The words hung over the mouth of hell: Abandon hope, all who enter. Dante’s poetic retelling of his journey to paradise begins with a tour of hell’s punishments. When Dante descends into the cave, he finds a school of ancient Greek philosophers. The first circle of hell is like a hall of fame, including philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Comparatively, these philosophers receive a lighter punishment, but are in hell because they did not adore God rightly or know the Christian faith. They eternally live without hope and are enflamed by a restless desire.
Dante’s vision of the afterlife is symbolic poetry. Doctrinally, it has significant problems. Still, his insights into sin and punishment at times flash with moral and intellectual clarity. This is true of his approach to Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers. For Dante, Plato was full of wisdom and nobility. Yet, Plato was also under the judgment of God as a pagan who did not know Christ. The punishment for Plato was to sit in the school of philosophy with the greatest thinkers, locked in dialogue and thought but never reaching satisfaction or relief from their thought projects. For them, thinking and dialogue would become a part of eternal conscious punishment.
Plato’s philosophy places ultimate hope on reason and dialogue. But Dante’s image of Plato eternally thinking and dialoguing in hell underscores the inability of philosophy and thought to save humanity. Reason cannot save. The noetic effects of the fall—the fact that even our minds are affected by sin—make our reasoning faulty, and we are unable to ascend to salvation through thought. We need our minds to be confronted with the gospel. This article presents the basics of Plato’s worldview and epistemology. I will then show how Plato’s philosophy directly contradicts the Christian gospel and the need for revelation from outside ourselves.
Salvation through Philosophical Reasoning
Plato believed that reality is made up of two different levels or realms.[1] The physical and material world is the lower realm that finds its source and meaning in a higher realm. This higher realm is a world that is unchanging and absolute. It is the world of “forms” or “ideas.” The material is a poor copy of the world of perfect forms. In his dialogue entitled Timaeus, Plato offers a mythology of the origin of the material universe where a god-like Demiurge sought to replicate the perfect forms. The Demiurge failed miserably, resulting in an imperfect world that is a twisted mimicry of the higher world of forms. To what extent Plato believed this mythology is a matter of debate. However, his point about the derivative and deformed material world is clear.
1. Gerald A. Press, Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2007), 162.
Plato’s mythology and metaphysics (his understanding of the nature of reality) produced an epistemology (a theory of how we come to know what we know) based on the primacy of the intellect and human reason. Human sense perception is unreliable for true knowledge because it belongs to the material world. These perceptions are twisted and distorted; the world they perceive is derivative, always changing, and in flux. However, people can transcend their material existence and reach the higher level of forms and ideas through the intellect and reasoning. For Plato, ultimate happiness is only found through reason, reflection, and dialogue.[2]
2. Press, Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed, 176.
For Plato, the ascent into the realm of forms by way of reason is possible because humans have an innate knowledge of this realm within them. Knowledge is a process of recollecting wisdom that the immaterial soul once had before birth in the material world.[3] This type of reasoning is accomplished through a process of dialogue that allows the intellect to recall what it once knew. This process of reason and recollection assists the thinker in the intellectual ascent into the realm of forms. Thus, for Plato, a precondition of knowledge is the innate capacity of the immortal soul. A second precondition is what he calls “the form of the Good.” This form of the Good is ultimately unknowable and abstract, but it illuminates the realm of forms for the reason and intellect.[4] Like the sun illuminates our world, the form of the Good also illuminates the realm of the forms and makes knowledge of that realm possible.
3. Plato, Phaedo 75a–76e.
4. Plato, Republic VI.507a–509c.
According to Plato, the purpose of education is to lead people from this material realm to the realm of forms. In one of Plato’s most celebrated passages, he describes life in the material world as being contentedly chained in the back of a dark cave. Education is freedom to emerge from the cave into the light of the Good in the realm of forms. Plato dreams of a republic ruled by philosopher-kings who know the freedom of the realm of the forms and the Good but re-enter the dark cave with the vision of the Good in their minds and seek to create a society of education and justice.[5]
5. Plato, Republic VI.500b; VII.519a–521c.
Plato’s works are entertaining and enlightening. The brilliance of Plato shines through the dramatic dialogues as one follows the flow of thought. However, Dante is right: Plato’s reason and dialectic dialogues are unable to save. He may have had some insights into truth, but ultimately Plato’s view of reality, epistemology, and message of salvation are fundamentally flawed. Plato, like all of humanity, ends up judged in the hands of an almighty God.
