Justified True Belief

(●) The student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, who taught the West that the visible world is not the whole world. + The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once described the whole European philosophical tradition as "a series of footnotes to Plato," and he was only half joking. Plato is where the West learned to argue carefully about the things that matter most: whether the soul outlives the body, whether right and wrong are real, whether the world we can see is all there is. He is also, for Christian readers, the most important philosopher who never heard the gospel. Four centuries before Christ he reasoned his way to a supreme Good above the world of change, an immortal soul made for truth, and a universe that exists because of goodness rather than accident. The church fathers, the Christian teachers of the first few centuries after the apostles, noticed. Augustine, the greatest of them in the West, judged that no philosophers came nearer to Christianity than the Platonists, and much of the vocabulary Christians still use (the eternal against the temporal, the invisible against the visible, God as the highest good) was first hammered out in his dialogues. A dialogue is simply a philosophical conversation written as a drama, with named characters, a setting, and something at stake. Plato published about thirty of them, and by a small miracle of history every one survives: not a single work he released is lost.

(●) 427 BC: Born into one of Athens’ oldest families, in a city already at war. + Plato was born in Athens around 427 BC, into a family that expected great things of him. His father Ariston traced his line back to the old kings of Athens; his mother Perictione was kin to Solon, the lawgiver who had shaped the city’s constitution more than a century and a half earlier. One ancient tradition says his given name was Aristocles, and that "Plato" began as a wrestling nickname, from the Greek platys, "broad." The Athens he grew up in was fighting for its life. The Peloponnesian War against Sparta had begun four years before his birth and did not end until he was in his early twenties, and it ended in Athenian defeat. Plague, siege, and political convulsion were the weather of his childhood. A boy of his class was groomed for public life the way a senator’s son might be today, and for a while Plato assumed politics was his future.

(●) 407 BC: At about twenty he met Socrates, and the future he had planned fell away. + Socrates wrote nothing. He spent his days in the marketplace and the gymnasium asking Athenians questions they discovered they could not answer: what courage actually is, what justice actually is, whether they knew the things they claimed to know. One tradition says the young Plato had been writing tragedies, and burned them after hearing him. For the better part of a decade Plato belonged to the circle around this barefoot questioner, and what he saw there became the measure of everything else in his life: a man who would rather be refuted than flattered, and who treated the care of the soul as more urgent than money, reputation, or safety.

(●) 399 BC: Athens executed Socrates, and Plato gave up on a political career. + In 399 BC a restored democracy, still raw from the civil war that had followed the defeat by Sparta, put Socrates on trial for impiety (disrespect toward the city’s gods) and for corrupting the young. He was convicted by a narrow margin and sentenced to drink hemlock. Plato tells us he was present at the trial; on the final day, in the prison, he was absent, sick. His dialogue the Phaedo records the death he did not see. Years later, in the autobiographical Seventh Letter that comes down under his name (scholars still argue whether he wrote it), he described what the execution did to him. He had twice stood near power, once under the oligarchs, the small ruling clique that seized Athens after the war (two of them his own relatives), and once under the democracy, and both had repelled him: the first for its brutality, the second for killing the man he called the justest then living. He concluded that every existing city was badly governed, and that the human race would have no rest from evils until philosophers ruled or rulers became philosophers. He left Athens for a time: to Megara, perhaps to Egypt and Cyrene, certainly to southern Italy, home of the Pythagoreans, the followers of Pythagoras (the man the theorem is named for), who lived under a shared rule like a religious order, and whose devotion to mathematics and to the soul’s immortality left permanent marks on his thought. And he began to write the dialogues in which Socrates lives again.

