Laws
upon religion, the greatest offence against them must be irreligion.
Hence the necessity for what in modern language, and according to a
distinction which Plato would scarcely have understood, might be termed
persecution. But the spirit of persecution in Plato, unlike that of
modern religious bodies, arises out of the desire to enforce a true and
simple form of religion, and is directed against the superstitions which
tend to degrade mankind. Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, is in favour
of tolerating all except the intolerant, though he would not promote to
high offices those who disbelieved in the immortality of the soul. Plato
has not advanced quite so far as this in the path of toleration. But
in judging of his enlightenment, we must remember that the evils of
necromancy and divination were far greater than those of intolerance in
the ancient world. Human nature is always having recourse to the first;
but only when organized into some form of priesthood falls into the
other; although in primitive as in later ages the institution of a
priesthood may claim probably to be an advance on some form of religion
which preceded. The Laws would have rested on a sounder foundation, if
Plato had ever distinctly realized to his mind the difference between
crime and sin or vice. Of this, as of many other controversies, a clear
definition might have been the end. But such a definition belongs to a
later age of philosophy.
The arguments which Plato uses for the being of a God, have an extremely
modern character: first, the consensus gentium; secondly, the argument
which has already been adduced in the Phaedrus, of the priority of the
self-moved. The answer to those who say that God 'cares not,' is, that
He governs by general laws; and that he who takes care of the great
will assuredly take care of the small. Plato did not feel, and has not
attempted to consider, the difficulty of reconciling the special with
the general providence of God. Yet he is on the road to a solution, when
he regards the world as a whole, of which all the parts work together
towards the final end.
We are surprised to find that the scepticism, which we attribute to
young men in our own day, existed then (compare Republic); that the
Epicureanism expressed in the line of Horace (borrowed from Lucretius)--
'Namque Deos didici securum agere aevum,'
was already prevalent in the age of Plato; and that the terrors of
another world were freely used in order to gain advantages over other
men in this. The same objection which struck the Psalmist--'when I saw
the prosperity of the wicked'--is supposed to lie at the root of the
better sort of unbelief. And the answer is substantially the same which
the modern theologian would offer:--that the ways of God in this world
cannot be justified unless there be a future state of rewards and
punishments. Yet this future state of rewards and punishments is in
Plato's view not any addition of happiness or suffering imposed from
without, but the permanence of good and evil in the soul: here he is in
advance of many modern theologians. The Greek, too, had his difficulty
about the existence of evil, which in one solitary passage, remarkable
for being inconsistent with his general system, Plato explains,
after the Magian fashion, by a good and evil spirit (compare Theaet.,
Statesman). This passage is also remarkable for being at variance with
the general optimism of the Tenth Book--not 'all things are ordered by
God for the best,' but some things by a good, others by an evil spirit.
The Tenth Book of the Laws presents a picture of the state of belief
among the Greeks singularly like that of the world in which we live.
Plato is disposed to attribute the incredulity of his own age to several
causes. First, to the bad effect of mythological tales, of which he
retains his disapproval; but he has a weak side for antiquity, and is
unwilling, as in the Republic, wholly to proscribe them. Secondly, he
remarks the self-conceit of a newly-fledged generation of philosophers,
who declare that the sun, moon, and stars, are earth and stones only;
and who also maintain that the Gods are made by the laws of the state.
Thirdly, he notes a confusion in the minds of men arising out of their
misinterpretation of the appearances of the world around them: they do
not always see the righteous rewarded and the wicked punished. So in
modern times there are some whose infidelity has arisen from doubts
about the inspiration of ancient writings; others who have been made
unbelievers by physical science, or again by the seemingly political
character of religion; while there is a third class to whose minds the
difficulty of 'justifying the ways of God to man' has been the chief
stumblingblock. Plato is very much out of temper at the impiety of some
of his contemporaries; yet he is determined to reason with the victims,
as he regards them, of these illusions before he punishes them. His
answer to the unbelievers is twofold: first, that the soul is prior to
the body; secondly, that the ruler of the universe being perfect has
made all things with a view to their perfection. The difficulties
arising out of ancient sacred writings were far less serious in the age
of Plato than in our own.
We too have our popular Epicureanism, which would allow the world to go
on as if there were no God. When the belief in Him, whether of ancient
or modern times, begins to fade away, men relegate Him, either in theory
or practice, into a distant heaven. They do not like expressly to deny
God when it is more convenient to forget Him; and so the theory of the
Epicurean becomes the practice of mankind in general. Nor can we be
said to be free from that which Plato justly considers to be the worst
unbelief--of those who put superstition in the place of true religion.
