The argument is an old one into whose merits this is not the place to
enter. But one thing is certain, that the sceptical spirit which was
invading religion, was invading also politics and ethics; and that
towards the close of the fifth century before Christ, Greece and in
particular Athens was overrun by philosophers, who not only did not
scruple to question the foundations of social and moral obligation, but
in some cases explicitly taught that there were no foundations at all;
that all law was a convention based on no objective truth; and that the
only valid right was the natural right of the strong to rule. It was
into this chaos of sceptical opinion that Plato was born; and it was the
desire to meet and subdue it that was the motive of his philosophy. Like
Aristophanes, he traced the root of the evil to the decay of religious
belief; and though no one, as we have seen, was more trenchant than he
in his criticism of the popular faith, no one, on the other hand, was
more convinced of the necessity of some form of religion as a basis for
any stable polity. The doctrine of the physicists, he asserts, that the
world is the result of "nature and chance" has immediate and disastrous
effects on the whole structure of social beliefs. The conclusion
inevitably follows that human laws and institutions, like everything
else, are accidental products; that they have no objective validity, no
binding force on the will; and that the only right that has any
intelligible meaning is the right which is identical with might.
[Footnote: See e.g. Plato's "Laws". X. 887.] Against these conclusions
the whole soul of Plato rose in revolt. To reconstruct religion, he was
driven back upon metaphysics; and elaborated at last the system which
from his day to our own has not ceased to perplex and fascinate the
world, and whose rare and radiant combination of gifts, speculative,
artistic, and religious, marks the highest reach of the genius of the
Greeks, and perhaps of mankind. To attempt an analysis of that system
would lead us far from our present task. All that concerns us here, is
its religious significance; and of that, all we can note is that Plato,
the deepest thinker of the Greeks, was also among the farthest removed
from the popular faith. The principle from which he derives the World is
the absolute Good, or God, of whose ideas the phenomena of sense are
imperfect copies. To the divine intelligence man by virtue of his reason
is akin. But the reason in him has fallen into bondage of the flesh; and
it is the task of his life on earth, or rather of a series of lives (for
Plato believed in successive re-incarnations), to deliver this diviner
element of his soul, and set it free to re-unite with God.
To the description of the divine life thus prepared for the soul, from
which she fell but to which she may return, Plato has devoted some of
his finest passages; and if we are to indicate, as we are bound to do,
the highest point to which the religious consciousness of the Greeks
attained, we must not be deterred, by dread of the obscurity necessarily
attaching to an extract, from a citation from the most impassioned of
his dialogues. Speaking of that "divine madness," to which we have
already had occasion to refer, he says that this is the madness which
"is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported
with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to fly away, but
he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless
of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad. And I have
shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest and the
off-spring of the highest to him who has or shares in it, and that he
who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it. For
every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was
the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not
easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for
a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly
lot, and having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some
corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things
which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them;
and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt
in amazement; but they are ignorant of what that rapture means, because
they do not clearly perceive. For there is no clear light of justice or
temperance, or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls, in
the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass dimly; and
there are few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities,
and these only with difficulty. There was a time when, with the rest of
the happy band, they saw beauty shining in brightness--we philosophers
following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and
then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery
which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of
innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were
admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and
happy, which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet
enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are
imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over
the memory of scenes which have passed away." [Footnote: Plato,
Phaedrus. 249d.--Jowett's translation.]