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PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
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TORONTO
 PLATO
AND

CHRISTIANITY
THREE LECTURES

BY

WILLIAM TEMPLE
Rector of St. James's, Piccadilly, Hon. Chaplain to H.M. the King, Chaplain
to tke Archbishop of Canterbury, President of the Workers' Educational
H
Association, formerly eadmaster of Repton, and Fellozv of
Queen s College, Oxford

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1916
 B37

J* * »• ; .^ j

>
. •', •"} •*• ''•"
 TO THE

WORKERS' EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION

346645
 NOTE
These lectures were delivered in the Hall
of Christ Church, Oxford, during the Extension
Summer Meeting of August, 1915. The first

two were again delivered in substance in the

Hall of King's College, London, during March,
1916, at the invitation of the London District
of the Workers' Educational Association.
On both occasions several members of the
audience expressed a hope that they might
be pubhshed.
W. T.
 CONTENTS
LECTURE I

General Philosophy ........ PAGE

1

LECTURE 11

Ethics and Politics ....... 31

LECTURE III

Plato J AND Christianity 75

PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY
LECTURE I

GENERAL PHILOSOPHY

It is very difficult to say what constitutes

the pecuhar genius of any race or nation, but
in the case of the Ancient Greeks this is easier
than in most. We may perhaps best sum-
marise their predominant characteristic and
their great gift to the world in the phrase,
" Intellectual passion." Both terms are
necessary. To most of us the intellect and
the search for truth appear lacking in human
warmth ; men contrast reason with intuition
on one side, and with feeling on the other.
Of course, there is a ground for this contrast,
but in the great Greeks feehng and intellect
are united with astonishing closeness. The
B
2 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

great minds among them had a living passion

for truth, such as among us is only stimulated
as a rule by a person to whom we are devoted,
or a practical cause to which we have given
our lives ; the only metaphors adequate to
describe the yearning of their souls for truth
or the rapture of attainment are drawn from
human love in its intensest shape. It is be-
cause of this that their great gifts to the world
are twofold —both scientific and artistic.

The beauty which they express is, upon the

whole, what we should call intellectual beauty ;

even in their sublimest moments they shrink

from anything that suggests licence or lack
of order. Their typical art is sculpture, and
in sculpture what happens is that the artist
gives significance to a shapeless mass of
marble, or whatever it may be, by reducing
it within limits that are themselves deter-
mined by the principle of proportion. A
Greek temple gains its beauty by proportion
and nothing else ; it has none of the wild
efflorescence of Gothic art. This is partly,

perhaps, because civilisation was a thing so

new. so precious, and so permanently threat-
ened both by the barbarism of surrounding
 — — .

I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 3

nations and by the survival of barbarism in

the souls of the Greeks themselves, that they
never really dared to let themselves go.

But this is not the whole reason ; it is also

true to say that their appreciation and love
was for the orderly, the coherent, the pro-
portioned. Beauty them the sensuous
is for
form of truth, and truth is the indweUing and
vital principle of beauty. The intuition of
Keats was quite right when he put his
lines
" Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know "

at the end of the poem on the " Grecian

Urn."
For us the search for truth has become more
complicated, more scientific and argumentative;
while, so far at any rate as we have dared to
trust the spirit of Christianity, the pursuit of
beauty has become less restrained and more
freely impulsive. For the Greeks the two
things are almost one ; for them science and
art are as near together as they can ever be.
Truth and beauty are twin apprehensions of the
same aspiring intellect, and it is in Plato that
this passion of intellect, at once in its scientific
 4 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

and in its artistic forms, reaches its supreme

expression. _
Plato was the disciple of Socrates, and it is

appropriate to say something, with the dog-

matism necessary to brevity, about the place
of Socrates in Greek life, and the relation of
Plato to him. Socrates was regarded by his
enemies as one of the sophists. The sophists
were men who arose in response to the demand
created by the growth of democracy it ;

suddenly became possible for men to achieve

power and fame by influencing their fellow
citizens. In the law courts and in the public
assembhes there was a great opening for per-
suasive speakers. The sophists undertook to
instruct men in the art of success.) There is

an American advertisement which represents

a truculent man shaking his fist in the reader's
face,
—
and saying " I can make you a forcible
speaker " ; that is the advertisement of a
sophist, though in all probability this sophist
is a quack, while many of the Greek sophists
were genuinely great men. Great as they
were, however, it remains true that their

aim was to teach success, and that only.

The natural result of the sharpening of a

I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 5

young man's argumentative power is that

he becomes critical of all conventions which
thwart his own desires, including the most
fundamental moral and the
conventions,
influence of the sophist upon the young men
of Greece was to make them even more
rebellious than the younger generation in-

variably is against the wisdom of its elders.

Moreover, the elders had not been in the

habit of asking questions about these matters,
and were consequently ill able to meet on
intellectual grounds the questions raised by the
juniors. The result was that the younger
generation began to break more and more
away from the code of morality on which
Greek civilisation rested. The task of Socrates
was to insist that the moral code, in principle
at least, is right, but that its real grounds are
not those conventionally accepted. This was
the only way in which the rising tide of moral
infidelity could be stemmed ; but naturally
the respectable old Athenians did not under-
stand it. When a man remarked on the
justice of Aristides or some other common-
place, and Socrates would approach him
with such words
—
as " I am deeply inter-
 6 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

ested in what you say ; now can you tell me

what that quality in Aristides in virtue of
is

which you call him just ? " and when the —

respectable Athenian found himself unable to
give an answer which the criticism of Socrates
did not at once reduce to silliness, he only
came to the conclusion that Socrates was
concerned to pour ridicule on morality. In
the end they condemned him to death for
setting up false gods and corrupting the young
men. He is the first martyr to intellectual
"Truth, and his martyrdom is the most in-
fluential single event in the history of in-
tellectual progress.)
It is very difficult to determine whether
or not Socrateswas himself a great philosopher.
It depends upon the view we take of the
respective merits, from an historical point of
view, of Plato and Xenophon. Considerable
reason has lately been shown for holding that
the Platonic works down to, and including,
the Republic and Phaedrus, and even the
'^hecBtetus, are to be traced to Socrates him-
and that Plato's independent-.develop-
self,

ment only starts with the Parmenides and the

Sophist, The view which has been traditional
I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 7

in England is rather that the philosphy of the

Platonic Dialogues is only Socratic down to
the end of the Protagoras. On the former
view, Socrates must be regarded, not only
as a martyr to the philosophic cause, but also
as himself a supremely great philosopher.
According to the latter and more traditional
view, his contribution was Httle more than the
impetus which he gave to his disciples, and

particularly to Plato. I shall myself follow

this traditional view, not so much because I
feel convinced of its truth, though my in-

cUnation is in that direction, but because it

enables us more easily than the other to take
the works of Plato as they stand, without
discussing at any given point where the
independent thought of Plato starts, for,

according to this view, all the really im-

portant Dialogues represent such independent
thought. After all, the question of origin
is mainly one of antiquarian interest. For us
the works of Plato are a complete whole which
we can read and study. S ocrates If^ft-
^^
writings. It is the Uving thought which is of
consequence to us, not the question who
should have the credit for it. We will there-
8 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

fore take the Dialogues as they stand and try

to summarise their leading points.
Aristotle tells us in the first book of his
Metaphysics that Plato was a disciple, not
only of Socrates, but also of Cratylus. From
Socrates, he learned to look for definitions
and to pursue inquiry by means of relevant
instances and from Socrates also he learned
;

to believe in the certainty of our knowledge

of moral principles. Cratylus was himself a
disciple of Heraclitus, and from him Plato
learned to believe in the universal flux of the
whole phenomenal world. [The development
of his thought may be regarded as a product
of the collision between Socrates' doctrine
of moral certainty and Heraclitus' doctrine
of universal flux. )
We have become quite
used to this latter idea we have found that
;

in practice it does not make life insecure nor

any more transitory than it would be if the
perpetual change of physical objects had never
been discovered at all. But this was not so
at first ; in the early days men were ex-
ceedingly perplexed as to the possibihty of any
knowledge or certainty in a perpetually chang-
ing world. We have become indifferent to the
 GENERAL PHILOSOPHY
problem, but the problem is still there, and
every now and then some new application of
the law of flux raises it again in an acute
form. For example, when Darwin suddenly-
popularised the idea of biological evolution,
it seemed to very many people that everything
was now reduced to a transition from one
phase to another. Morality was merely a
convention of the passing period ; it had no
permanent significance or application. We
have again largely outgrown this perplexity,
but again it is rather through becoming in-
different to it than through properly solving
it ; the problem is still there. It is because
of this combination of ideas, due to Socrates
on the one hand and to Cratylus on the other,
that Plato, in the words of Edward Caird,
" did more than anyone else before or since
to open up all the questions with which the
philosophy of religion has to deal."
While still entirely under the Socratic influ-
ence, Plato begins with the question so com-
monly asked in Greece —Can virtue be taught J
This is the problem of the Protagoras. It
has been pointed out that in that Dialogue
Socrates, though victorious of course in
10 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

dialectic, concludes by establishing the oppo-

site position to that which he had set out
to defend, while Protagoras himself has
similarly changed his ground. This suggests
that Plato at this date is already feeling the
need of passing beyond the historic teaching of
Socrates.
In the next Dialogue, the Meno, he continues
the same subject. His conclusion here is that
most virtue is based on opinion only, not upon
knowledge. Knowledge is distinguished from
right opinion simply by the thinking out of its
ground. (When we know, we not only beheve
what is in fact true, but we are able to say
why it is true. For practical purposes, right
opinion is entirely equivalent to knowledge
while it lastsy want to know the road to
If I

Larissa or to Abingdon and ask a passer-by,

—
he may possibly say '^ That is the road :

I know, because I have just come along it " ;

or he may only be able to say *'

I think it is

that road." Supposing that he is right, his

opinion is as good a guide as his knowledge

would have been. But opinion is unstable ;

it may easily be changed, and a right opinion

which can give no reasoned justification for
 —

I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 11

itself is therefore a precarious basis for life.

This, then, is the answer to the question

" Why have not the men of great virtue
"
imparted their virtue to their sons ?
It is because they were good through^ right
opinion only, and not through knowledge,)
They could not give the reason for their
principles of action, and consequently, while
they had virtue in themselves, they could not
convince others of its claim. Here for the

moment the question is dropped ; but most

characteristically the new-found distinction
between knowledge and opinion is immediately
applied to politics in the Gorgias. But here
the reflection has gone further ; it is no
longer admitted that the great statesmen of
Athens had virtue at all ; they were not
even really statesmen ; for they did not fill

the city with its true treasures, which are

Temperance and Justice, but only with
harbours, war-ships and tribute, and rubbish
of this character. Socrates himself is the
only real statesman, for only he has even
tried to base pohtical action upon rational
principle (517-522).
The Meno, besides containing the first
12 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

definite distinction between knowledge and

opinion, also sets the problem how it is possible
to learn anything. I set out in search of some
idea which is to be the solution of a per-
plexity ; but either I already know that of
which I am in search, or else I do not ; if

I know it, the search is endless, and if I do

not know it, it is futile, for I should not
recognise the object of the search even if I

came upon it. The answer to this is somewhat

startling. Without argument Plato throws
down the tremendous dogma, and that,
moreover, as it were by the way in a sub-
ordinate clause
— " Seeing that nature is all

of it akin." (81 c.)

/The result of this kinship in all nature is

that there is a genuine connection between

any one apprehended fact or truth and all

other facts and truths. Consequently, the

presence in the mind of any apprehension may
give rise to the grasp of kindred truths.y He
goes further ; inasmuch as before birth the
soul in the spiritual world has had a vision of
all truth, but has at birth forgotten it, the
perception of the various facts which con-
stitute our experience may revive in the mind
I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 13

a recollection of the kindred facts, which in

that pre-natal vision the soul had apprehended.
Knowledge, in other words, is recollection.)