The Need for Salvation from the Outside
While there may be some insights here and there, the project of human philosophy apart from Christ is doomed to failure and judgment. Humanity is locked in the prison of sin, and philosophy and thought cannot escape from this prison to find the right answer. Human reason may parade as freedom, but without God’s revelation and redemption, it is nothing more than further imprisonment. We need someone to open the prison doors from the outside. We need Someone to work the miracle of resurrection to restore us from our spiritual death.
One theologian who strongly cautioned against human philosophy was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.[6] On November 18, 1943, Bonhoeffer reflected on the nature of salvation in a Nazi prison. His prison became an analogy for sin and the need for salvation: “one waits, hopes, does this or that – ultimately negligible things – the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”[7] Bonhoeffer developed Luther’s Pauline doctrine of salvation extra nos, that is, salvation from outside of us—outside of a person’s thoughts and experience. Bonhoeffer, following Luther, critiqued every philosophy that heralded the unfettered freedom of human wisdom. The problem with the philosophy of fallen man is that it puts man in the impossible position of “giving truth to themselves” and “of transporting themselves into the truth by themselves.”[8] This is impossible because, “thinking is as little able as good works to deliver.”[9] Philosophers such as Plato, Kant, and Heidegger may champion thought as the means of salvation and freedom. Still, human reason itself is chained in the prison of depravity and can only lead to ultimate death.
6. Bonhoeffer’s theology, like Dante’s, has significant issues, but his critique of reliance on human thought as a means of salvation is insightful in this context.
7. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Works 8:188.
8. Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, Works 2:87.
9. Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, Works 2:80.
Rather than a means to ascend into the heavens, human reason is like twisting the chains around oneself again and again. Sinful humanity needs truth from the outside: “Only when Christ has broken through the solitude of human beings will they know themselves placed in truth.”[10]
Hell Ripped Open by the Mighty One
Philosophy and thought are unable to save us. Human philosophy only further imprisons us in ourselves. While intellect and thought are gifts that come with bearing the image of God, the human enslaved in sin is unable to think himself out of depravity and rebellion into salvation and life. Plato’s analogy of the cave is insightful. However, the chains that hold us in darkness are not the material world, but rebellion against God. Plato suggested that thought and reason can save us and lift us to the realm of light. But this light is only a mirage, a disguise for further darkness.
10. Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, Works 2:141.
We do not need thought or dialogue for deliverance; we need redemption and salvation provided outside ourselves in the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is why Paul warns us of every form of human philosophy outside of Christ: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Col. 2:8). It is not that these philosophies are neutral paths for the Christian to delight in; they are systems of deception from the enemy that threaten to take us captive.
Dante’s image of Plato sitting in the cave of hell, thinking and dialoguing for eternity, powerfully pictures the inability of thought to save. We need someone outside ourselves and our depravity to rip open the sky and save us. While not biblical, Dante’s imaginative description of the first circle of hell becomes an analogy for salvation. In the Inferno, Virgil, an inhabitant of hell along with Plato, recalls how hell was ripped open from outside. A crowned and victorious “Mighty One” invaded hell and saved the Old Testament saints:
He took from us the shade of our first parents,
of Abel, his pure son, of ancient Noah,
of Moses, the bringer of the law, the obedient.Father Abraham, David the King,
Israel with his father and his children,
Rachel, the holy vessel of His blessing.[11]
11. Dante, The Inferno IV, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Signet Classics, 2001), 51.
Dante concludes, “Many more he chose for elevation among the elect.” The ascent to heaven does not come through thought; it comes through Christ’s saving action. There is an intentional contrast between Greek philosophers’ thought and the elect Old Testament believers’ faith. One group sits there eternally imprisoned in their own thoughts and dialogue, while the believers are rescued from outside themselves by the Mighty One.
Conclusion
In our own lives, we are confronted by rival systems of thought which seek to allure us. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only solution to our predicament. He has opened the heavens and saved us from our depravity and slavery to Satan, sin, and death. Since Christ has led us out of our imprisonment, we must be vigilant that no human tradition, including Plato’s philosophy, take us captive.
