The parallels between Plato and Augustine are striking. Augustine, while being Plato's biggest critic, was a Platonist. Augustine and Plato both drew inspiration from the traumatic, tragic executions of Jesus and Socrates, two sages who also had a lot in common. Jesus and Socrates were both humble thinkers who challenged the way people thought. Both believed in an afterlife that would decide matters of cosmic and karmic justice: Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Socrates told the Myth of Er. Their teachings eventually challenged the authority of civil and religious leaders and they were both put to death (Murphy, lecture).
However the similarities between Socrates and Jesus end there. How Jesus and Socrates faced death illuminates their view of life. Socrates was less of a humanist than Jesus. He desired to find the constants of human nature but he believed the body to be evil and only the soul capable of being good. To Socrates, very few could attain the philosophical inquiry he did during life. Since life was mostly an intellectually wasteland, philosophy was "learning how to die" and death was "a cure to life." Understandably, Socrates faced his death with great serenity and poise (Murphy, lecture). Jesus on the other hand, was a great humanist, even though Christians later, for the most part, abandoned that tradition. Unlike Socrates, who was usually very calm and composed, Jesus was very passionate and empathized with his followers. He taught that life on earth was hard and that the only way people could find happiness was through compassion, loving and suffering with your fellow man. Accordingly, Jesus faced death with sadness and despair in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. While Socrates was very nearly emotionless, Jesus was very emotional (Murphy, lecture).
Augustine used Jesus to disagree with Plato and Socrates on many points. Jesus and Augustine did not believe the body to be evil. The body was created in the image of God, so to call the body evil would be equivalent to calling one of God's works evil. God is good, so what he creates can’t be intrinsically evil (Murphy, lecture). The greatest sins, as Oscar Wilde would later point out in The Picture of Dorian Grey, are enacted in the mind through rationalization. In the Bible, when Eve plucked the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she wasn't hungry. She was reasoning that the fruit would give her the powers of God. Satan and other demons are spirits and do not have physical bodies, so it is their eternal soul that must be evil (Murphy, lecture). In City of God, Bk XIX, Chapter 13, Augustine says that "the peace of the body is the ordered proportion of its parts. The peace of the irrational soul is the ordered repose of the appetites. The peace of the rational soul is the ordered agreement of knowledge an action." (Morgan, 449). For Augustine, there can be a irrational and rational soul, but there can only be a rational body. Also, he attributes base appetites to the soul, not the body. Therefore, Augustine concludes the soul cannot always be good enough to always reason rationally, undermining most Platonic assumptions.
On the other hand, in the Republic, Bk IX, Plato calls the body evil because its base appetites, or epithumia, drive the person against his reason, logos, and his dignity, thumos (Murphy, lecture). In Bk IV, 431e, he says "Temperance is surely a sort of order, the mastery of certain pleasures and appetites." (Morgan, 137). Plato believed that through reining in the body and observing the constants of nature and human nature, the reason of the soul could be perfected. In Republic Bk III, 411a, he asserts that "isn't the soul of the person thus harmonized temperate and courageous?" (Morgan, 126). Yet, Augustine counters, saying in XIX, Chapter 5 "Therefore, let us not believe that as long as we are in this internal war, we have already attained out happiness, which we will attain by conquering the flesh" (Morgan, 444). The reason we even need virtues like courage, justice, prudence and temperance are because "we are not made well" and if we are unwell, "how shall we say we are yet already happy in the attainment of final happiness?" (Morgan, 444). The war between the evil soul and the good body can not create happiness. Therefore, the enlightened republic, built on the constants of human nature can only exist in the ideal world of the mind, not in real life. In XI,2 Augustine argues that "Great it is and very rare, after one has looked at the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has discerned its mutability, to go beyond it by stretching the mind, and to arrive at the unchangeable substance of God," (Arnhart, 68). Mutable, imperfect human nature can only be seen clearly through the lenses of a perfect, immutable creator.
What about the creator? Plato argued that the best reason could bring happiness, but Augustine countered that God brings happiness. Obviously Plato esteemed the creator a lot less than Augustine did. Even though both men believed in a creator, their views could not be any more different. Plato is famous for his idea of eternal forms, ideal molds in heaven or in the mind, from which things on earth are created in the form of. Who made these eternal forms? Was it the creator? Surprisingly, the creator did not make these forms. The forms either existed alongside, or even before the creator Plato has in mind. Plato's creator is the Demiurge, or Divine Artisan who did not make the eternal forms but informs the forms. The Demiurge did not make the matter, but he did use his divine reason to shape and build it into something workable. The final product was planned and adheres to the strict rules of the eternal forms. Augustine's creator is entirely different. In Genesis, God creates both matter and form "ex nihilo," out of nothing. God does not mold or shape the matter, (with the exception of man) he simply speaks it into being. God's method of creation is analogous to procreation. No plan, or materials are created beforehand. Creation of new life just happens, and there is radical creative freedom, as opposed to the Plato's restrictive eternal forms (Murphy, lecture).
