Why study ancient philosophers? As Church Father Tertullian famously queried many centuries ago, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Since we have the completed Scriptures and the revelation of Jesus Christ, what need is there any longer to study those pagan Greeks who speculated so long ago about the nature of reality?

For one thing, they give testimony to the strength of even fallen human reason to draw conclusions, as incomplete as they may be, that nonetheless resonate with the created order. These men, through reason alone and without the aid of special revelation, got much more right about the way things are than many contemporary secular thinkers. In addition, although they got much wrong as well, they are even so our allies as we seek to formulate and communicate the rational basis for the Christian Worldview. In this short series, we will look at the thought of Plato and Aristotle, starting with Plato.

Indeed, Plato sought to solve this riddle by positing a separate and transcendent realm of ultimate and perfect Forms or Ideas accounting for each universal concept applied to each particular instance in the physical world. Although these perfect Forms were distinct and immaterial, their existence was objective and real, not a subjective invention of the human mind. However, the particulars in the physical world that exemplified these perfect Ideas did so but partially and imperfectly. The physical objects and actions were corrupt imitations of the perfect Ideas or Forms.  

Nonetheless, Plato held that a perfect and transcendent Form was truly an objective feature of any particular thing or action insofar as that thing or action “participated” in the ideal type. In this manner, Plato could account for the decay of a beautiful flower, the presence of corruption in an otherwise just action, or the loss of sight in an otherwise healthy person. Perfect beauty, justice, or health could only appear to some degree spoiled in an ever changing physical object or action. Hence, worldly objects or actions enjoyed only a quasi-real existence, a kind of reality that was still subordinate to the ultimate reality of the perfect Forms.

True knowledge of these universal Ideas was therefore not available through concentration on the particulars alone. The objects in the world were only “triggers” that awakened one to a transcendent realm of objective and absolute truths and prodded one to pursue this knowledge, that is, knowledge of the perfect Forms. One could only attain such knowledge through illuminated reason, not empirical observation, and those who devoted themselves to this pursuit were true philosophers. 

How did one acquire knowledge of the Forms? Plato argued that every human being was a soul entrapped in a physical body. One’s soul existed prior to this material incarceration and traveled in the immaterial realm of the Real. It was then that the soul imbibed the knowledge of the Perfect and the Absolute “where true being dwells, without color or shape, that cannot be touched.” This was a world that one could apprehend by “reason alone, the soul’s pilot…, and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof” (Phaedrus, 247 c). However, the soul fell from this pristine state and found itself confined to a body. In the process of this fall, the soul suffered severe amnesia of its previous existence.  

The goal of education was to recover and recall that which one had forgotten. By responding to the “triggers” offered by physical objects and actions, and through rational reflection and dialogue with other serious seekers, one could, by means of progressive illumination, slowly recall and regain knowledge of the perfect and absolute Ideas that the soul had come to know in its previously liberated state but had forgotten when becoming embodied.

For example, the Idea of perfect equality cannot be derived from the physical world, since no two things are perfectly equal. Yet we seem to understand the notion since we know when things are unequal. How did we come to such an understanding if it was not already given to us in a preembodied state? Such Ideas are the perfect Forms that participate in the objects of this world only incompletely, and which one fully discovers only by means of rational reflection and discourse and recollection of what one had encountered in a perfect preembodied existence. As one advances along this course of inquiry and recollection, he thereby grows in wisdom and understanding, ultimately achieving knowledge of the One, the Divine, the source of all perfect Forms.

Plato penned a now famous allegory illustrating this process of coming to know the truth.  We will consider Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" as well as how Plato’s theory of the Forms comports with Christianity in our next post.

Blessings,

Arnie Gentile