(●) 387 BC: He founded the Academy, among the first schools of its kind, and a school bearing its name taught in Athens for nine centuries. + Back in Athens, around 387 BC, Plato began teaching in a grove and gymnasium sacred to a hero named Academus, just outside the city walls. The school that grew there took its name from the place: the Academy, the ancestor of every "academy" and "academic" since. He charged no fees, in pointed contrast to the sophists, the traveling teachers who sold wisdom by the hour, and the school drew students from the whole Greek world to study mathematics, astronomy, law, and philosophy. A later tradition says an inscription over the entrance read: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter." No other school of the ancient world lasted so long. In one form or another a Platonic school taught in Athens until the emperor Justinian forbade pagans to teach in AD 529, more than nine hundred years after its founding, though the line was broken along the way: the Roman general Sulla’s army wrecked the original Academy in 86 BC, and the school that carried the name in late antiquity was a revival. Its most famous student arrived around 367: a seventeen-year-old from the northern town of Stagira named Aristotle. He stayed twenty years, first as pupil, then as colleague, and though he came to disagree with his teacher about a great deal, he never escaped the questions Plato had set him.

(●) 367 BC: Twice he sailed to Syracuse to make a philosopher of a king, and twice it failed. + Plato did not merely theorize about philosopher-rulers; he risked his life on the idea. He had visited Syracuse, the richest Greek city of Sicily, around 388, and left its tyrant Dionysius I thoroughly unimpressed with philosophy. One ancient story claims that visit ended with Plato sold into slavery and ransomed by a friend. In 367 the old tyrant died, and Dion, Plato’s devoted friend at the Syracusan court, begged him to come and train the new ruler, young Dionysius II. Here was the dream of the Republic, his great book about a city ruled by philosophers, offered on a plate: a ruler still young enough to be taught. Plato went, and it went badly. The court suspected Dion and exiled him; the young tyrant wanted Plato’s company more than his geometry. A third voyage in 361 nearly ended with Plato detained for good, until friends in the Greek city of Tarentum sent a ship to bring him home. The failure marked him. His last and longest work, the Laws, is the sober constitution of an old man who had watched the ideal collide with the actual.

(●) 347 BC: He died at about eighty, and his books have never gone out of circulation. + Plato died in Athens in 347 BC, around the age of eighty; one tradition has him at a wedding feast, another quietly at his writing. He was buried near the Academy. His nephew Speusippus succeeded him as its head, and Aristotle left Athens, tutored a Macedonian prince named Alexander, and in time came back to found a school of his own. What no one at the funeral could have guessed is that the books would simply never stop being read. Cicero, the Roman statesman, read him; Plutarch, the Greek biographer, taught him; Plotinus, some six centuries after Plato’s death, built a whole system out of him. In the fourth century after Christ, a restless North African professor of rhetoric named Augustine picked up "the books of the Platonists" and found in them a road that led him toward the God of Scripture. Twenty-four centuries on, everything Plato published is still in print.

What He Taught

(T1) Beyond the changing world of the senses stands an eternal order, and at its peak the Good. + Start with an ordinary puzzle. You have seen thousands of circles: coins, plates, the full moon. Every one of them is slightly imperfect, yet you recognize them all as circles, which means you are somehow measuring them against a perfect circle that no one has ever drawn. Plato called that perfect standard a Form: the unchanging reality that all the changing copies point back to. There is a Form of circle, he argued, and of justice, and of beauty, and the visible world is a world of copies. His most famous picture of this is the allegory of the cave in the Republic. Prisoners chained in the dark watch shadows thrown on a wall and take them for the whole of reality; one prisoner is freed, dragged up into the daylight, and finally sees the sun itself. The sun in the story stands for the Form of the Good: the source that makes everything else both real and knowable. Education, Plato says, is not pouring information into the soul but turning the whole soul around toward the light. Christian readers have always noticed how far this reaches and where it stops. A supreme Good that gives being and truth to everything else sounds very like what theologians mean by God. But Plato’s Good is a principle to be contemplated, not a person who speaks, acts, and loves.

(Q) "Now, that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have you term the idea of good." + Source: Plato, Republic VI, 508e–509a (Jowett translation). Socrates is comparing the Good to the sun: as the sun gives light to the eye and growth to living things, the Good gives truth to what is known and the power of knowing to the knower. Jowett’s "idea" is the same Greek word other translators render "Form" (T1).