The evidence of this is a dialogue between

Socrates and a slave boy, from whom, by
means of extraordinarily leading questions,
Socrates succeeds in educing mathematical
knowledge which the boy had never
learned.^
This doctrine of " recollection," however,
does not supply knowledge with an adequate
object ; the empirical facts, which are the
occasion of the recollection, belong to the
world of flux, but it is not possible that the
object of knowledge should itself be per-
petually changing, for if it were, the knowledge
would become false —that is, ignorance — ^in

the very process of own formation. In

its

the Cratylus the two persons who carry on the

discussion are Cratylus and Socrates, that is

to say the two men from whom, according to

Aristotle, Plato received his own philosophic

^ It may be worth while in passing to note the fact that

the boy answers in a straightforward way so long as his
answers seem to be right, but on discovering that they are
not, at once starts swearing, ov fia Ai'a (83 b.)
14 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

training —Socrates, from whom he had learned

to believe in the possibility of knowledge, at
least in the moral sphere, and Cratylus, from
whom he had learned to believe in the incessant
changefulness of all empirical facts. At the
end of this dialogue Socrates raises the question

whether there are eternal forms or ideas,

which remain themselves absolutely unchanged
while various physical objects conform to
them in greater or less degree as their changeful
process runs its course. The existence of these
forms or ideas is something which Socrates
says he often dreams to be true, but there is

no definite assertion of the doctrine, and the

dialogue ends with the statement that
perhaps they exist and perhaps they do not.
(440 d.)
It is also noticeable that in this dialogue
the idea seems to be, not an independent
j

entity, but a teleological principle. The (

form of the shuttle is simply that which will ;

meet the weaver's purpose. (389 b.) i

In the Symposium the atmosphere is quite

different, and the same is true of the Phaedo.
Here there is no doubt at all about the ex-
istence of the eternal Ideas. Either Plato
I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 15

now reaches this behef himself, or else he now

gives it an entirely new prominence ; for a

mere outline understanding of his thought

such as we are attempting, it does not very-
much matter which. (Proper study leads to an
apprehension of the Ideas by the pure in-
tellect, and therein to a perfect satisfaction
of the soul/ The language used, both of the
apprehension itself and of the satisfaction
which it brings, is the language of rapture and
ecstasy. This is largely borrowed from the
experience of those who were initiated in the

mysteries at Eleusis. In the Symposium,

Plato speaks in such as way as to suggest
that he had himself received a vision of the
perfect beauty. I have attempted elsewhere
{Mind, N.S. XVII, p. 502) to give an account
of the psychological occasion of this vision
and the particular influence which it may have
had upon the Hne of his philosophic thought.
The other Dialogue which most definitely
suggests the occurrence of such a vision is the
Phaedrus. It is of some interest to notice
that another man of genius, not unlike Plato
in some points of his temperament, has re-
corded a similar experience. In Shelley's
 — ——

16 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty these lines

occur

" Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
—
Of human thought or form, ^where art thou gone ?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state.

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate ?

Ask why the sunlight not for ever

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river.
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown.
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
—
Such gloom, ^why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope ?

" Love, Hope, and SeK-esteem, like clouds depart

And come, for some imcertain moments lent,
Man were immortal, and omnipotent.
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies.
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes
—
Thou that to human thought art nourishment.
Like darkness to a dying flame !

Depart not as thy shadow came.

—
Depart not ^lest the grave should be.
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

" While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

Thro' many a listening chamber, cave and ruin.
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
—
I was not heard I saw them not
When musing deeply on the lot
 —

I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 17

Of life, at the sweet time when winds are wooing

All vital things that wake to bring
News and blossoming,
of birds
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me j

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy I

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

—
To thee and thine have I not kept the vow ?
^*

But whatever the occasion, whether there

was any actual vision or not, at least belief
in the eternal Ideas becomes now the governing
principle of Plato's thought. In the Sym-
posium (210 a-211 c) he describes the ascent
of the soul towards the perfect beauty ;

suddenly, he says, she will behold something

marvellously beautiful, not beautiful by parts
or by seasons as is the case with material
beauty, but itself abiding true to itself for
ever. This is very different from the tentative
language about the absolute Idea with which
the Cratylus closed. In both Dialogues in
which the eternal Ideas first appear in this
conspicuous position, they are associated with
the thought of immortality. In the Sym-
posium the association is comparatively little

stressed. In the Phaedo it is the main theme

of the Dialogue. The capacity to apprehend

the eternal Ideas marks the soul off as
 18 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

akin to the eternal world, which is its real

home.
Just as the discovery of the differences
between " knowledge " and *' opinion " in
the Meno had been immediately applied to
problems of statesmanship in the Gorgias,
so the new conviction concerning the eternal
Ideas is made the basis of a philosophy of
(

statesmanship in Plato's masterpiece — ^the

Republic.
The Phaedo had asserted that the true
method of explanation is teleology, that is
to say, the exposition of the purpose which
determines the thing being what it is. With
the characteristic honesty which leads Plato
always to offer an extreme instance, he now
meaning by desiring that some-
illustrates his

one should prove whether the world is round

or flat by demonstrating that one or the other

is better ; for whichever is better, that it will be.

(Phaedo 97 d, e.) In the Republic this principle
becomes the metaphysical background of all

his pohtical thought. ( The Ideas are all of

them subordinate to a supreme Idea the —
Idea of Good. The statesman, therefore, is

to be so trained that he may apprehend this

 —

i GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 19

supreme principle of the universe, and may

then so govern his state that he will cause it

to fulfil its true place in the universe which

that supreme Idea controls.) The relation
of his and ethics to his ultimate
politics

philosophy must concern us more precisely

in the next lecture ; at present it will be best
to illustrate, as far as we
what he means
can,
by an Idea. [An Idea is the most real thing
in the world it is that by conformity to which
;

all physical objects have their qualities it is ;

that in physical objects which the mind grasps ;

and it is the perfect satisfaction of the mind

that grasps To these four functions of the
it.

Idea we have four corresponding EngUsh

words Fact Law, M eaning and Truth.} Let
, ,

us consider the Idea in each of these functions.

(a) The Idea of Justice which he is seeking
in the Republic then becomes what we may call
the Fact of Justice. When we use this phrase
we do not simply refer to the just quaUty of
just acts ; one might say, for example, " the
fact of the justice in the world makes the
pursuit of selfish ends a fool's game " or ;

we might —
say "the fact of generosity is

itself the refutation pf cynicism." In each of

c 2
 ;

20 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

these two sentences what we should be

insisting upon would not be the just quality,
or the generous quality, of certain acts or
powers, but the reality of the justice and of
the generosity, and this particularly as throw-
ing light upon the scheme of reality as a whole.

If love is real, the whole world is different

from what it would be if love were not real.
How different, is a question still to be deter-
mined ; but such a phrase as " the fact of love,"

as of justice or generosity above, would only

^

be used by someone who wished to imply

certain inferences with regard to reality at
large.

(b) We are all familiar with the conception

of Laws of Nature, for example, the Law of
Gravitation. But no one has ever experi-
enced a Law of Nature ; they are grasped by
the mind only. And there are some of-
them, as I am assured by students of science,
which never can represent any actual facts
and yet they are true. The Law of Gravita-
tion itself, for example, only acts in co-opera-
tion with other laws or forces, e.g., friction and
the like. No one ever saw it at work in its
purity. I remember once asking a scientific
I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 21

friend about a Law which I beUeve is known as

Boyle's Law of Gases; I asked whether all gases
really behaved exactly as the Law described
them, and he replied Oh no —
none of ''
!

them do ; they would not be gases if they did."

And yet the Law is a true Law ; only some-
thing else about the gas prevents it from quite
coming off ; the particular never realises the
idea. must add that I know nothing con-
I

cerning gases on my own account, and I

always have a shrewd suspicion that the
students of science spend their time in pulling
the leg of the lay public.
(c) Meaning is something which the mind
grasps on the occasion of certain experiences
of the senses, but which the senses themselves
can never reach. Physically regarded, the
Plays of Shakespeare consist entirely of

twenty-six curiously shaped black marks on

white paper, arbitrarily arranged. Anyone
who did not know English might look at the
printer's ink for ever and ever without getting
any further ; l)ut on the occasion of seeing
this printer's ink arranged in curious shapes
the mind of an English reader grasps the
meaning of Shakespeare. The meaning then
 —

22 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

is in some sense contained in the physical fact,

but it is same as the physical
certainly not the
fact. So people ask with regard to the war
'*
What is the meaning of such things happen-
ing in God's world ?
" The facts are certain

enough ; the meaning seems to be something

other than facts.
(d) All this is most of all conspicuous in

relation to Truth. When people ask for the

real Trutli about the world, or about life, they
are wanting something beyond what their
experience has given them ; otherwise they
would not and there would be no philo-
ask,
sophy and no art. The truth of the world
must be the interpretation of experience, no
doubt, but it is something which in our ordinary
work-a-day experience we have not found.
When, then, we consider the four great
functions of the Platonic Idea, we see easily

enough that Plato had full warrant for in-

sisting that it is something distinct from the
physical reality which partially embodies it,

and that it must be grasped by the mind alone

and can never be reached by the senses.
The eternal Ideas which are thus appre-
hended by the intellect supply the object of
I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 23

knowledge which could not be found in the

perpetually changing material world. Con-
cerning everything that belongs to this terres-
trial existence we can never have real know-
ledge, but only opinion. In the Meno the
difference between right opinion and know-
ledge had consisted in the addition to the
former of its ground, but now the two have
different spheres altogether, and it is only
of the intellectual world that knowledge is

possible. /The relation between the Ideas and

their Particulars is at this stage described

under three figures : (a) the Particular par-

ticipates in the Idea (Symposium, 211 b) ;

(6) The Idea is present in the Particular

{PhaedOy 100 d) ;
(c) The Particular imitates

the Idea (Republic, X, 597, 598).j In this last

book of the Republic, for the first time since

the explicit formulation of the ideal theory
of the Symposium and Phaedo we are con-
fronted with( Ideas, not only of attributes
such as the *'
beautiful," the " just," and the
hke, but of things such as a " bed."^ Plato
there speaks of the ideal bed which is the
creation of God, and in imitation of which the
^ Bntjfj, the ideal shuttle m the Cratylvs,
24 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

carpenter, or whoever else it may be, makes a

material bed.) (We note in passing how all

this is preparing for the line of thought

familiar in the Epistle to the Hebrews, con-
cerning the Heavenly Tabernacle and its

earthly counterpart.) We shall see in a

moment that th's development, while in-

herent in the logic of the whole Ideal theory,

none the less prepares the way for a great
change which was to come over Plato's philo-
sophy ; but not yet. The Phaedrus belongs to
the same date as the Republic ; the great myth,
which is its supreme glory, shows just that
combination of philosophic grasp and poetic
intuition which is the great characteristic of
this period in Plato's work ; but the Dialogue
ends with an expression of despair concerning
philosophic writing, and it would seem that
after it there was a long pause.
The next Dialogue in date is probably the
Thecetetus, but it may be the Parmenides,
which belongs to the same period. Let us
take the latter first for convenience in ex-
position. In RepuhliCy Book X, there had
appeared the argument known as the TpLTo<i

avOpcDTTo^ argument. The argument was there

I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 25

introduced to prove that each Idea is single,

for if there were two, this would not be the

real Idea, which would appear behind them
as the principle of their unity ; e.g., if we sup-
pose two ideal beds, we shall have to suppose
another which gives to each its character,
and this will be the real Idea. (597 c).

