Good Friday Fact Check: an ontological claim - God can be known through Plato's ideal forms.
Or, can God only be known through Jesus Christ?
Today’s fact check is both philosophical and theological; many people may believe that theology is merely a matter of opinion. I believe that all theological and philosophical questions can be tested against the word of God, so for my special Good Friday 2022 fact check I am fact-checking an ontological claim made principally by Paul Vervaeke in the following talk with Jordan Peterson:
First - a first “unimpression” of this talk - I was slightly unimpressed by Peterson and Verveake early on in the talk referring to the suggestion by some Christians that Peterson and Vervaeke sounded like Christians - I felt their responses were a little ungracious, actually, to what was essentially very high praise; perhaps too much praise, from some Christians!
Also John Vervaeke’s claim to have explained agapé better than anyone sounded comically arrogant. I would have thought the only claim that might carry any real weight is to have lived out agapé better than anyone. Explaining God’s love is a chump’s game – surely the hard thing for all of us is living out that kind of selfless love.
This is what the apostle John’s first epistle says about agapé, translated ‘love’ in the following passage, although agapé means very specifically the love of God (divine love, the love of the gods in the original Greek usage, but the word was adopted by Christians to mean God’s love); so wherever ‘love’ is mentioned in this passage, think ‘agapé’:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
This is how God’s love was revealed among us: God sent His one and onlyc Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. And love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we remain in Him, and He in us: He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world.
If anyone confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. And we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love; whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him. In this way, love has been perfected among us, so that we may have confidence on the day of judgment; for in this world we are just like Him. 1 John 4:7-17
Jesus is the only human being who has ever managed to live agapé out with perfect perfection, without sin – even in the estimation of His best friends Peter (1 Peter 2:22) and John (1 John 1-2), that is, those who knew him most intimately – and that indicates the direction of my thoughts today.
The claim that I am disputing is that God can be known through the writings of Plato, writings that Vervaeke in particular refers to with great praise.
I am not disputing, however, that the existence and perfect nature of God can be inferred through the kind of reasoning demonstrated in Plato’s writings.
Believing that God exists and actually trusting (believing in) God are two different things – this is something Peterson and Vervaeke both acknowledge, actually, later in the talk.
Knowing God, which is surely part of trusting Him (for you cannot really trust someone you don’t know) is surely very important (to actually know the Creator of the Universe! What an awesome idea…) and I’m asking the question, can we know God through the philosophical writings of Plato?
When Peterson and Vervaeke mention Socrates in their talk, they are also mentioning Plato by implication, because Plato’s books are all accounts of Socrates having philosophical conversations with people, in other words, dialogues (dia meaning “through” + logos literally meaning “word” yet carrying the meanings “thought” and “rationality” as well )
The writings of Plato are the only record we have of what Socrates said or thought.
Socrates was a historical person who lived in Greece from approx. 470 BC to 400 BC and who had a very distinctive way of teaching philosophy by questioning people about their underlying beliefs, which he called dialogue. Among his teachings Socrates taught that there is one God, who is the embodiment of perfect goodness.
The Athenian authorities eventually got sick of Socrates’ disruptive habit of constant questioning, and accused him of atheism (by which they meant, not believing in the small-g gods) and corrupting the youth. They had a trial and sentenced him to death, a sentence which he carried out upon himself by drinking hemlock, a lethal poison.
English writers in the past often called Plato Socrates’ Boswell, a reference to the poet and society wit in the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson whose friend Boswell collected all the wise and witty things Johnson said off the cuff at dinner parties and wrote them down.
Plato’s dialogues are accounts of Socrates’ teachings; some scholars say that Socrates’ original teachings were changed by being filtered through Plato, although I don’t know how they could possibly know that more than 2000 years later.
Several of Plato’s dialogues are about Socrates’ decision to suicide; they are collected under the name “The Last Days of Socrates”: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. It was a decision Socrates made because he believed the lawful authorities must be obeyed, otherwise society itself would collapse. His friends offered him a way out; escape and exile, but Socrates was prepared to live by this rational principle that lawful authority must be obeyed to the bitter end, even when those lawful authorities told him to commit suicide.
Socrates’ willingness to die an unjust death, which to some degree resembles Christ’s willingness to die on the cross, is why, to some Orthodox Christians, Socrates is considered a pre-Christian gentile prophet.
Now Plato’s Phaedo, being a very dramatic account of Socrates’ last days, is not a bad place to start reading Plato; alternatively the Republic, which is probably his most well known work.
