5
January 2024
Alcinous on Virtue
Alcinous wrote The Handbook of Platonism. Scholars say that Alcinous lived in the second century CE. The Handbook is written in topic-focused sections that succinctly explain the Platonism of that time. The topic of Virtue is the 29th topic in the Handbook.
“1. Virtue is a divine thing, being the perfect and most excellent state of the soul, which makes a man, both in speech and in action, graceful, harmonious, and firm, both in relation to himself and others. ?There are two species of it, the rational(?), and those (virtues) which are concerned with the irrational part of the soul, to wit, courage and self-control, courage being concerned with the spirited part, self-control with the appetitive; for since the rational, and the spirited, and the appetitive are distinct, the perfection of each should be different. The perfection of the rational part, then, is wisdom; of the spirited part, courage; and of the appetitive, self-control.
“2. Wisdom is the science of what is good and evil, and what is neither, while self-control is a sense of order in relation to desires and impulses and their submission to the ruling element, which is the reason. When we speak of self-control being a kind of order and submission what we mean to convey is that it is a faculty in virtue of which the impulses are brought to order and submission in relation to that element which is their natural master, that is, the reason.
“3. Courage is the maintenance of a law-abiding opinion as to what is and what is not to be feared, that is to say, the capacity to maintain a law-abiding doctrine.
“As for justice, it is a kind of harmonization of these three with one another, being a capacity in virtue of which the three parts of the soul agree and harmonize with one another, while each of them fulfils the function which is proper to it and falls to it as its due, in such a way, as to constitute the supreme perfection of the three other virtues, wisdom, courage, and self-control. Since, then, the rational element exercises rule, while the other two parts of the soul are brought into submission by the reason according to their respective characteristics, and yield obedience to it, on these terms one may accept the doctrine of the mutual implication of the virtues.
“4. Courage, then, being the ‘maintaining of law-abiding opinion’, is thereby also the maintaining of right reason; for law-abiding opinion is a sort of right reason, and right reason arises from wisdom. But wisdom in turn is involved with courage; for it is knowledge of what is good, but no one can see the good if his view is obscured by cowardice and the feelings that follow upon cowardice. Likewise, no one can be wise if he is possessed of intemperance, and in general if someone does something contrary to right reason through being overcome by passion, Plato says that he does this by reason of ignorance and folly. So one cannot possess wisdom if one is intemperate and cowardly. The virtues, therefore, in their perfect forms, are inseparable from one another.”
(Alcinous, The Handbook of Platonism, translated by John Dillon, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pages 38 and 39, ISBN: 0198236077. Note: The question marks are the translator’s way of offering an emendation of a lacuna.)
1. Alcinous uses a three-part division of the soul to explain how virtue works. This is a standard Platonic division. As I have mentioned before, the traditional Greek view of the soul is much more complex, and includes many more functions, than modern conceptions of the soul. For example, in these brief paragraphs Alcinous includes opinion, wisdom, self-control, and courage as aspects of the soul that can be cultivated. Our tendency is to see things like opinion is a function of the brain, and things like self-control as an aspect of psychology, and courage as likely a hereditary capacity.
2. It’s always of interest to me when I read Platonists emphasizing ‘law-abiding’ as a virtue. It interests me because it is so different from the way our modern culture views obeying the law. The root of this emphasis on being law-abiding, and seeing this as an important civic virtue, lies in the Apology of Socrates as well as Crito. Socrates had the option of escaping prison and thereby escaping the consequences of an unjust decision by the Athenian jury. But Socrates chose to remain and accept the consequences that his life had brought to him, which meant accepting the death sentence handed down to him. My observation is that this way of understanding being law-abiding is rejected by most modern ethical discussion of the topic. In its place is the view that one should at the very least challenge unjust laws and decision. And this often leads to stronger statements and movements of discontent with the law. I have read on more than one occasion and ethicist argue that ‘you do not have to obey an unjust law.’ And some argue that ethically you are required to disobey an unjust law.
But that isn’t how Socrates understood this issue. And it seems that this left its mark on how Platonists viewed their relationship to law and civic injustice. This is a complex issue and I find myself having a lot of sympathy with the modern view. On the other hand, I think there is something to be said for being a good ‘law-biding’ citizen of the community in which one lives, a perspective that is often overlooked these days.
