A few months back, I gave a lecture entitled The Right Time: The Cultural, Religious, and Philosophical Environment of the Græco-Roman World at the Birth of Christianity. In it, among other things, I covered the philosophical views of the Epicureans and the Stoics. My intention is to follow it in a few months with a study which will include reference to Platonism and Neoplatonism. The writings of Plato and his successors exerted a profound influence on early developments of Christian theology, not only with St. Augustine in the West, but also Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor in the East (among others, of course).
In that study, the writings of the Marsilio Ficino were recommended to me. Ficino, a 15th century Florentine priest, physician, and philosopher, operating under the patronage of the Medici family, led the Renaissance revival of Plato.
The modern forward to "When Philosophers Rule", an edition of his commentaries on The Republic, The Laws, and Epinomis, was, to say the least, startling.
For Plato, democracy as described by him is a dangerous and delicate form of government amounting at its worst to little more than mob rule based on the primacy of the pleasure-loving appetites in the souls of the citizens. When this becomes dominant in the majority of citizens, the very foundations of participatory government are destroyed as fewere and fewer people people develop in themselves the virtues necessary for the government of themselves or of states. New laws are passed on a whim to demonstrate to electorates that their governors are dealing with the latest crisis, but without any real regard to the effect of such laws on the body politic. There is an inevitable tendency for citizens to become ever more dependent on the state for the regulation of every aspect of life; regulations multiply and the people, far from becoming free citizens, become instead ever mor dependent on the ever-increasing bounty of the state to provide for every aspect of life. In the end this cannot be sustained because the state has to appropriate more and more of the wealth of its citizens in order to pay for the services which the citizens demand in exchange for their votes.
Of course, this forward only dealt with the view of democracy. Examples can be taken from virtually every non-technological field of human action. Our children must be taught to think, as must our adults. And Plato is a good place to start, is it not?
Comments
Post a Comment