In the Parmenides this same argument is

applied with ruinous effect to a certain form

of the Ideal theory itself (132 a), for a third

Idea is wanted connecting the Idea with its

Particulars, and so ad infinitum. The same

fate awaits the extension made in Republic, X,
of the Ideal theory to physical objects. He
asserts there the existence of the Ideal bed.
But this, too, leads to absurdities. In the
Parmenides (130 c) Socrates confesses per-
plexity as to whether there are Ideas of Man,
Fire, Water, and so on, and himself urges
that to maintain the existence of Ideal Hair
or Ideal Mud would be to fall an abyss
into
of absurdity. We see then that two of the
developments contained in Republic, X, supply
the occasion for attack on a certain form of
Ideal theory, which attack is developed in the
Parmenides ; moreover, I believe this forr^i
26 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

to be one which Plato himself had at least

provisionally held. Socrates, the represen-
tative of the Ideal theory, is here defeated in
the argument. Surely it is legitimate to infer
—refuted by
that the Ideal theory here refuted
Parmenides and upheld by Socrates — meant ^is

to be that which in former Dialogues Socrates

has so often maintained. Moreover, the
precise point of attack in the Parmenides is the
relation between the Ideas and Particulars,
and especially three theories of this relation,
namely, those of the Symposium, the Phaedo,
and the Republic, mentioned above.
We are therefore not surprised that in the
Thecetetus, which belongs to the same period,
a wholly new start is made with regard to the
—
question " What is knowledge ? " Whether
we call this the new Platonism, or the first

genuine Platonism, will depend upon our views

about the responsibility of Socrates or Plato
for the doctrines mentioned hitherto. At any
rate, there can be no doubt that, from this
time onwards, Plato's thought makes a new
start and follows a new line^ The Thecetetus
begins with the question—h' What is know-
ledge ? " Its main contribution is to be found
 — ;

I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 27

in its assertion of certain known principles

which quahfy all experience (184-186). These

"
are " being " and " not-being," " likeness

and *'
un-hkeness," ''
identity " and " differ-

ence," " unity "

and " pluraUty." It is

maintained that inasmuch as these are applic-

able to the objects of all the several senses,

they cannot be actually received through
sensation. They are principles belonging to
the mind itself, which is thus shown to be one
and the same agent in all acts of sensation
seeing, hearing, smelling, and the like. It will

be noticed that in this argument Plato has

anticipated the Kantian theory_of Categories
and of the Unity of Apperception. It is

curious that this great argument should have

lain for all the centuries almost unheeded until
Kant set it forth with far less lucidity than
PlatoJ) The fact is that here, as so often,
Plato's^grasp of the problem is so direct and
complete, that men whose minds are less clear
do not realise that he has handled it at all.

When the argument is developed in a couple

of hundred pages it begins to impress us
when its essence two pages we have
is stated in
not yet reached the problem by the time that
 ;

28 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

Plato has given a solution and passed on.

While I am dealing with the capacity of Plato's
insight to leap the centuries and anticipate
the greatest advances of modern philosophy,
I must allude to the section of the Sophist,
where, reviving the problem of error from the
Thecetetus (188-200), he solves it by means of
a doctrine of negation which anticipates what
we often regard as Hegel's chief contribution
to Logic (236-260).
We may now sum up the results of this
discussion. Plato begins with the conviction
that man possesses moral knowledge. This ait

once implies the existence of a permanent

object of knowledge, at least in the moral
sphere, but our ordinary experience does not
itself give the ground for such knowledge ; it

is itself perpetually changing and it does not

perfectly represent the principles of which it is

the expression. The truth which corresponds

to real knowledge is only found by deeper
insight and wider apprehension than is obtain-
able at the level of ordinary experience.
At the crown of the whole system as repre-
sented in the Republic is the Idea of Good
whether Or not Plato thought of this as some-
I GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 29

thing personal when writing the Republic,

there is no doubt that later on his supreme
principle is the purpose or thought of a
Living Grod. So he exclaims in the Sophist
(248 e) :
"
Can we ever be made to believe
that motion, and life, and soul, and mind, are
not present with perfect being ? Can we
imagine that being is devoid of life and mind,
and exists in awful unmeaningness, an ever-
lasting fixture ?
" Again, in the
Philebus
(30 c), we find him speaking of the " royal
mind of Zeus." In the myth of the Timceus,
written near the end of his life, he tells us that
God made the world because He was free from
all jealousy, and desired to share His own
perfection as widely as possible (29 e). Per-
haps the greatest height that he ever reaches
is in the Thecetetus (176 a, b), where he says
that the wisdom of man is to fly from this
world to the spiritual world, and this flight

consists inbecoming holy and just and good.

" Evils cannot perish, Theodorus, for there

must always be something opposing good, nor

can they find their place among the gods,
but they attend of necessity upon our mortal
nature and this terrestrial sphere. We should
30 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY i

endeavour to flee from this region to that with

all speed ; and by flight is meant a resemblance

to God as far as is possible ; but to resemble
Him become just and holy with wisdom.
is to
Indeed it is no easy task, my friend, to per-
suade men that the majority are wrong in the
reason which they assign for fleeing wicked-
ness, and pursuing virtue :—I mean, the
avoidance of a bad reputation, or the acquire-
ment of a good one ; this, as it seems to me, is

an '
old wives' tale,' as the saying is. The
truthwe may put in this way. God is in no
manner of way unjust but utterly and abso-
lutely just, nor is there anything more like to

Him than whosoever among men becomes as

just as possible."
 LECTURE II

ETHICS AND POLITICS

Plato starts, as we saw in the last Lecture,

from Socrates' conviction of moral certainty.
Morality, the sphere in which this certainty is

found, is itself the science or art of social life.

The principles which Socrates regards as un-

questionably knowable are those which govern
the relations between men within the system
which is called Society, the City, or the State.
Plato's whole thought on this subject is deter-
mined by his behef in human immortality.
All the concerns of this world, public and
private ahke, are to be viewed in the light of
eternity. One of the strongest instances of
the effect which this produced is to be found in
his account of the life that the true philo-
sopher should live in this wretched world.
''
He will be like one," says Plato, " who
31
32 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY n

cowers behind a wall out of the storm of hail

and sleet, counting himself happy if he can
escape unspotted to the other world."
(496 d, e.)^ With this, of course, we must con-
trast the duty of the philosopher in the ideal
State ; there he will take his full part, de-
serting his contemplations to share in the
government, because in that State he will be
genuinely at home.
Politics for Plato becomes, in consequence
of this perspective, entirely subordinate to
ethics. The State is to be so fashioned that
the influence of its organisation may create
in the souls of its individual citizens that
habit and proportion which is profitable for
eternity. It is quite true that in the details of

his political organisation Plato seems entirely

to sacrifice the individual to society ; but this,

after all, is in the end for the individual's own

sake. Justice in the State is a mere image oL,
the true justice which is a condition of the ,

individual soul (443 The true criterion of

c).

a Constitution is to be found by asking what

training for eternity it affords. To make the
^ All references in this Lecture are to the Republic unless
otherwise specified.
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 33

matter clear, we may at this point contrast

the view of Aristotle, who believed indeed in
the eternity of spirit, but not at all in individual
immortaUty. The result is that for him there
is nothing beyond the life of society by which
that life itself is to be judged. The test of a
j

Constitution would seem to be its stability j®

and capacity for resisting change ; while the
ideal life for man is something not socially
serviceable in any high degree, so that ethics
and pohtics fall right apart. Aristotle seems
to care more for the individual, because he ,

cares more for the individual's temporal con-

cernsand freedom, but inasmuch as he prefers
the good citizen to the good man when these /

two ideals fall apart, it is clear that for him |

the State comes first, and the individual

second ; while in Plato the individual as an ^
eternal souTcomes first, ana it is only his
temporal concerns that are sacrificed to the
State — this sacrifice itself being demanded
for the sake of the Individual's eternal welfare.

The method which Plato would wish to

ideal
apply in the sphere of pohtics and ethics is that
which he outlines as actually at work in his
ideal State. Kings are philosophers, but they
D
 34 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

are ideal philosophers ; in other words, govern-

ment is to be conducted by knowledge of the
eternal truth. The philosopher king, who has
seen the Idea of Good which is the governing^
^> i
principle of the whole universe, will so order his
T State that it may properly discharge its func-
'
tion as that function is determined by this
supreme Idea. In modern or Christian terms,
Plato's demand is for a State which shall be.
governed in all its details in accordance with the
known purpose of God for His universe. This
explains the curious, and at first sight baffling,
extension of the area of inquiry in the Republic,
He begins with the search for individual justice
(Book I). He then remarks that justice is a
term used of States, not only of Individuals,
and we shall see it on a larger scale and
therefore in a more easily recognisable form in
j
the State than in the Individual. He there-

I fore constructs his ideal State to embody the

principle of justice. Alike in the State and
Individual soul, justice turns out to consist
in the true performance of its own function by
each constituent element (Books II-V). But
then this same law suddenly expands into the
governing principle of the universe, for the
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 35

Idea of Good which allots to all other principles

their sphere of operation is nothing but
justice on a cosmic scale ; and so through
individual morality, State organisation, and
ultimate theology, he traces one principle.
He has found it indeed by beginning with the
individual, but it is only perfectly understood
when it is grasped as cosmic ; consequently
the philosopher king must be trained up to
that apprehension, and in the light of it will

administer the State.

From this it follows that the perfect con-
stitution and the perfect science of poKtics
aUke require as their starting point and
ground a knowledge of the Idea of Good ; but
this knowledge Plato emphatically says that
he does not himself possess (506 c-507 a) . He
beheves that the most intellectually gifted of
citizens, if trained according to his scheme of
education, and under the influence of the whole
moral atmosphere of his ideal State, would
attain to this knowledge and govern their
State in the Ught of it. Plato himself must fall
back upon a provisional method and his ;

method in ethics and poUtics is as a fact not

metaphysical but psychological. A poUtical
D 2
36 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

constitution, he says, both springs from the

characters of the citizens, and then reproduces
itself in those characters again (435 e, 544 d,

491a-497a, 547b-580a). If, for example, a

State gives great honour to wealth, this can

only be because the citizens regard wealth as
of peculiar importance ; but children born in
the State which thus honours wealth will be
ledby its institutions to pay to wealth the
same honour. A plutocracy is bad, not chiefly
because it is unstable and liable to revolution,
but because it rests upon a moral standard
which and a symptom of disease in the
is false

soul. It is from this conviction that the

whole analogy between the State and the
Individual springs.
No doubt Plato constructs his State in such
a way as to make the parallel as close as
possible, but he shows in one or two casual
phrases^ that he is himself quite aware that
the parallel is not actually so close as he has
drawn it, and in two passages, widely separ-
ated, he insists that it is from the spiritual
root, and not from the superficial resemblance,

that the analogy springs (435 544 There

7 ^ E.g.y el aWa
e,

arra fxera^v rvyxo-vei ovra (443

d).

e).
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 37

is a condition of the soul which is inherently

good and healthy. A good constitution in
the State is therefore one which springs from
and perpetuates the good spiritual condition

of the Individual. The excellence of this

spiritual condition is entirely independent of

the fact of the soul's eternity, but when that
is brought into account ever3rthing other than
spiritual excellence immediately becomes negli-
gible. So the State is criticised from a rigidly

moral point of view, and the ideal State is

that which is at once the expression and the

seed-plot of beautiful characters, and is, more-
over, the best school for eternity.
We have already noticed that Aristotle
seams to have no ultimate principle by which
he criticises the State. His method is for the
most part inductive ; he considers what in-

stitutions there have been, and tries to infer

from their merits and defects in working what

is the best available. Plato, looking into
human nature with the thought of immor-
tahty always present to him, imagines a State
which should be the perfectly congruous home
of the perfect character. No doubt by the
end of Book IX this has become a city in
38 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

Heaven, which he despairs of com- realising

upon earth but it is one upon which
pletely ;

a man may gaze and fashion the constitution

within his own soul after its pattern. In a
similar way, with regard to individual ethics
we find that Aristotle is in the end of theday
purely intuitionist ; there are many acts which
are to be done merely because to do them is

noble, and to shirk them is base. At one time

we had thought that he was going to give us
the principle which determines nobility and
baseness, when he tells us that virtue lies in a
mean between two extremes, and that this
mean is determined by that principle which
the wise man {i>p6vLfio<;) would apply. But
when we ask who is the wise man we are only
told that it is he who applies the right principle.
For practical purposes this works well enough.
We do know as a fact the kind of man whose
moral advice we value in cases of perplexity.
But as science the position is plainly in-
tolerable ; we have not been brought any
nearer to understanding why a given act is
right. Plato is intuitionist, as every man must
be, about the end ; but there is only one end,
which is justice. With regard to all particular
 "

II ETHICS AND POLITICS 39

actions and principles Plato is ruthlessly /

utilitarian: the useful is noble, and the p

harmful is base (457 b). The general objec-
tion to a utilitarian criticism of morals is not
really that it justifies moral action by an end
beyond itself, but that the end which it pro-
poses is pleasure. It is the hedonism of

Bentham and Mill, not their utilitarianism,

that is the real flaw. With regard to such
questions as the relation of the sexes most
men need to fall back either upon prejudice
or intuition ; the two are not always easy to
distinguish. Bentham would consider what
arrangement most conduces to the greatest
happiness of the greatest number, and inter-
prets happiness in terms of pleasure. Plato
will be equally utiUtarian ; the arrangements
and conventions must be such as most effec-

tively serve the highest good but for him the

;

highest good is by no means pleasure ^it is —

justice. And here we may parenthetically
remark that his whole system fails just inl
proportion as justice itself falls short of Love.
About the end, if there be an end, man must
be intuitionist, and therefore Plato does not
try to justify his ideal man or his ideal State. .
 ;

40 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

He draws the picture and says —Do you like

it or not ? But once that ideal is accepted as
the end, ever3^hing else falls into place as
means to that end. He is very near that
interpretation of morality which says that to
love God and to love man is the whole of the
moral law, and that all particular actions or
departmental principles are to be determined
as love to God and man on each occasion
prompt. For this reason Plato is, of course,
rather shocking to respectability, and no doubt
there is work a lack of reverence for the
in his
authority of tradition. But the tradition of
civilisation in his time was still very short

the Greeks, whose life is symbolised by their

walled cities, knew that barbarism lay all
about them and that they were only just
raised above it. They did not look back to
two thousand years of history in a society
which they believed to be inspired, even
though the treasure be in earthen vessels.

