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Salvation in Plato and St. Paul: An Essay in Normative Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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What is a good man, and how does he become good? My aim in this paper is to unravel and to assess Plato's and St. Paul's very different answers to these questions. The pivotal texts are the Republic and Paul's Epistles.
A good man, according to Plato, is a man who is dikaios (righteous, just), temperate, wise, and courageous. A just man is one each one of the three parts (elements, components) of whose soul is doing its own [work, ergon]. We must pause a moment at the crucial passage in 441 DE. Cornford's translation of it is somewhat ambiguous. “ ... each one of us likewise will be a just person, fulfilling his proper function, only if the several parts of our nature fulfil theirs.” According to this rendition Plato may be construed to be saying that a human being is doing his own work as a just person only if each part of his inner nature (=soul) is doing its own work.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1973
References
1 The consensus among scholars is that the genuine Pauline texts include Romans, I and II Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, I Thessalonians, and Galatians.
2 See Vlastos, G. “The Argument in the Republic that ‘Justice Pays’”, Journal of Philosophy, LXV, 21, pp. 665–74Google Scholar: “Justice and Psychic Harmony in the Republic”, ibid, LXVI, 16, pp. 505–21.
3 In the course of the argument with Thrasymachus in Republic BK I, Socrates proclaims that every one who practices a craft, be it shoemaking, medicine, statesmanship is necessarily serving the interest of the “subject” of his art, not his own interest. Socrates' thesis is false. But Socrates' examples point to the fact that to undertake an occupation is to incur obligations to perform according to the requirements of the job, and that in many instances these are obligations to benefit others.
4 Note that the question “Why should I be righteous?” will receive a similar answer. In his famous essay, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” Prichard misunderstands Plato on this centrally important point of doctrine. Prichard takes Plato to be saying “Be righteous so as to be happy”, as if Plato were thereby denying that a man who knows what is best does what is best for the reason that it is the best. Far from denying this, Plato reaffirms it time and again in the Republic. In order to be happy (insofar as it lies within him to be so) a man must satisfy the desires of reason, and to do that it is necessary and sufficient that he do what is best for the reason that it is the best.
5 In the supposedly inauthentic Hebrews there is at 11 a long list of Jews, beginning with Abraham and stopping before Jesus, all of whom, the Epistle says, had faith.
6 According to the Revised Standard Version, Philippians 2:4 says: “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Even if this is what Paul really meant rather than what he says in l Cor., still the love commandment could not be interpreted to mean: Seek your nieghbor's good no less than you seek your own. For this would imply that men in fact do not commit suicide or lie to themselves. But they do.
7 Paul distinguishes the Mosaic reception of the Law as a body of codified commands from the Law as it is writ in the conscience of every man. According to the view a Hottentot's conscience knows the Law even though the Hottentot cannot articulate it and has not even entertained it.
8 According to the Law a woman who is (by civil law) divorced from her husband and marries (by civil law) another man, commits adultery if she sleeps with him.