Phaedrus
which mankind in general have agreed to conceal, partly because they are
compensated by greater goods. Socrates or Archilochus would soon have
to sing a palinode for the injustice done to lovely Helen, or some
misfortune worse than blindness might be fall them. Then they would take
up their parable again and say:--that there were two loves, a higher and
a lower, holy and unholy, a love of the mind and a love of the body.
'Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.
.....
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.'
But this true love of the mind cannot exist between two souls, until
they are purified from the grossness of earthly passion: they must pass
through a time of trial and conflict first; in the language of religion
they must be converted or born again. Then they would see the world
transformed into a scene of heavenly beauty; a divine idea would
accompany them in all their thoughts and actions. Something too of the
recollections of childhood might float about them still; they might
regain that old simplicity which had been theirs in other days at their
first entrance on life. And although their love of one another was ever
present to them, they would acknowledge also a higher love of duty and
of God, which united them. And their happiness would depend upon their
preserving in them this principle--not losing the ideals of justice and
holiness and truth, but renewing them at the fountain of light. When
they have attained to this exalted state, let them marry (something too
may be conceded to the animal nature of man): or live together in holy
and innocent friendship. The poet might describe in eloquent words
the nature of such a union; how after many struggles the true love was
found: how the two passed their lives together in the service of God and
man; how their characters were reflected upon one another, and seemed
to grow more like year by year; how they read in one another's eyes the
thoughts, wishes, actions of the other; how they saw each other in God;
how in a figure they grew wings like doves, and were 'ready to fly away
together and be at rest.' And lastly, he might tell how, after a time
at no long intervals, first one and then the other fell asleep, and
'appeared to the unwise' to die, but were reunited in another state of
being, in which they saw justice and holiness and truth, not according
to the imperfect copies of them which are found in this world, but
justice absolute in existence absolute, and so of the rest. And they
would hold converse not only with each other, but with blessed souls
everywhere; and would be employed in the service of God, every soul
fulfilling his own nature and character, and would see into the wonders
of earth and heaven, and trace the works of creation to their author.
So, partly in jest but also 'with a certain degree of seriousness,'
we may appropriate to ourselves the words of Plato. The use of such a
parody, though very imperfect, is to transfer his thoughts to our sphere
of religion and feeling, to bring him nearer to us and us to him. Like
the Scriptures, Plato admits of endless applications, if we allow for
the difference of times and manners; and we lose the better half of
him when we regard his Dialogues merely as literary compositions. Any
ancient work which is worth reading has a practical and speculative as
well as a literary interest. And in Plato, more than in any other Greek
writer, the local and transitory is inextricably blended with what is
spiritual and eternal. Socrates is necessarily ironical; for he has to
withdraw from the received opinions and beliefs of mankind. We cannot
separate the transitory from the permanent; nor can we translate the
language of irony into that of plain reflection and common sense. But we
can imagine the mind of Socrates in another age and country; and we can
interpret him by analogy with reference to the errors and prejudices
which prevail among ourselves. To return to the Phaedrus:--
Both speeches are strongly condemned by Socrates as sinful and
blasphemous towards the god Love, and as worthy only of some haunt of
sailors to which good manners were unknown. The meaning of this and
other wild language to the same effect, which is introduced by way of
contrast to the formality of the two speeches (Socrates has a sense of
relief when he has escaped from the trammels of rhetoric), seems to
be that the two speeches proceed upon the supposition that love is
and ought to be interested, and that no such thing as a real or
disinterested passion, which would be at the same time lasting, could
be conceived. 'But did I call this "love"? O God, forgive my blasphemy.
This is not love. Rather it is the love of the world. But there is
another kingdom of love, a kingdom not of this world, divine, eternal.
And this other love I will now show you in a mystery.'
Then follows the famous myth, which is a sort of parable, and like other
parables ought not to receive too minute an interpretation. In all such
allegories there is a great deal which is merely ornamental, and the
interpreter has to separate the important from the unimportant. Socrates
himself has given the right clue when, in using his own discourse
afterwards as the text for his examination of rhetoric, he characterizes
it as a 'partly true and tolerably credible mythus,' in which amid
poetical figures, order and arrangement were not forgotten.
