A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

of the Forms. Once they had understood the totality of the world of the Forms,
the elite had the right to coerce the less disciplined masses into acceptance of
what they, the elite, decreed was truly ‘the Good’, or Wisdom, Justice or Beauty.
Later Platonists would equate ‘the Good’ with a supreme god and Platonism
would provide Christianity with much of its intellectual backbone.
Plato’s philosophy proved highly attractive, largely due to the coherence and
depth with which he developed his arguments in his so-called Dialogues, in
which Socrates was often given a leading part as a defender of Plato’s views.
Plato’s belief that the soul existed independently of the body and carried with it
memories of certainties of the world beyond that could be recovered through
reasoning was enormously influential, while his distaste for emotion and sensual
excess appealed to the more austere (and so, in later centuries, to ascetic
Christians). The search to understand the nature of the Forms, such as Justice or
Beauty, could appeal to anyone who felt that these were subject to abuse in their
own society. However, the freedom with which Plato was able to develop his
philosophy was in conflict with its end, which was to impose a minority’s views
on the majority. Moreover there was something joyless and ethereal in his ideal
society, in which entertainment and good fun would have no place.
It says a great deal, however, for Plato’s Academy, and Greek society in
general, that his most brilliant pupil, Aristotle (384—322 BC), could reject this
approach. Aristotle was suspicious of imaginary worlds outside the knowledge
of the senses. While he was prepared to accept that there must be a supreme
Unmoved Mover, whose existence could be supported by reason, he was not
prepared to go further into the unknown. Instead he focused his brilliant mind on
what could be grasped empirically in the natural world, and became the founder
of the disciplines of botany and zoology. However, Aristotle went much further
in exploring how one could assess and develop knowledge of the material world,
and his researches took him into logic and an understanding of the underlying
causes of physical change. He speculated on the nature of the universe, how to
live an ethical life, and even on the purpose of tragedy and art. While he was
prepared to accept that human beings did have a dimension that could be called
the soul, he did not believe that this could exist independently of the human
body (in another sphere of being, for instance). It was, he once said, like the
image stamped on a coin, impossible to imagine apart from the coin itself.
This focus on empiricism underlies one of the most important differences
between Plato and Aristotle. While Plato believed that only a tiny elite would
reach true understanding, Aristotle had a much more democratic approach to