by
Damien F. Mackey
One may perhaps
discern the influence of the biblical books of Job and Daniel upon key features
of two of Plato’s famous dialogues, “Protagoras” and “Meno”.
Plato and Likely Borrowings
from the Book of Job
There can be a similarity in thought between
Plato and the Jewish sages, but not always a similarity in tone. Compared with
the intense atmosphere of the drama of the Book of Job, for instance, Plato’s Republic, and his other dialogues, such
as the Protagoras, brilliant as they
are, come across sometimes as a bit like a gentlemen’s discussion over a glass
of port. W. Guthrie may have captured something of this general tone in his Introduction to Plato. Protagoras and Meno (Penguin,
1968), when he wrote (p. 20):
… a feature of the
conversation which cannot fail to strike a reader is its unbroken urbanity and
good temper. The keynote is courtesy and forbearance, though these are not
always forthcoming without a struggle. Socrates is constantly on the alert for
the signs of displeasure on the part of Protagoras, and when he detects them,
is careful not to press his point, and the dialogue ends with mutual
expressions of esteem. ….
[End of quote]
Compare this gentlemanly tone with e.g. Job’s ‘How
long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words? These ten times
you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me?’ (19:1-3), and
Eliphaz’s accusations of the holy man: ‘Is not your wickedness great? There is
no end to your iniquities [which supposed types of injustice on the part of Job
Eliphaz then proceeds to itemise]’ (22:5).
In Plato’s dialogues, by contrast, we get pages
and pages of the following sort of amicable discussion taken from the Republic (Bk. 2, 368-369):
[Socrates] ‘Justice can be a
characteristic of an individual or of a community, can it not?’
[Adeimantus] ‘Yes’.
[Socrates] ‘And a community is
larger than an individual?’
[Adeimantus] ‘It is”.
[Socrates] ‘We may therefore
find that the amount of justice in the larger entity is greater, and so easier
to recognize. I accordingly propose that we start our enquiry …’.
[Adeimantus] ‘That seems a
good idea’, he agreed.
….
Though Protagoras is a famous Sophist, whose
maxim “Man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, and
of those that are not that they are not” (Plato’s Theaetetus 152), I have often quoted in a philosophical context {–
and also in}:
The Futile Aspiration to
Make ‘Man the Measure of All Things’
this Protagoras may actually be based upon -
according to my new estimation of things - the elderly Eliphaz of the Book of
Job. Whilst Eliphaz was by no means a Sophist along the Greek lines, he was,
like Protagoras with Socrates, largely opposed to his opponent’s point of view.
And so, whilst the God-fearing Eliphaz would never have uttered anything so
radical or atheistic as “man is the measure of all things”, he was however
opposed to the very Job who had, in his discussion of wisdom, spoken of God as
‘apportioning out by measure’ all the things that He had created (Job 28:12,
13, 25).
Now, whilst Protagoras would be but a pale ghost
of the biblical Eliphaz, some of the original (as I suspect) lustre does still
manage to shine through - as with Protagoras’s claim that knowledge or wisdom
was the highest thing in life (Protagoras 352C, D) (cf. Eliphaz in Job 22:1-2).
And Guthrie adds that Protagoras “would repudiate as scornfully as Socrates the
almost bestial type of hedonism advocated by Callicles, who says that what
nature means by fair and right is for the strong man to let his desires grow as
big as possible and have the means of everlastingly satisfying them” (op. cit., p. 22).
Eliphaz was later re-invented (I think) as
Protagoras the Sophist from Abdera, as a perfect foil to Socrates (with Job’s
other friends also perhaps emerging in the Greek versions re-cast as Sophists).
Protagoras stated that, somewhat like Eliphaz, he was old enough to be the
father of any of them. “Indeed I am getting on in life now – so far as age goes
I might be the father of any one of you …” (Protagoras
317 C). That Eliphaz was old is indicated by the fact that he was the first to
address Job and that he also refered to men older than Job’s father (Job
15:10). Now, just as Fr. R. MacKenzie (S.J.) in his commentary on “Job”, in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, tells of
Eliphaz’s esteem for, and courtesy towards, Job (31:23):
Eliphaz is presumably the oldest of the three and
therefore the wisest; he is certainly the most courteous and the most eloquent.
He has a genuine esteem for Job and is deeply sorry or him. He knows the advice
to give him, the wisdom that lays down what he must do to receive relief from
his sufferings.
