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.
Who's view is this, betty? Could it be... the biblical view?
"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." Ephesians 2:8-10
In that case, it seems to me that suffering would be perfectly pointless and gratuitous, too.
Does that then include Christ's suffering? Was it then pointless and gratuitous?
more unscriptual goofiness, totally against what Christ said:
John 6:44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.
[JS:] more unscriptual goofiness, totally against what Christ said:
John 6:44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.
How can Christ draw the soul to the Father, if the soul hasn't first said "yes" to Christ? This is what I meant by saying the soul must first turn toward -- or "tune into" -- Christ, in love. Then the great work of salvation can begin.
Of course not, Jesse. But this is a non-sequitur: We were speaking of human suffering. My point was that God must have a very high opinion of man to have sent His Son to redeem us and restore us to Him in the first place.
If you read what I write with attention, Jesse, you might find you can avoid putting words in my mouth.
Do you imagine that I haven't?
Jesse, this statement is an absolute absurdity. Scripture can't "interpret" scripture. Only a mind can interpret anything. Interpretation is a cognitive act; and scripture is not "cognitive." It is information -- divinely inspired and absolutely true -- in search of a knower, a mind, a soul.
Earlier you suggested that Christ's revelation to us was the complete revelation of the Mind of God. I strongly doubt this view is scripturally valid. For the great theologican and spiritual writer, Francis Schaeffer, observed that, in the Holy Scriptures, God has told us of Himself "truly, but not exhaustively." That is to say, He did not communicate everything about Himself -- likely because there would be no way for the human mind to take it all in, to understand God's Mind, Will, and Purpose.
That is why the more mystical spiritual traditions of Christianity invariably posit a "cloud of knowing" or a "dark night" as being betwixt the human mind and God's Love and Truth. The closer we draw to Him in meditation, the more we notice this "cloud." But its very presence means God is near. I imagine that "cloud" is there to protect man; for God cannot be comprehended -- God the Father is the Unseen God of the burning bush, the I Am That Am. Man cannot contemplate Eternal Being in full -- his mind is not capacious enough, and the effort likely may destroy him.
Plato's daimon can't help you and no amount of rocking in your room, with your eyelids turned up twitching, helps either.
My word you have do an active imagination, Jesse! But making me the butt of a silly joke doesn't help your argument.
Very interesting insight. God and Truth are One. Thanks, Uno Animo.
That is man-made doctrine and is not supported in scripture AT ALL. God is the one who choses us (not the other way around), as evidenced in many, many scriptures. Consider the following:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved."
(Ephesians 1:3-6)
"And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, " (Eph 2:1-2)
++++++++++++++
The spiritually dead are not capable of "saying yes" without first being made alive by God.
This is what I meant by saying the soul must first turn toward -- or "tune into" -- Christ, in love. Then the great work of salvation can begin.
The great work of Salvation has NOTHING to do with any work we do.
But I do not discount either the revealed Word of God or the revealed nature of Christ!
I look at things this way, Jesse. (1) I believe that Christ is the Word of the Beginning, the Logos that was "God, and with God," as the beloeved apostle tells us. (2) This Logos is the Alpha and the Omega -- which suggests to me that the Logos has been in the world since the Beginning. The incarnation of Christ brought it into actual human history. But even before that event, there were human minds capable of "sensing" the Logos. Certainly the Prophets spoke of it; and Plato seems to have "stumbled" upon some part of its Truth. (3) As a student of culture and history, I find this the most marvelous mystery! (4) IMHO, all of human spiritual history throughout all time is an increasing revelation of the Logos. There is One God, and One Truth -- and the Truth is the Logos. Even human secular history, human evolution, is bound to more fully manifest it in the world.
Well, them be my thoughts, FWTW.
This is the Truth, goodseedhomeschool! And also the problem -- some men choose not to love Him. I agree with you, this is the single most important decision a man can make.
God chooses. Certainly, yes. But, a man chosen must still say "YES."
Well I suppose that we will disagree about this, HalfFull. Of course, this is the very point of contention between Orthodox and Reformed Christianity.
I shudder to think of what happened to one who tried:
Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.
Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.
All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never [shalt] thou [be] any more. - Ezekiel 28:16-19
Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?
Deck thyself now [with] majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one [that is] proud, and abase him. Look on every one [that is] proud, [and] bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together; [and] bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee. - Job 40:6-14
Absolutely, A-G! We see "as if through a glass, darkly." For any man to say he knows God, His Truth, His Will, His Purpose, or His Methods fully, completely, is absurd -- and most likely culpable.
Well I suppose that we will disagree about this, HalfFull. Of course, this is the very point of contention between Orthodox and Reformed Christianity.
Ok, since you disagree...what, exactly, did you add to bring salvation to His elect?
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