While Socrates could draw on and is part of this critical tradition in Greek thought, the Socrates of Plato’s dialogue is at the same time portrayed as religiously pious. But in assessing Socratic and Platonic piety, it should be taken into account that Plato not only had the pious task of defending the memory of his master: although trials for impiety were a sign of the unstable times of the Peloponnesian War rather than of the first half of the fourth century, Plato will have wanted to avoid all possibility of suffering the same fate as Socrates. The fact, therefore, that the Socrates of the Platonic dialogue is pious does not, as such, mean anything for an interpretation of Plato’s theology. To learn about his theology, one must rather start from those arguments in the dialogues which do not form part of the dramatic setting or the portrayal of character.
One series of such arguments can be found in the Euthyphro, a threshold dialogue between the Meno and the Phaedo, in which Socrates, who has been accused by Meletus of introducing new gods and corrupting the young, a charge which will result in Socrates’ condemnation, is in conversation with a man of religion, Euthyphro. Socrates poses the Greek question ‘‘What is the pious and what is the impious?’’ (5). In this question, the definite article ‘‘the’’ in front of the neuter singular adjective ‘‘pious’’ indicates and sums up what Euthyphro and Socrates both believe and had previously agreed on, that what is pious itself underlies all actions that can be called pious, and that it does not change over time or according to circumstances. Socrates’ question is one concerning human behavior, and insofar as Socrates and Euthyphro talk about gods, it is within those ‘‘ethical’’ parameters. Nevertheless, something can be said about Socrates’ conception of these gods of tradition. Unlike Euthyphro, who seems to accept wholesale the gods of mythology, i. e. the gods of poetry, and whose theological considerations coexist with the tradition he has inherited, Socrates seems uncomfortable with the notion of gods quarrelling and feuding. And, unlike Euthyphro, Socrates is presented as being puzzled by the practice of sacrifice, if not prayer. Prayer, says Socrates, can be understood as our asking for something from the gods; but sacrifice, our giving of something to the gods, does not make sense as either a tending to the gods, therapeia, as one would tend domesticated animals, or as a serving of the gods, hyperesia, as a slave would serve his master: for what could we give to the gods that would be useful, chresimon, to them? The question is left unanswered and the dialogue moves in a different direction. The reader is therefore left with the last point Socrates and Euthyphro genuinely seemed to agree on; this is that piety is a certain form of justice, that part of justice that pertains to a human being’s dealing with the gods (12). But making piety a part of the interpersonal virtue of justice allows for an unexpected inference, not actually made explicit by Plato: if piety is a form of justice, and if that which had been agreed for piety is also true for justice, namely that it is always the same, regardless of the passage of time and regardless of circumstances, then the same rules and standards apply in man’s dealings with the gods as in man’s dealings with his fellow men. There is no fundamental distinction between dealing with men and dealing with the gods. This result will have repercussions, notably in the Republic.
In the Euthyphro, in which a hexameter couplet is quoted that refers to Zeus as having created everything (12), the notion of the gods as perfect and in need of nothing is thus mooted for the first time. But Socrates and Euthyphro do not on grounds of principle dispute that - as a gesture of gratitude - sacrifice may be dear, philon, to the gods, even if it is not useful, chresimon (15). This question is also pursued in the Lysis, a dialogue between Socrates and the two youths Lysis and Menexenos, which has as its subject ‘‘what is dear,’’ philon. While this dialogue is aporetic (i. e. ending with questions unresolved) so far as the relationship between what is dear and what is useful is concerned, it raises a number of interesting questions concerning the divine. In the context of reciprocity as a necessary condition of friendship, Socrates wonders jocularly if somebody devoted to the breeding and riding of horses, a horse-lover, phil(h)ippos, will be loved in turn by the horse, a wine-lover, philoinos, by the wine, and a wisdom-lover, philosophos, by wisdom, sophia (212). This, of course, is a Sophistic argument, exploiting the syntax of the Greek adjective philos, dear. But it opens up an interesting possibility once one assumes a highest wisdom that transcends human approximations to wisdom, and once this highest wisdom, which is equivalent to real knowledge of everything, is attributed to the gods. And this very step is taken in the Lysis, in which it is suggested that for a human being to be good is to be wise, i. e. to know whatever there is to know, and that those who are not completely stupid and ignorant and bad are striving to be good and are striving to know. That is to say, while they are not in possession of wisdom, they love wisdom and are thus wisdom-lovers, philosophoi; by contrast, those who already have knowledge no longer strive for wisdom; they are wise, sophoi, not wisdom-loving, philosophoi, be they gods or men (218). This is significant because the remainder of the dialogue suggests that no human being has actually achieved this wisdom; by elimination, it is therefore only the gods who could qualify as perfectly knowledgeable and wise.