I first read the Republic because my Dad had it in his bookshelf at home.
Plato’s writing when I first read this book was marvellous to me - the dialogues when I first read them breathed an air of intellectual freedom that was like looking out at the ocean and breathing in the sea air, a spiritual feeling of complete philosophical freedom, because Plato’s thinking seemed completely untouched by dogma or Christian religious assumptions as well as modern scientism, evolution, etc etc. Completely untrammelled.
Socrates, in Plato’s writing, comes to a belief that God exists by looking at the natural world and considering his own rationality and sensing that the thingness of things seems to point to a Creator, in that the imperfect forms we see imply perfect forms, e.g. of tree or stone or water or man or lion, and on a higher level, beauty, goodness, love, etc, and he infers that the source of these forms must be an ideal heavenly form.
Socrates comes to the conclusion that above everything ‘ontologically’ speaking (in terms of being or existence) there must exist something really perfect and perfectly good, a perfectly good Being, from whom all these other good things come.
Many of Socrates’ arguments are good arguments for the existence of God and for living a rational kind of virtuous life in response to God’s existence as distinct from following the natural ‘irrational’ passions and these ideas are certainly worth thinking about.
Now, earlier I said my first impression of Plato was of free thought untrammelled by cultural and historical and theological assumption. What I came to realise was that while Plato was not trammelled by my assumptions, Plato and Socrates himself were trammelled by their own cultural assumptions.
For, there are also some ideas in Plato’s writings that, in retrospect, I think we would all agree are bad ideas.
Firstly Socrates (or Plato) is an elitist.
The ideal Republic is ruled by an expert class of clever people who have been raised from birth to believe themselves in a class superior to all the others because they have been trained to rule1; Socrates’ thought is the earliest historical example of the kind of totalitarian elitism of the WEF bureaucrats today and people like Justin Trudeau.
The elitism in Socrates’ Republic, if it was ever put into practice, would be somewhat mitigated by the fact that these rulers were required to have no possessions and live like monks (rather ironically the state of poverty required of the rulers in Plato’s Republic has now become the state of being the WEF wants the subjects to have - to own nothing and be happy, while the rulers own everything! A strange, disturbingly satanic inversion of Plato’s Republic. What villains. )
Having rulers who own nothing is something no government has ever tried, to my knowledge, apart from in monasteries on the small scale perhaps; something that didn’t always work there, either, because no set of rules can inculcate humility, which is the real pre-condition for being a good ruler and is actually the condition of having a heart that possesses nothing2.
Plato’s ideal Republic also assumed the existence of slaves as non-citizens who don’t have any human rights, and accepted that as inevitable and normal. The New Testament doesn’t accept slavery ‘in-house’ in the church, actually, as a social division, although it has a pragmatic approach to it in society.
For, if you look at the letter to Philemon and how Paul is asking Philemon to treat his slave, Onesimus, who escaped, you will see what I mean; also Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28 that erases all social divisions in Christ: There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
The other, even worse bad stench (honestly!) that hangs around Plato involves a cultural practice of the ancient Greeks, and is why there are jokes about the effeminate Greeks in the movie “300”; a movie that treats the historical background with respect.
That evil tendency is exposed in Plato’s dialogue, Symposium, which praises man-boy paedophilia. This corrupt and highly prevalent ancient Greek cultural practice was largely destroyed in Greece by the arrival of Christianity, thank God. (It survived in nearby Afghanistan to the present day, where Christianity never reached the hill tribes.) Perhaps the reason this dreadful custom was found in institutions such as the English school system in the early twentieth century was that they revered a classical education and Plato in particular so much; even more than the Bible, unfortunately.
The first and second chapters of the Biblical letter to the Romans refer to this Greek practice actually, as one of the consequences of human sinfulness, in the apostle Paul’s analysis of the evil tendencies of human nature in chapter 1 and 2, and Paul concludes that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”, but Paul says that God has revealed His righteousness, now, by which we can be justified.
But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, as attested by the Law and the Prophets. And this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
God presented Him as the atoning sacrifice through faith in His blood, in order to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance He had passed over the sins committed beforehand. He did this to demonstrate His righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:21-26)
But going back to Plato - I think it’s plain to see that God can’t actually be known through intellectual practices such as Socrates’ meditation on the perfect forms, which according to Plato can lead us up to contemplating and sharing in the perfection of God, and I’ll tell you why; for this was Socrates’ best effort to know God. If he really had known God, Socrates would not have recommended corrupting little boys.