And so Plato is able practically to ignore all

conventions, and try to think out the whole

problem for himself, j Of course his solution

will not work. His proposed abolition of the

family, his communism in husbands, wives,
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 41

and children, however wisely regulated and

however strictly conducted, ignores elementary
facts in human nature, and would result in
making men more selfish, not, as he hoped,
more self-devoted moreover, it postulates
;

an understanding by the rulers of the intimate

characters of their subjects such as no philo-
sopher king, nor anyone less than Divine,
could ever have. But then the honesty and
thoroughness of the attempt make his failure

more instructive than the success of most

other men, here as in so many departments
of his work. At least his method is one by
which a complete- systematic grasp of the
moral life of man, whether individual as in
ethics, or corporate as in politics, is possiblej

We now turn to the actual analogy between

the State and the Individual which is the most
familiar feature of the Republic. It is really
based upon an analysis of the human soul,

though Plato develops the outline of his

Constitution first, and only discovers the

psychological parallel afterwards. Let us
therefore change his order and take first the
analysis of the Soul.
Its governing principle is simply this.
 ;

"^PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

! There are three primary relations in which a

man may stand to other men, and there are
/ only three. He may ignore them, he may
compete with them, and he may co-operate
with them. No doubt these three can be
combined in an infinite variety of ways.
For example, in a game two
of football the
teams co-operate in creating the enjoyment of
the game, but the enjoyment depends upon the
competition between them, for if one side does
not play up there is no fun. Consequently,
within the whole co-operative system of the
game there is a competitive element which is

vital to it. But again in this competition

each team co-operates ; to be a good in-
dividual player is to be good in co-operation
the selfish player, however brilliant, is always
an inferior player. But there may in either
team be some wretched individual who plays,
not for the sake of the game, but for the sake
of exercise, and so far as motive is concerned
he has no regard to other persons at all,

whether in the way of competition or co-

operation ; he takes advantage of this com-
petitive co-operative activity to satisfy a
purely self-regarding desire. This illustrates
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 43

the way in which by being mixed together the

three primary relations may be concealed from
anything but rather close observation. It
remains true, however, that one or other of
must be present between
these three relations
any two men existing in the same universe,
while all may of course exist together.
The elementary desires pay no attention to
other persons. When I am hungry I need
food, when I am thirsty I need drink. ^ Here
there is no relation to other people impUed at
all. In a vicious social system it may be true
that I can only get my food by virtually
robbing someone else of it, and so far I become
involved in competition ; or like Sir Phihp

Sidney, I may when thirsty forgo satisfaction

^ In order to insist on our thinking of the desires in their
simplicity, Plato introduces a long section (437 b-439 c)
to explain that each desire is of an object and that the
object is only qualified if the desire is. Thirst is desire
for drink ; if I am very thirsty I desire much drink ; if

I am hot and thirsty I desire a cold drink ; if I am cold and

thirsty I desire a hot drink. Will it be believed that some
German critics, thinking that the qualification should be the
same on both sides of the relation, alter the MS. and make
Plato say that if I am hot and thirsty I desire a hot drink
and if I am
cold and thirsty I desire a cold drink ? One
wonders even a German professor was ever known to run
if

into a shop out of a blizzard and exclaim, " I am frozen to

death ; give me an iced lemon squash."
 ——

44 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

of my thirst for the sake of another, but this

is not done in so far as I am thirsty, but in so
far as I am also generous.The life of desire
then is purely self -regarding, and the function
of the desires is simply to maintain the basis of
life. But the separate desires are not only
entirely void of relation to other persons,
but they are atomistic in themselves. The
desire for food may be quite isolated from the
real nature of the whole self, may the
so desire
for drink. In fact, these desires may easily
conflict with the real good of the whole person,
or even with his deliberate purpose, so that by
indulging in them a man may wreck both
himself and the purpose of his life. They are
self-regarding, but do not attain to the level
of self-respect.
This is reached by the second division of
the Soul which we
perhaps re-
dvjxo^, may
present in English by the word " spirit,"
understood in that sense which it bears in the
phrase ''
A man of spirit," or by the word
''
devil " in the sense which it when we
bears
say of someone
— " He has no devil in him."^
^ It is possible that a very profound philosophy of evil
lurks in this expression, with its apparent recognition of the
value of qualities clearly evil if held in proper subordination.
 :

II ETHICS AND POLITICS 45

dvfjLcx; does regard the self as a whole in con-

trast with the desires which ignore the whole
that they constitute ; but it sees the man
always in distinction from, and in competition
with, other men. Its leading word is Honour,
and perhaps its temper is best expressed in the
words attributed by Blougram to Gigadibs
" Best be yourself, imperial, plain and V
true."
Above this stands reason, whose function it

is to realise the self as a member of the com-

munity, and therefore to perform those tasks
which fall to it as such a member ; in other
words, it is co-operative.
Two things are clear about this scheme. \
In the first place there is a real function for (

each of the elements of the soul in the perfect

Ufe. If the desires are not satisfied life will ^

cease altogether ; 6vijlo<; will play its part

in protecting reason against any attempt
of desires to go beyond their true province or
against such oppression by other men as might
deprive the man of scope for the service he
is qualified to render ; for the man who has
once learned that he is essentially a member
of a community will only satisfy his self-
46 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

respect, will only gain such honour as he cares

to have, by living up to his membership.
Consequently, if reason is supreme there is a
place found for the other elements ; but if

Ov^o^ is supreme reason is given no place ;

and if desire is supreme then neither reason

nor 6vfjbo<; can find a place.
Secondly, we have obviously here the basis
of three types of society : anarchism, individ-
uaUsm, and socialism in its true and philo-
sophical sense. Before, however, passing on
to this, it may be worth while to deal with
the complaint that Plato seems to personify
the different elements in the Soul, and to ignore
its unity. After all, it is one man who has
desires and ambitions and duties. That, of
course, is quite true, and Plato was as well

aware as anybody else of the fundamental

unity of the Soul ; so he says in the Thecetetus
(184 d) that it is ridiculous to regard the various
faculties as sitting side by side in the Soul
like the Greek warriors in the Trojan horse.
But here he is concerned with personality as
exhibited in action, and everyone is aware
that his character as exhibited in action is a
variable thing. There are days when desires
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 47

seem to run riot ; there are periods when he is

conscious of his dignity and is liable to act

with haughtiness ; there are other times
when he is really concerned to render the kind
of service that his gifts make him fit to render.
The task of moral training cannot be better
expressed than in the phrase which governs
Plato's thinking at this point " Out of many :

to become one " (443 e) that is, to gather up

all the different impulses and instincts and
perceptions, and bind them into one whole
which shall be harmonious both with itself

and with its neighbours in the social fabric.

The State, according to Plato, has three main
divisions corresponding to the three main
divisions of the Soul. The bulk of the
population will always be concerned with
ministering to the Desires, that is to say, in
the production of food, clothing, houses, and
everything else necessary to the bodily life

of man. But the State might need to defend

itself, and therefore a certain number of citizens

in whom the spirited element is most conspicu-

ous will be set apart as its guardians, and
again from among these those whose rational
faculty is greatest will be selected for training
48 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

as rulers. These three classes provide the

skeleton which is necessary to the existence
of a State, but inasmuch as the life of desire
goes far beyond mere maintenance of physical
existence, there will also be those who minister
to what he calls the unnecessary passions.
These will include the whole range of artists,

from those concerned with the fine arts to those

who make an art of what can be treated as bare

necessity, such as high-class cooks, etc. The
multiphcation of these he considers will also
involve a considerable increase in the number
of doctors. As he pictures this extension of

his primary State or City of Pigs, he says that

an extension of territory will be necessary for
the accommodation of these adjuncts, and that
this is the original reason for the institution of
soldiers and he takes occasion at this point
;

to affirm, Hke St. James, that the origin of

war is that " ye lust and have not." Still it
is rather for defence than for aggression that
the military class is really required, and
perhaps also because Plato, who dreamt of

practical reforms as well as ultimate ideals,

desired that his ideal State should be actually
founded and become the leader of Greek
 —

11 ETHICS AND POLITICS 49

civilisation against Persian barbarism (369 b-

376 c; 469b-471c).
jiisticft, whethey in t}i^ >^^n1 r^v \j}
^I^a .^^iiafp,

c onsists in the doing by each element of lust

that which it is jEttted to do._ Wisdom resides

in the rational faculty alone, and the wisdom
of the State in its ruling class. Courage resides
in the spirited element and the military class.

Temperance consists in each of the three

elements or classes refraining from interference
in the affairs of one another. Justice is the
positive side of the same virtue, and consists
in the right performance by each element or
class of its own function. There must be in
the State perfect equality of opportunity, and
loyalty is always to be primarily given to the
whole community. It is for the second of these

objects that he desires to abolish the family

whether in the two higher classes or in all the
State, for this point is not made clear. He
will have no narrower loyalty that may hinder
complete devotion to the whole State. No
doubt he is here psychologically wrong. It is
only through learning loyalty in the smaller
society, to which the child can recognise its

obligation, that we become capable of the

E
50 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

wider loyalty ; but, of course, Plato has

abundant basis in experience for saying
that very often the narrower loyalty in fact
prevents a true loyalty to the larger unit.
Men do often put their family before their
country, perhaps not usually in war, but very
generally in peace, and a Christian must add
that nearly men put their
all country before
humanity and the Kingdom of God. The
abolition of the family also secures incidentally
equality of opportunity. Children are all

brought up under the same influence and given

the same chances, and they are to be allotted
by the rulers to that class for which their
faculties fit them. The child of a philosopher-
king who is not distinguished either for

courage or wisdom will go into the class of the

craftsmen ; and the child of the craftsman
may become a philosopher-king (414b-415 d ;

432b-434c; 443b-444a; 457 b-466 d).

^he ideal State then is one in which the

true constitution of the Soul is exemplified
on the larger scale of political organisation

(443c). And this is made clearer by the

account which Plato gives of cities which fall

short of the ideal. This account is given in

II ETHICS AND POLITICS 51

a semi-mythical form as though it represented

[

actual history, but the procedure is logical i^

and not historical, and represents the giving
of supreme power to various elements in
human nature other than reason in a downward
series. He imagines that his State has been
founded ; but if so it will come under the
general law that all which has growth must also
suffer decay (546 a). It is free from the seeds
of decay within and therefore the
itself,

moment when the decay sets m must be

determined by something outside itself. He
suggests in solemn language that there is a
geometric or earth-measuring number whose
completion will inevitably initiate decay.
The controversy, that rages round the question
what exactly this number is, is itself enough to
show that it was never very specially meant
to be any number in particular that Plato ;

knew it for such we shall find evidence a httle

later no doubt it was intended for a Magnus
;

Annus of some sort.

