Puslapio vaizdai
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of Deity to be implicated for a moment with the question of evil. "God leaves to the disposition of our will the causes on which the quality of each depends."45 "Virtue has no master: it cleaves to him who honors it and abandons him who rejects it. Each is responsible for his choice. God is guiltless." 46 And with this responsibility was connected the dignity of the soul. "No man," said he, "is willingly evil." This is a fundamental and continually recurring point of Platonic ethics. He borrowed it from Socrates, and was faithful to it throughout.

No man desires to be subject to evil. The end of every volition is not the act committed, but that for the sake of which the act is committed, and this in every undertaking is ultimate good.47 In the last analysis, the true and the good are one. Evil therefore is moral ignorance; and since the soul is essentially reason, it cannot voluntarily 'be subjected to ignorance, and is not therefore voluntarily wicked.48 The virtuous man is the true artist who has his aim and can attain it; and vice must be attributed, not really to the will, but to lack of art.49 The only consistent theory of eternal punishment, then, for Plato, is eternity of sin, which is itself contradictory to the last mentioned view of the harmony of the soul with virtue. We see, therefore, that the idea of eternal punishment as depicted in the Gorgias and the Phædon, is entirely hostile to Plato's declared views of God and man, and moral order. It is contrary to his views of God, for he must not be charged with the commission of any evil, but arranges all things for the best; of man, since the very essence of the soul is free causality and natural harmony with good; of moral order, since to suppose that God removes from the soul this freedom, or that it loses this love of good, would not only violate his scheme of human nature, but would destroy the very principle which solved for Plato the origin of evil. Olympiodorus, one of the Alexandrian commentators of Plato, takes up the passage in the Gorgias which teaches eternal punishment, and attempts to account for its introduction there. "Punishment," says he, "cannot

45 Vol. viii., Laws, p. 265.
47 Vol. vi., Meno.

46 Vol. 10, Rep., p. 287.
48 Vol. xi., Sophist.

49 Vol. iv., The Second Hippias,

be eternal; much better to say that the soul is perishable. An unending pain can do no good, for it is useless. But God and nature do nothing in vain." He accounts for the passage by contending that Plato used the word eternal with reference to the order of the heavenly spheres. The moral cycle of the world corresponds to the motions of the planets, and when the whole system shall have returned to the same relative positions from which they started with respect to each other and the sun, a new period will commence. The cycle includes many thousand years, and it is to this period that Plato refers in his use of the term everlasting. The criticism does honor to the benevolence of the commentator, who, with all the Alexandrine school, we believe, rejected the doctrine of eternal woe.50 But it is entirely fanciful as a solution of the passage in question, and we must fall back upon the inconsistency of the tenet with Plato's ethics and theology as affording reasonable

50 See the whole commentary quoted by Cousin in the notes to his translation of Plato, vol. iii., Gorgias. We cannot help contrasting this view of the ancient philosopher, with the glee which inspires a modern Christian critic, Dr. Tayler Lewis, in detailing the facts of Plato's myths. He seems quite delighted with the aid which Plato brings to his theology, and more than once forces him into the field against "modern semi-infidels and neologists." We doubt whether Plato would be elated with the honor of a Doctorate in Calvinistic Divinity; at any rate, when modern orthodoxy shall become Platonic, Christianity will have occasion to rejoice over her freedom from many a theological excrescence; and the world of woe, at least, may expect to be visited and cheered by some rays of mercy from the throne of Love. Dr. Lewis' admiration seems almost equally divided between Plato and the Bible. He defends some of Plato's wildest flights of fancy by the letter of Scripture, as in the case of the animation of the heavenly bodies. Plato at times seems to imagine that the planets have souls and are intelligent beings, which Dr. Lewis considers a very plausible idea, and seeks to defend from the Old Testament. "The Bible teaches us," says he, "that even the ordinary courses of physical events are under the controlling agency of angelic beings. He maketh his angels winds, his ministers a flaming fire. Why not an angel of the sun, of the moon, and of each planet? Was it simply a sublime personification, when it was said, He bringeth out their host by number, he callelh them all by their name? or when we are told that, at the creation of our earth, THE STARS OF THE MORNING sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" And yet with all Plato's orthodoxy, Dr. Lewis' mind seems not entirely at ease upon the question of his salvation. Could he trace anything of the doctrine of the atonement "in the lives or writings of Plato and Socrates," he should "indulge more hope of their salvation from it than from any of those moral lessons-truly beautiful and sublime as they which have been left to us in their immortal dialogues."

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proof that, like. the whole myth in which it occurs, it was borrowed from popular superstition, and was preserved in obedience to the law of artistic consistency, as an embellishment to the severe moral discussion of the Gorgias.