(T2) The soul is immortal, and this life is training for another. + The Phaedo is set in a prison cell on the last afternoon of Socrates’ life, and the setting is itself the argument: a man hours from death calmly reasons with his friends about whether the soul survives, and his calm shows what his arguments claim, that a person is not merely a body. Of the four arguments the dialogue offers, the one that has traveled furthest is an argument from kinship. The soul grasps unchanging truths, like those of mathematics, so it must be more akin to the unchanging and invisible than to the changing, visible body it inhabits; a thing at home among eternal objects is not the sort of thing that dissolves. He also taught that the soul faces judgment: in the Gorgias and at the close of the Republic he tells of souls judged after death, stripped of rank and wealth, answerable for the lives they chose. He held, too, that souls return to live again in new bodies (reincarnation), a point where Christians would firmly part company with him. But against the materialists of his own day and of ours, the thinkers who hold that matter is all there is, Plato stands as the great pagan witness that a human being is more than matter in motion, and that how you live now matters forever.

(Q) "But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith." + Source: Plato, Phaedo 79d (Fowler translation). Socrates is explaining why the philosopher does not fear death: the soul thinking by itself, apart from the senses, is already practicing the kind of existence it hopes for.

(T3) The visible universe is the work of a good craftsman, not an accident. + In the Timaeus, his one sustained account of the cosmos, Plato asks why there is an ordered world at all, and answers with a story he admits is only a "likely account." A divine craftsman (his word is demiourgos, "Demiurge," ordinary Greek for a skilled workman) looked to the eternal Forms as a blueprint and shaped disorderly material into a cosmos: one world, alive, mathematical, beautiful. The reason he gives for the making is the startling part: the craftsman was good, and goodness does not hoard; he wanted the world to be as like himself as possible. Notice what this is and what it is not. It is the first great Greek argument that the universe exists because of goodness rather than chance, and the church fathers loved it for that. It is not yet the doctrine of creation. Plato’s craftsman is like a sculptor handed a block of marble: he shapes material that was already there and is constrained by what it will bear. Genesis knows no such constraint: God speaks, and there is. That difference, creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo, as later theology names it), is one of the clearest lines between Athens and Jerusalem, between the best that Greek reason reached and what Israel was told.

(Q) "He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be." + Source: Plato, Timaeus 29e (Jowett translation). The Demiurge’s motive for making the world: not need, not conflict with rival gods, but ungrudging goodness that wants to share itself.

(T4) Justice is the soul in right order, and the just life is the happiest life. + The Republic opens with a challenge every generation rediscovers. Glaucon, one of the young men pressing Socrates in the dialogue (and Plato’s own brother), tells of a shepherd who finds a ring that makes him invisible; safe from all detection, the shepherd seduces the queen, murders the king, and takes the kingdom. If you had that ring, Glaucon asks, why exactly would you stay just? Plato’s answer fills the rest of the book. The soul has three parts: reason, which seeks truth; spirit, which seeks honor and burns at wrongdoing; and appetite, which seeks food, drink, money, and pleasure. Justice is each part doing its own work under reason’s rule, the way health is every organ doing its own work; injustice is civil war inside a person. So the unjust man has not gotten away with anything, ring or no ring. He is his own punishment, a soul in mutiny, and the tyrant with unlimited license turns out to be the most enslaved man in his city. Along the way Plato lays down rules for how poets may speak of God that read almost like the canons (the formal rulings) of a church council: God is good and the cause only of good; God does not change; God does not deceive. Early Christian writers quoted those lines for centuries.

(Q) "The just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others; he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals, when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act." + Source: Plato, Republic IV, 443d–e (Jowett translation). Justice described from the inside: not a set of external rules but a soul in tune with itself.

