The Republic
natural superior ruling over the natural inferior, which he compares to
the soul ruling over the body. He prefers a mixture of forms of
government to any single one. The two portraits of the just and the
unjust, which occur in the second book of the Republic, are transferred
to the state—Philus, one of the interlocutors, maintaining against his
will the necessity of injustice as a principle of government, while the
other, Laelius, supports the opposite thesis. His views of language and
number are derived from Plato; like him he denounces the drama. He also
declares that if his life were to be twice as long he would have no
time to read the lyric poets. The picture of democracy is translated by
him word for word, though he had hardly shown himself able to ‘carry
the jest’ of Plato. He converts into a stately sentence the humorous
fancy about the animals, who ‘are so imbued with the spirit of
democracy that they make the passers-by get out of their way.’ His
description of the tyrant is imitated from Plato, but is far inferior.
The second book is historical, and claims for the Roman constitution
(which is to him the ideal) a foundation of fact such as Plato probably
intended to have given to the Republic in the Critias. His most
remarkable imitation of Plato is the adaptation of the vision of Er,
which is converted by Cicero into the ‘Somnium Scipionis’; he has
‘romanized’ the myth of the Republic, adding an argument for the
immortality of the soul taken from the Phaedrus, and some other touches
derived from the Phaedo and the Timaeus. Though a beautiful tale and
containing splendid passages, the ‘Somnium Scipionis; is very inferior
to the vision of Er; it is only a dream, and hardly allows the reader
to suppose that the writer believes in his own creation. Whether his
dialogues were framed on the model of the lost dialogues of Aristotle,
as he himself tells us, or of Plato, to which they bear many
superficial resemblances, he is still the Roman orator; he is not
conversing, but making speeches, and is never able to mould the
intractable Latin to the grace and ease of the Greek Platonic dialogue.
But if he is defective in form, much more is he inferior to the Greek
in matter; he nowhere in his philosophical writings leaves upon our
minds the impression of an original thinker.
Plato’s Republic has been said to be a church and not a state; and such
an ideal of a city in the heavens has always hovered over the Christian
world, and is embodied in St. Augustine’s ‘De Civitate Dei,’ which is
suggested by the decay and fall of the Roman Empire, much in the same
manner in which we may imagine the Republic of Plato to have been
influenced by the decline of Greek politics in the writer’s own age.
The difference is that in the time of Plato the degeneracy, though
certain, was gradual and insensible: whereas the taking of Rome by the
Goths stirred like an earthquake the age of St. Augustine. Men were
inclined to believe that the overthrow of the city was to be ascribed
to the anger felt by the old Roman deities at the neglect of their
worship. St. Augustine maintains the opposite thesis; he argues that
the destruction of the Roman Empire is due, not to the rise of
Christianity, but to the vices of Paganism. He wanders over Roman
history, and over Greek philosophy and mythology, and finds everywhere
crime, impiety and falsehood. He compares the worst parts of the
Gentile religions with the best elements of the faith of Christ. He
shows nothing of the spirit which led others of the early Christian
Fathers to recognize in the writings of the Greek philosophers the
power of the divine truth. He traces the parallel of the kingdom of
God, that is, the history of the Jews, contained in their scriptures,
and of the kingdoms of the world, which are found in gentile writers,
and pursues them both into an ideal future. It need hardly be remarked
that his use both of Greek and of Roman historians and of the sacred
writings of the Jews is wholly uncritical. The heathen mythology, the
Sybilline oracles, the myths of Plato, the dreams of Neo-Platonists are
equally regarded by him as matter of fact. He must be acknowledged to
be a strictly polemical or controversial writer who makes the best of
everything on one side and the worst of everything on the other. He has
no sympathy with the old Roman life as Plato has with Greek life, nor
has he any idea of the ecclesiastical kingdom which was to arise out of
the ruins of the Roman empire. He is not blind to the defects of the
Christian Church, and looks forward to a time when Christian and Pagan
shall be alike brought before the judgment-seat, and the true City of
God shall appear...The work of St. Augustine is a curious repertory of
antiquarian learning and quotations, deeply penetrated with Christian
ethics, but showing little power of reasoning, and a slender knowledge
of the Greek literature and language. He was a great genius, and a
noble character, yet hardly capable of feeling or understanding
anything external to his own theology. Of all the ancient philosophers
he is most attracted by Plato, though he is very slightly acquainted
with his writings. He is inclined to believe that the idea of creation
in the Timaeus is derived from the narrative in Genesis; and he is
strangely taken with the coincidence (?) of Plato’s saying that ‘the
philosopher is the lover of God,’ and the words of the Book of Exodus
in which God reveals himself to Moses (Exod.) He dwells at length on
miracles performed in his own day, of which the evidence is regarded by
him as irresistible. He speaks in a very interesting manner of the
beauty and utility of nature and of the human frame, which he conceives
to afford a foretaste of the heavenly state and of the resurrection of
the body. The book is not really what to most persons the title of it
would imply, and belongs to an age which has passed away. But it
contains many fine passages and thoughts which are for all time.