But this inference, which may be drawn from the Lysis, has the form of a theoretical postulate. As in the Euthyphro, Socrates’ starting point and end point is the human being in its imperfection. It is the human goal that is named as the good, and, coupled with a recognition that nobody can actually attain this end completely, this perfection is attributed to the gods. But even so, the end for the human being has not changed. It still is becoming good through knowledge of what is good.
The Lysis, however, goes further than this in providing a rational picture of the position of man in the world. Discussion of the good as what is aimed for leads to a positing of three classes of things in the world as good, bad, or neither-good-nor-bad (216). In this scheme of things the neither-good-nor-bad is interpreted as being somewhat good, but not perfectly so, and in this respect bad, rather than being neither-good-nor-bad by being indifferent and not in any way good nor in any way bad. It is the neither-good-nor-bad that desires and therefore and thereby loves the good. As a principle, this can apply to many things in many contexts; but in the context of friendship, a logical consequence would be that a philosophos, someone not entirely ignorant but not perfect, loves a sophos, someone perfectly wise. But as no human being is perfectly wise, it should be the gods, who are wise, that are loved; and as very few human beings are absolutely ignorant, almost everybody qualifies to fulfill this definition of philosophos. Read in this way, the Lysis could contain the kernel of Plato’s theory of motivation and at the same time of his theology. But the dialogue itself does not exploit this possibility. Instead, Socrates, having mentioned the gods (218), reverts to speaking of liking and loving ‘‘the good.’’ Despite the aporetic ending and despite the apparent logical puzzles (which led Aristotle to develop a perverse theory of friendship and love of god in Eudemian Ethics 7 and Nicomachean Ethics 8-9), the reader of the Lysis is left with the impression that indeed only good people can be friends with each other, that no one loves the bad, not even the bad himself. This corresponds with the view of friendship advocated in the Phaedrus (255), a dialogue in which those souls that are capable of it spend time in close association with the gods (247). In the Lysis, though, this notion of the good’s being friends only with the good is intimately connected with the stability and immutability of the good (214). In this way, the proverbial ‘‘friendship of similar with similar’’ has been more closely defined as ‘‘friendship of good with good’’; but the notion of friendship with what is similar to oneself and in that respect akin has not been abandoned completely. At the same time a gap is felt between the neither-good-nor-bad striving for the good and the good striven for. The neither-good-nor-bad is constantly striving to close the gap by becoming better. And while this predicament is not expressed in the Lysis in so many words, the human being who is neither-good-nor-bad, by virtue of being philosophos, is indeed trying to become as similar as possible to the good: in that sense, the ideal of assimilation to god (which we have encountered at Republic 10, 613, Theaetetus 172-7, Phaedrus 252-3, Timaeus 89-90; Laws 4, 716) is prefigured in the Lysis. But at the same time the good is said to be the beautiful (216). The beautiful itself, however, is the highest goal of human striving and cognition in the Symposium just as the good itself is the goal of everything and at the root of everything in the Republic. One can thus see already, on the basis of the early and middle dialogues, why later generations would want to equate the good itself with god, and with the demiurge, the divine craftsman, of the Timaeus.
The Lysis makes a further methodological and ontological point in connection with its topic, ‘‘what is dear’’ (218-20). The point is methodological and epistemological to the extent that it pertains to a method of investigation and definition. In determining what is dear, Socrates suggests that what is dear is so because of something and for the sake of something: for example medical science is dear to the patient because of his illness and for the sake of his health. But that for the sake of which something is dear, here health, is also itself dear. If it is dear, is it dear for the sake of something? With any such regress, where one is led from one question to another, there must be a point at which one arrives at a firm ground, a starting point and beginning, arche:. Stated thus apodictically, this looks like an arbitrary demand; but one can supply the implicit condition: one must arrive at a beginning ‘‘if there is to be any explanatory power in the process at all.’’ Read this way, the statement loses its arbitrariness and instead just distinguishes fruitful search and explanation from an asking that is pointless because it is endless.