(Q) "Evils, Theodorus, can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Having no place among the gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the mortal nature, and this earthly sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him, is to become holy, just, and wise." + Source: Plato, Theaetetus 176a–b (Jowett translation). Socrates is answering his friend Theodorus, a mathematician, who has just said that if everyone could be persuaded as Socrates persuades him, there would be fewer evils among men. Becoming like God, so far as a human can, was for Plato the whole point of philosophy. Christian writers heard in it an anticipation of "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48), and an admission from the greatest of pagans that the cure for evil is not found in this world.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The early church read him as preparation: a pagan who had seen, dimly, what Israel had been told. + When the first Christian philosophers looked for common ground with the Greek world, Plato was the ground. Justin Martyr, a converted philosopher of the second century, argued that whatever the philosophers had said truly belonged to Christians, because the same divine Word (the Logos who became flesh in Christ) had scattered seeds of truth among the nations. Clement of Alexandria, a Christian teacher in Egypt a generation later, went further: philosophy, he wrote, had been given to the Greeks as a tutor to bring them to Christ, as the Law had been given to the Hebrews. The pagan philosopher Numenius could even ask, in a line Clement liked well enough to quote, "What is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?" Attic Greek is the Greek of Athens: Moses, that is, with an Athenian accent. Behind this reading lies what theologians call general revelation: the knowledge of God available to every human being through creation, conscience, and reason, as distinct from the special revelation of Scripture. Paul appeals to it on Mars Hill, the rocky rise in Athens where he addressed the city’s philosophers, quoting Greek writers to Greeks (Acts 17:22–31). Seen that way, Plato’s supreme Good, his immortal soul, and his good craftsman are what the truth looks like when a first-rate mind reasons toward God with no Bible on the shelf: genuinely right about much, and unable to get all the way.

(†) Augustine climbed his ladder as far as it went, and found it stopped short of the manger. + Augustine of Hippo, the most influential theologian of the Western church, tells the story in his Confessions. As a young professor he could not conceive of anything real that was not physical, and so could not make sense of God. Then "certain books of the Platonists" taught him to think of a reality that is immaterial, eternal, unchanging, and more real than matter, and the roadblock fell. But he is precise about the limit. In those books he found, in substance, that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God; what he did not find there was that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1, 14). The Platonists, he said, are like men who glimpse the homeland of peace from a wooded mountaintop but cannot find the road down to it. The road is the Incarnation: God humbling himself in Christ. Through Augustine, Plato’s inheritance flowed into the bloodstream of Christian theology: God as the supreme Good and the most truly real; the unseen and eternal prized over the seen and passing (2 Corinthians 4:18); evil understood not as a rival power but as a privation, a falling away from good; the restless soul that finds no rest until it rests in God. Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the thirteenth century, set out five short arguments for the existence of God, his "five ways," and the fourth of them, reasoning from degrees of goodness up to a highest Good, still runs on recognizably Platonic rails.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: creation from nothing, the raising of the body, and grace. + Honesty requires the other column of the ledger. Christians who learned from Plato also had to unlearn him at four points. - Creation. Plato’s craftsman shapes material that was always there; the God of Scripture creates all things from nothing, and no leftover chaos limits him (Genesis 1:1; John 1:3). - The body. Plato at times calls the body the soul’s prison, something to be escaped. Scripture calls the body God’s good creation and promises not escape but resurrection. When Paul preached in Athens, his hearers listened politely until he mentioned the resurrection of the dead, and then some of them sneered (Acts 17:32). That sneer measures the distance between the two worlds. - The afterlife. Plato taught reincarnation, the soul returning in life after life. Scripture answers plainly: "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). - The way up. For Plato the ascent to the Good is by education and long training in argument, a climb for the gifted few. The gospel moves in the opposite direction: God descends to fishermen, tax collectors, and slaves, and the way up is by grace received through faith, not by aptitude (Ephesians 2:8–9). Plato saw further than perhaps anyone who reasoned without Scripture, and that is exactly why the church has kept him close. He shows how far the climb can go, and where a hand must reach down.