Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 42

14 April 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 42

1.  “. . . virtue and great wealth are quite incompatible . . . “

(Plato, Laws, Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Laws is translated by Trevor J. Saunders, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1997, page 1423, 742e, ISBN: 9780872203495)

Plato has a consistently hostile attitude towards the accumulation of wealth, or ‘great wealth’.  Plato thinks that cultivating virtue is difficult in such a circumstance as a life of great wealth.  This is a common theme in many spiritual traditions.  Buddhist monastics live a life of voluntary poverty and few possessions.  Jesus famously said that a person cannot follow God and money.  

There are some spiritual traditions that do not have this attitude, so it’s not a universal that is found in all spiritual traditions.  But it is found in many of them and it is worthwhile pondering why this is so. 

My personal observation has been that money is an enormous temptation that can seduce people into abandoning their principles, or virtues, so that its pursuit often leads to deception and harming others, even many others.  For this reason I think it is best for the Platonist practitioner to live a life of at least modest means.

2.  One of the interesting things about asceticism, something that is unexpected, at least it was by me, is how happy its practitioners often are.  I first ran into this when reading the Therigatha and Theragatha from the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism.  In particular the Theirgatha, which are poems of the earliest Buddhist Nuns (Theri) are often expressions of how happy they are to now live a life of renunciation when comparing it with the life they previously lived.  

We tend to think of such a life as grim and unfulfilling because we view such a life through a materialistic lens.

I think this is true of asceticism in general, and true of Platonist asceticism specifically.  The traces of Platonist asceticism are difficult to find and consist mostly of stories about such practitioners.  There are not a lot of such stories.  Still, they may be enough to demonstrate the great joy that an ascetic life brings to its practitioners.

3.  “But no race, Greek or foreign, seafaring or landsmen, nomadic or urban, can bring itself to dispense with establishing some kind of symbols for the honour they pay their gods.”

(Maximus of Tyre, Oration 2: Images of the Gods, translated by M. B. Trapp, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, page 23, ISBN: 0198149891)

I think Maximus brings this up because it is a perennial problem for those spiritual traditions that point to an ineffable ultimate.  An ineffable ultimate is one that cannot be seen, heard, cannot be touched, and is beyond sensory experience or mental fabrication.  But this is difficult for human beings to understand, or to rest in, or to be satisfied with.  The result of this difficulty is for human beings to create symbols of various types as stand-ins for the ultimate.  These stand-ins are perceivable by one or more of the senses and thus more accessible.  It is not surprising, therefore, that it is often the case that people think of the symbolic reality as the end of their journey to the divine.  

A paragraph later Maximus writes:

“For God, Father and Creator of all that exists, is greater than the Sun and the heavens, mightier than time and eternity and the whole flux of Nature; legislators cannot name him, tongues cannot speak of him, and eyes cannot see him.  Unable to grasp his essence we seek the support of sounds and names and creatures, and shapes of gold and ivory and silver, and plants and rivers and peaks and streams; though desiring to understand him, we are forced by our own weakness to name merely terrestrial beauties after his divine nature.”

(As above, page 23)

4.  “If most men live and die without knowing what true happiness is, the reason is not that they do not desire it – at heart they never desire anything else – but that they look for it in the wrong place.  They confuse it with the round of pleasures, with health and long life, with worldly wealth, or with that irresponsible power which, by lifting its possessor above all law enables him always to ‘do as he likes.’”

(A. E. Taylor, Platonism and its Influence, Edicions Enoanda, Barcelona, 2018, page 48, ISBN: 9781977012975)

A. E. Taylor (1869-1945) was a British Idealist philosopher at a time when British Idealism was a pervasive movement in that country.  Platonism and its Influence was published in 1924.  He was a Christian Platonist but his Christianity seems to have been strongly shaped by the Church of England which has a different perspective than Catholic Platonism.  I first encountered A. E. Taylor as a young undergraduate where my professor recommended Taylor’s short work on Metaphysics.  I found it to be a masterpiece of conciseness and insight; I’ve reread it several times.