For the larger half of Christians continue to assert that the justice of
God may be turned aside by gifts, and, if not by the 'odour of fat, and
the sacrifice steaming to heaven,' still by another kind of
sacrifice placed upon the altar--by masses for the quick and dead, by
dispensations, by building churches, by rites and ceremonies--by the
same means which the heathen used, taking other names and shapes. And
the indifference of Epicureanism and unbelief is in two ways the parent
of superstition, partly because it permits, and also because it
creates, a necessity for its development in religious and enthusiastic
temperaments. If men cannot have a rational belief, they will have an
irrational. And hence the most superstitious countries are also at a
certain point of civilization the most unbelieving, and the revolution
which takes one direction is quickly followed by a reaction in the
other. So we may read 'between the lines' ancient history and philosophy
into modern, and modern into ancient. Whether we compare the theory of
Greek philosophy with the Christian religion, or the practice of the
Gentile world with the practice of the Christian world, they will be
found to differ more in words and less in reality than we might have
supposed. The greater opposition which is sometimes made between them
seems to arise chiefly out of a comparison of the ideal of the one with
the practice of the other.
To the errors of superstition and unbelief Plato opposes the simple and
natural truth of religion; the best and highest, whether conceived in
the form of a person or a principle--as the divine mind or as the idea
of good--is believed by him to be the basis of human life. That all
things are working together for good to the good and evil to the evil in
this or in some other world to which human actions are transferred, is
the sum of his faith or theology. Unlike Socrates, he is absolutely free
from superstition. Religion and morality are one and indivisible to him.
He dislikes the 'heathen mythology,' which, as he significantly remarks,
was not tolerated in Crete, and perhaps (for the meaning of his words
is not quite clear) at Sparta. He gives no encouragement to individual
enthusiasm; 'the establishment of religion could only be the work of a
mighty intellect.' Like the Hebrews, he prohibits private rites; for the
avoidance of superstition, he would transfer all worship of the Gods
to the public temples. He would not have men and women consecrating
the accidents of their lives. He trusts to human punishments and not to
divine judgments; though he is not unwilling to repeat the old tradition
that certain kinds of dishonesty 'prevent a man from having a family.'
He considers that the 'ages of faith' have passed away and cannot now
be recalled. Yet he is far from wishing to extirpate the sentiment of
religion, which he sees to be common to all mankind--Barbarians as well
as Hellenes. He remarks that no one passes through life without, sooner
or later, experiencing its power. To which we may add the further remark
that the greater the irreligion, the more violent has often been the
religious reaction.
It is remarkable that Plato's account of mind at the end of the Laws
goes beyond Anaxagoras, and beyond himself in any of his previous
writings. Aristotle, in a well-known passage (Met.) which is an echo of
the Phaedo, remarks on the inconsistency of Anaxagoras in introducing
the agency of mind, and yet having recourse to other and inferior,
probably material causes. But Plato makes the further criticism, that
the error of Anaxagoras consisted, not in denying the universal agency
of mind, but in denying the priority, or, as we should say, the eternity
of it. Yet in the Timaeus he had himself allowed that God made the world
out of pre-existing materials: in the Statesman he says that there were
seeds of evil in the world arising out of the remains of a former chaos
which could not be got rid of; and even in the Tenth Book of the Laws he
has admitted that there are two souls, a good and evil. In the Meno, the
Phaedrus, and the Phaedo, he had spoken of the recovery of ideas from a
former state of existence. But now he has attained to a clearer point of
view: he has discarded these fancies. From meditating on the priority of
the human soul to the body, he has learnt the nature of soul absolutely.
The power of the best, of which he gave an intimation in the Phaedo
and in the Republic, now, as in the Philebus, takes the form of an
intelligence or person. He no longer, like Anaxagoras, supposes mind to
be introduced at a certain time into the world and to give order to
a pre-existing chaos, but to be prior to the chaos, everlasting and
evermoving, and the source of order and intelligence in all things. This
appears to be the last form of Plato's religious philosophy, which might
almost be summed up in the words of Kant, 'the starry heaven above and
the moral law within.' Or rather, perhaps, 'the starry heaven above and
mind prior to the world.'
IV. The remarks about retail trade, about adulteration, and about
mendicity, have a very modern character. Greek social life was more
like our own than we are apt to suppose. There was the same division
of ranks, the same aristocratic and democratic feeling, and, even in a
democracy, the same preference for land and for agricultural pursuits.
Plato may be claimed as the first free trader, when he prohibits the
imposition of customs on imports and exports, though he was clearly
not aware of the importance of the principle which he enunciated. The
discredit of retail trade he attributes to the rogueries of traders,
and is inclined to believe that if a nobleman would keep a shop, which
heaven forbid! retail trade might become honourable. He has hardly
lighted upon the true reason, which appears to be the essential
distinction between buyers and sellers, the one class being necessarily
in some degree dependent on the other. When he proposes to fix prices