The point is ontological because this thing which turns out to be a first beginning, which is designated as the first dear (thing), protonphilon, has in each case a concrete reality. It is that ‘‘at which all the others end’’ as their metaphorical point of arrival and completion (220). In this context, Socrates speaks of ‘‘us,’’ by which must be meant all human beings, as being ‘‘in between,’’ metaxy, good and bad. This notion of metaxy is also encountered in the Symposium. The Symposium is a dialogue containing a series of speeches in praise of the god Eros. When it is Socrates’ turn to talk about the god (199-212), he startles his audience by claiming that Eros is not all-beautiful, all-knowing, all-powerful. Here the interjection of one of the interlocutors is that Socrates cannot possibly mean that Eros is ugly and bad. ‘‘Indeed not,’’ replies Socrates, and he reports that when he was young he was taught by a priestess that not all that is not beautiful is ugly, just as not all that is not wise is stupid, but that there is something in between, metaxy; between ignorance and wisdom or knowledge is correct opinion without argument and proof. In that way, Eros is desiring the beautiful and good as being in between what is beautiful and good and, on the other hand, what is ugly and bad. But how can a god like Eros be anything but beautiful and good and wise? To that the answer is that Eros is not a god but a great and powerful daimon. In Homer, daimon is often a synonym for theos, god. But at Hesiod Works and Days 122 daimones is the designation for the golden race of men once this race died: ‘‘they, now, are daimones because of the will of great Zeus, noble, earth-bound, guardians of mortal men, giving riches: and that they hold as their kingly prerogative.’’ Whether Hesiod knew that etymologically daimon is ‘‘distributor’’ is irrelevant; Plato hardly did. Nor is it important whether Hesiod is the originator of a particular belief in daimones, or whether Plato was influenced in his choice of the word by Hesiod. Already at Apology 27 the word daimones is defined as either referring to gods or to children of gods; in the myth at the end of the Phaedo, each soul has a daimon allocated to it to guide it through the underworld (107, 108,113): when Plato introduces the term daimoon for Eros at Symposium 202, he provides it with a new definition: what is daimonion, of the sort of a daimoon, is in between, metaxy, god and mortal.
This immediately raises a number of questions within the context of Plato’s dialogues: daimonion was the voice which Socrates habitually heard telling him when not to do something (Apology 40, Euthyphro 3); it is thus something intimately linked with the soul, whether it be interpreted as a forerunner of the concept of conscience or as a nervous, hallucinatory hypersensitivity on Socrates’ part. Eros in the Symposium, on the other hand, as between ugly and beautiful, between ignorant and wise, is the desire for the beautiful and for wisdom. Eros the daimon is the great philosopher. But this is just an image for the striving for the beautiful and for knowledge on the part of the philosophical (i. e. the thinking) human being that has already been seen in the Lysis. The desire of Eros is an allegory of the human soul. (One is reminded of Democritus’ saying that ‘‘the soul is the dwelling place of the daimon’ D-K 68 B 171.) And Eros’ position between god and mortal in that way stands for the position of the soul in between ignorance, which is connected with what is mortal, changing, and perishable, and knowledge, which is stable, unchanging, and in that sense divine (208): the culmination of the ascent described by the priestess and recounted by Socrates is the vision of ‘‘the beautiful itself by itself with itself, always being of one form’’ (211). The daimon Eros is thus introduced to illuminate the conceptually difficult position of the human soul as somehow being part of the perishable human being, but somehow sharing in what does not change, just as in the Phaedo the human soul was said to be more similar, homoioteron, to what is always the same as itself and unchanging than to what changes, what comes to be and perishes (79-80). Here too the notion of assimilation to the unchanging is in the background, but here too it is not literally a god to whom one's soul assimilates itself. While Eros the great daimOn in the Symposium gave rise to literal interpretation, not least in the demonology of late antiquity, he should thus better be understood as one of the images Plato uses in describing aspects of human psychology which are difficult or impossible to convey without recourse to imagery at any time and in the context of any philosophy.
