| That sounds very abstract – and indeed it is – but Plato infuses it with passion. He speaks of the ‘pursuit of being’ (Phaedo 66 C) using the imagery of the hunt; of the soul ‘approaching and mingling with the truly real and begetting understanding and truth’ (Rep. 490 B). There is, too, the passionate description of the soul’s recognition of true beauty in the form of the beloved in the Phaedrus: ‘when one who is fresh from the mystery, and saw much of the vision, beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there comes upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god…’ (251 A). 22 These two strands – the austerely abstract and the passionate – are fused in the account of the pursuit of beauty found in Diotima’s speech in the Symposium: He who aspires to love rightly, ought from his earliest youth to make a single form the object of his love, and therein to generate intellectual excellences. He ought, then, to consider that beauty in whatever form it resides is the brother of that beauty which subsists in another form; and if he ought to pursue that which is beautiful in form it would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not one and the same thing in all forms and would therefore remit much of his ardent preference towards one, through his perception of the multitude of claims upon his love. In addition, he would consider the beauty which is in souls more excellent than that which is in form. So that one endowed with an admirable soul, even though the flower of his form were withered, would suffice him as the object of his love and care, and the companion with whom he might seek and produce such conclusions as tend to the improvement of youth; so that it might be led to observe the beauty and the conformity which there is in the observation of its duties and the laws, and to esteem little the mere beauty of the outward form. The lover would then conduct his pupil to science, so that he might look upon the loveliness of wisdom; and that contemplating thus the universal beauty, no longer like some servant in love with his fellow would he unworthily and meanly enslave himself to the attractions of one form, nor one subject of discipline or science, but would turn towards the wide ocean of intellectual beauty, and from the sight of the lovely and majestic forms which it contains, would abundantly bring forth his conceptions in philosophy; until, strengthened and confirmed, he should at length steadily contemplate one science, which is the science of this universal beauty. (Symp. 210 A–D) 23 |
| Here Plato describes how love is subjected to the process of intellectual purification. It is a process of abstraction and simplification – abstraction both qualitative and quantitative. Thus, the soul is led from that which is perceived by the senses to that which is independent of the senses and perceived by the mind alone – a movement from the material to the spiritual. It is led, too, from concern for the many and various to what is single and unique. And yet it is still love. It is not love drained by abstraction and become indifferent, but a love intensified and deepened as the soul plunges into ‘the wide ocean of intellectual beauty’. When the soul has thus been led through this process of moral and intellectual purification, when it has been dragged up ‘the steep and rugged ascent’, what does it find? It is this that Diotima describes in the continuation of the speech from the Symposium already quoted: He who has been disciplined to this point in Love, by contemplating beautiful objects gradually, and in their order, now arriving at the end of all that concerns Love, on a sudden beholds a beauty wonderful in its nature. This is it, O Socrates, for the sake of which all the former labours were endured. It is eternal, unproduced, indestructible, neither subject to increase nor decay: not, like other things, partly beautiful and partly deformed; not at one time beautiful and at another time not; not beautiful in relation to one thing and deformed in relation to another; not here beautiful and there deformed; not beautiful in the estimation of one person and deformed in that of another; nor can this supreme beauty be figured to the imagination like a beautiful face, or beautiful hands, or any portion of the body, nor like any discourse, nor any science. Nor does it subsist in any other that lives or is, either in earth, or in heaven, or in any other place; but it is eternally uniform and consistent, and mono-eidic with itself. All other things are beautiful through a participation of it, with this condition, that although they are subject to production and decay, it never becomes more or less, or endures any change. When any one, ascending from a correct system of Love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty, he already touches the consummation of his labour. (Symp. 210 D–211 B) 24 |
| (Phaedrus 247 C–248 A) ‘Such a life as this’, says Diotima to Socrates, ‘spent in the contemplation of the beautiful, is the life for man to live’ (Symp. 211 D). This contemplation of true beauty is bios biotos, the life worth living. But we would misunderstand Plato if we left it there. The vision of the Good and the Beautiful, of the source of true reality, enables one to understand how all true reality fits together. The realm of the Forms becomes something one can understand as a whole, not as a collection of disorganized aperçus. A man who has seen the truth like that is the man who can help his fellow men, help them to order their lives. For Plato this is expressed in his conviction that in the true form of the city-state the rulers would be men who had attained contemplation and were thus able to discern the principles governing human life. Plato recognizes that one who has enjoyed this supreme vision will be reluctant to leave contemplation of it; he recognizes too that one who sees clearly will not necessarily (or even probably) be credited with possession of true wisdom by others; yet he seeks in his writings, in various ways, to show how the contemplation of the Good is something to be used for the benefit of others. How this is to be is less clear. Plato thought in terms of a city-state; but the city-state was about to pass into history. There is, moreover, a strand in Plato that can see no hope for the city-state. But the undertow of his thought is deeper than mere historical contingency, for he is concerned with true wisdom, not with mere appearance, with the fundamental orientation of man’s soul, rather than with his behaviour. But however deeply he interiorized the notion of virtue, he could not relinquish a concern for the society in which men lived, as his unfinished Laws bears witness. This tension between the contemplative and the statesman was bequeathed by Plato to later ages. II. Philo WITH Philo we move from the world of classical Greece, a world of city-states, to the period of Roman Empire. Philo was born towards the end of the first century BC and died in the middle of the first century AD. He was thus a contemporary of Christ, though there is no reason to suppose he had heard of him, and an elder contemporary of most of the writers of the New Testament, some of whom he may have influenced. A Jew of one of the wealthiest families in Alexandria, he was very much at home in the Hellenistic world. His education was Greek and it is unlikely that he knew much Hebrew; but he was a devout Jew, none the less, and defended the traditional customs of his faith. The bulk of his writings consists of commentaries on parts of the Pentateuch in the Septuagint version. |
|
|