[End of quote],
so does Guthrie, reciprocally (I suggest), say:
“Protagoras – whom [Socrates] regards with genuine admiration and liking” (op. cit., p. 22).
But, again, just as the righteous Job had
scandalised his friends by his levity, according to St. Thomas Aquinas
(“Literal Exposition on Job”, 42:1-10), “And here one should consider that
Elihu had sinned out of inexperience whereas Job had sinned out of levity, and
so neither of them had sinned gravely”, so does Guthrie use this very same
word, “levity”, in the context of an apparent flaw in the character of Socrates
(ibid., p. 18):
There is one feature of the
Protagoras which cannot fail to puzzle, if not exasperate, a reader: the
behaviour of Socrates. At times he treats the discussion with such levity, and
at other times with such unscrupulousness, that Wilamowitz felt bound to
conclude that the dialogue could only have been written in his lifetime. This,
he wrote, is the human being whom Plato knew; only after he had suffered a
martyr’s death did the need assert itself to idealize his character.
[End of quote]
Job’s tendency towards levity had apparently
survived right down into the Greek era. Admittedly, the Greek version does get
much nastier in the case of Thrasymachus, and even more so with Callicles in
the Gorgias, but in the Republic at least it never rises to the
dramatic pitch of Job’s dialogues with his three friends. Here is that least
friendly of the debaters, Thrasymachus, at his nastiest (Republic, Bk. I, 341):
[Socrates] Well, said I, ‘so
you think I’m malicious, do you Thrasymachus?’
[Thrasymachus] ‘I certainly
do’.
[Socrates] ‘You think my
questions were deliberately framed to distort your argument?’
[Thrasymachus] ‘I know
perfectly well they were. But they won’t get you anywhere; you can’t fool me,
and if you don’t you won’t be able to crush me in argument’.
[Socrates] ‘My dear chap, I
wouldn’t dream of trying’, I said ….
Socrates and Plato are similarly (like the
Sophists) watered down entities by comparison with the Middle Eastern
originals. Such is how the Hebrew Scriptures end up when filtered through the
Greeks, [and, in the case of Plato, perhaps through the Babylonians before the
Greeks, hence a double filtering]. Even then, it is doubtful whether the finely
filtered version of Plato that we now have could have been written by pagan
Greeks. At least some of it seems to belong clearly to the Christian era, e.g.
“The just man … will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned … and after enduring
every humiliation he will be crucified” (Republic,
Bk. 2, 362).
I submit that this statement would not likely
have been written prior to the Gospels.
Plato and Likely Borrowings
from the Book of Daniel
The Chaldean rulers of Babylon, as they are
presented in the Book of Daniel, are a most interesting psychological study.
The autocratic and tyrannical Nebuchednezzar eventually goes mad (4:28-33), but
later returns to his senses and is said to have exalted the Most High God (vv.
34-37). His son, Belshazzar, however, is a ne’er do well from beginning to end,
whom Daniel reprimands for his stubbornness and pride.
Plato’s Meno
It seems to me that the evil Chaldean king,
Belshazzar, might find an echo in the person of Meno, in Plato’s Meno.
He is not a king there, but a man of some power, nonetheless, a friend of the
ruling family of Thessaly, and he has connections interestingly with the king
of Persia (read Media?).
Guthrie tells of Meno as follows (Introduction to Plato. Protagoras and Meno, Penguin, 1968, pp. 101-102):
… The character of Meno, as a
wealthy, handsome and imperious young aristocrat, visiting Athens from his
native Thessaly, is well brought out in the dialogue itself. He is a friend of
Aristippus, the head of the Aleuadae who were the ruling family in Thessaly,
and his own family are xenoi (hereditary guest-friends) of the Persian king, a
tie which must have dated from the time of Xerxes, who made use of Thessalian
hospitality on his expedition against Greece. He knows the famous Sophist and
rhetorician Gorgias, who had stayed at Larissa in Thessaly as well as meeting
him in Athens. From Gorgias he has acquired a taste for the intellectual
questions of the day, as seen through the eyes of the Sophists, whose trick
question about the impossibility of knowledge comes readily to his lips.
Xenophon tells of his career
as one of the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus and gives him a bad character,
describing him as greedy, power-loving, and incapable of understanding the
meaning of friendship. This account is probably prejudiced by Xenophon’s
admiration for the Greek leader Clearchus, a grim and hardly likeable
character, whose rival and personal enemy Meno was. There were rumours that
Meno entered into treacherous relations with the Great King [of Persia], but he
appears to have been finally put to death by him after the failure of the
expedition, though possibly later than his fellow-prisoners.
