Philosophy – Plato and Augustine
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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. Augustines Confessions, where he specifies Platos good as God by personalizing the forms, Eros, sin, and recollection. Specifically, Augustines 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 Platos 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 madeÐFor 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. It is the ability to bring the divine into the finite world, which is the role of a philosopher. “It follows that love must be a lover of wisdom and, as such is in between being wise and being ignorant” (Symposium 204B). Augustine famously says in the opening lines of his Confessions, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you” (1.1.1). It is this pursuit, the search for truth, the search of the soul between the finite and the infinite, that creates a restless heart. It is searching for the place from which it came, not knowing from where it came or how to recognize it, but trying to remember. Augustine goes on to say, “But how does one who does not know you call upon you?” (1.1.1). This is an area of struggle for most peopleЖtrying to find something that they do not know, but knowing that they are missing it. Plato wrote that the soul falls from the realm of the good, and upon entering the body, forgets, or as Augustine says, turns away from God, thus committing sin. Plato calls this placing the body over the soul, which Socrates spoke of in the “Phaedo”. He sees death as more of a cure for evil, rather than a poison for life. He says that death is releasing the soul from the body (“Phaedo” 64c), as if the body is only a trap for the soul that keeps it from realizing the good. He goes on later to ask, “Then when is it that the soul attains to truth? When it tries to investigate anything with the help of the body, it is obviously led astray” (“Phaedo” 65b-65c). Here is Augustines later assertion that the body leads astray, and while he held an original innocence because God made him, his body also gave