The soul is described in magnificent language as the self-moved and the
source of motion in all other things. This is the philosophical theme or
proem of the whole. But ideas must be given through something, and under
the pretext that to realize the true nature of the soul would be not
only tedious but impossible, we at once pass on to describe the souls
of gods as well as men under the figure of two winged steeds and a
charioteer. No connection is traced between the soul as the great motive
power and the triple soul which is thus imaged. There is no difficulty
in seeing that the charioteer represents the reason, or that the black
horse is the symbol of the sensual or concupiscent element of human
nature. The white horse also represents rational impulse, but the
description, 'a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and a
follower of true glory,' though similar, does not at once recall the
'spirit' (thumos) of the Republic. The two steeds really correspond in a
figure more nearly to the appetitive and moral or semi-rational soul
of Aristotle. And thus, for the first time perhaps in the history
of philosophy, we have represented to us the threefold division of
psychology. The image of the charioteer and the steeds has been compared
with a similar image which occurs in the verses of Parmenides; but it
is important to remark that the horses of Parmenides have no allegorical
meaning, and that the poet is only describing his own approach in a
chariot to the regions of light and the house of the goddess of truth.
The triple soul has had a previous existence, in which following in
the train of some god, from whom she derived her character, she beheld
partially and imperfectly the vision of absolute truth. All her
after existence, passed in many forms of men and animals, is spent in
regaining this. The stages of the conflict are many and various; and
she is sorely let and hindered by the animal desires of the inferior or
concupiscent steed. Again and again she beholds the flashing beauty of
the beloved. But before that vision can be finally enjoyed the animal
desires must be subjected.
The moral or spiritual element in man is represented by the immortal
steed which, like thumos in the Republic, always sides with the reason.
Both are dragged out of their course by the furious impulses of desire.
In the end something is conceded to the desires, after they have been
finally humbled and overpowered. And yet the way of philosophy, or
perfect love of the unseen, is total abstinence from bodily delights.
'But all men cannot receive this saying': in the lower life of ambition
they may be taken off their guard and stoop to folly unawares, and then,
although they do not attain to the highest bliss, yet if they have once
conquered they may be happy enough.
The language of the Meno and the Phaedo as well as of the Phaedrus
seems to show that at one time of his life Plato was quite serious in
maintaining a former state of existence. His mission was to realize the
abstract; in that, all good and truth, all the hopes of this and another
life seemed to centre. To him abstractions, as we call them, were
another kind of knowledge--an inner and unseen world, which seemed
to exist far more truly than the fleeting objects of sense which were
without him. When we are once able to imagine the intense power which
abstract ideas exercised over the mind of Plato, we see that there was
no more difficulty to him in realizing the eternal existence of them
and of the human minds which were associated with them, in the past and
future than in the present. The difficulty was not how they could exist,
but how they could fail to exist. In the attempt to regain this 'saving'
knowledge of the ideas, the sense was found to be as great an enemy as
the desires; and hence two things which to us seem quite distinct are
inextricably blended in the representation of Plato.
Thus far we may believe that Plato was serious in his conception of the
soul as a motive power, in his reminiscence of a former state of being,
in his elevation of the reason over sense and passion, and perhaps in
his doctrine of transmigration. Was he equally serious in the rest? For
example, are we to attribute his tripartite division of the soul to the
gods? Or is this merely assigned to them by way of parallelism with men?
The latter is the more probable; for the horses of the gods are both
white, i.e. their every impulse is in harmony with reason; their
dualism, on the other hand, only carries out the figure of the chariot.
Is he serious, again, in regarding love as 'a madness'? That seems to
arise out of the antithesis to the former conception of love. At the
same time he appears to intimate here, as in the Ion, Apology, Meno,
and elsewhere, that there is a faculty in man, whether to be termed in
modern language genius, or inspiration, or imagination, or idealism,
or communion with God, which cannot be reduced to rule and measure.
Perhaps, too, he is ironically repeating the common language of mankind
about philosophy, and is turning their jest into a sort of earnest.
(Compare Phaedo, Symp.) Or is he serious in holding that each soul bears
the character of a god? He may have had no other account to give of
the differences of human characters to which he afterwards refers. Or,
again, in his absurd derivation of mantike and oionistike and imeros
(compare Cratylus)? It is characteristic of the irony of Socrates to
mix up sense and nonsense in such a way that no exact line can be drawn
between them. And allegory helps to increase this sort of confusion.
As is often the case in the parables and prophecies of Scripture, the
meaning is allowed to break through the figure, and the details are not
always consistent. When the charioteers and their steeds stand upon the
dome of heaven they behold the intangible invisible essences which
are not objects of sight. This is because the force of language can
no further go. Nor can we dwell much on the circumstance, that at the
completion of ten thousand years all are to return to the place from
whence they came; because he represents their return as dependent on