[End of quote]
‘Bad character’, ‘greedy’, ‘power-loving’
‘unloyal friend’, ‘connected with a Persian (Median) king’, but then ‘slain and
replaced by the king of the Persians (Medes)’, all of this fits King Belshazzar
and his replacement by Darius the Mede (Daniel 5:30-31). Belshazzar’s greed and
his love of power and flattery is clearly manifest in this description of his
great feast, one of the most celebrated feasts in history and in the Old
Testament (Daniel 5:1-4):
King Belshazzar made a great
festival for a thousand of his lords, and he was drinking wine in the presence
of the thousand.
Under the influence of the
wine, Belshazzar commanded that they bring in the vessels of gold and silver
that his father Nebuchednezzar had taken out of the Temple in Jerusalem, so
that the king and his lords, his wives, his concubines might drink from them.
So they brought in the vessels of gold and silver that had been taken out of
the Temple, the House of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his lords, his
wives, and his concubines drank from them. They drank the wine and praised the
gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.
Obviously Meno could not match this sort of
opulence and grandeur; but Socrates does say of him – and this is immediately
before Socrates begins to write in the sand: “I see that you have a large
number of retainers here” (Meno, 82).
We can gain some impression of King Belshazzar’s
treacherous nature from Daniel’s pointed address to him (vv. 18-23):
‘O king, the Most High God gave
your father Nebuchednezzar kingship, greatness, glory, and majesty. And because
of the greatness that He gave him, all peoples, nations, and languages trembled
and feared before him. He killed those he wanted to kill, kept alive those he
wanted to keep alive, honoured those he wanted to honour, and degraded those he
wanted to degrade. But when his heart was lifted up his spirit was hardened so
that he acted proudly, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and his glory was
stripped from him. He was driven from human society, and his mind was made like
that of an animal. His dwelling was with the wild asses, he was fed grass like
an oxen, and his body was bathed with the dew of heaven, until he learned that
the Most High God has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals, and sets over it
whomever He will. And you, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, even though
you knew all this! You have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven! The
vessels of his Temple have been brought in before you, and you and your lords,
your wives and your concubines have been drinking wine from them. You have
praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do
not see or hear or know; but the God in whose power is your very breath, and to
whom belong all your ways, you have not honoured.
Daniel would on this occasion have had the full
attention of the whole company since these words of his were spoken just after
King Belshazzar and his court had witnessed the terrifying apparition of the
‘Writing on the Wall’ whilst in the midst of their blasphemous celebration.
Here is the description of it. And does it have a resonance anywhere in Plato?
(vv. 5-9):
[As they were drinking the wine
and praising their gods]:
Immediately the fingers of a
human hand appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal
palace next to the lampstand. The king was watching the hand as it wrote. Then
the king’s face turned pale, and his thoughts terrified him. His limbs gave
way, and his knees knocked together. The king cried aloud to bring in the
enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the diviners; and the king said to the wise men
of Babylon, ‘Whoever can read this writing and tell me its interpretation shall
be clothed in purple, have a chain of gold around his neck, and rank third in
the kingdom’. Then all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the
writing or tell the king the interpretation. Then King Belshazzar became
greatly terrified and his face turned pale, and his lords were perplexed.
This fascinating life and death encounter I think
may have inspired the whole drama of the (albeit pale by comparison) Meno.
Instead of the miraculous ‘Writing on the Wall’ of the Chaldean king’s palace,
though, we get Socrates writing in the sand. Instead of the words that name
weights and measures indicating the overthrow of a great kingdom, we get a
detailed lesson in geometry. Instead of the stunned and terrified Chaldean
king, we get Meno, who tends to be similarly passive in the face of the
Socratic lesson. Instead of the exile, Daniel, we get Meno’s slave boy
seemingly providing a confirmation of the matter, under the skilful prompting
of Socrates.