The quote elaborates on the idea that everyone is searching for the Good (the transcendental) but they cannot find it because they think of this in terms of a search for material happiness.  I think the source for this view are remarks in the Dialogues where Plato states that no one intentionally does evil, that people do evil things because they are ignorant of the true nature of the cosmos and therefore think that what they are doing will make them happy.

I often heard this kind of teaching when I was studying Buddhism.  The idea is that all living creatures are seeking peace, happiness, equanimity, and so forth, but because they do not know the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path they are unable to attain these goals.

I wonder if these kinds of teachings are true.  As I have grown older I have become more pessimistic about humanity.  I’m not sure that it is the case that everyone is seeking true happiness and transcendent peace.  In a sense this is an unanswerable question because our experience with others is very limited in number.  And my change of view doesn’t seem to have impinged on my practice; that is to say that my growing pessimism regarding humanity has not diminished my own commitments to study, practice, and contemplation.  My feeling is that the soul of many people is so deeply buried in negative habits and tendencies that it is unlikely that many souls will ever see the light outside the cave, or will join with that light.  In other words, I think we tend to underestimate the obstacles to spiritual growth and the tenacity of a materially focused life.  Again, though this is pessimistic, it does not deflect my own ongoing practice; in some ways I think it strengthens it.  Either way, Platonism offers the possibility of spiritual growth and realization.  And that is what really matters.

5.  One of the intriguing things about the contemporary Catholic Platonist, Peter Kreeft, is that he sometimes interprets Thomas Aquinas in Platonist terms.  This is unusual; at least it is unusual in the reading on Christian Platonism I have done.  It seems to be the case that Aquinas is thought of as an Aristotelian.  Of course there is an intimate relationship between Plato and Aristotle, and maybe Kreeft is relying on that historical connection. 

“The most recent and most radical philosophy called Deconstructionism centers on the denial that even words are signs, and reduces them to things that are either the causes or effects of power.  The Platonic tradition, exemplified by Aquinas’s hermeneutic, is the total opposite of this because it says that even things are words and signs as well as being things . . . A symbol is a kind of analogy in words, of course, but for Aquinas analogies are not just in words and language or just in thought and concept, but they are first of all in being.  Reality itself is analogical.”

(Kreeft, Peter, The Platonic Tradition, St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, Indiana, 2018, page 63, ISBN: 9781587316500)

I don’t know enough about Aquinas to comment on Kreeft’s emphasis on the Platonic tradition in this context.  But it’s intriguing to me that Kreeft feels very comfortable with the idea that Platonism plays a significant part in the thought of Aquinas.

Regarding the idea that the things of this world are inherently analogical (I would probably say metaphorical), I think this is beautifully stated.  I think this is affirmed in the Dialogues by the use of analogy, and other structures of comparison, as modes of reasoning.  The quoted passage highlights one of the failings of contemporary philosophy, particularly in the analytic tradition and traditions derived from the analytic tradition.  And that is that the analytic tradition does not seem to understand how words work, that words are not numbers, and that words are, as Kreeft implies, inherently analogical.

I think we can understand what Kreeft is saying by noting how in Platonism certain experiences are symbols, or analogies, of transcendental realities.  The experience of beauty is such an experience.  So is the experience of numbers.  So is the experience of justice,  And so is the experience of equanimity and peace.  All of the manifestations in the material world that exhibit these realities, no matter how dimly, act as messengers from the divine, letting us know that in comparison to the dim and distorted experience of these realities here, these realities are only analogies, or emanations, or instantiations, of the the pure presence of these realities there.

Our soul responds to these realities because our soul is also such a reality.  Our soul is at the same time a symbol, and an analogy, of the divine, and the actual presence of the divine in our life and lives.  The soul is inherently present in the One, the transcendental, and the individual because of its everywhere and everything nature.  If we follow that which resonates with the soul we will walk the way to the Good and the One with patient assurance.