The first stage in decay is where 6vfjLb<i \ ^
becomes supreme in the soul and the military
class in the State. Such a city was Sparta
in Plato's time ; such a State perhaps is

E 2
52 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

Prussia, according to its own estimate of

itself, in the modern world. Here the supreme
concern is glory for the State and honour for
the Individual —^honour interpreted, not as
the maintenance of moral integrity, but as the
maintenance of reputation, the kind of honour,
in fact, that takes offence at an insult. There
is still self-respect and therefore self-control,
hut the general spirit is aggressive and dis-

agreeable. In the next stage the unnecessary

passions, for example the passion for wealth,

have won supremacy in the Soul, and the

political constitution becomes an oligarchy,
or as we should say plutocracy. Here too
there is some self-control, because for the
making of money a certain restraint upon the
more violent passions and a certain concentra-
tion of purpose are needed ; but the con-
stitution, whether of the Soul or of the State,

is now precarious ; both political power and

social position are in the hands of a few men
who are doing nothing whatever to deserve
them. The soldier-leaders of a timocracy are
after all serving the State and offering their

lives for it ; the plutocrat does nothing of the

kind. There is no principle of any sort to
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 53

justify his position, and consequently the great

mass of citizens are ready to rise against him.
Similarly, in the Soul the unnecessary desires
can give no reason to the more elementary
passions why they should be kept in check.
This is represented in Plato's mythical story,
by the suggestion that as the oligarchical man
is the son of a timocratic man, so for his
own son he has a democratic man. He is

unable to impart to his son the principles

which have kept him at least respectable,
because these principles have no rational
basis ; and so in the son all passions run riot
together, while in the democratic State
citizens claim the right to do everything ; for
by democracy Plato means mob-rule. The
representative system had not been invented,
though it is true that the Athenians elected
their chief executive officers. The great vices
of democracy as he understands it arise from
the unwillingness of anyone to recognise the
superiority of anyone else, in any department
whatever. It is an attempt at equality, not
only of opportunity, but of influence and
power. And so he says it is a kind of bazaar of
constitutions, which acts upon different prin-
54 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

ciples almost every day ; and the corre-

sponding man is whom now this passion,
one in
now that, is uppermost. One day he may
choose to be a profligate, another day he may
choose to be an artist, another day he may
choose to govern the State or lead an army.
He may possibly be very clever and attractive,
but there is no constancy about him and no one
can trust him. There is only one stage worse ;

that is where in the Soul a single violent

passion has won control over all the rest, and
the corresponding State is one where a single
citizen —not himself fitted for rule — ^holds all

the power. The philosopher-king is a despot,

who governs for the sake of the subjects,
as reason is a despot governing the Soul for its

fullest good. The tyrant is a despot who

governs for the sake of himself, as the tyran-
nical man is one whose soul is under the
oppression of one of its own parts which is

unfit to rule. Worst and most miserable of

all things is that tyrannical man who has
attained the position of tyrant in a State.
For here the single violent passion which
governs his soul forces all the resources of the
State into its service. For the description
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 55

of such a man Plato says we must go to one

who has lived in the house of such a tyrant,
and has himself the insight to reaUse the facts.
He is, of course, thinking of his own experience
in the court of Dionysius of Syracuse (547 c-
580 a).
At the and
close of this series of States
Individuals we have another Pythagorean
number, and its quality throws hght on the
former. He says that from the philosopher-
king to the oligarch is 3 ; from the oligarch
to the tyrant iswe multiply these together
3 ; if

we get 9, but we want a solid result so we ;

cube it ; and the cube of 9 is 729 and this is

;

very nearly, but not quite, twice the number

of days in a year ; so the philosopher-king is

happier than the tyrant every day and every

night of his life. Plato counts one stage twice
over ; he multiphes when he ought to add ; he
cubes the product for no reason at all ; and
the result is a number which is nearly but not
quite one to which a wholly fantastic signi-
ficance could be given. Plainly the whole
thing is a satire on the humbug of mystical
numbers, but I need not add that the German
commentators are seriously exercised as to the
56 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

rationale of the philosopher's procedure (587 b-

588 a).

I have deliberately given the outline of the

ideal State and the process of decay from the

ideal to tyranny before stating how it is that
in the Republic the ideal State ever came to be
constructed. This is because the argument of
the first Book, and even of the first part of
Book II, usually strikes people at first as
being singularly sHght and inconclusive. It
is only when read in the light of what comes
afterwards that its real significance is appre-
ciated ; for the significance is first and fore-

most dramatic and not logical. Kephalus,

the devout old man, maintains that for a man
who is just and who is provided with the means
of rendering his duty to gods and men death
has no terrors. Socrates at once asks him
what is this quality of justice which saves a
man from the fear of death. But Kephalus
does not answer ; he hands over the argument
to his son and himself goes out smiling to offer
sacrifice. The simple faith of his serene old

age need not be disturbed (327 a-331 d). His

son Polemarchus is a well-brought-up young
man, but he has to live in a world where
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 57

questions are being asked that were not

common when Kephalus was young, and
unless he can give a reason for the hope that
is in him he is likely to be driven into cynicism
and perhaps from that to the abandonment of
morality even in practice. Polemarchus be-
gins by quoting Simonides ; he appeals, in
fact, to authority. Justice is to render to
each his due. This, as a matter of fact, is true
enough, though it is always a superficial
statement ; but Polemarchus attaches no
particular meaning to it ; he has not thought
it out, and so, as Socrates debates the question,
he is reduced to complete perplexity. It is

important to notice that one of the confusions

that Socrates introduces arises from the
question—^What is the sphere or department
of justice ? Every other art has its own
department ; medicine is the art of healing,
cookery the art of cooking, and so on. What
is the sphere of justice corresponding to these
two ? And no sphere is discoverable. The
attempt to allot one results by a process of
ingenious argument in the view that justice
is itself a special department of the art of
stealing. The whole point of this argument,
58 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

of course, is the error of its starting-place.

Justice has no special department because all
life is its department, and we presume suf-

ficient justice in our doctor or our cook to

safeguard us against being poisoned by them.
As soon as a special department is sought
there is none to be found, and justice becomes
useful only in uselessness (331 e-336 a).
The conventional beliefs of the well-brought-
up young man have broken down he is ;

succeeded by Thrasymachus, the clever but

superficial cynic. In the dialogue these two
phases must be represented by two persons,
but in fact they are two stages in mental
growth. Everyone who has watched under-
graduates passing through their University
course has seen Polemarchus change into

Thrasymachus, generally I think about the

beginning of the second year, in a score of
instances. According to Thrasymachus all

moraUty is a convention, and on the whole a

bad one. The true principle of Hfe is the

interest of the stronger ; the weak must go

to the wall ; it is just that the strong should

control them or trample on them. But Thrasy-

machus himself cannot defend this position
 II ETHICS AND POLITICS 59

in the end, for it really involves in practice

that the ruler of the State must be infallible.

What is to happen if he enacts something which
is contrary to his own interest ^that is, the —
interest of the stronger ? Is the subject, or

weaker, to serve what is the interest of the

stronger, or what the stronger thinks to be his
interest ? No coherent answer can be given
to this question, and so cynicism itself also
breaks down (336 b-354 c). In the same way,
the philosophy of Nietzsche, which is Thrasy-
machus turned into poetry, involves either the
same incoherence or else a perpetual state of
anarchy while the superman is being discovered.
In the process of this purely dialectical argu-
ment Socrates has estabUshed three points
which stand firm. One is that it can never be
- just to inflict an injury , for to injure is to make
worse, and it is contradictory to say that
justice can make a man worse, i.e., more
unjust. It may or may not be right to in- /

flict pain ; but it will only be right to inflict

pain when it is inflicted as a medicine. Con-

sequently, Polemarchus' paraphrase of Simon-
ides^ that we should benefit friends and injure
enemies, must be rejected. The just man will
 —

60 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

not injure his enemies in any real sense of the

word injury (335 b-d). The second principle
2- "which has been established and stands firm
is that rulers as such are concerned not with
themselves but with their subjects ;
just as
the shepherd qua shepherd is concerned, not
with himself, but with the sheep. If he is

paid for it and if he only tends the sheep for"

pay, he does all that as a money-maker and

not as a shepherd ; but the duty of a shepherd
is not to make money but to care for the sheep

^ (341 a-347 a). The third principle is that

Justice is a principle of union and therefore
of strength, while Injustice is a principle of
disunion and therefore of weakness. Even
a gang of robbers, if it is to be effective in
villainy, must be held together by its members'
respect for one another's rights. Justice is

therefore already seen to be what in the Ideal

State it explicitly becomes — ^the principle of

—^co-operation (348 a-352 d).i

Conventional beliefs have broken down, and

1 The closing argument of the Book (352 d-354 c) is in its

place a quibble on the two senses of

" live well " sc. live

agreeably and live virtuously. The identity of these two

isestablished, and the argument retrospectively justified,

by subsequent developments.
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 61

cynicism has broken down ; the argument is

now taken up by Glauco and Adeimantus, who

are Plato's two brothers, and in whom he has
embodied the two main streams of his philo-
sophic ardour. Glauco is the uncompromising
idealistand Adeimantus the practical re-
former, and from now to the end of the
dialogue Glauco is always the interlocutor in
the more ideal passages, and Adeimantus in the
more practical. Indeed Adeimantus several
times breaks in when the argument seems to
be becoming too idealist and remote from
facts, recalling Socrates to the question —^What
can we actually do ? {e.g., 362 d, 449 b, 487 b).

Glauco now undertakes to revive the argu-

ment of Thrasymachus, not because he believes
in it, but because he thinks Socrates' refutation
up till now inadequate, and so he will state
the argument as forcibly as he can in the hope
that he may hear Socrates refute its strongest
claims. The argument which he advances is
this. All men are by nature selfish. If left

to themselves they would live in what Hobbes

describes as the state of nature, wherein
the life of man is
''
solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short." As soon as anyone
62 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

possesses anything he finds all the rest against

him, and so there is security for nobody.
Consequently men have made a convention
neither to commit nor suffer injury. What
would be best for each, namely, to commit
injury with impunity, is out of reach. It is
worth while to recognise the rights of others
in order to secure one's own ; morality is just
the compromise arrived at by selfish men,
in order that through setting a certain limit
upon their selfishness they may secure a
considerable measure of selfish enjoyment.
If men could be sure of always escaping
detection by having, for example, the power
to become invisible at will, no one's con-
science would be strong enough to stand the
strain, and men would indulge in every sort
of pleasure —^wholesome and horrible. On
the other hand, if there should appear in the
world a man perfectly righteous and caring
for righteousness for its own sake, he would
appear to others to be an assailant of morahty
because he challenged their own moral habits,
and they would scourge and crucify him.^

* fxaaTiyd)a€Tai .... reXfUTwj/ Trdvra kuko. naOatv dvaa^iv-

dv\ev6^<r€Tai (361 e).
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 63

And so morality itself is, in fact, not the

supreme good, but the lesser of two evils, and
if any man can ignore it and be sure of impunity
he will do so, and will be wise in doing so
(358 e-362 c).

Here Adeimantus takes up the tale. Not

only, he says, do men what Glauco
believe
has just said, but you cannot expect them to
believe anything else when they are educated
as they are ; for the poets, who are our only
authority for beheving in the gods, themselves
represent them as having nothing in par-
ticular to do with righteousness ; their ex-
ample is disastrous to the morality of man ;

and there are quack-priests in the world

ready to offer absolutions and perform re-
quiems by means of which, at a trifling cost,

men may escape the penalties of their mis-

deeds. So the part of a wise man, as it would
seem, is to commit robbery and offer sacrifice

out of the proceeds ; so he will make the best

of both worlds (362 d-367 e).

