The Myth of Plato

The Myth of Plato

Essay by Charlie Obert, November 2020.

In this essay I will be using the word Myth here in a couple of different senses. First, there is myth in the popular sense as a set of false beliefs. Second, and more important, I will use myth or mythology as meaning an overall coherent system of beliefs.

I need to explode some myths about Plato so that we can get at recovering the mythology of Plato.

There will be a couple of parts to this essay.

First, we need to look at the myths we need to explode. By myths here I mean false assumptions we have made about Plato’s philosophy, and actually about philosophy in general. There is a false narrative about Greek philosophy that warps our view of the actual tradition.

Once that is out of the way we will examine some statements about what is true of mythology and theology in the Platonic tradition.

In order to illustrate these points, we will look some examples from specific texts of Plato that support what I am claiming here.

This essay is going to be a high level overview. I will be examining the parts of this in more detail in future essays and in my next book.

The False Myths About Plato

First, the Myths we need to explode.

These are some beliefs, some assumptions that we have commonly made about just what the significance is of Greek philosophy in our Western tradition. These are assumptions that run very deep; they are part of our schooling, and they are part of how we view the world. We just take these for granted without realizing they are interpretive choices.

1) This is the big one. This is the view that the development of Greek philosophy was the era in our history where Reason left behind Superstition so that all that nonsense about the Gods could be discarded. In this view, prior to the period of Greek philosophy was a period of superstition, of naive belief in stories of the Gods. With the rise of philosophy we left all that behind, and realized that all those myths were just childish fantasies. You could call this the de-mythologizing of the Western mind.

Wrong. Completely wrong. That is not what Plato is about, that is not what Greek and Roman philosophy is about. That is a modern interpretive filter that we have projected back onto the Greek writers.

2) There is another particularly western myth, related to our being dominated by the Judeo-Christian tradition for thousands of years. Western academic scholarship views Plato, and Greek philosophy in general, through a heavily monotheistic bias, and the tendency has been to read that back into Plato, and to dismiss the evidences of polytheism in Plato as being just metaphors or superstitious remnants. This is related to a further assumption that monotheism is superior to polytheism, that it is a later, more mature system.

Wrong. Completely wrong. Plato’s writing is not monotheist, nor can you reduce it to a brilliant precursor to Christianity.

3) Plato himself is the central figure of a long tradition, the Orphic, Pythagorean and Platonist tradition. This reaches from the earliest Greek writings we have – the Orphic hymns, Homer, Pythagoras and the other so-called “Pre-Socratics” – through Plato and Aristotle, and to the period of the late Platonists, usually mis-labeled Neo-Platonists.

The usual claim is that the elaborate systems of theology that are part of the late Platonist writings, and the theology shading into high mysticism of Plotinus, is in discontinuity with what Plato actually did – that the fantastic ravings of the NeoPlatonists have nothing to do with what Plato actually taught.

Wrong. Completely wrong. There are consistent themes that run throughout the Platonist tradition that are far more important than the differences, and that we in the modern world tend to misunderstand since their worldview is so very different from the modern one.

The Platonist Mythos

So what is actually true about Plato and his theology, his philosophy and his mythology? I am convinced we make these general statements.

1) The Pythagorean/ Platonist tradition is generally all of a piece. There are differences in detail and development throughout its history, and I do not mean to minimize them. However, there are also some very important continuities, some core features that you can see throughout the tradition. The elaborate systems of the late Platonists may be a more detailed development than what we see in Plato himself, but they are basically congruent with the tradition as a whole. The late Platonists viewed themselves as heirs and synthesizers of the entire tradition, and I am convinced they are right.

2) You can’t separate out the philosophy of Plato and the Platonists, and discard the theology and mythology as outdated superstition while keeping a stripped down, freeze-dried, decaf, fast food version we call rational philosophy. The whole worldview of Plato is basically coherent and all of a piece, and the philosophy and theology are interwoven and integrated with each other.

3) Parallel to the mythology/philosophy split, we assume that Platonism shares our current worldview in the sense that there is a split between inner and outer, between subjective and objective. With that division, mythology and religion apply only to our subjective inner lives, while it is reason, and eventually science, that measures objective and real outer experience. I think that is part of the reason why the accepted academic view of Plato kept the emphasis on reasoning questioning and dialectic, and discarded any references to gods or theology or mythology.

Wrong. The Platonist system does not have that split. It is all of a piece. The subjective inner and objective outer worlds are connected, and the structure of our inner world is mirrored in the structure of the outer world.

The core argument of The Republic is built on that inner/outer parallel structure. It is not just hinted at, it is explicitly stated. He develops that part of the argument in Book 4, where he goes from discussing the parts of the city, to discussing the parts of the human soul. Many, many parts of the book make sense only if you assume they are applying to both dimensions.