The importance of the Lysis as the starting point of much of Plato's ontology, cosmology, and theology does not end here. The dialogue introduces two more concepts which became influential in the history of metaphysics and theology alike. The first of these is found in the passage just discussed in connection with the metaxy (218-20). Taking the example of the patient whose disease is curable and who loves the science of medicine because of his illness and for the sake of health, Socrates explains that the neither-good-nor-bad loves the good and dear because of the bad and inimical, for the sake of something good and dear. Because of the identical description of the object of love and that for the sake of which that object is loved, an infinite regress looms. If there were such an infinite regress, we would be bound to give up, i. e., we would not be able to finish the investigation. The alternative is that we reach a beginning, arche (219). Archohad been the word for the ultimate physical constituent of the world since Anaximander, the first Presocratic philosopher of whom any word has survived. Subsequently, arche became the object of research for virtually all the Presocratics in Aristotle's accounts of early philosophy. In the Lysis, Plato is adopting this term and applying it to something which is in principle nonphysical, the object of desire. But he does more than change the nature of what arche:, beginning, is. Once he has equated arche: with something desired by a human being, regardless of the physical or ontological status of that object of desire, he points out that, in terms of a hierarchy of things loved and desired, all else that is dear to and loved by us ends in this first thing which really and truly is dear to and loved by us, while all else that is loved for the sake of something else is ‘‘dear and loved’’ just in name, as a pale shadow or reflection of this first good. The word for ‘‘ends’’ employed here contains the root of the noun telos, ‘‘end.’’
All mental activity, which for Socrates is always directed towards the good, thus aims at an end. An explanation of the world in terms of this aiming for and at an end, and directing one’s actions accordingly, is sometimes referred to as ‘‘teleology.’’ Plato is usually read as demanding a teleological explanation of the world instead of a mechanistic one at Phaedo 95-107, and to have attempted answers in those terms both in the myth of the Phaedo and in the Timaeus as a whole; in both cases, something super-human is involved, be it an immortal soul or a divine craftsman. But the origin of the notion of telos or end is found in the purely anthropocentric explanation of loving and liking in the Lysis. This, again, opens up the possibility for an interpretation of the later dialogues as metaphorically extending and transferring human psychology to a different plane, for purposes which may be wholly internal to these later dialogues.
In the Lysis, the Phaedo, and the Timaeus, the noun telos, end, is not employed in a teleological setting; we do find it, however, in the appropriate sense at Symposium 210-11, in a context which is exactly parallel to the one in the Lysis. In the Symposium, suddenly seeing and grasping the beautiful itself, for the sake of which one has pursued all the many beautiful things, is described as having reached it as a telos, an end. This usage has repercussions far beyond Plato. In an ethical sense, it underlies the rival theories of action and motivation of the various philosophical schools of antiquity as to the question of the highest good. But it would be wrong to divorce this ethical sense from the teleological ontological explanations of nature and the world. These include Aristotle’s explanation of physical movement, which he links with the movements of the heavenly bodies. The heavenly bodies in turn, for Aristotle, form part of his theory of the highest god, the unmoved mover for the sake of whom all else moves; he moves as being loved and desired (Metaphysics L 7-10). The same thought underlies later Neoplatonic teleological theology: in his book on Platonic theology (2.59.16), Proclus, like Aristotle in the Metaphysics, uses the phraseology of Plato’s Lysis.
