The City of Heaven

24 March 2023

The City of Heaven

Speaking about the Guardians of the Republic that is detailed on Book IX of the Republic:

“’Does this also apply then to arrangement and concord in acquiring his possessions?’  I asked.  ‘And he won’t increase beyond measure the mass of his wealth, carried away by the adulation of the crowd, and so acquire countless faults, will he?’

“’I don’t think so,’ he said.

“’But by paying attention to his inner constitution and by taking care not to disturb any of those elements in him on account of the size of his wealth, or lack of it, in this way, as far as he can, he’ll steer and accumulate and spend his resources.’

“’Absolutely,’ he said.

“’And what’s more, keeping his eye on this same principle, he’ll willingly partake of and sample some of the rewards which he thinks will make him a better person, but those which will disturb his existing state he’ll avoid in his private and public life.’

“’Then he won’t want to have anything to do with public life, if this is what he cares about,’ he said.

“’Yes, by the dog!’ I said.  ‘Certainly in his own state, although perhaps not in his native city, unless by some heaven-sent chance.’

“’I understand,’ he said, ‘you mean in the state we’ve been founding and discussing, the one existing in words, since I don’t think it exists anywhere on earth.’

“’Well, perhaps there’s a model up in heaven for anyone willing to look and if he sees it, found himself on it.  But it makes no difference whether it exists anywhere or will do.  You see, he’d only involve himself in its affairs, not those of anywhere else.’

“’That’s likely,’ he said.”

(Plato, The Republic, Book IX, Plato, The Republic Books 6-10, translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013, 591d – 592b, pages 387 – 389, ISBN: 9780674996549)

 

1.  This is another example of where Plato unpacks, in a casual way, how allegory works in his dialogues, and how the reader, presumably a student of philosophy, should use the allegories Plato presents.  From this perspective, this passage shares the same purpose as the passage I quoted yesterday from Phaedo concerning the allegory of the afterlife journey.

2.  When it is suggested that the City that was being discussed doesn’t exist ‘anywhere on earth’, Socrates responds that “perhaps there’s a model up in heaven for anyone willing to look and if he sees it, found himself on it.”  The ‘model’ is the ‘form’ of the perfectly just city.  The model cannot exist on earth, because forms are immaterial.  However, the forms emanate material existence and are thus connected to appearances.

3.  However, Plato adds that someone, presumably a philosopher, or at least a philosophy student, should be willing to ‘found himself on it’; the ‘it’ being the heavenly city.  This is a declaration by Plato (not the only one) where Plato states that The Republic is an allegory of the soul and its ascent by purification to the transcendental realms. 

4.  The Republic is not a political treatise; its focus is otherworldly.  This is widely misunderstood both by people who admire Plato (e.g. Leo Strauss) and by those who are critical of Plato (e.g. Karl Popper).  I’m not saying that there are no teachings that can be applied to a political context in The Republic; but that is true of a great many dialogues.  What I am saying is that The Republic as a whole is an allegorical inquiry whose purpose is to harmonize and transform the conflicting tendencies of the soul, transforming the soul, or uncovering the soul, so that the soul is now equipped to ascend to that which is eternal, The Good and The One.

5.  Why would Plato write a dialogue consisting of ten books using allegory as its central manner of teaching?  I believe this has to do with that the Greek understanding of the soul was more complex, and, in addition, more subtle, than the view of the soul in modernity, or even in late traditionalism.  For example, both reason and emotions are considered parts of the soul in Greek writing on the subject.  From the perspective of modernity, emotions are psychological and entirely due to material factors such as upbringing.  And in modernity reason is considered an almost mechanical process.  I say this because it is often assumed that two perfectly reasonable people would have to come to the same conclusion on any specific issue.  But this is not how Greek philosophy saw reason.  Greek philosophy saw reason as the servant of intuition, tradition, and transpersonal insight and experience, including explicitly mystical insight.  (A good example is Parmenides’s assent to an upper region of the cosmos wherefrom his philosophical insights are given to him.)  In modernity this would make reason, paradoxically, irrational because of the way modernity has merged reason with materialism and empiricism.  But for Platonism there is no such merging; the material realm is the lowest level of emanation from the non-material transcendent. 

Often Platonists depict the soul as pulled by the senses into materiality, but at the same time capable of uniting with the transcendental; this in itself gives the soul a complexity missing from modernity.  With The Republic Plato offers us, the readers, a way of ‘seeing’ and ‘comprehending’ the soul in all of its complexity.  Because Plato saw this complexity clearly Plato is in the perfect position to offer us a guidebook to our interior life, and the way for that interior life to break free from its entanglements.

6.  The point Plato is making at the end of Book IX is that we need to ‘found ourselves on’ these transcendental realities and the teachings that lead us to these transcendental realities.  We do this by practicing the Dharma of Platonism on a regular, hopefully daily, basis.  These are the ‘affairs’ of the City of Heaven.  Then the insights and tools offered by Platonism can be used to cultivate the transcendental tendencies of the soul.