United States or Heard Island and McDonald Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is not given to every great man to have Xenophon and Plato for his biographers; it is not given to every one who has overpassed the limit of life, and, in the natural course of events, has but a little longer to continue, to attain the crown of martyrdom in behalf of virtue and morality. In an evil hour for the glory of Athens, his countrymen put him to death.
It is observations of this kind that induced Zeller to believe that Plato altogether denied the gods of popular belief; he also contends that the gods have no place in Plato’s system. No doubt his doctrine of ideas led up to a kind of divinity, the idea of the good, as the crown of the system, but the direct inference from this conception would be pure monotheism and so exclude polytheism.
'Oh! nothing only perfection, laughed Greif. 'Nonsense! If I am perfection, what must you be? Plato himself? I do not know much about him, but I have read that he was a good man. Perhaps you are like him. 'The resemblance cannot be very striking, for no one has noticed it, not even the professors themselves, who ought to know.
This book was written in the last year of his life; but ten years earlier, in the beautiful myth, imitated from the myths of Plato, which he appended to his treatise de Republica, he had emphatically asserted the doctrine.
He, from whom Salvation was hidden, saw remotely, by presentiment as it were, many things which to us, the Redeemed, are clear and plain and near. He perceived the relation of earthly beauty and heavenly truth. The great gift of Love binds and supports us all and Plato gave the name of the divine Eros, that is divine love, to an inspired devotion to the Imperishable.
Wilde said that the first poem seemed obscure, but, when pressed as to the "love" described in the second poem, he let himself go for the first time and perhaps the only time during the trial; he said: "The 'love' that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an older for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very base of his philosophy and such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare a deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect, and dictates great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michaelangelo and those two letters of mine, such as they are, and which is in this century misunderstood so misunderstood that, on account of it, I am placed where I am now.
Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair talent and education; they are wondrously inferior to what Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth. Nor, what is more noticeable, do they ever contain an idea that was not on the earth before.
When nothing means anything, laughter is the only human language left. The Cratylus is a similarly conceived diversion. Most of it is occupied with fanciful derivations and linguistic discussions of all kinds. It is difficult to say how far Plato is serious.
Paul is dead and buried, and so I suppose will most of us be in a few years; so the question confronts us, what becomes of us then? As Milton puts it in "Il Penseroso" we want: "to unsphere The spirit of Plato and unfold What worlds or what vast regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in the fleshly nook."
One of the old Roman Stoic Emperors had a pantheon in his palace with Jesus Christ upon one pedestal and Plato on the one beside Him. And some of us are trying the same kind of thing. Christ there, and somebody else here. Remember, Christ must be everything or nothing! Stars may be sown by millions, but for the earth there is one sun.
Word Of The Day