[0:00]This is a history of Western thought number 12, Plato on God.
[0:23]In our last program we discussed Plato's view of the human soul. And very much related to that is the question of God and the nature of God in Plato's philosophy. With the rise of early Christianity, many early Christian thinkers thought that there were many parallels or similarities between Plato and his conception of the divine and that of the Christian Church. So, it is important as we're discussing these things to outline exactly what Plato was saying, how he related God to the world, how he related God to the gods of the ancient Greeks of which he was a part. So we're going to be discussing three aspects to Plato's view of God. The first of those is the nature of creation and God's relationship to creation. The second is the relationship of God and goodness, and the third is the relationship between a singular God and the ancient Greek gods. Now, the question of creation is very much related to the question of God, especially within the later Christian context. And this is the area where it was seen that there were a lot of parallels between Plato and what was taught in early Christianity, that as opposed to someone like Aristotle, Plato did not have an idea that the world or matter or the physical objects were necessarily eternal. Plato argues, especially in his later work The Timaeus, that the world itself cannot be eternal, or the material objects cannot be eternal. Now, this makes a lot of sense with Plato's generalized idea that that which is ideal or the realm of the forms, the non-material things, the ideas are necessarily superior to those things which are physical. The physical objects of this world are constantly changing, they are in a process of decay, falling apart. So if that is true of the physical material world, then that physical world cannot be eternal, it's a world of change and decay. So it is the realm of the forms, or the realm of ideas that in contrast to the material world is eternal. And here is where Plato's idea of creation mirrors that of Christianity in that in Plato, the material objects, the material world that we live in, had to come to being at some point in time. Now, as Plato describes this, we can't really talk about it as a creation ex Nihil, or a creation out of nothing. Instead, it's really a creation of taking items that were pre-existent, or a kind of pre-existent matter and putting it together in a way that was organized. And it is that idea of an organized world that is also essential for Plato's approach to creation, because Plato argues that the world itself or the creation is rationally organized. It's something that can be rationally looked at. We can find laws of creation, we can find laws of the universe. It is not pure chaos, but it was put together in a particular order. And this is also echoed in the idea in Plato that there is a necessary hierarchy. There are hierarchies in various societies, there are hierarchies within creation in many ways, and the place where we see that hierarchy perhaps most clear, especially in relation to God, is that there is a hierarchy of levels of goodness. There are some things that are less good than other things, and goodness is something that can be, in a sense, placed on a scale. There are things that are less good, as we already talked about, the things that are ideas or the non-material things have a higher level of goodness than the material particular objects. And this brings us to our second point. That if we're going to speak about God in Plato, especially as we think about God in a monotheistic context, his monotheism, if you can say that in any sense, we'll address this after, is something that is intimately related to his concept of goodness. So as we've seen, material objects have a less amount of goodness than those things which are merely ideal, or ideas. But even among those ideas, there are some ideas that have a greater level of goodness than other ideas, and ultimately, there has to be a singular source, that which we may refer to as the good. This is the source of the goodness that is in all other creatures and all other objects. This is a singular unity that we would probably call God. Now, Plato does also address this good, this good source, as the source of motion and the source of change in the world. Similar to what Aristotle would later say when he called God the unmoved mover, in other words, one who is constant, one who is timeless, one who is unaffected by the changing realm of the material world, yet he has an impact on the material world. He brings or gives the power of motion or movement or change to things that are external to himself. With all of this that sounds very similar to what we think about as a Christian conception of God, we also have to then reckon with the third idea here, and that is the relationship between the gods of ancient Greece, the polytheism of ancient Greece and this concept that Plato has of a singular good or the highest good, which we would often refer to as God. Plato can in some sense be called a monotheist, if by that we mean that there is one singular source or greatest good, and that is what we are referring to here as God. However, when we're thinking about the notion of Greek gods and polytheism and the relationship between that singular God and these various other gods worshipped in ancient Greece, the situation gets a little more complicated. Plato often does speak about gods in the multiple in the plural. Plato believes that there are these real spiritual beings that we think of as the gods of the ancient Greeks. And these spiritual beings are kind of intermediary figures for Plato. They are intermediaries between God or the good and humanity, or the material world. So we have these kind of grades of being, we have these intermediary figures that are called gods, but are not God in the sense of being the ultimate source that is the highest good. And so in this way, Plato is able to adopt a perspective that is consistent with Greek polytheism. However, even within that, Plato does not believe, as you find in the old Homeric stories, that these gods are in a constant process of getting jealous and fits of rage and all of the kinds of things that you think about as these anthropomorphic features, or these features of the Greek gods that look very similar to human emotions and human flaws.
[7:46]Plato believes instead that these gods are perfectly moral. They are good gods. They are not swayed by the midst of human emotions and change as we are. Plato also argued that worship and rituals and religion as a whole is something that is necessary for society. It's necessary for social cohesion. So Plato was not willing to throw away the worship of the Greek gods in the society in which he lived. But that also brings about the question, how did Plato respond or how did Plato interact with this figure that he referred to as the good or the one, the source of goodness? Plato did not have any conception in his writings that this was a personal being. He also didn't have any idea that there was any kind of rapturous connection with that one or that source, as we do find in later middle and particularly Neoism. And so we may say then that Plato's view of God as the good is not necessarily a religious perspective, at least in the sense that we would probably think of today. So, this is a brief overview of Plato's perspective on God and the gods. In the next program, we'll be looking at our final episode on Plato as we discuss his approach to ethics.