For surely, truly knowing a God who is completely good, must transform human character.
Knowing God can’t help but do that; for knowing Him surely means that not only do we see clearly, but His light and goodness infiltrates our whole lives.
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. (Matthew 6:22-23)
God’s existence and his perfect qualities can be inferred through creation, but He Himself cannot be known as the loving, intimate Father that He is, except through knowing God’s Son, and the fact that someone knows God is seen in that person knowing Jesus’ commandments and following them, i.e. walking as Jesus Christ walked. This is what John says about this matter in his first epistle (letter):
By this we can be sure that we have come to know Him: if we keep His commandments. If anyone says, “I know Him,” but does not keep His commandments, he is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone keeps His word, the love of God has been truly perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him: Whoever claims to abide in Him must walk as Jesus walked. (1 John 2:5-7)
This is the difference between knowing someone exists and knowing them personally.
It’s the difference between hearing Jordan Peterson speak online and being in his family. No one could ever deny that Mikaela Peterson knows Jordan Peterson better than you or I ever will, no matter how many of his lectures we listen to.
The Bible is not just a book of principles to live by or a bunch of sensible rules to follow or laws or even a collection of archetypal stories in which we can find meaning. The Bible is a book through which we can know God and be fed spiritually by Him.
As Jesus said, “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)
And as Isaiah said,
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. For just as rain and snow fall from heaven and do not return without watering the earth, making it bud and sprout, and providing seed to sow and food to eat, so My word that proceeds from My mouth will not return to Me empty, but it will accomplish what I please, and it will prosper where I send it. (Isaiah 55:9-11)
That is the great difference between the Bible, which is the word of God, and philosophically helpful books like Plato’s Republic that are not divinely inspired: Plato’s writings are written by a human being reaching up to God, and failing to reach Him ultimately, and I guess we can learn something from that effort, but the Bible is the story of God reaching down to us in agapé - it is both the historical account and the present communication of God reaching down to us, despite the fact that we are in a dreadful hole of our own making, our sin.
For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. (John 3:16-17)
In the Narnia Chronicles, Aslan is frightening precisely because he is a real lion, and he is the one looking for the Pevensie children.
The idea that God can be known personally is unsettling and even frightening; until we know him and realise that He is a loving Father and does not mean to do us any harm. He only wants to help and save sinners, like us. He wants us to know Him and be friends with us, even though we were enemies of God.
For if, when we were enemies of God, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through His life! Not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation Romans 5:10
Plato’s mental efforts of meditation on the forms, trying to reach up into heaven to know God by some work of imagination or rational mysticism, cannot achieve what God has already done, through his own beloved Son, on the cross, in reaching down to us to bring us up to heaven to be with Him.
So put your trust in Jesus Christ, after all, he has died for you.
Plato’s claim that things would not be well with Greece until philosophers were kings and kings were philosophers, in other words, until rulers were educated according to the highest standards of education of the age, was actually tried a generation later, and it could be argued that it did not end well. Plato’s student Aristotle, inarguably one of the greatest philosophers in all of history and whose writings influence people even today, was the tutor of Alexander, the son of the ruler of Greece Phillip of Macedon, from the age of thirteen. Aristotle said, “Phillip brought me into the world, but Aristotle taught me how to live well.” Alexander became king at twenty years of age. He is known to history as Alexander the Great, for he conquered the known world of his age. After his successful campaign to conquer Persia, Aristotle’s nephew, Calisthenes, who had gone with the armies to be official historian, was executed because he refused to bow to Alexander in the Persian fashion. In response, in Athens, where Aristotle’s school was now located, Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus wrote a book called “Calisthenes, or On Grief”, criticising Alexander for not making good use of his excellent fortunes, and this was the start of a tradition in which Aristotle’s pupils criticised Alexander. Alexander on his return to Greece demanded to be worshipped as a god, and rejected Aristotle’s advice to treat the the Persians as slaves, instead proclaiming that all races would be equal under his reign and that he had come to bring peace to the world; a peace in which he, Alexander, was the only ruler; essentially, a tyrant and dictator. For further reading: Aristotle and Alexander the Great, Michael Tierney.
Having a heart that possesses nothing – this is exemplified in Jesus, who not only possesses such humility, but is perfectly aware that he is humble: Matthew 11: 28-29 Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. This is why Jesus is worthy to rule: Philippians 2:6-9 - Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name…