It is in answer to the two brothers that

Plato sketches the ideal State. Society would
arise if men were simply and entirely selfish,

as Glauco has said ; but Society would also

 64 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

arise if men were wholly free from selfishness,

for men have different gifts, and each needs the

gifts of all and so, apart from all competition
;

or selfishness, men would as a matter of fact

co-operate according to some ordered scheme.
The ideal State is society as it would be if

men were thus wholly free from selfishness.

Actually society no doubt rests upon both

principles at once. In so far as it is repre-
sented by the police and the law courts,
Glauco's theory is true ; and most of us would
have to confess that if the penal sanctions of
morality were all abohshed, our own standard
of conduct would be likely in one respect or
another to decHne. But there is also in actual
society an immense element of fellowship
and co-operation; and political progress has,
in fact, consisted in the development of the

element of fellowship as against the element of

mutual antagonism ; that is to say, in the
development from society as Grlauco repre-
sents it, towards the ideal State which Socrates
constructs.
Justice as the governing principle of the
ideal State is, as we have seen, the requiring
from each man of the service he is fitted to
I
 II ETHICS AND POLITICS 65

render. No doubt in abstract logic this works

out as identical with justice, as Polemarchus
following Simonides defined it—the rendering
to each his due. For rights and duties are
correlative terms ; my neighbour's duties are
constituted by my rights, and my duties by
his rights. But in practice the two are very
different. In the first place, it is much easier
for a man to determine whether he is doing
his utmost for society than to determine what
is really due (that is, what will be truly bene-
ficial) to any given individual. If all men will

solve their own problem of doing their very

best, the other problem will have solved itself.

But even more important than this is the

distinction in moral atmosphere. Polemar-
chus' phrase lays all the emphasis on rights,
and would suggest a society of persons, each
claiming his just rights. Socrates' definition
lays the emphasis on duties, and suggests a
society of persons eager to render each his just
meed of service. Perhaps there is nothing so
important for our modern democracy as to
learn this transference of emphasis from rights
to duties.
Glauco, then, is answered by the construc-
F
66 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

tion of the Ideal State. Morality as we know

it is very often adopted as a mere compromise ;

but it need not be so ; and morality in its own

nature and when loved for its own sake turns
out to be the highest good for men.
The answer to Adeimantus follows similar
lines. Contemporary education is very apt
to be as bad as he says it is but it is capable ;

of reform and we can conceive a type of

;

education which will be a real training in

morality. The governing principle in Plato's
educational "Scheme is that character must be
moulded before the intellect is trained. The
primary business of elementary education is

so to mould the impulses and instincts that

the child will spontaneously love and hate the
right things. The child is to be brought up
in such surroundings as will make goodness
attractive. It must have no personal ex-
perience of evil at all. When it meets with
evil in later life it will recognise it by the
jarring discord between it and the character
that its early environment has moulded.
Morality here differs from Science. It may be
a good thing that a doctor should have had
experience of disease, for he heals body with
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 67

mind, and the bodily disease may not damage

his mind. But the judge must not have
experienced moral evil in his own soul, for
he has to heal soul with soul. We cannot
make moral experiments, for to introduce
evil into the soul vitiates the very faculty by
which we afterwards pronounce judgment
(408 d-409 d). There is a danger that the soul
itself may become possessed by a lie, and then
it can no more grasp the truth, even if it gazes
on it, than a warped mirror can accurately
reflect what is before it (382 a and b). To train
the intellect if the character is unsound may
only enable a man to be successful in his
villainy ; this will be bad for society but also
for himself, for it will make him content with
vice (376e-403c).
Plato is under no illusion with regard to
the greatness of the moral task. He knows
that virtue is only attained at great cost and
effort. The apparent sacrifice of the in-

dividual to the State in Book V is the measure

of his apprehension of the difficulties in the
way. Perhaps, however, the parable in Book
IX represents the matter still more forcibly.

He says that we must fashion in our minds a

F 2
68 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

composite image. First there shall be a many-

headed monster which represents the life of
desire, and then smaller, but very formidable,
a lion, representing the element of self-assertion
or Ou/jLo<;, and lastly, far smaller than this, a
man representing the rational principle. All
of these we must enclose in the outward form
of a man. That is human nature ; and the
moral task consists in reducing the many-
headed monster into complete subordination
to the tiny man, and forming an alliance be-
tween the man and the lion on terms which
the man dictates. The whole scheme of the

Ideal State, not only as regards Education,

but also in the principles of its political con-

stitution, is intended to facilitate the per-

formance of this task, the development of the

humanity in man (588 c-592 b).

It may perhaps be asked—^What has become
of free-will ? Is it ignored ? Perhaps we
must answer that for practical purposes it is
ignored. But then surely we must add that
all political discussion is bound to ignore it.

Environment does, to an immense extent at

least, determine character, and when we are

discussing what we can do to form the char-

II ETHICS AND POLITICS 69

acters of citizens, we must leave out of sight

the possibility that some individuals may make
the most adverse circumstances material for
their moral achievement. We should indeed
remember (and it may fairly be held that Plato
forgets) the fact that the deepest springs of
human nature can only be appealed to through
something which arouses sympathy. Plato
has this fully in mind in his educational
scheme, but when he comes to the Constitution
he seems to leave it out of sight. The ultimate
problem of free-will, however, is fully present

to his mind. •
In the myth with which the
Dialogue closes, the souls of men in the other
world are represented as being brought before
the throne of Necessity to choose the genius
which shall govern their life after reincarna-
tion. The various lots are set out before
them, and a voice is heard proclaiming that
each must choose for himself ;
" the re-

sponsibility is with the chooser —God is

blameless. "1 Taken as mere prose, this seems

to place the act of free-will in a moment
previous to birth, after which it would seem
that we merely work out the result of the

^ alria iXoiifvov dfos dvairios. (617 e.)

70 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

choice then made ; indeed it is because of that

choice that philosophy is represented as so
supremely important. A man who has lived
well, but without Eeason, will indeed depart
undefiled to the other world and for the thou-
sand years of pilgrimage there will enjoy the
rewards of his virtue ; but on having to choose
upon earth he may make
his lot for a future life

terrible mistakes through not knowing the

real standards of value and so he may return

;

to earth and live the life of a villain, and

depart again to the other world, needing this
time the purification of its punishments.
Perhaps at this point one may remark that
these punishments for Plato are all to be
remedial so long as remedy is possible ; but
there is, he thinks, a condition of soul which is

incurable ; and then, as no good can be made

out of the man for himself, he may still be
turned to some good through being used as a
warning to others. Such was Ardiseus the
Great ; he, at the end of a life of tyranny,

had died a thousand years before the vision

was seen. The souls who had passed through
this world with him inquire, as they prepare
for reincarnation, where the great tyrant is ;
II ETHICS AND POLITICS 71

there are some who answer that they had seen

him emerge from the pit, but before he reached
its mouth men of fierce and fiery countenance

seized him and hurled him back. There is in

Plato's theology a Hell for those who have
passed beyond the reach of all spiritual
healing, but only for them.
But all of this is part of a myth ; it is all of
it poetry, not science. It signifies the infinite

and eternal significance of the moral choice,

and also the truth that somehow or other man
is responsible, though God is supreme ; and
there it is left. The problem of free-will, as we
know it, is not one which Plato has made the
subject of definite philosophical discussion.
The last paragraphs make it clear that in
Plato's view there are indeed rewards for
justice, and punishments for injustice ; but
these are only introduced at the very end and
after justice has been pronounced the best life

for man. It had been demanded by Glauco

(361 c, d) that this should be demonstrated
without any regard to the consequences of
justice ; and the Ideal State was conceived
and the philosopher-king described, to meet
that demand of Glauco. For indeed the
72 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

highest good can never be justified. To

justify is to approve as righteous by reference
to some external standard righteousness ; itself,

therefore, which constitutes the standard,

cannot be justified ; we can only describe it

and ask —Do you like it or not ? In the

passage concerning the Idea of Good Glauco
suggests that by this perhaps Socrates means
Pleasure ; but the suggestion is repudiated in
words which imply that it is blasphemy (509 a).
Nor is the highest good Happiness in any
possible sense of that word, for this still

subordinates what is right to what is agreeable.

The highest good is Justice itself — ^but Justice

and not Love.

Plato never took that step which seems to
us to be so easy for him ; in the supreme
moment he is terribly stern ;
pleasure posi-
tively terrifies him ; it is the one subject
about which he seems to be the victim of
prejudice. Until Christ came, every image of
God was an idol ; until Christ died, every
conception of the Divine Love was soft and
sentimental, unless it were balanced, as we
see it balanced in the prophets, by an element
of sternness which may be logically incompat-
 —

II ETHICS AND POLITICS 73

ible with the other, but is morally necessary.

Forgiveness of sins is demoralising, unless it is

offered at an overwhelming cost to the par-

doner. If God merely says " Never mind,"
that is an insult to the better kind of man
and an encouragement to the worse kind.
But when God has set forth the tremendous
cost at which alone He can forgive, everything
is changed. There is nothing so humbling as
that one's friend should say ''
You have
betrayed me, and no words can express the
pain it caused ; but it shall not disturb our
friendship." There is nothing in that demoral-
ising, nor anything that can encourage the
basest. But this revelation had not yet been
given, and we see Plato lacking just the one
element that would have made his philosophy
coherent and his morality complete. He
somewhat resembles Ezekiel, one of the ten-
derest of all the prophets, who seems to shrink
in a kind of horror from allowing that God
can be moved by pity for men. The word of
the Lord, as he hears it, promises acts of
compassion, but always goes on to say that
these will be done, not for the sake of men,
but for the glory of the Lord who does them ;
74 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY ii

the prophet who demands unselfishness in men,

represents God as altogether self-occupied,
because he dare not commit himself to the
doctrine of Divine Love, which must be
blasphemous if it is not true. So Plato
leaves us at the last strangely cold. We do
not want to live in his Ideal State ; it would
be dull and mechanical. We do want to
feel the emotions of pity and tenderness which
he regards as weakness. His absolute morality
is in the end repellent, because the revelation

which alone can give it attractive power had

not yet been granted to men.
 LECTURE III

PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY

The aim of this Lecture is to suggest a

number of points in which Pl ato approache s
pr pre pares for the Christian interpretation of
^

life. We have already seen that the whole

of his moral and pohtica l philosopl^y is con- ,

structed against the background of a. hplipf \p \

hujnan_immortality . No doubt this belief as

it arose among the Pharisees had a more

direct influence upon primitive Christian
thought, but it has often been pointed out
that the existence of the Gfreek conception
of immortality was one of the main factors
enabling the Church to survive the disappoint-
ment due to the postponement of the Second
Coming. The Jewish form of the behef had
been, at least to a considerable extent, materi-
alistic, as is shown by the question of the
75
7Q PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

Sadducees. The Resurrection of the body in

a very literal sense was anticipated. But
Christianswho had died in the faith were
becoming very many and their bodies were
undergoing the ordinary process of corruption.
The Resurrection hope, as Pharisaism had
tended to encourage it, was becoming almost
untenable. It would appear that in the

Church of Corinth there was a party who

called themselves the ''
Spirituals," who main-
tained a belief in purely spiritual immortality
and were liable in consequence to ignore the
body and all morality that is immediately
concerned with the body. Against them St.