It may easily be seen from the rapid survey we have taken of Plato's passages on immortality, that the task of criticism is no pastime. And so far as results in plain black and white, in dogmatic sentences, are concerned, it certainly is unsatisfactory. "Myths," says Cousin, "can never be translated." It is almost impossible to convey by analysis the fresh impressions produced by the perusal of an author like Plato. He is an artist. In his dialogues, as in his mind, the philosophic and the poetic, the beautiful and true, unite and blend. No author is less likely to be appreciated, or more likely to be misunderstood, by a cold, severe and unimaginative thinker. He must be read by an eye that can look beneath the words; he must be criticised by a spirit in sympathy with the author's aim, and which can resign itself to the influence of the dialogues, often trusting to feeling as its guide, rather than to a microscopic analysis of sentences. Such a mind, while from the diversity of the materials, and the various poetic developments of the thought, it feels the difficulty of stating with precision the form of Plato's views, will rise from the study of them, impressed with their power and elevated by their purity. It will no more impute to Plato the literal views developed in many of his gorgeous philosophic poems, than it would judge the theology of Phidias by his head of Jove, or the faith of Goethe by his picture of Mephistophiles. The results to which a criticism fitted to disentangle the Platonic dialogues would arrive as to their doctrine of immortality, would be immeasurably more accurate, we believe, as they would be more noble, than could be developed by any textual harmony. It would grant that concerning every thing connected with the soul and man's spiritual nature, Platonism is vastly superior to any other form of ancient, we may almost add, even of modern speculation. For Plato never faltered in his spiritual view of man. The superior principle and governing agency of the universe, was one infinite, controlling Mind, entirely independent of material forms. And so the spirit in man, with him, was superior to its

fleshly envelope, an indivisible, eternally subsisting entity. The proofs brought to establish this point may seem futile to modern logic; but the moral end and aim of existence, the relation of the soul to duty and the moral law, every where implied in Plato's system, compel us to rank it next to, though far enough removed from, the ethics of the Gospel. Plato keeps the soul ever in the light of eternity. His theory of life is based upon a consciousness of the enduring nature of the spirit and its nearer relation, in its disembodied state, to eternal justice, the discipline and retribution of impartial wisdom. The limit which divides the abstract theology of Platonism from the abstract theology of Christianity, is the boundary line which separates the intellectual principle of justice from the higher quality of love.

Looking about in modern times for some man with whose views to compare Plato's theory of the future state, we should say that it has a nearer affinity with the speculations of Swedenborg than with those of any other thinker; inasmuch as the central idea of most of the Platonic myths would seem to be that the soul creates its own objective circumstances according to its inner character, with the difference, however, that, with Swedenborg, the condition of the soul in future life is fixed and final from the beginning, while with Plato, there is a constant development of life, the successive cycles of its discipline promising at last to restore the soul to good. The man who reads Plato, expecting to find logical arguments for immortality, applicable to the present state of science, will certainly be disappointed. There is no danger that the Christian will be anxious to exchange the grounds of his belief for the supports of philosophy alone. Still, no man can become thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Plato's views, without being better able to appreciate the simplicity and purity of the Gospel; and it is a valuable and inspiring truth which Platonism sufficiently reveals, that the human mind, in proportion as it becomes more spiritual, and learns to live within itself, feels a witness of its dignity and destiny, and is elevated to a sense of certainty as to its enduring life, which logic, though it may not be able satisfactorily to establish, is entirely unable to weaken or remove.

T. S. K

ART. VI.

Literary Notices.

1. The Statesmen of the Commonwealth of England; with a Treatise on the Popular Progress of English History. By John Forster, of the Inner Temple. Edited by J. O. Choules. New-York: Published by Harper & Brothers, No. 82 Cliff-street. 1846. 8vo.

We have seldom opened an historical work that so deeply interested us, as this of Forster's. With a style, sufficiently correct indeed, but of little beauty, and somewhat cumbersome, the author succeeds, to a remarkable degree, in placing before us the great characters of the Protectorate, in their living, speaking, and acting features. We feel, too, while reading, that he has not written in a spirit of adventurous generalization, but from a minute acquaintance with the facts of the time, and with the men themselves, after examining and weighing all the documentary evidence, now accessible, of the parts they acted. The character and course of the Earl of Strafford, in particular, were always an enigma to us, till we found them unriddled in the clear and natural account here presented, confirmed as it is, apparently, by the fullest proof. Sir John Eliot, on the other side of the great question, was almost unknown to us, though he was one of the earliest and most devoted champions of English liberty. Are not the portraits, in general, which Forster has filled up, truer to the originals than the dazzling sketches of Carlyle, who could not, perhaps, appreciate such a character as Hampden's, or recognize the perversities in such a powerful Titan as Cromwell. In the case of Sir Harry Vane, we must confess, our author seems to labor rather hard to clear away, from his religious speculations, the appearance of mysticism and extravagance. The value of this work, however, is, by no means, confined to the gratification of our curiosity with respect to the affairs of the Commonwealth, and the leaders of the parties in that age. It exemplifies, in a striking manner, the influence which faith in eternal principles exerts, at all times, on the destinies of nations and governments. Some of the noblest characters, in all history, belong to the times of Charles I. and Cromwell. They are such as we need, in our own country, at this day; such as our young men especially ought to study. After centu ries of eclipse, their fair fame is shining out in its brightness.— Even the central figure in the group, if it indeed be that of one who eventually fell, appears not "less than an archangel ruined."

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