The short treatise de Monarchia of Dante is by far the most remarkable
of mediaeval ideals, and bears the impress of the great genius in whom
Italy and the Middle Ages are so vividly reflected. It is the vision of
an Universal Empire, which is supposed to be the natural and necessary
government of the world, having a divine authority distinct from the
Papacy, yet coextensive with it. It is not ‘the ghost of the dead Roman
Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,’ but the legitimate heir
and successor of it, justified by the ancient virtues of the Romans and
the beneficence of their rule. Their right to be the governors of the
world is also confirmed by the testimony of miracles, and acknowledged
by St. Paul when he appealed to Caesar, and even more emphatically by
Christ Himself, Who could not have made atonement for the sins of men
if He had not been condemned by a divinely authorized tribunal. The
necessity for the establishment of an Universal Empire is proved partly
by a priori arguments such as the unity of God and the unity of the
family or nation; partly by perversions of Scripture and history, by
false analogies of nature, by misapplied quotations from the classics,
and by odd scraps and commonplaces of logic, showing a familiar but by
no means exact knowledge of Aristotle (of Plato there is none). But a
more convincing argument still is the miserable state of the world,
which he touchingly describes. He sees no hope of happiness or peace
for mankind until all nations of the earth are comprehended in a single
empire. The whole treatise shows how deeply the idea of the Roman
Empire was fixed in the minds of his contemporaries. Not much argument
was needed to maintain the truth of a theory which to his own
contemporaries seemed so natural and congenial. He speaks, or rather
preaches, from the point of view, not of the ecclesiastic, but of the
layman, although, as a good Catholic, he is willing to acknowledge that
in certain respects the Empire must submit to the Church. The beginning
and end of all his noble reflections and of his arguments, good and
bad, is the aspiration ‘that in this little plot of earth belonging to
mortal man life may pass in freedom and peace.’ So inextricably is his
vision of the future bound up with the beliefs and circumstances of his
own age.
The ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More is a surprising monument of his genius,
and shows a reach of thought far beyond his contemporaries. The book
was written by him at the age of about 34 or 35, and is full of the
generous sentiments of youth. He brings the light of Plato to bear upon
the miserable state of his own country. Living not long after the Wars
of the Roses, and in the dregs of the Catholic Church in England, he is
indignant at the corruption of the clergy, at the luxury of the
nobility and gentry, at the sufferings of the poor, at the calamities
caused by war. To the eye of More the whole world was in dissolution
and decay; and side by side with the misery and oppression which he has
described in the First Book of the Utopia, he places in the Second Book
the ideal state which by the help of Plato he had constructed. The
times were full of stir and intellectual interest. The distant murmur
of the Reformation was beginning to be heard. To minds like More’s,
Greek literature was a revelation: there had arisen an art of
interpretation, and the New Testament was beginning to be understood as
it had never been before, and has not often been since, in its natural
sense. The life there depicted appeared to him wholly unlike that of
Christian commonwealths, in which ‘he saw nothing but a certain
conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name
and title of the Commonwealth.’ He thought that Christ, like Plato,
‘instituted all things common,’ for which reason, he tells us, the
citizens of Utopia were the more willing to receive his doctrines
(‘Howbeit, I think this was no small help and furtherance in the
matter, that they heard us say that Christ instituted among his, all
things common, and that the same community doth yet remain in the
rightest Christian communities’ (Utopia).). The community of property
is a fixed idea with him, though he is aware of the arguments which may
be urged on the other side (‘These things (I say), when I consider with
myself, I hold well with Plato, and do nothing marvel that he would
make no laws for them that refused those laws, whereby all men should
have and enjoy equal portions of riches and commodities. For the wise
men did easily foresee this to be the one and only way to the wealth of
a community, if equality of all things should be brought in and
established’ (Utopia).). We wonder how in the reign of Henry VIII,
though veiled in another language and published in a foreign country,
such speculations could have been endured.
He is gifted with far greater dramatic invention than any one who
succeeded him, with the exception of Swift. In the art of feigning he
is a worthy disciple of Plato. Like him, starting from a small portion
of fact, he founds his tale with admirable skill on a few lines in the
Latin narrative of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. He is very precise
about dates and facts, and has the power of making us believe that the
narrator of the tale must have been an eyewitness. We are fairly
puzzled by his manner of mixing up real and imaginary persons; his boy
John Clement and Peter Giles, citizen of Antwerp, with whom he disputes
about the precise words which are supposed to have been used by the
(imaginary) Portuguese traveller, Raphael Hythloday. ‘I have the more
cause,’ says Hythloday, ‘to fear that my words shall not be believed,
for that I know how difficultly and hardly I myself would have believed
another man telling the same, if I had not myself seen it with mine own