The decisive link which allows us to see the Lysis as at the root of both teleology of nature and teleology of action(s), and which therefore opens up the possibility of reading Plato’s theology as an allegory for human ethics, has sometimes been overlooked. It constitutes the last of the concepts introduced in the Lysis which are of interest in this context, and indeed of interest for a fuller understanding of Plato’s philosophy as a whole. It is the dual notion of cause-and-reason and explanation, aition and aitia. In the Lysis, the word aition had appeared once at the beginning of the discussion in the context of a reason and explanation for certain laws and prescriptions in human life, reminding the reader that adjective and noun had a widespread application in Attic law as ‘‘responsible’’ and ‘‘the one responsible,’’ ‘‘culpable’’ and ‘‘culprit’’ (209). It then recurs five times in quick succession at 221c-d. The context is a thought experiment by Socrates: if the neither-good-nor-bad loves and likes the good for the sake of the good and because of the bad, what if the bad disappeared? (Would we still love medicine if we were not ill? Perhaps. Would we still love medicine if all disease and illness as such disappeared from the world? What would then be the function of medicine?) Would there be anything dear (to us) left if the bad disappeared? With needs based on deficiencies, this is something one may well ask; but there are also other desires, in themselves neither good nor bad, for the good. But as the effect disappears if the cause disappears, the bad cannot be the cause of these desires, if they continue to exist once the bad has disappeared. There must thus be another cause and explanation for liking and being liked, loving and being loved.
Where this argument is taken in the dialogue is not important here. The possibility it opens up, though, is this: by posing the question of what a world without the bad would look like, Plato lays the seed for an explanation of the cosmos in which what is bad is not cause of or reason for anything. If the bad is not, we would still do things for the sake of the good. This position is explicated at Phaedo 95-107. There, Plato does not speak of ‘‘the first dear thing’’ which is good and dear by itself and not for the sake of something else, but rather simply of the good itself and the beautiful itself. And the good itself and the beautiful itself are said to be cause-and-reason not only for our desiring what is good and what is beautiful, but for everything good and beautiful, all the good and beautiful things we see around us. Plato combines the notion of aition, a notion perhaps first introduced into natural philosophy by the atomist Democritus, whom Plato saw as a main opponent throughout his life, with that of arche, the beginning of everything that was the stuff of the Presocratics. Everything in this world of becoming has a beginning, and everything has a cause: for Plato, beginning and cause are not water or fire or ‘‘the infinite,’’ but the beautiful and the good.
This explanation is stated in more or less this form in the Phaedo, the Symposium, and the Republic, and rephrased in the Timaeus as the conviction that order is more beautiful and better than disorder. But while this explanation may satisfy the mind, it does not satisfy popular imagination and belief. Any explanation of the world which did not take account of the gods of tradition was in danger of being equated with the doctrine of Protagoras, who had claimed, about the gods, not to know whether they existed or not (D-K 80 B 4), or the doctrine attributed to Critias, that the gods were invented by clever people for political reasons (D-K 88 B 25), or those doctrines of others again who claimed that there were either no gods at all, or if there were gods, they did not care for us. Already in the Republic Plato therefore deals with the role of traditional, popular mythology and poetry in society (Republic 2-3, esp. 377-83). Socrates declares that, in the city he envisages, stories about gods must present them as not causing harm, not doing anything bad, not being the cause-and-reason, aition, of anything bad, but being good and beneficent, being the cause-and-reason of what is good only. In addition, god as good does not change his form, being perfectly self-sufficient and not in need of change (379-80), concepts prefigured in a nontheological context in the Lysis, where they were attributes of the perfectly good man.
This conception of god as good is then introduced into an explanation of the world at large. The link is the notion of aition, which is applied both to actions, decisions, responsibilities, and culpabilities of human beings and to natural science, since in the natural world of change too nothing happens without a cause. But while causality in the Phaedo does not go beyond positing the form of the good, the form of the beautiful, etc., and while the Republic (6.503-11) sees the form of the good as a cause-and-reason beyond all else, the Timaeus reverts to the popular notion, already encountered in the Euthyphro (12), of the highest god as father of all. This is then explicated in the way outlined at the beginning of this chapter. But what Plato says about a creator god in Republic 10 and in the Timaeus, what he says in the Phaedrus, the Politicus, the Philebus, and the Laws about soul and about god, all has the character of myth and allegory, designed to persuade. The starting point of explanation, throughout Plato’s work, is the conviction that the world is, actually, good. Any explanation of the world must therefore not only explain the physical constitution of things, it must explain the good. But at the same time, the explanation must be such that it is acceptable to those whom Plato wants to be persuaded by his ethics otherwise. Myths about god are tales of persuasion.
World History
