Phaedrus
(Translated by Cic. Tus. Quaest.) The soul through all her being is
immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal; but that which
moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move ceases also to
live. Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move,
and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides.
Now, the beginning is unbegotten, for that which is begotten has a
beginning; but the beginning is begotten of nothing, for if it were
begotten of something, then the begotten would not come from a
beginning. But if unbegotten, it must also be indestructible; for if
beginning were destroyed, there could be no beginning out of anything,
nor anything out of a beginning; and all things must have a beginning.
And therefore the self-moving is the beginning of motion; and this can
neither be destroyed nor begotten, else the whole heavens and all
creation would collapse and stand still, and never again have motion or
birth. But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he who affirms
that self-motion is the very idea and essence of the soul will not be
put to confusion. For the body which is moved from without is soulless;
but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature
of the soul. But if this be true, must not the soul be the self-moving,
and therefore of necessity unbegotten and immortal? Enough of the soul's
immortality.
Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large
and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a
figure. And let the figure be composite--a pair of winged horses and a
charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are
all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are
mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is
noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed;
and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to
him. I will endeavour to explain to you in what way the mortal differs
from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of
inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers
forms appearing--when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and
orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings
and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground--there,
finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be
self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of
soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no
such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not
having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal
creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout
all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of
acceptably to him. And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her
wings!
The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine,
and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates
downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods.
The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the
wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil
and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away. Zeus, the
mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in
heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the
array of gods and demi-gods, marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone
abides at home in the house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned
among the princely twelve march in their appointed order. They see many
blessed sights in the inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro,
along which the blessed gods are passing, every one doing his own
work; he may follow who will and can, for jealousy has no place in the
celestial choir. But when they go to banquet and festival, then they
move up the steep to the top of the vault of heaven. The chariots of
the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide rapidly; but the others
labour, for the vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer
to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained:--and
this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul. For the
immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand
upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries
them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven which
is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing
worthily? It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the
truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which
true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible
essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine
intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the
intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper
to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth,
is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds
brings her round again to the same place. In the revolution she beholds
justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of
generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge
absolute in existence absolute; and beholding the other true existences
in like manner, and feasting upon them, she passes down into the
interior of the heavens and returns home; and there the charioteer
putting up his horses at the stall, gives them ambrosia to eat and
nectar to drink.
Such is the life of the gods; but of other souls, that which follows
God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the
outer world, and is carried round in the revolution, troubled indeed by
the steeds, and with difficulty beholding true being; while another
only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see by reason of the
unruliness of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after
the upper world and they all follow, but not being strong enough they
are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another,
each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and
the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings
broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers; and all of them after
a fruitless toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being,
go away, and feed upon opinion. The reason why the souls exhibit this
exceeding eagerness to behold the plain of truth is that pasturage is
found there, which is suited to the highest part of the soul; and the
wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this. And there is a law
of Destiny, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in company
with a god is preserved from harm until the next period, and if
attaining always is always unharmed. But when she is unable to follow,
and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath
the double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her
and she drops to the ground, then the law ordains that this soul shall
at her first birth pass, not into any other animal, but only into man;
and the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to the birth as a
philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature; that which
has seen truth in the second degree shall be some righteous king
or warrior chief; the soul which is of the third class shall be a
politician, or economist, or trader; the fourth shall be a lover of
gymnastic toils, or a physician; the fifth shall lead the life of a
prophet or hierophant; to the sixth the character of poet or some other
imitative artist will be assigned; to the seventh the life of an artisan
or husbandman; to the eighth that of a sophist or demagogue; to the
ninth that of a tyrant--all these are states of probation, in which
he who does righteously improves, and he who does unrighteously,
deteriorates his lot.
Ten thousand years must elapse before the soul of each one can return to
the place from whence she came, for she cannot grow her wings in less;
only the soul of a philosopher, guileless and true, or the soul of a
lover, who is not devoid of philosophy, may acquire wings in the third
of the recurring periods of a thousand years; he is distinguished from
the ordinary good man who gains wings in three thousand years:--and they
who choose this life three times in succession have wings given them,
and go away at the end of three thousand years. But the others (The
philosopher alone is not subject to judgment (krisis), for he has never
lost the vision of truth.) receive judgment when they have completed
their first life, and after the judgment they go, some of them to the
houses of correction which are under the earth, and are punished; others
to some place in heaven whither they are lightly borne by justice, and
there they live in a manner worthy of the life which they led here when
in the form of men. And at the end of the first thousand years the good
souls and also the evil souls both come to draw lots and choose their
second life, and they may take any which they please. The soul of a man
may pass into the life of a beast, or from the beast return again into
the man. But the soul which has never seen the truth will not pass into
the human form. For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be
able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of
reason;--this is the recollection of those things which our soul once
saw while following God--when regardless of that which we now call being
she raised her head up towards the true being. And therefore the mind
of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always,
according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to
those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He
is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated
into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he
forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him
mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired.
Thus far I have been speaking of the fourth and last kind of madness,
which is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is
transported with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to
fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward
and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.
And I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest
and the offspring of the highest to him who has or shares in it, and
that he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of
it. For, as has been already said, every soul of man has in the way of
nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the
form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other
world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have
been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts
turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may
have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only
retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold
here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they
are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly
perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the
higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them:
they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to the
images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty.