follow whatever institutional arrangements and traditions characterize their church community, especially if they are of long-standing practice.

Still, one has to be very careful about this sort of thing, it seems to me. Human beings aren't always very good at making judgments about evil (e.g., there may be issues of self-interest, or envy, etc., that affect one's objectivity, for instance). But once a good rhetorician, pointing the finger of blame, and waxing eloquent in censure of some identified miscreant, gets up a good head of steam, chances are he can carry the crowd away with him. I wonder: Would justice be the outcome of this sort of thing?

How good is human justice, really, when it comes to matters of sin? How deeply do we penetrate the deeper strata of the souls of our fellow men, so as reliably to tell their "guilt?"

I was reading a review of Lance Morrow's new book, Evil: An Investigation in NR today. There was a very sobering passage in it that touches on the present issue:

"Evil," [Morrow] writes, "is a strange, versatile, and dangerous word that can be used to describe a genocide or to incite one ('Let's kill all of the ______s. They are evil.')."....

The reviewer, Michael Potemra, continues:

"Evil cannot finally be understood, [Morrow] concludes, but wisdom helps us deal with it: 'The task is to recognize evil for what it is, and yet to respond to it with discernment. See comprehensively, as a hedgehog does, but respond discriminately, flexibly, as a fox does, without the dogmatism that makes zealots stupid and prompts them, from time to time, to burn people at the stake."

Morrow has this further perceptive and thought-provoking observation regarding the nature of evil:

"Evil portrays itself, almost without exception, as injured innocence, fighting back."

Just some things to think about some more. I know I will. Thanks for writing, HalfFull.

Thank you so much for your excellent posts, betty boop! Hugs!!!

Following is some background information on correcting “bad behavior” within a church. To the Protestants, the most severe method for correcting bad behavior is to have a member "churched" which is basically, having them kicked out. This is roughly the equivalent of the Catholic excommunication.

But as you say, people are well advised to be careful about such things. I offer this as the strongest example known to me:

Martin Luther - A Strong Stand - VI. (emphasis mine)

As he was no longer able to tolerate Luther, the pope issued a ban against him. He hoped that the German people would rally around him and follow the edict of the ban, which read as follows:

Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause. A wild boar has invaded thy vineyard. Arise, O Peter, and consider the case of the Holy Roman Church, the mother of all churches, consecrated by thy blood. Arise O Paul, who by thy teaching and death hast and dost illumine the Church. Arise, all ye saints, and the whole universal Church, whose interpretation of Scripture has been assailed. We can scarcely express our grief over the ancient heresies which have been revived in Germany. We are the more downcast because she was always in the forefront of the war on heresy. Our pastoral office can no longer tolerate the pestiferous virus of the following forty-one errors. [They are enumerated.] We can no longer suffer the serpent to creep through the field of the Lord. The books of Martin Luther which contain these errors are to be examined and burned. As for Martin himself, good God, what office of paternal love have we omitted in order to recall him from his errors? Have we not offered him a safe conduct and money for the journey? [Such an offer never reached Luther.] And he has had the temerity to appeal to a future council although our predecessors, Pius II and Julius II, subjected such appeals to the penalties of heresy. Now therefore we give Martin sixty days in which to submit, dating from the time of the publication of this bull in his district. Anyone who presumes to infringe our excommunication and anathema will stand under the wrath of Almighty God and of the apostles Peter and Paul. Dated on the 15th day of June, 1520

[snip]

Luther made his initial appearance before the Diet of Worms on April 17, 1521. This was an impressive assembly of persons. It was not merely an ecclesiastical court of the Roman Catholic Church, but involved the emperor himself, as well as many lesser officials.

The scene lends itself to dramatic portrayal. Here was Charles, heir of a long line of Catholic sovereigns—of Maximilian the romantic, of Ferdinand the Catholic, of Isabella the orthodox—scion of the house of Hapsburg, lord of Austria, Burgundy, the Low Countries, Spain, and Naples, Holy Roman Emperor, ruling over a vaster domain than any save Charlemagne, symbol of the medieval unities, incarnation of a glorious if vanishing heritage; and here before him a simple monk, a miner’s son, with nothing to sustain him save his own faith in the Word of God. Here the past and the future were met.

Luther was examined by John Eck, a representative of the archbishop of Trier (not the Eck of the Leipsic debate). Eck confronted Luther with a pile of books and asked whether they were his. He answered:

“The books are all mine, and I have written more.” The door was closed, but Eck opened it again. “Do you defend them all, or do you care to reject a part?”

Luther considered the matter carefully:

“ This touches God and his word. This affects the salvation of souls. Of this Christ said, ‘He who denies Me before men, him will I deny before My father.’ To say too little or too much would be dangerous. I beg you, give me time to think it over.”

A day was given for him to consider his answer. The next day he appeared and said that he would not retract anything he had said in his writings. He stated that if he were to be shown error from the Scriptures, he would be the first to throw his books into the fire. To this Eck responded:

Your plea to be heard from Scripture is the one always made by heretics. You do nothing but renew the errors of Wyclif and Hus.

Luther answered:

Since then Your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.

A stormy debate ensued over what was to be done with this heretic. The more Luther was pressed to recant, the more he persisted in his views. When the time allotted to Luther expired, the matter was closed; Luther was pronounced a heretic.

The following edict to all the people of the Empire was drawn up declaring Luther to be an outlaw:

You shall refuse the aforesaid Martin Luther hospitality, lodging and bed; none shall feed and nourish him with food or drink; … wherever you meet him … you shall take him prisoner and deliver him to us…. As for his friends … and supporters … we order that you shall attack, overthrow, seize and wrest their property from them, taking it all into your own possession…. As for the books of Martin Luther … we order that nobody shall dare to buy, sell, keep, copy, print them … or support, preach, defend or assert them in any way…. We decree … that the works of Luther are to be burned and by this and other means utterly destroyed.

The final draft of the Edict of Worms read:

He has sullied marriage, disparaged confession, and denied the body and blood of our Lord. He makes the sacraments depend on the faith of the recipient. He is pagan in his denial of free will. This devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle and has invented new ones. He denies the power of the keys and encourages the laity to wash their hands in the blood of the clergy. His teaching makes for rebellion, division, war, murder, robbery, arson, and the collapse of Christendom. He lives the life of a beast. He has burned the decretals. He despises alike the ban and the sword. He does more harm to the civil than to the ecclesiastical power. We have labored with him, but he recognizes only the authority of Scripture, which he interprets in his own sense. We have given him twenty-one days, dating from April the 25th. We have now gathered the estates. Luther is to be regarded as a convicted heretic. When the time is up, no one is to harbor him. His followers also are to be condemned. His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man.

In light of all this, I assert again the wisdom of Gamaliel in Acts 5:

And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.

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The Platonic Soul

The Great Hierarchy of Being