Daniel enters the palace’s banquetting hall
preceded by his reputation, though now somewhat faded from memory (as in the
case of Joseph with the Oppressor Pharaoh). And Meno is aware of the legendary
reputation of Socrates. Let us compare the two accounts, taking firstly the
biblical one (vv. 10-16):
The queen, when she heard the
discussion of the king and his lords, came into the banquetting hall. The queen
said, ‘O king, live forever! Do not let your thoughts terrify you or your face
grow pale. There is a man in your kingdom who is endowed with a spirit of the
holy gods. In the days of your father he was found to have enlightenment,
understanding, and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods. Your father, King
Nebuchednezzar, made him chief of the magicians, enchanters, Chaldeans, and
diviners, because an excellent spirit, and understanding to interpret dreams,
explain riddles, and solve problems were found in this Daniel, whom the king
named Belteshazzar. Now let Daniel be called, and he will give the interpretation.
Then Daniel was brought in
before the king. The king said to Daniel, ‘So you are Daniel, one of the exiles
of Judah, whom my father the king brought from Judah? I have heard of you that
a spirit of the gods is in you, and that enlightenment, understanding, and
excellent wisdom are found in you. Now the wise men, the enchanters, have been
brought in before me to read this writing and tell me its interpretation, but
they were not able to give the interpretation of the matter. But I have heard that
you can give interpretations and solve problems. Now if you are able to read
the writing and tell me its interpretation, you shall be clothed in purple,
have a chain of gold around your neck, and rank third in the kingdom’.
Now Meno, supposedly focussing on the subject of
virtue, tells of what he knows of Socrates’ enigmatic reputation, and it, too,
like Daniel’s, has connection with “magic” (see quote above and 4:9), and Meno
himself feels numb and weak, just like Belshazzar, so lacking in virtue (or
“moral goodness” as in quote below) (Meno, 80):
Meno. Socrates, even before I
met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and
reduce others to perplexity. At this moment I feel that you are exercising
magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I
am just a mass of helplessness. If I may be flippant, I think that not only in
outward appearance but in other respects as well you are exactly like the flat
sting-ray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with
it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me
now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to
you. Yet I have spoken about virtue hundreds of times, held forth often on the
subject in front of large audiences, and very well too, or so I thought. Now I
can’t even say what it is. In my opinion you are well advised not to leave
Athens and live abroad. If you behave like this as a foreigner in another
country, you would most likely be arrested as a wizard.
Socrates. You’re a real
rascal, Meno.
On the occasion of Socrates’ writing in the sand,
which I think must have originated from the ‘Writing on the Wall’ in the Book
of Daniel, we have as the audience, Meno (whom I am equating with King
Belshazzar), and his “large number of retainers” (Belshazzar’s large court),
and the writing about to be effected due to a query from Meno. And, in a sense
to interpret it, we get, not Daniel a former exiled slave, but Meno’s own slave
boy, a foreigner (like Daniel) who however speaks the native language (like
Daniel). The issue has become the immortality of the soul and whether it
pre-exists the body, as manifest in someone’s being able to recall knowledge.
Socrates will attempt to demonstrate this supposed pre-knowledge using the
young slave boy – but perhaps this, too, is built upon Daniel’s God-given
ability to arrive at entirely new knowledge without any human instruction (as
in the case of his recalling Nebuchednezzar’s Dream).
Anyway, here is the dialogue (ibid.):
Meno. …. If in any way you can
make clear to me that what you say is true, please do.
Socrates. It isn’t an easy
thing, but still I should like to do what I can since you ask me. I see you
have a large number of retainers here. Call one of them, anyone you like, and I
will use him to demonstrate it to you.
Meno. Certainly. (To a
slave-boy). Come here.
Socrates. He is a Greek and
speaks our language?
Meno. Indeed yes – born and
bred in the house.
Socrates. Listen carefully
then, and see whether it seems to you that he is learning from me or simply
being reminded.
Meno. I will.
Socrates. Now boy, you know
that a square is a figure like this?
(Socrates begins to draw
figures in the sand at his feet. He points to the square ABCD)
Boy. Yes.
Socrates. It has all these
four sides equal?
Boy. Yes.
Socrates. And these lines
which go though the middle of it are also equal? (The lines EF, GH).
Boy. Yes.
….
And so on.
Such apparently is how the life and death
biblical account becomes gentlemanly and tamed, and indeed trivialised, in the
Greek version! Daniel is not a passive slave, like the boy, supposedly
recalling pre-existent knowledge, but a Jewish wise man, a sure Oracle to kings
under the inspiration of the holy Spirit of God.
