Chapter XIV. That Plato Has Not Stated All Things Correctly: Wherefore it is Not Without Reason That We Have Declined His Philosophy, and Accepted the Hebrew Oracles

THE oracles of the Hebrews containing prophecies and responses of a divine power beyond that of man, and claiming God as their author, and confirming their promise by the prediction of things to come, and by the results corresponding to the prophecies, are said to be free from all erroneous thought. For instance, ‘the words of God are declared to be pure words, and silver tried in the fire, tested by earth, purified seven times.’ [1]

But not such are the words of Plato, nor yet of any other of the wise among men, who with the eyes of mortal thought and with feeble guesses and comparisons, as in a dream, and not awake, attained to a notion of the nature of all things, but superadded to the truth of nature a large admixture of falsehood, so that one can find in them no learning free from error.

Now, for example, if you would suppress a little of this self-admiration, and contemplate the true light itself by the faculty of reason, you would perceive that even that wonderful philosopher, who alone of all the Greeks touched the threshold of truth, dishonours the name of the gods by applying it to perishable matter and carved images fashioned by mechanic hands into a human shape; and after the lofty height of his magniloquence, wherein he contended that he knew the Father and Maker of this universe, is thrust down from his place on high among the supramundane circles, and sinks with the common people of Athens into the lowest depth of their God-detested idolatry; so that he does not shrink from saying that Socrates had gone down to the Peiraeus to pray to the goddess, and to see his fellow citizens then for the first time celebrating their barbarous festival; acknowledging also that he had enjoined the offering of a cock to Aesculapius, and regarded as a god the ancestral prophet of the Greeks, the daemon who sits enshrined at Delphi.

Wherefore also the blame of the superstitious delusion of the unphilosophical multitude might with good reason be ascribed to him. Take up again for instance his discourse a little farther back, and after his incorporeal and imperishable ‘ideas,’ and after a first god and a second cause, and after intelligent and immortal essences, observe what kind of laws the all-wise philosopher would enact concerning the belief of the common people, speaking thus: [2]

[PLATO] ‘To tell of the other divinities and to learn their origin is beyond us; but we must give credence to those who have spoken in former times, who being, as they said, the offspring of gods, had, I suppose, a clear knowledge of their own ancestors. It is impossible therefore to disbelieve children of the gods, even though they speak without certain or probable proofs: but as they assert that they are reporting family histories, we must in obedience to the law believe them.

‘On their authority then let the origin of these gods be as follows and so stated. The children of Earth and Heaven were Oceanus and Tethys; and their children Phorcys and Kronos and Rhea, and all the others with them: and of Kronos and Rhea came Zeus and Hera, and all whom we know as their reputed brethren, and still others who were their offspring.’

For these reasons then we must give up the great philosopher, as having misrepresented the fabulous theogonies of the poets, not like a philosopher, nor in a self-consistent manner. For you had the opportunity of hearing himself speak in the Republicas follows: [3]

‘In the greater fables, said I, we shall also discern the less: for there must be the same type, and the same tendency in both the greater and the less: do you not think so?

‘Yes, I do, said he: but I do not even understand which you call the greater.

‘Those, said I, which Hesiod and Homer and the other poets told us: for they, I suppose, were the composers of fictitious tales, which they told and still tell to mankind’; meaning the stories which we have quoted a little above.

Again there was that passage of his in which he said, [4]

‘We shall begin then, said I, with the following verse, and strike out it and all that are like it:

“ Fain would I serve some master in the field,” [5]

and the rest; also the passage wherein he adds: [6]

‘Once more then we shall entreat Homer and the other poets not to represent Achilles, the son of a goddess,

“ Now turning on his side, and now again Upon his back,” [7]

and the rest that follows. To this he adds: [8]

‘Or to say that Zeus, while all the other gods and men were asleep, and he alone awake, lightly forgot all the plans he had devised, through the eagerness of desire, and was so smitten at sight of Hera that he would not even wait to go into his chamber, but wished to lie with her there on the ground like a lark, and said that he was possessed by a stronger passion than even when they first used to meet “without the knowledge of their dear parents.” [9] Nor shall we admit the tale of Ares and Aphrodite being bound by Hephaestus for acts of the same kind!’

And then after having told these tales in such a manner, what does he mean in the saying which comes after, by calling the poets ‘children of the gods,’ [10] and asserting that ‘to disbelieve them is impossible,’ although he protested that they had invented the fictitious stories about the gods ‘without necessary or probable proofs’?

And what is the meaning of this unreasonable belief, put forward in fear of punishment from the laws? And how can Uranus and Ge be first of the gods, then their offspring Oceanus and Tethys, and after all these Kronos, and Rhea, and Zeus, and Hera, and all their sons and brothers and descendants mentioned in fables by Homer and Hesiod, when he was refuting these very stories by speaking thus: [11]

‘The fault, said I, which we ought to reprove before all and above all, especially if a man lies in unseemly fashion.

‘What fault is that?

‘When a man in his discourse concerning gods and heroes misrepresents their nature, just as when an artist paints what is not at all like the things which he may wish to imitate.’

And again: [12]

‘In the first place, said I, it was no seemly lie that was told by the author of that greatest lie about the greatest gods, how Uranus wrought what Hesiod says he did, [13] and how Kronos took revenge upon him,’ and what follows this.

But how could the same poets who are here called false and untruthful be spoken of on the other hand as offspring of the gods? However, for these reasons we must abandon this philosopher, as having through fear of death played false with the Athenian democracy: but must honour Moses, and the Hebrew oracles, as everywhere shining out from the one true religion that is free from error. Look then at another point.