Plato's Shambling Feet 01
“The Bible did not learn from Aristotle, but Aristotle from the Bible.”
- Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah
Plato has a problem: Plato is a pagan.
Of course, this has not stopped Christianity from hanging on his coattails like a lonely toddler in need or security. Even as many pious Christians are seeking to come out of the collapsing insanity of the secularized post-Christendom, classical education curriculum continue to posit that our happy future relies on the rediscovery of our foundations. Those foundations inevitably rest on Plato.
A very wise man once told me, “In philosophy there is Plato, and everything else is a commentary on Plato.” He is exceptionally right. If you are a classicist, whichever niche philosopher you may love, his foundations are either Platonic, or a reaction to the Platonic. But Aristotle has the same problem as Plato: he too is a pagan.
So here’s the thing: Solomon is not a commentary on either of them.
“Yes, but Solomon did not write a philosophy.”
Are you so sure?
I understand that the book of Proverbs is an afterthought to most biblical commentary. I see how it can come off as a quaint little book about taming the tongue and having balanced scales. But something just doesn’t sit right with me in the idea that the wisest man who ever lived, who wrote not one but two books about it, is so quickly shrugged off by the same arrogant modernism that relegates all the ancients to cavemen scribbling best as they could on their primitive walls.
I also have discovered that the book of Proverbs is grossly under-translated into English. In the first seven verses the English “wisdom” is used for multiple Hebrew terms, and likewise Hebrew roots are translated with multiple English words as diverse as “take” and “learn.” How would one ever see philosophical categories in Plato with ham-fisted poetics like that? Philosophy is terminology, and so far as Solomon’s goes, we simply do not have access to it.
So I’m not pointing fingers anywhere except the text. I’m not trying to say that your classical school curriculum is sinful. I’m just saying that if, in a time of pagan societal collapse you have the opportunity to found something new, to plant the seed of a culture that might emerge on the other side of the fire, sprout and grow into a regenerated bloom, wouldn’t you rather build with gold than silver or straw?
To know wisdom from discipline, to understand the words you stand under…
- Solomon, Prv 1:2
What if there were a true philosopher more ancient than Plato? Inspired by God himself to be so? Not a pagan but a Christian?
Wouldn’t that man’s categories be a thing worth knowing? Wouldn’t such a text be written for such a time as this? He who has ears, let him hear.
To be continued…
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