The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of ChristianityMoore, Clifford Herschel
Religion
The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity
Moore, Clifford Herschel
Greece -- Religion; Philosophy, Ancient; Religious thought -- Greece; Religious thought -- To 600
Before we approach Plato’s ethical and religious views we must glance
for a moment at his psychology, for on that depends in no small measure
his moral system. In the fourth book of the Republic when discussing
the different forms of government, Socrates is made to show that the
soul has three parts or elements: the first is the divine or rational
part (τὸ θεῖον, τὸ λογιστικόν) whose seat is in the head, the second,
the courageous or passionate element (τὸ θυμοειδές) residing in the
heart, and the third is the appetite (τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν) which belongs to
the diaphragm or liver.[196] In the Phaedrus[197] this same division
is set forth in a myth. Now when in an individual all three parts are
in accord under the leadership of reason, whose orders are enforced
by courage on appetite, the man is virtuous; but if appetite and
courage unite against reason, discord results and the man is vicious.
As the state is well ordered when harmony exists among its parts, so
harmony of the soul, led by the reason, produces the virtuous human
being. In the earlier dialogues the soul is evidently regarded as a
unit, so that the parts are really forms or manifestations of the
soul; all three are immortal. But in the Timaeus only the reason is
immortal, the other parts being separable and bound to the body with
which they die.[198] Now we have already seen that the soul, or at
least its rational part, being divine and immortal, has an affinity
for the eternal ideas and is endowed by a natural love for the true,
the beautiful, and the good. It is therefore impelled toward the
divine world of ideas by a natural passion, and this effort on the
part of man’s reason is philosophy. The true philosopher then is the
lover of truth and reality, who is absorbed in the pleasures of the
soul so that he will hardly be conscious of bodily pleasure; indeed he
will not think much of human life or even fear death.[199] The soul,
however, in its effort to mount into the realm of the ideas, is held
back by the body in which it is imprisoned and fettered in the world
of the senses. Thus we find in Plato the Orphic belief that man has a
dual nature, made up of a divine soul and a mortal hindering body. We
shall presently see how he gave to the emotional belief of that sect a
philosophic basis and so transformed it into a reasonable article of
morality and religion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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