Some modern commentators on the Republic that I have read want to downplay or dismiss that inner/outer parallel connection. Why? I suspect that they are reading our contemporary inner/outer split back into Plato. The parallel is stated clearly and explicitly in the Republic, and we have no grounds whatsoever for separating them and for downplaying what does not fit our modern world.

Modern philosophers want to be very careful about not “reading in” something to Plato that is not there. In the process, they are oblivious to the fact that they are reading their own modern reductionist worldview back into Plato.

4) Platonism is not monotheist, not by any stretch of the imagination. The system is shot through with the presence of the gods from beginning to end. It is a form of polytheism, but it is polytheism within an overall unitive structure that contains the gods.

This quote from the Phaedrus illustrates what I mean. This is the central part of the dialog, where Socrates is speaking of the gods, and of human souls, as being like charioteers, each with two horses. For the gods, the horses pull together and fly upward. For mortals, the horses conflict and pull the rider downward. In this quote notice how Socrates is talking of the gods and of heaven. [Section 246e – 247d, Jowett translation]

Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and demigods, marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone abides at home in the house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned among the princely twelve march in their appointed order.

They see many blessed sights in the inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro, along which the blessed gods are passing, every one doing his own work; he may follow who will and can, for jealousy has no place in the celestial choir. But when they go to banquet and festival, then they move up the steep to the top of the vault of heaven. The chariots of the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide rapidly; but the others labour…

But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul.

The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth, is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds brings her round again to the same place. In the revolution she beholds justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute.

The point I am making is very simple – the highest heaven, the heaven above the heavens, is above the gods. The gods exist within the overall order rather than the overall order being created by a single God.

In other dialogs Plato refers to the highest, the source, as the One and the Good, and that source is prior to the gods. It is polytheism within a unitive order.

5) There is a heavy emphasis in Plato, and in the Platonist tradition as a whole, on intermediaries between the highest source the One and the Good, and our physical world. There are levels upon levels of higher and lower gods and daemons and spirits and heroes and so on.

It is those intermediaries that tie the entire system together. And – very, very important – the entire system of traditional astrology fits within that system of intermediaries. With that system, astrology is necessary and makes luminous sense. Without the intermediaries, astrology is at best superfluous. I think this is the reason why astrology is such an uneasy fit in the monotheist religions like Christianity – to a monotheist, the distinction between an intermediate god and an idol is very blurry.

As a beautiful example, I want to quote a section from Diotima’s teaching to Socrates in the Symposium. She has determined that Love cannot be a god, since it is a yearning for something that one desires and does not have. [Section 202e – 203a, Jowett translation]

“What then is Love?” I asked; “Is he mortal?” “No.” “What then?” “As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two.” “What is he, Diotima?” “He is a great spirit (daemon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.”

“And what,” I said, “is his power?” “He interprets,” she replied, “between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all, prophecy and incantation, find their way.

For highest divinity mingles not with man; but through Love. all the intercourse, and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar. Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love. “

The intermediaries, the lesser gods or daemons, are needed to tie everything together. They provide our human connection to the highest divine.The whole system is inter-connected from the highest eternal source on through to the lowest physical matter. The system is shot through with the presence of gods and daemons from top to bottom.

6) The gods are not just occasional or incidental features of Plato’s writing that can be explained away as allegory or as metaphor.They are integral parts of his system and show up over and over in dialog after dialog.

We have already mentioned Phaedo and Symposium. Books 2 and 3 of the Republic are devoted to the importance of teaching the right kinds of stories about the gods – there is no attempt whatever to explain them away. The gods have an important place in the Laws, the last dialog Plato wrote. Book 10 of Laws includes a proof of the existence of the gods, and the necessary part they play in society. One entire dialog, the Cratylus, is about the importance of the meaning of names, including names of the gods.

7) Finally, I want to tie in astrology here. Astrology only makes coherent sense within a worldview, a philosophy and a theology, that is all of a piece, that integrates inner and outer, subjective and objective. Our current worldview makes astrology seem like superstitious nonsense. If we really understand Platonist philosophy and theology, astrology not only makes sense, it is an integral and essential part of the overall system. We need the gods to make sense of Plato and of astrology.

Summary

I want to sum up the main points in our argument here.

The platonic tradition is all of a piece. In the west we’ve ripped it in pieces and discarded – and, I would say, deliberately misunderstood – the parts that don’t fit our own modern worldview.

The theology, the mythology and the philosophy of Platonist tradition is all of a piece. You can’t separate out and discard the theology half of it without misunderstanding the whole system.

The entire system is integral, is whole, in the way that our current world model is not, and we can look to the Platonist system for a way out of the problems with our current model. As part of that wholeness it heals the inner outer, subjective objective split in the modern psyche. It does not discard reason and science, but includes it in a larger integrated whole.

And again – the system is shot through with the presence of the gods from top to bottom.

To make sense of Platonism – and to make coherent sense of astrology – we need to recover the gods.

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Image of the god masks is by Greg Montani from Pixabay