Philosophy

Interpreting Plato

Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that all of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato. This proves true in the case of St. Augustine’s Confessions, where he specifies Plato’s good as God by personalizing the forms, Eros, sin, and recollection. Specifically, Augustine’s idea of “original sin,” forgetfulness and recollection follow the philosophy of Plato, bringing them into the “God realm,” rather leaving them in a figurative sense open for interpretation. In the Confessions, Augustine says that “the soul commits fornication when it is turned away from you and, apart from you, seeks such pure, clean things as it does not find except when it returns to you” (2.6.14). Here Augustine provides an overview of his idea of God: it is initially with God, because it must turn away, or forget, in order to leave God, but is left unsatisfied until it returns, or remembers. This is a direct use of Plato’s theory that the soul of man originally dwells with the forms in the realm of the “good,” then the soul forgets on earth what the “good” is, but spends life trying to remember.

For both Plato and Augustine, the journey begins at birth. When a person is born, they possess both an original sin and an original innocence. Being born into the world, people are certainly corrupted by society and prone to sin, because in the eyes of Plato and Augustine, the body itself is corrupt and leads to sin. At the same time, though, man is born with “good” inside of them. The soul of humankind comes from God or from the “good,” and it has a recollection of the good of which it once knew. Augustine said of infancy that, “the sin that is in him you have not made…For in your sight, no man is clean of sin, not even the infant who has lived but a day upon earth” (1.7.11). So what is it about living a day on the earth that makes an infant sin, and what is it in a person that makes them turn away from sin? According to Plato, the body leads to sin. As with Plato, while a person becomes a sinner when they enter into the body, they have within them an inherent, incorruptible good, the soul; only it forgets from what it came, thus turning away from the good. In the speech of Diotima, she says that love is giving birth to new ideas, bringing beauty in the presence of mortality.