Greek mythology is fascinating. Thorough research has been and continues to be written about it at all levels. I’d been meaning to read Josef Pieper’s essay, * On Platonic Myths* (Herder, 1998), for quite some time. The clarity of his arguments and the author’s skillful writing make this short essay a thought-provoking reflection.
Pieper limits the concept of myth to “narratives about the origin of the cosmos, the primitive history of happiness and misfortune, the fate of the dead, judgment, and reward in the afterlife (p. 18).” Within this framework, the mythical stories in Plato’s work are the following: “the story in the Timaeus about the creation of the world; the story in the Symposium about the original form and the fall of man, latent in Aristophanes’ discourse; and above all, the eschatological myths about the afterlife, judgment, and the fate of the dead, which appear at the end of the Gorgias, the Republic, and the Phaedo (p. 28).”
Plato attributes a strict sense of truth to these mythical accounts, indicating that the authority that confers credibility upon them is “the ancients.” Who are they? They are not the elderly, nor the pioneers, nor even Hegel’s famous “noble spirits,” who burst into the mystery of the world “with the audacity of their reason.” Who are they, then? “The ancients are rather, in Plato’s opinion, the first receivers and transmitters of news that comes from a divine source (cf. p. 72).” Therefore, we participate in the knowledge of that “divine source” only “by ear,” ex akoes, by virtue of what we hear, not through our own experience or reflection, not through our own verification of the facts, but solely and exclusively in the manner of faith (p. 75).
In the Symposium, Pieper argues that the comedian Aristophanes states that man is originally spherical and complete, the spherical form being the most perfect of all forms. As punishment for his delusions of grandeur, man was stripped of this condition of perfection, an imperfection that is inherited. In the Timaeus, on the other hand, it is narrated that the world is an image of something good. “The essential content of this birth of the cosmos can be condensed into a few sentences. The first is that there is ‘a maker and father of all this,’ who is sometimes called ‘founder’ and sometimes also ‘the begetting father’ (p. 50).”
All of this is familiar to a Christian; it is the “primitive revelation,” expressed in the following principles: “At the beginning of human history there is the fact of a divine communication properly addressed to man. What was transmitted in it has entered into the sacred tradition of all peoples, that is, into their myths, and in them, it has been preserved and is present—in a certain way, although distorted, exaggerated, and very often becoming almost unrecognizable (p. 74).” It is no coincidence that Plato had a very marked influence on the first centuries of Christian thought, in part because of the bridges that connect theological reflection with Greek philosophy.
Plato opens the way to expressing certain universal concepts in the form of a story, which must be told. “The reason for this,” Pieper notes, “is that—to use Lessing’s language—it is not expressly a matter of ‘necessary truths of reason,’ which can be derived from abstract principles, but of events and actions that proceed from freedom, both the freedom of God and the freedom of man (p. 75).”