Paul has to strive, but he definitely concedes

that the crude form of the Pharisaic hope must
be abandoned. " I admit this point," he says
(for that is the force of the Greek words),
" that flesh and blood cannot inherit the

Kingdom of God."^ In his own earlier

writings he had spoken in terms at least

suggestive of a crudely physical resurrection,
but in his later works the terms appropriate
to the Greek view become more frequent.
To die is now apparently forthwith to be at
1 1 Cor. XV, 60.
 ;

Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 11

home with the Lord.^/ Plato cannot, indeed,

be given the credit for the whole of the Greek
doctrine of immortality, but his teaching in
this matter was of immense importance.] Let
us then follow out the steps of his main argu-
ments on the subject.
It would appear from the Apology that
Socrates was an agnostic on this subject
to die may be to pass to a better life or it

may be to pass into nothingness ; he is only

sure it cannot be a passage to anything evil,

for " it is not possible that evil should happen

to a good man in life or in death, nor is his_

welfare neglected by the gods " (40 c-41 d). In \

the Phaedo, however, the doctrine of immor-
taht^; is asserted and defended. Let us attend
to the various arguments which Plato advanpes
on behalf of it. (1) The first is this : (AH
things that have opposites are generated out
of those opposites ;
greater from less, sleep
from waking, death from hfe, and —we may
infer by analogy— ^life from death ; our souls
therefore must have existed in Hades before
our birth in order to be born into life (70 d-

72 d). (In passing we notice that Plato thus

1 II Cor. V, 8.
78 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

assumes life before birth and life after death

to stand and fall together ; what he is really
concerned with is the capacity of the soul to
exist independently of the body.) This rather
unconvincing argument from analogy is re-

inforced by the insistence that if there is no

return from death to life, then, inasmuch as
all that lives passes into death, a time must
come when life is extinct and the whole uni-
verse is dead, which Plato regards as incon-
ceivable (72 b, c). (Here we must note that
the permanence of life is assumed, but, still

more important, the possibility of new creation

is not even contemplated ; in the Republic
it is even more definitely excluded (611 a)).

(2) The second argument is purely Platonic ;

it is concerned with his doctrine that know-

ledge is Recollection. We never saw perfect
equality or perfect straightness ;
yet we have
the thought of them. How did we acquire it ?

It must be because we saw them in a life

before birth, and the approximately straight
lines, the approximately equal magnitudes,
wh'ch we see in this physical world, revive

the recollection of the ideal which before

birth we had apprehended. So the soul must
 — ;

Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 79

have existed before birth to have received that

apprehension (72 d-77 a). " But this does not

prove that the soul continues to exist after

death." Yes it does, if we combine it with
what was said above about the generation of

opposites from opposites (77 c-77 d).

(3) A brief dialectical argument is here

introduced to controvert the notion that the
soul may at death be dissolved into its parts.
The soul is simple, and therefore indissoluble.
But Plato's own grasp of the unity of the soul
was at this date less complete and less well
grounded than in later times (77 e-81 c).

(4) That Plato attached only small import-

ance to this argument is shown by the fact
that Cebes, one of the interlocutors, admits
that Socrates has proved the soul to be longer-
lived than the body, but not that it is eternal
and unless it is eternal, it may perish at any
occasion of death, even though it has pre-
viously survived both death and birth many
times, and indeed may in any one life or
period of incarnation perish before its body
just as a man outlives many coats, but his
last coat outlives him (86 e-88 b).
This draws from Socrates what is at this
80 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

stage Plato's last argument on the subject.

We noticed before that opposites arise from
one another ; the great becomes small, the
hot becomes cold, and so forth. But the
opposite ideas do not pass into one another.;
for instance, greatness does not become small-
ness nor does heat become chill. Further,
entities whose nature it is to possess one idea,
never admit the opposite^ snow cannot
become hot, nor fire become cold. Now it is

the function of the soul to make alive ; for

life and death are distinguished by the presence

or absence of soul ; in other words, the soul as
such possesses life, and therefore cannot
admit death. The soul therefore is deathless
and imperishable (102 d-106 d).
That is, in the Fhaedo, Plato's final argu-
ment it is plain that it has no cogency. It
;

does indeed prove that there cannot be a dead

soul ; the soul cannot be, and be dead, any
more than the fire can be, and be cold. But
the fire may go
and Plato has not proved
out ;

that the soul cannot go out, and altogether

cease to exist. He establishes that the soul
is, in one sense, deathless [aOdvaTov^ 105 e),

but this sense is such as to make illegitimate

Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 81
\
his further conclusion that, if deathless, it

must be imperishable {avdoXedpov, 106 c).

I have spent time on the arguments of this

Dialogue because they show the kind of diffi-

culty under which the whole subject labours

when handled from the philosophic point of
view, but also because Plato points unerringly
to the vital matter when he says that what we
need is, not a proof of mere survival, but of
the eternity of the soul. Survival for a
limited period only postpones the evil, and
utterly fails to safeguard the interests, whether
ethical or sentimental, which cause men
to care for immortality.
It is also interesting that in this very
Dialogue almost any reader feels that Plato
trusts more to the actual behaviour of Socrates

at the moment of death than to his arguments

just before, to produce conviction. Crito asks
how Socrates wishes to be buried. " How you

Hke," says Socrates, " if you can catch me.

But I am going away." He will not wait

till the last possible moment to drink the hem-
lock. As the chill creeps up his body, he
uncovers his face and says to Crito
—" I owe | j

Arclgpiusacock ;
pay the debt^don^tforget."
a
82 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

The cock was the offering of poor men to

Arclepius, the god of healing, which they
presented on recovery from an illness ; So-
crates died poor, for he had taken no fees such

as the Sophists required ; so it is only the

poor man's offering that he can make. But
his death is a recovery and involves some
offering to the god of heahng ; he is recovering
from the fitful fever of life (115 c-118).

In the Republic he has another argument.

Nothing perishes but by its own disease ; if

a man dies of poison the poison does indeed

kill the body, but only by first throwing it

out of gear, and introducing into it disease of

its own. But the disease or evil of the soul
is injustice and injustice manifestly does not
;

kill the soul, for it may co-exist with great

Ltality (608d-611b).
Plato never repeated the arguments for
immortality which he elaborated in the Phaedo
and the Republic. But in the Phaedrus, a
Dialogue of about the same date as the Republic,
he has an argument of a wholly different kind.
Here he argues that because the soul is the
source of its own movement, or, in other words,
is essential activity and does not only become
Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 83

active through communicated impulse from

without, it has in itself the principle of eternal
life. But it is doubtful whether the argument
is intended to prove the eternity of every
individual soul as such or only that of the
spiritual principle in the universe. It is true
that it is only vaHd as applied to the latter.

And this seems to have been recognised by

Plato himself, for in the Timceus he has come
round to the point of view, which in this
Lecture I should desire to urge, namely, that
the soul is not immortal in its own right, but
has immortahty conferred upon it by God.
It will be remembered that in this Dialogue
he comes very near to the Christian doctrine
of creation. He is attempting to explain the
origin of the world ; God, he says, is good,
and therefore free from all jealousy ; conse-
quently He desired that there should be as
many beings as possible to share His perfection
(29 e). Upon the spiritual beings whom He
thus creates He confers the eternity which
belongs of right to Him alone (41 a, b). You
will see how close this is to the Christian
doctrine that God is Love, and created a
universe on which to lavish His love.
G 2
 84 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

Plato, then, consistently believes in human

/ immortality, though the arguments with which

/ he supports that belief vary at different dates ;

I
and the eternal world is for him at all times
\ a sphere of judgment. Three of his great

\ Dialogues—the Gorgias, the Phaedo, and the

\ Republic—end with a myth concerning the

I
passage of the soul from this world to the
!
other ; and each contains a vision of judgment.
As we have seen, it is only the incurable who
are punished eternally : some such he believes
there are. They are used good for the only

purpose they can any longer serve, namely,

to warn others they are past the point at
;

/ which it is possible to treat them as ends in

themselves, and it becomes legitimate to
regard them as means only. We may not>
assent to this, yet we cannot but recognise
that, terrible as the judgment is in Plato's
presentation, his conception of God is more
merciful than that which has many times
been presented as the doctrine of Christianity.
This naturally leads to our second main
topic, which is Theology proper. Here his

leading principle is very simple, though it

leads to immense perplexities ; for the leading

 ;

Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 85

principle is just this : that God is good, and

therefore the author of good only (Republic,
379 a-c). This dogma is indeed laid down
primarily with direct reference to elementary
education. Plato is considering what is to be
done with the mythology which constitutes
the main part of literary education for Greek
children. He agrees with Adeimantus that
the stories told about the gods are demoralising.
But it is not only for the sake of the moral
influence upon the children that they are
banished ; they are also untrue. This does
not mean merely that they state events which
have not happened, but that they convey a
false conception of God. The former kind of
untruth Plato is quite ready to support
there are, he says, two kinds of story, and in
education we begin with what is false. By
this, of course, he means that we begin with
fables, which in an historical point of view
are not expressions of truth, but which are so
written as to leave upon the mind the true
impression. These must be written for our
children in the light of the dogma stated above.
From this it follows that the Divine must
never be associated with what is dishonourable,
86 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

and that God must not be represented as

appearing in assumed forms ; for the motives
which may occasionally justify lying can have
no application to Him, and to appear in an
assumed form is virtually to He. So far as
moral theology goes, all may be plain sailing ;

but when we come to the more philosophical

questions, difficulties begin. For in this very
passage he admits that if God is the author
of good only, he must be the author of less
than half our experience, since the evil things

in life are many more than the good things.

And yet side by side with this we have the
assertion that God or the Idea of Good is the
controlling principle in the universe. Plato
does not in any way explicitly deal with the
problem of evil on any extensive scale, but
it is clear that somehow or other he connects
it with li n^iitation in time and space, o r in
other words with finitude generally. He was
far too real in all his thought to be content
with calling it mere negation or a shadow
''

where light ought to be " ;

yet he would seem
to regard it as arising from the failure of this

temporal world to embody perfectly the eternal

principles or ideas which in their imperfect
Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 87

manner its constituent elements resemble. It

is clear enough from this that Plato is pressing
on, as it were, towards a conception of God
akin to the Christian, and we have already
seen that his doctrine of the Creation in the
Timceus comes as near as it possibly can to
the attribution of the Creation to Divine
Love.
We have seen so far that with regard to

the two fundamental problems, the character

of God and the destiny of Man, Plato comes
curiously near the Christian position. The
same can be said of his conception of moral
excellence. We saw in tracing the argument
of the Republic that in his hands_Justice is

changed from anything like a selfish claim of

rights into an unselfish rendering of service ;

and yet here too he just fails to take the last

step, for he entirely fails to appreciate the ex-
cellence of sacrifice. This is most conspicuous
in the answer which he gives to the ques-
tion whether we shall not be injuring our
philosopher-kings in calling upon them to
abandon, for a time at least, their contempla-
tion of eternal truth and condescend to the
administration of political affairs. His answer
88 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

is that in the State which we have founded

there will be no injury, for the capacity to
contemplate eternal truths will itself have
been developed by the society which they are
calledupon to serve, and we shall only be
making a just demand upon just men who for
this reason will feel no resentment at it.

But this would not be true with regard to any

actual State. There the philosopher has won
his intellectual vision in spite of rather than
by the assistance of society ; he has attained
by his own efforts alone ; he owes society,
therefore, no debt, and would not be right to
leave the better life of contemplation and
descend to the inferior life of action (519 d-
520 b).

There are two obvious comments to make

on this. The first is that, like so many
idealists, Plato ignores to a great extent the
good elements present even in contemporary
Greek society. It must have looked as if
throughout his life Socrates had been opposed
by nearly all the forces of the time, but
Socrates himself could not have emerged in a
barbarous state. He stood indeed high above
the level of contemporary Hfe, but he could
Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 89

only reach that eminence by using what was

good in that very life, and in the Crito we may
see his conviction of a debt to obey the laws
of Athens even when they pass upon him an
unjust sentence, because of all that they have
done for him in his life hitherto.
This leads to the second comment, which
refers to his exclusion of sacrifice. This is an
instance of what is perpetually discoverable in
his writings ; his theory falls short of his in-
tuition. We may mention two t>ther examples.
In the tenth Book of the Republic, he says that,
whereas the making any material
artificer in

object imitates the eternal idea, an artist

only imitates the imitation (595 a-598 d) ; but
in Book V he said that we do not blame an
artist who depicts a face more beautiful than i

any actual human face either is or ever could

j

be (472 d). In other words, when he forgets

to theorise, he knows that the artist is really
representing the eternal idea far more ade-
quately than the artificer, or even than nature ;

but when he comes to explicit theory he falls

short of that intuition.