The ‘Writing on the Wall’ contains, like
Socrates’ writing in the sand, division, and measure, but adds weighing. There
is nothing Protagorean or Sophistic here. God, not man, is indeed the measure
of kings and kingdoms according to the biblical account (vv. 24-28):
‘So from [God’s] presence the
hand was sent and this writing was inscribed. And this is the writing that was
inscribed: Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin. This is the interpretation of the
matter: Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an
end; Tekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; and Peres
[the singular of Parsin], your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and
the Persians’.
Russian Orthodox priest Fr. Sergei Sveshnikov has
likewise, in his Internet article, “The Sovereignty of God”, made a Platonic
connection with this very biblical incident (http://frsergei.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/the-sovereignty-of-god):
….
The yearning for Goodness has
been with us through the recorded history of humanity. In the words of Plato,
Good, “is that which every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does all
that it does …”. (Republic 505 …). Men have been striving to do what is good,
and not always selfishly what is good for them. Every new philosophy tried to
market itself by appealing to some universal good to be achieved. And yet the
result of all our intense labors has horrified us in the twentieth century, and
the twenty-first one is up to no good start. Good appears to be other than
sovereign in our hearts. And if not there, can it find refuge anywhere in a
godless world?
Murdoch writes that “the chief
enemy of excellence in morality … is personal fantasy: the tissue of
self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams, which prevents one from
seeing what is there outside one” …. This personal fantasy, or in patristic
terms, logos fantastikon, also and perhaps most importantly, prevents one from
seeing what is there inside one. And if we humble ourselves enough to see our
true state, then would we not cry out with Apostle Paul: “Wretched man that I
am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24 NRSV) If Good is
merely a concept, a creation of the human mind, then there can be no hope. If
man is the measure of all things, then “mene, mene, tekel u-parsin” (Dan.
5:25).
One thinks that King Belshazzar, who was
apparently incapable of humbling himself to recognise his true state, as Daniel
had said of him, ‘You have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven!’, would
have been perfectly at home therefore with man, and not God, as the measure.
Hence, when he was weighed, he was found wanting.
Now, could the very name Meno have arisen from
the Mene, ‘God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end’?
Certainly Fr. L. Hartman (C.SS.R), commenting on “Daniel” for The Jerome
Biblical Commentary (26:22), connects the Mene (or half of it) to King
Belshazzar (on whom I think this Meno was based):
…. Daniel must first say what
words were written on the wall; evidently no one else could even decipher the
script. His interpretation involves a play on words that is possible only in a
purely consonantal script, such as Hebrew or Aramaic. The three words that were
written in the consonantal script would be mn’, tql, and prs, which could be
read, as Daniel apparently first read them, menê’, teqal, and peres – i.e., as
three monetary values, the mina (equivalent at different times to 50 or 60
shekels, and mentioned in Lk 19:12-25), the shekel (the basic unit of weight),
and the half-mina. Daniel, however, “interpreted” the writing by reading the
three words as verbs, mena’, “he counted”, teqal, “he weighed”, and peras, “he
divided”, with God understood as the subject and Belshazzar and his kingdom
understood as the object. Thus, God has “numbered” the days of Belshazzar’s
reign. (Things that can be counted are few in number). God has “weighed” the
king in the balance of justice and found him lacking in moral goodness. (The
idea of the “scales” of justice, which goes back to an old Egyptian concept, is
met with elsewhere in the OT: Jb 31:6; Ps 62:10; Prv 16:11, etc.). God has
“divided” Belshazzar’s kingdom among the Medes and the Persians. For good
measure, there is an additional pun on the last of the three words, prs, which
is also read as pãras, “Persia”, “Persians”.
Fr. Hartman continues
speculatively, and he concludes by equating King Belshazzar to the half-mina:
An older form of the conundrum
may also have connected the word mãday, “Media”, “Medes”, with the root mdd,
“measure”. The conundrum seems to have existed in an older form, independently
of its present context. The statement that Belshazzar’s “kingdom has been
divided and given to the Medes and the Persians” does not fit well with the
statement at the end of the story, according to which Belshazzar’s whole
kingdom was handed over to the Medes, with no mention of the Persians. Ginsberg
even opines that the conundrum was originally applied to the only three
Babylonian kings who were known to the Jews of the Hellenistic period: the mina
would stand for the great Nebuchadnezzar, the shekel for the insignificant
Evil-merodach, and the half-mina for Belshazzar.
According to my revision of the Neo-Babylonian
dynasty, Evil-merodach was Belshazzar.
No comments:
Post a Comment