The Case for God by Karen Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page B

“a great expense of time and trouble.” Like Socrates, Plato insisted that it must be conducted in a gentle, compassionate manner so that participants “felt with” their partners.
    It is only when all these things, names and definitions, visual and other sensations, are rubbed together and subjected to tests in which questions and answers are exchanged in good faith and without malice that finally, when human capacity is stretched to its limit, a spark of understanding and intelligence flashes out and illuminates the subject at issue. 60
    If the argument was spiteful and competitive, the initiation would not work. The transcendent insight achieved was as much the product of a dedicated lifestyle as of intellectual striving. It was “not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself thereafter.” 61
    In
The Republic
, Plato’s description of an ideal polis, he described the process of philosophical initiation in his famous allegory of the cave. 62 He imagined a group of men who had been chained up all their lives in a cave; turned away from the sunlight, they could see only shadows of objects in the outside world cast on the rocky wall. This was an image of the unenlightened human condition. We are so inured to our deprived vision that, like the prisoners, we assume that the ephemeral shadows we see are the true reality. If the prisoners were taken into the upper world, they would be bewildered and dazzled by its light, brilliance, and vibrancy; they would find it too muchand would want to go back to their twilight existence. So they must be initiated gradually into this new mode of being. The sunlight was a symbol of the Good, the highest of the forms, source of knowledge and existence. The Good lay beyond anything we could experience in ordinary life. But at the end of a long apprenticeship, enlightened souls would be able to bask in its light. They would want to linger in the upper world, but had a duty to go back to the cave and enlighten their companions. They would be able to assess the problems of their shadowy world far more clearly now, but they would get no credit for it. Their former companions would probably laugh at them. They might even turn on their liberators and kill them—just, Plato implied, as the Athenians had executed Socrates.
    Toward the end of Plato’s life, as the political situation in Athens deteriorated, his vision became more elitist and hard-line. In
The Laws
, his last work, which described another utopian republic, he even introduced an inquisitorial mechanism to enforce a theological orthodoxy that took precedence over ethical behavior. The first duty of the state was to inculcate “the right thoughts about the gods, and
then
to live accordingly, well or not well.” 63 This was an entirely new development, alien to both ancient religion and philosophy. 64 A “nocturnal council” must supervise the thinking of the citizens, who were required to submit to three articles of faith: that the gods existed, that they cared for human beings, and that they could not be influenced by sacrifice and worship. A convicted atheist was allowed five years to recant, but if he persisted in his heresy, he would be executed. 65 It is sobering to note that the inquisitorial methods that the Enlightenment philosophes castigated in the revealed religions made an early appearance in the Greek rational tradition they so much admired.
    In his later work, Plato’s theology also became more concrete and prepared the ground for the religious preoccupation with the physical cosmos that would characterize a great deal of Western religion. In the
Timaeus
, he devised a creation myth—not, of course, intended to be taken literally—that presented the world as shaped by a divine