Again, in theory he regards pity as a weak-
ness ; he will not have Achilles, who is a hero,
90 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

represented as mourning for his friend ; for

the better aman is the more self-sufficient he
will be,and therefore the more indifferent to
the Hfe and death of his friends (387 d-388 d).
He forbids us to witness certain kinds of
drama because they appeal to and develop
the impulse of pity and compassion which are
weaknesses in men (605 c-607 a). And yet he
wrote the Phaedo ; and we know that in his
heart he must have valued the pathos of the
scene described.
So it is with regard to sacrifice ; according
to his theory, to ask a man to forfeit some
self-culture for the sake of social service will
be wrong unless it can be claimed as payment
of a debt ; even then, while no injury, it is

still from the individual's point of view

regrettable. This is all due to the fact that
his mind has never grasped that for a man to
sacrifice himself for the community is good,

not only for the community, but for the man

too ; he never grasped the excellence that is

in sacrifice itself, and he is trying to judge it

by an outside standard ; but he knows that

the whole life of Socrates was a sacrifice, and
still more his death. He knows that he chose
Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 91

to die rather than live after an abandonment

of his mission, which would suggest that his
mission had been and even rather than
false,

escape from prison when the duties of good

citizenship called upon him to remain and
submit to the sentence ; and again his heart

told him that this sacrifice was excellent,

though his theory lags behind.
In short, we feel that, noble as is the picture
of Justice, it is still not love ; for love finds
sacrifice its most natural expression and does
not stop to balance up the good abandoned
and the good secured, for it knows that in
itself, active in sacrifice as it is, it has a value
greater than either. It is just this failure!
to pass from justice to love which prevents
Plato from finally rounding off his system ;

for the Idea of Good, as we have seen, is

justice in the universe.

to serve the whole ;
All the parts exist
so far so
never went on to say that the whole exists
good ; but he A
for service of the parts ; nor did anyone else
say so until God came into the world and
shewed His love alike by life and by death.
It is now obvious that Plato's works afford a
definite anticipation of much that Christianity
92 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

gave to the world. Partly, this is apparent

in the actual conclusions which he reaches,
still more in the fact that he stops short at
a point where satisfaction is not forthcoming.
He represents at once an approach to the per-
fect satisfaction of the soul, and a confession
of failure to attain to it until there was given
something that was then not yet given. But
more important even than this is the prepara-
tion which he accomplishes in what may be
called the spirit of thought. His quite reckless
idealism, his relentless criticism, and his
combination of passion with the cold light
of reason, kindle desire for a truth which
shall be able to stand firm without artificial

supports,and can satisfy, not only the intellect,

but the entire soul. At Alexandria the spirit
of Plato met with the tradition of Judaism,
and in Philo we find a deliberate attempt to
combine his writings with the Old Testament.
Plato had not himself made any prominent
use of the doctrine of the Logos, which
began with Heraclitus and became the domi-
nant element in Stoicism ; but his analysis
of the soul, with the conception of justice
as realised only when the rational element is
Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 93

supreme and allots to each of the other ele-

ments their sphere of action, and the expansion

of justice into the Idea of Good as governing
the universe, is substantially very near the
Logos doctrine. For the Logos alike in
HeracHtus and the Stoics is the supreme
rational principle by which the world is

governed. Philo combines with

This the *'

"
word of the Lord in the Old Testament, the
word which is the expression —and therefore
revelation — of the transcendent God of

Judaism ; so that everything is ready, so far as

intellectual apparatus is concerned, for St.

John's interpretation of Christ when He comes.

Moreover, it is the Platonism of Alexandria
which lies behind the whole theology of St.

Athanasius and provides the language in which

the Nicene Creed and the great orthodox
formularies generally are drawn up. In fact,

at the time of the Council of Nicea, it may,

broadly speaking, be said that to accept Plato
as philosophical master was almost essential
to orthodoxy, while Aristotle was undoubtedly
regarded with suspicion. All through the
great formative period, while the human mind
was attempting to master more and more
 ;

J
94 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

elements of Christian truth, Plato was its

guidelj^When this task was for the time ac-

comphshed, Aristotle, whose supreme genius
lay mainly in analysis, took Plato's place
for the work now to be done was not so much
the conquest of new fields as the consolidation
of that which had been won, and the ordering
of it so medieval theology, which is more
;

concerned to correlate what is known than to

reach new knowledge, is Aristotelian rather
than Platonic in principle.
modern readers that the
It is curious to
Dialogue which had most influence in the early
times was the T^mkI^s, This is partly because
it hints at certain Christian ideas (for people
have traced in it an outline of the doctrine of

the Trinity, and the Universe, which is called

'^
the Son of God," is also expressly called
" Only-begotten "), and also partly because of
the relatively accidental fact that of it alone
a Latin translation was available. But the
general conception in the Republic of a City
in Heaven of which we may even now be
citizens, also had enormous influence. When
St. Paul says " our citizenship is in Heaven "^
1 Philippians iii, 20.
Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 95

he is talking pure Platonism ; when the Epistle

to the Hebrews speaks of the earthly taber-

nacle as made in imitation of a spiritual

tabernacle in the Heavens, of which it is an
imperfect copy, it is speaking in a way for

which the Platonic theory of Ideas had pre-

pared. But perhaps more important than pro-

viding material of expression to each of these
writers,was the service which Plato rendered
to the Church through St. Augustine. When
Rome, which had called itself the Eternal City
and had been regarded as such by all civilisa-
tion, fell before the invasion of the Goths, St.

Augustine was able to rally the spiritual

forces of Christendom in loyalty to the Eternal

City of God. Of course his interpretation of

this is thoroughly Christian, but the idea

behind it originates with Plato ; and his

discussion of civilisation as displaying two

tendencies —the one towards selfishness and
antagonism, the other towards co-operation
and fellowship — is drawn straight from the
Republic itself.

Before leaving this part of the subject, it

is worth while to point out that the two strands

in Plato's thought with regard to the eternal
96 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

realities correspond to two permanent and

permanently different interpretations of the
universe. When he speaks of the separation
of the Ideas from their particulars he is using
the language of ordinary Mysticism ; the
seeker after truth or reality must turn his
back on this world and grasp the eternal in a
pure intuition. When he speaks of the par-
ticular as participating in the Idea, or of the
Idea as present in the particular (as in the

Symposium and the Pkaedo), he is on the verge

of that sacramental view of the physical
world which may be said to constitute Chris-
tian mysticism, and to be the inevitable result
of behef in the Incarnation. ^ The former
leads to Plotinus, the latter to St. John.
It is curious to notice how close is the
parallel between the Papal theory of medieval
Europe and the outhne of Plato's Ideal State.

In that Ideal State there were three main

classes —the philosopher-kings who governed
in the light of eternal truth ; the warrior class
obedient to the kings, and fighting either
1 This does not turn its back upon the creature in seeking
the Creator, but adores the Creator in His creatures. It
must be admitted that many mystics who were members
of the Church have belonged to the other school.
Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 97

for the defence of the State or for the sake of

civilisation against and the crafts-
barbarism ;

men who produced the necessities and com-

forts of life generally. So in the medieval
theory, at any rate in its Papal form, there
stood at the head of Christendom the Pope,
whose voice was to be taken as the voice of
God. Below him and under his supreme
authority, spiritually if not secularly, stood
the kings of the nations, each having subor-
dinate to him the feudal barons, just as the
kings were themselves subordinate to the
Pope. The main concern of the barons at
least was with war, and the pursuit of such
pleasures and exercises as were fitted for
warriors. Below these again came the mass
of citizens, whether serfs or free, mainly con-
cerned in the different departments of material
production. Europe under Innocent III was
an attempt to set up something remarkably
like Plato's Ideal State ; but of course it had
not the two great cementing virtues of Tem-
perance and Justice ; it lacked Temperance
as Plato defines it, inasmuch as the two lower
classes consisting, one of kings and barons,
and the other of citizens generally, did not

H
98 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

confine themselves to the performance of

their own functions, but perpetually invaded
the prerogatives both of one another and of
the supreme ruler. The system also lacked
Justice in so far as the Pope himself had not,
as indeed he could not have, that complete
knowledge of the ultimate truth which alone
can enable the philosopher-king to govern a
city by the light of it. It is made clear in
the Republic itself that unless the philosopher
is a perfect philosopher he had much better
not be king. Political power and philosophic
insight can only safely be combined when the
philosophic insight is absolute. And of course
it is for precisely this reason that the Papacy
broke down. The Papacy failed chiefly be-

cause the Popes themselves were not content

with spiritual authority derived from their
knowledge of truth, but endeavoured to back
their spiritual authorityby worldly power, and
so first came under, and then fell before, the
temptation of worldliness.
But while there is this close parallel between
the medieval theory of Christendom and the
Platonic Ideal State, it is also true that the
temper of mind in these ages was rather
Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 99

Aristotelian than Platonic. Indeed, this whole

scheme of government is an application to
politics of the subsumptive logic of the Prior

Analytics —the logic of pure deduction, which

the medieval scholastics endeavoured on all

sides to apply. For the whole principle of

this logic is to arrange terms in pyramids ;

at the apex the summum genus ; below this

the various genera or kinds ; below each of
these again its constituent species ; below each
of these the sub-species, and at last the indi-

vidual facts or persons. All medievalists

regarded society in much this way, but there
were two rival pyramids. According to the
Papal scheme the Pope actually represented
God on him held the Emperor
earth ; of ;

the various kings held of the Emperor the ;

barons of the kings and so on till we reach

;

the serfs. According to the Imperial theory,

God is Himself the apex of the pyramid ; the
Pope and Emperor, who stand on a level,
both hold of him, and from them proceed the
authorities of the ecclesiastical and temporal
officers. It is interesting to note that the
first philosophic attempt to arrive at a theory
of society from another basis simply inverts
100 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

the same process, and beginning with the

isolated individuals proceeds to construct a
pyramid with absolute monarchy at its head.
The influence of this pyramidal scheme upon
Hobbe's " Leviathan " is made perfectly plain
by the frontispiece to that work.
The theology of the Middle Ages also is
entirely Aristotelian. St. Thomas Aquinas,

the supreme expression of medieval thought,

represents the attempt to co-ordinate the whole
of Christian doctrine by means of the Aris-
totelian logic, as that logic was then understood.
The Renaissance was no doubt a movement
to which very many causes contributed ; but
one main element in was the revival of the
it

Platonic spirit as against the dominant Aris-

totelian. Plato again began to be read, having
for many centuries been almost forgotten ;

and his spirit chimed in with the aspirations

of the time, giving encouragement to the
desire to press forward into new fields of

thought, instead of being content to move

round and round the established orthodox
scheme.
But even during the centuries in which
Plato himself was Httle known, his spirit had
 '

Ill PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY 101

been at work on one most important side

of theology, for there was a steady stream
of Christian mysticism whose fountain head

was St. Augustine, and St. Augustine himself

is emphatic with regard to his debt to Platon-
ism. From him and through St. Bernard
the Platonic tendency is maintained at least
so far as concerns the aspirations of the
individual soul.
But if Plato was a considerable factor in
bringing about the Kenaissance, and in forming
the mind of St. Augustine, anyone who reflects

how much the Reformation owed to the

Renaissance in spite of its quarrels with it,

and how much Luther owed to St. Augustine,

will see at once how immensely great Plato's

influence has been upon the modern world.

This is, indeed, what might have been expected.
The Greek nation has been the source of
nearly all that is alive in thought or civilisation
as distinct from pure religion, and Plato is (

theculmination ofthe_Gree^^ It has, I

indeed, been said that Plato is not a typical

Greek ; that is true, but only because he is

more Greek than all the other Greeks together.

In him the intellectual passion which is the —
102 PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY iii

conspicuous mark of the Grreek genius —comes

not only to flower but to fruit, which bursts
and scatters its seed broadcast. Hellenism
here comes to its utmost limits and bursts
them, and Plato is left at last, wondering
whether perhaps his Ideal State may not,

even as he writes, exist somewhere outside

the knowledge of the Greeks, in what they
would call a barbarian land, and with his
whole system manifestly incomplete because
it is waiting for just that one final touch
—that one crowning glory —which only
Christianity could give.

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