How Much Plato Did Paul or the Rabbis Know?

Last week’s column ended with the question of why Plato’s 19th-century translator Benjamin Jowett chose to render Socrates’ observation in the Phaedo that we see the world around us “in images” as of our seeing it “through a glass darkly,” a phrase taken from a New Testament epistle of Paul’s.

Was Jowett, as some have thought, seeking to Christianize Plato? One suspects that, on the contrary, he was seeking to Platonize Paul.

Plato and the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues introduced into Western philosophy the notion that the world of our everyday sensory experience is an imperfect version of a more perfect reality that we can grasp only with our intellects. A cabbage, a cat, a melody, a beautiful face, a just act—all are blurred representations of an ideal vegetable, animal, musical structure, vision of beauty, or concept of justice that life as we know it falls short of. In the famous metaphor in Plato’s lengthy dialogue Republic, human society is compared to a band of cave dwellers permanently seated with their backs to the cave’s entrance. Beyond the entrance is a real world they cannot see; visible to them are only the shadows projected by the light behind them on the cave’s rear wall that is in front of them. We live, says Plato, in a world of shadows that are mistaken for reality by all but the philosopher.