Augustine's final critique of Plato and all other non-Christian philosophers is that pride, the first and worst of all sins, prevents them from agreeing that a belief in God inspires reason, and not reason of itself. In City of God, Bk. XIX, Ch.5, Augustine says “So great is the pride of these men that while holding that the final good is found in this life and that they are made happy by their own efforts.” (Morgan, 444). Pride also prevents Plato from seeing that nature is too mysterious and unpredictable to be understood perfectly through corruptible reason (Arnhart, 68). One's reason, Augustine argues, can't be perfect enough to be the final authority on things like truth and justice. Therefore, in Christianity, God replaces the individual's reason as the final authority on truth and justice. Augustine concludes that "I believe in order to understand." (Arnhart, 71).
However, is the view of life through a window of faith truly realistic? Can natural rights only be perceived through God? In this respect, the teachings of Plato are more realistic since nature itself apart from God should be sufficient to provide the basis for natural rights and natural law. In City of God IV, 33 Augustine claims that the complexities within the flux of nature, even the purely accidental, serve a divine purpose (Arnhart, 74). Plato also admits that human perfection requires a rare combination of circumstances that can only arise by "divine chance" (Arnhart, 73; Republic, 592a; Morgan, 294). If happiness and human perfection is dependent on luck in Plato's world then in the Christian world such absurdity is removed, since God is the source of good and bad luck (Arnhart, 74, 75). Yet, referring everything back to God does not solve all problems (Arnhart, 74). Socrates would object to God being wholly good if he is the source of both good and bad luck saying "Since gods are good, they are not - as the masses claim - the cause of everything,...Of the good things, they alone are the cause, but we must find some other cause for the bad ones, not the gods" (Republic Bk II, 379c; Morgan, 107).
More importantly, Plato, and later Aristotle, argued that human nature by itself
should provide satisfactory moral standards for individual and political life (Arnhart 74). If we ignore the afterlife and its supernatural implications outside the realm of human existence, we stumble upon a more realistic view of the natural abilities of man. It is man's nature that determines what will be expected of him. For example, when conceptualizing the Guardians of the Republic, Plato says "Then our task is to select, if we can, which natures, which sort of natures suit people to guard the city (Republic, Bk II, 374e; Morgan, 104). Despite luck, some essential natural tendencies in human political activity remains the same (Arnhart, 73). Man’s ability to reason is his chief ability, and perfecting that ability will lead to happiness and the closest thing to human perfection in a human state (Arnhart 74). Striving for supernatural ideals is unrealistic and inapplicable to human politics.
For Plato, the reason and virtue of human nature found within the human soul can transcend the evils that by chance befall them in order to redeem and define justice and politics. In Republic, Bk X, 610e and 611a, Plato says that "If its own deficiency.. is not enough to kill and destroy the soul, an evil designed for the destruction of something else will hardly destroy the soul or anything else, except what it is designed to destroy..Then when something is not destroyed by a single bad thing -whether its own or an external one - clearly it must always exist. And if it always exists, it is immortal." (Morgan, 244). Plato proves the soul to be immortal, while Augustine does not prove the supposedly unrighteous soul mortal, or the supposedly righteous body immortal. That which is immortal, is by virtue of greater value than that which is mortal. The immortal soul, and it's ability to reason therefore takes precedence over the body, only virtuous in its creation by God.
Augustine might reply that all that is of God is immortal even if the body is mortal and that how can the human soul be immortal if the entire human being is mortal? In City of God, Bk XIX, Ch.13, Augustine objects to intrinsic human virtue since it arises from the nature of the soul and it is the distortion of nature that creates evil. He says "There is a nature in which there is no evil, or even a nature in which there can be no evil, but there cannot be a nature in which there is no good. Thus not even the nature of the devil himself, insofar as it is a nature, is evil. Rather it is a distortion of that nature that make it evil." (Morgan, 449). To answer this possible objection, in Meno, Plato expressed the idea that all men are born with inherent knowledge and virtues (Murphy, lecture). Life is the process by which the immortal soul recollects the inherent knowledge and virtues it is naturally imbued with.
Whether or not the body or the soul is evil is relevant when it comes to dismissing human reason entirely. Politics and reason must be interpreted according to human nature found within the human soul. The ideal or the divine is something to strive for, but since it does not exist in a tangible form within the realm of human life, it cannot be used as the only standard for justice, republics, rights or law. Jesus may have been a humanist, but Augustine is less of a humanist since he believes little good can be gained from the human nature of the human soul. Compared to Augustine, Plato is much more in touch with humanism and therefore, realism.
Works Cited
Arnhart, Larry. Political Questions - Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls. 3rd
ed. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland, Inc., 2003. Print.
Morgan, Michael L., ed. Classics of Moral and Political Theory. 4th ed.
Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Company, 2005. Print.
Murphy, James B. An Augustinian Critique of Plato. Lecture notes. October 9th 2009
- Ryu
Earlier Essay here
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