NONFICTION: Plato, Phaedrus (4th century B.C.E.)

Recently a dear friend wanted me to read Plato's Phaedrus, saying that it had been a life-changing experience. Here is how it was life-changing for me: it moved me spiritually at a depth that few books have. While I read, I became transported into a realm where I felt happy and whole and removed from superficial worldly concerns. It was the kind of ecstasy that reminds me I am a disciple of literary beauty for life. Halfway through the book, I wrote to a couple of my best friends: "As I read these pages of the Phaedrus, as when I read Rilke or Dante or Wallace Stevens, I feel that the dormant noble elements of my soul are reawakened, my thoughts become fresher, my hopes renewed, and I feel more alive, more passionate, more motivated to make my life what I want it to be."

There were two passages in particular which stole my breath away and required me to pause in reading. The first is when the character of Socrates describes what happens prior to our incarnation as mortals on earth. While we are still disembodied souls, we are taken up to heaven where we experience a view of such truths as Wisdom, Beauty, and Justice in their "celestial forms." After that, our life begins, and only some of us still remember our original vision, but never clearly. "There was a time when with the rest of the happy band [we] saw beauty shining in brightness,--we philosophers following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the memory of scenes which have passed away."

I groaned out loud when I read this, and laid the book down to "linger over the memory" along with Socrates; what an exquisite dream and vision, how sublime and how tragic. What is posited is not an afterlife but a "beforelife." There is a juicy parallel with Christian theology in the phrase "through a glass dimly" which also appears in 1 Corinthians 13. I find a lot of poetry in the idea that when we behold beautiful things or people on earth, it is not a new sensation but a remembered one--the idea that beauty moves us so much because it takes us back to our original selves.

The second breathtaking passage in Phaedrus, for me, is Socrates' explanation of what romantic love is. Love, says Socrates, is to see in a human being the divine beauty that you perceived in heaven before you were made incarnate. When you behold your beloved, your soul regrows the wings which it used to have;

"And when [the soul] has seen [her beloved], and bathed herself in the waters of beauty, her constraint is loosened, and she is refreshed, and has no more pangs and pains....

"Every one chooses his love from the ranks of beauty according to his character.... The followers of Zeus desire that their beloved should have a soul like him; and therefore they seek out some one of a philosophical and imperial nature...and in like manner the followers of Apollo, and of every other god walking in the ways of their god, seek a love who is to be made like him whom they serve, and when they have found him, they themselves imitate their god, and persuade their love to do the same, and educate him into the manner and nature of the god as far as they each can...they do their utmost to create in him the greatest likeness of themselves and of the god whom they honour."

This is truly a noble conception of love! I am reminded of the Antoine de Saint-Exupery quotation, "Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in gazing outward together in the same direction." First and foremost, one walks in the train of one's god (for me personally, as I have said, that "god" is Beauty...a word which encompasses for me Art, Thought, Goodness, and Love for family and friends and mankind). After that, the soul happens to find her beloved because his beauty inspires her, and then being with him makes her want to be better, and together they can walk closer to what is eternal and good and true. Through love they are made more beautiful, more "godlike" if you will. Again: what a dream! I had to pause from the Phaedrus in order to contemplate it.

The second half of the dialogue is quite a bit more mundane. From visionary uplifting myth (which gave me trouble categorizing this particular "book review" as nonfiction) Plato shifts to a dry and increasingly pedantic discussion of the art (or rather, as I think he would have it, the craft) of rhetoric. Fine, philosophy is superior to speechmaking, but it is when he insists that philosophy is superior to creative writing that I lose sympathy. He has a disturbingly narrow conception of what the literary art entails:

"[I]n the written word there is necessarily much which is not serious, and...neither poetry nor prose, spoken or written, is of any great value, if, like the compositions of the rhapsodes, they are only recited in order to be believed, and not with any view to criticism or instruction; and...even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and...only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness...."

He sounds very much like those reactionaries from a couple of centuries ago who didn't keep any book in their homes aside from the Bible. It just so happens that writing has immense value even when it exists for other purposes than "criticism or instruction." "The best of writings" are MORE than "a reminiscence of what we know," because writing does not just record; it interprets and creates, it thinks and breathes and lives. What befuddles me is that Plato just spent the first half of the dialogue glorifying Beauty. Why then deny that writing can justifiably exist for beauty's sake alone?