2.1 This is an addendum. It has been pointed out to me that this
section on Virtue, Section 39, is a summary of what Plato has to say about virtue
in The Republic. My comment
failed to make that connection; but it certainly is true that Alcinous is
presenting a condensed version of what is found in The Republic.
The translator, John Dillon, in his extensive endnotes, refers to many sources, but The Republic, Book 4 and notes that Alcinous is focused in deriving his presentation explicitly from Plato. An example from Book 4 that Dillon notes is as follows:
”’Then again, that each man doing his own business and not dabbling in a large number is justice, and we have heard many others and have said so ourselves many times.’
“’We have indeed.’
“’Then, my friend,’ I said, ‘somehow it turns out that this is in a sense what justice is: doing your own business. You know where I get my proof of this from don’t you?’
“’No, but do tell me,’ he said.
“’It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that of the qualities we’ve looked at in our state, temperance, courage and prudence, the one remaining is the one that gives them all the ability to come into existence and gives security to those that come into existence for as long as it is there. And indeed we said justice would be the one remaining of them if we were to discover the other three.’
“’Yes, that has to be so,’ he said.
“’But on the other hand,’ I said, ‘if it were necessary to determine which of these could make our state especially good if it was present in it, it would be difficult to decide whether it is the unanimity of our rulers and their subjects, or the security of lawful belief which has been inculcated in our troops with regard t danger, or the lack of it, whatever it is, or the prudence and guardianship in our rulers, or the fact that what especially makes our state good is to be found in children, women, slaves, freemen, artisans, rulers and their subjects: namely that each one being an individual would carry out one job and not involve himself in any number of them.’
“’It is difficult to decide, of course,’ he said.
“’Then it seems that the ability of each individual to do his own job in the state is an equal match for the virtue of the state in wisdom, temperance, and courage.’”
(Plato, The Republic, Book 4, translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013, pages 393-395, 433b-433d, ISBN: 9780674996502)
Given this connection to The Republic readers need to recall that The Republic is an allegory for the soul and the soul’s journey to the transcendent. This places terms like ‘law-abiding’ or ‘lawful belief’ in their deeper context, that of spiritual growth. In this context virtues are tools for freeing the soul and the laws referred to are, in a sense, the laws of cause and effect that result in spiritual realization.
I suspect that this kind of deep background context would have been obvious to the audience Alcinous was addressing. According to the ‘Introduction’, some scholars think that this work was intended for teachers of Platonism. This implies that they already had more than a passing acquaintance with the Dialogues.
In any case, it is easy for us to neglect these kinds of connections, but that can be overcome through regular reading and study of the Dialogues and the Enneads.
3. “Wisdom is the science of what is good and evil, and what is neither.” Wisdom is the craft of making clear distinctions; here Alcinous is focusing on making the distinction between good and evil. It’s not clear to me exactly what Alcinous means by good and evil, but tentatively, given the context of this section of the Handbook, that which is good is that which cultivates the virtues because such cultivation leads us to becoming ‘divine.’ Evil is what takes us farther and farther away from that which is ‘divine.’ The practice of the virtues, such as courage and self-control, leads us to the divine. Neglecting such practice leads us farther away from the divine.
4. Alcinous sees self-control as the means whereby we diminish the power that desires by placing them under the control of reason. This is not easy to do. My observation is that people often suffer setbacks and have to start over when attempting to place their desires under the control of reason. But a setback is not the same as a defeat. If one is persistent it is possible to overcome even strong desires by cultivating the reasoning part of the soul, remembering that reason is a much broader concept in Platonism than simply our analytic power of mind.
5. Wisdom perfects the rational part of the soul.
“The virtues, therefore, in their perfect forms, are inseparable from one another.”
An analogy of how this works might be becoming a musician. Learning various rhythms, learning how to play certain successions of intervals smoothly, learning scales, and many other skills, all mutually re-enforce each other, even though one studies them and practices them one at a time. This can also apply to becoming a Doctor or Healer; there are many things to learn, many subjects to internalize, but they all serve the single purpose of health and healing.
6.. Alcinous begins by saying virtue is a ‘divine thing.’ I think the virtues are divine in three ways. First, they are divine because they are purifications (Porphyry associates the virtues with Purification.) Second, they are divine because their source is the Good and the One. And third, they are divine because they transform us by aligning our life and our soul to the divine, by which I mean that Good, the One, and the Beautiful. Seen in this way, the virtues are not only instrumental, they are also of the nature of the divine.
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