Appearance vs Reality. Opinion vs Knowledge. The Relative vs. the Absolute. The Changeable vs. the Immutable. The Desirable vs the Good. These contrasts are intelligible and recognizable to all today, and have been since man’s earliest existence, though not necessarily expressed in these terms. But it was Plato who first gave them precise definitions, most profoundly plumbed their depths, and most comprehensively explored their ramifications, writing over 35 dialogues and 13 letters, totaling over 500,000 words, to do so. He was inspired to do so by the person of Socrates, who convinced Plato by his words, but most of all by his life, that there could be nothing more important than understanding and living out these distinctions, seeking and loving transcendent reality, knowledge, the absolute, the immutable, and the good in and through the immanent appearances, opinions, relativities, mutations, and desires of earthly life. And for Plato, Socrates did this as perfectly as any man could ever do it, up until his last breath after he drank the Hemlock.
For Plato, Socrates was a living icon of something higher, a higher level of existence, of consciousness, of being, of beauty, of goodness. Being in the presence of Socrates was mysteriously to be in the presence of these transcendent realities. The Plato scholar Catherine Pickstock described Socrates as a “walking liturgy.” The Catholic Faith teaches us that only one man in history was an actual icon of the transcendent, being ontologically both God and man—“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. But as Jesus Christ was adumbrated religiously and morally by John the Baptist, “the greatest man born of women,” he was foreshadowed ontologically, as it were, by Socrates, who, one could say, was a preparatory icon of the Icon.
The primary insight of Plato and Socrates, which is at the root of the aforementioned contrasts, is that there is always something more to things than what is on the surface. In short, reality is symbolic. As physical icons represent physical realities, physical realities represent metaphysical realities. Of course, this is not an insight exclusive to Plato and Socrates, for it was known by the ancient Israelites, first and foremost, but also to all the ancient mystery cults as well as all the religions and cultures in the mytho-poetic stages of human consciousness preceding the axial age of Socrates’ classical Athens. Homer knew it, as did the authors of the Babylonian Gilgamesh, the Indian Upanishads, and the Persian Avesta, and their audiences knew it as well. What Socrates embodied and spoke, and Plato created and wrote, was the first synthesis of this great religious insight, in all of its ramifications, with human rationality, that is, the intimate marriage of mythos with logos. A few centuries later, this marriage would be supernaturally incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ, in which Reality itself became appearance, the Absolute became relative, Eternity became temporal, Infinity became finite, and the Good became a good—while paradoxically and mysteriously remaining absolute, eternal, infinite, and absolute.
“And Jesus answered, and said to him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon, the son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father Who is in Heaven’” (Matthew 16: 17). Such is the perfect instantiation and expression of Plato’s teaching. It is through Peter’s intimate contact with the invisible Father that he is able to accurately identify the visible Jesus. The paradox, of course, is that it is his intimate contact with the visible Jesus that put him in intimate contact with the invisible Father. And this is also the paradox at the heart of Plato’s teaching. Everything we perceive with our senses, interpret with our imagination, and understand with our intellect are both what they are and more than what they are, and it only by existing in contact with this suprasensible, unimaginable, and unthinkable reality that we are both able to recognize this, that is, to receive and know particular images as images, as both expressions of and conduits of transcendent reality, and through this very recognition, to be taken up into this transcendent reality.
Plato cast 500,000 shadows on the cave wall in the hope that they were the sort of shadows that somehow, choreographed and rendered correctly, would enable the Athenian cave dwellers to recognize them as shadows, see through them, grasp their real objects, and ultimately the Real Object casting them, the agathon, the Good.
Plato’s challenge and hope is now ours. The cave we are all now in is much darker, suffocating, and impregnable than anything Plato could have imagined. How do we cast life-giving shadows in it? How can we read them rightly so they bring us closer to the Good?