下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
All things are indeed “full of gods,” Plato asserted in his final work, the Laws . And here we must address a peculiar ambiguity in the nature of archetypes—an ambiguity central to the Greek vision as a whole—that suggested the existence of an underlying connection between ruling principles and mythic beings. Although at times Plato favored a more abstract formulation of archetypes, as with the mathematical Ideas, at other times he spoke in terms of divine figures, mythical personages of exalted stature. On many occasions, Socrates’s way of speaking in the Platonic dialogues has a distinctly Homeric tone, treating various philosophical and historical matters in the form of mythological figures and narratives.
A taut irony, a playful seriousness, colors Plato’s use of myth, so that one cannot pin down precisely the level on which he wishes to be understood. He often prefaced his mythical excursions with the ambiguous ploy, at once affirming and self-distancing, of declaring that it was “a likely account” or that “either this or something very like it is true.” Depending on a specific dialogue’s context, Zeus, Apollo, Hera, Ares, Aphrodite, and the rest could signify actual deities, allegorical figures, character types, psychological attitudes, modes of experience, philosophic principles, transcendent essences, sources of poetic inspiration or divine communications, objects of conventional piety, unknowable entities, imperishable artifacts of the supreme creator, heavenly bodies, foundations of the universal order, or rulers and teachers of mankind. More than only literalistic metaphors, Plato’s gods defy strict definition, in one dialogue serving as fanciful characters in a didactic fable, in another commanding an undoubted ontological reality. Not infrequently, these personified archetypes are used in his most philosophically earnest moments, as if the depersonalized language of metaphysical abstraction were no longer suitable when directly confronting the numinous essence of things.
We see this memorably illustrated in the Symposium , where Eros is discussed as the preeminent force in human motivations. In a fine succession of elegantly dialectical speeches, the several participants in Plato’s philosophical drinking party describe Eros as a complex and multidimensional archetype which at the physical level expresses itself in the sexual instinct, but at higher levels impels the philosopher’s passion for intellectual beauty and wisdom, and culminates in the mystical vision of the eternal, the ultimate source of all beauty. Yet throughout the dialogue that principle is represented in personified and mythical terms, with Eros considered a deity, the god of love, with the principle of Beauty referred to as Aphrodite, and with numerous allusions to other mythic figures such as Dionysus, Kronos, Orpheus, and Apollo. Similarly, in the Timaeus , when Plato sets forth his views on the creation and structure of the universe, he does so in almost entirely mythological terms; so too in his many discussions of the nature and destiny of the soul ( Phaedo, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Republic, Laws ). Specific qualities of character are regularly attributed to specific deities, as in the Phaedrus , where the philosopher who seeks after wisdom is called a follower of Zeus, while the warrior who would shed blood for his cause is said to be attendant upon Ares. Often there is little doubt that Plato is employing myth as pure allegory, as when in the Protagoras he has the Sophist teacher use the ancient myth of Prometheus simply to make an anthropological point. In his theft of fire from the heavens, giving it to mankind with the other arts of civilization, Prometheus symbolized rational man’s emergence from a more primitive state. At other times, however, Plato himself seems swept up into the mythic dimension, as when, in the Philebus , he has Socrates describe his dialectical method of analyzing the world of Ideas as “a gift of heaven, which, as I conceive, the gods tossed among men by the hands of a new Prometheus, and therewith a blaze of light.”
By philosophizing in such a manner, Plato gave expression to a unique confluence of the emerging rationalism of Hellenic philosophy with the prolific mythological imagination of the ancient Greek psyche—that primordial religious vision, with both Indo-European and Levantine roots extending back through the second millennium B.C . to Neolithic times, which provided the Olympian polytheistic foundation for the cult, art, poetry, and drama of classical Greek culture. Among ancient mythologies, that of Greece was singularly complex, richly elaborated, and systematic. As such, it provided a fertile basis for the evolution of Greek philosophy itself, which bore distinct traces of its mythic ancestry not only in its initial emergence but in its Platonic apogee. Yet it was not just the language of myth in Plato’s dialogues, but rather the underlying functional equivalence of deities and Ideas implicit in much of his thought, that made Plato so pivotal in the development of the Greek mind. As the classicist John Finley has noted, “Just as the Greek gods, variable though they may have been in cult, corporately comprise an analysis of the world—Athena as mind, Apollo as random and unpredictable illumination, Aphrodite as sexuality, Dionysus as change and excitement, Artemis as untouchedness, Hera as settlement and marriage, Zeus as order dominant over all—so the Platonic forms exist in their own right, lucent and eternal above any transitory human participation in them.… [Like the forms, the gods] were essences of life, by contemplation of which any individual life took on meaning and substance.” 1
Plato often criticized poets for anthropomorphizing the gods, yet he did not cease from teaching his own philosophical system in striking mythological formulations and with implicitly religious intent. Despite the high value he placed on intellectual rigor, and despite his dogmatic strictures concerning poetry and art in his political doctrines, the distinct implication in many passages of the dialogues is that the imaginative faculty, both poetic and religious, was as useful in the quest for attaining knowledge of the world’s essential nature as any purely logical, let alone empirical, approach. But of especial importance for our present inquiry was the effect of Plato’s vision on the unstable and problematic condition of the Greek world view. For by speaking of Ideas on one page and gods on another in such analogous terms, Plato resolved, tenuously yet with weighty and enduring consequences, the central tension in the classical Greek mind between myth and reason.