‘Perception is moulded by belief, and belief by culture.’ Photo: Image by M P from Pixabay
Solving a dilemma: Plato for Quakers, by Philip Waywell
‘Plato did believe that the route to “the Good” went via the disciplined work of attention.’
Christian theology is peppered with Plato, and so is the Quaker way. Our belief in that of God in every person – and our practice of attentive stillness – is inescapably neoplatonic.
Plato is often blamed for saddling Western culture with unhelpful ‘dualisms’ – the idea that the world (or reality) consists of two basic, opposed, and irreducible principles (appearance versus reality, for example). He also stands accused of devaluing the everyday world of the senses into a second-rate land of shadows. He could further be criticised for over-moralising human life. If only he could have heard Ella Fitzgerald, courtesy of lyricist Dorothy Fields, lamenting that ‘fine romance’ of hers ‘with no quarrels / With no insults and all morals’!
On top of all this, Plato’s desire to order the whole of reality under a single spiritual principle also seems at odds with a culture that is – at last – beginning to embrace plurality. Now, more religious people can enjoy diversity for its own sake, and not only as the concomitant of a longed-for unity.
But all this said, Plato did believe that the route to ‘the Good’ went via the disciplined work of attention – a Quaker speciality. I’m a retired translator and I still hanker after the professional obligation to pay attention. I miss being ‘in the zone’, focusing on producing accurate and clear translations in the right registers, and to deadlines. What a holiday from self-absorption that was!
Paying attention benefits our mental state. In the words of PJ Kavanagh, ‘The best way out of our apathies and megrims [low spirits] is the closest possible attention to the world outside us… I mean the kind of concentrated observing that is necessary for the correct drawing of a leaf, or an architectural detail. Sanity lies that way because wonder lies that way, at something outside the self.’
I’ve been learning Swedish for years. I’m entranced by its plangent beauty and, as a Lancastrian who once lived in Perth, beguiled by its deep connections with Scots and northern English. The language has its own integrity, authority and mystery. I don’t want to master it. When we attend respectfully to a foreign language, or to a painting by Vermeer, or to an elegant mathematical formulae, we know that these are structures to be heeded, not appropriated.
Anyone who’s ever listened to a person in despair knows that what they need least is to be judged, and to be given advice (of which they’ve probably already had earfuls). They need to know that, no matter what they’ve done, or had done to them, they’re accepted for the person they are. The last word about them has not been said. They require the undivided attention that might hear them back into being. As for the listener, they are fully themself, yet also more than themself, as they deploy their own resources with something like the unselfconscious self-awareness of the professional actor.
In ideal worship, too, we become more than ourselves, as the clamorous ego recedes. Fantasy gives way to realism, and individual listening to the communal attentiveness that is familiar to many of us from our experiences of the performing arts. Think of those rare moments in a concert hall or theatre when strangers in a darkened room become, as it were, a single organism, vibrant with attention.
Not only is attention linked to realism, but realism to virtue. Iris Murdoch, whose possible Quaker leanings have been discussed by Jonathan Wooding in his ‘Seeing Iris’ articles, was an expert on Plato. In her book The Sovereignty of Good (see 24 September), she asserts 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’.
Murdoch recognised that we humans don’t behave according to abstract principles laid up beyond the stars, or matched with the grain of the universe. Rather, we act (at least partly) on the basis of whom we’ve allowed ourselves to become through the things we’ve chosen to focus on. Paul understood this when, in Philippians 4:8, he declared: ‘Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’
Perception is moulded by belief, and belief by culture. As Western European cultures withdraw their support for the familiar belief in God as an intelligent, loving and communicative reality that undergirds, infuses and arches over everything, the question ‘To what do we pay attention in worship?’ is likely to become more difficult to answer.
In response to this new situation, radical theologians have come up with accounts of religion in which meaning is made rather than discovered or received. Interesting though these are, they are of limited use to a Religious Society of Friends whose worship is based on listening.
In contrast, Plato’s curious notion of ‘the virtues’ as interrelated ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’ (the form or idea of ‘the Good’, for example) might be of service to much of contemporary liberal Quakerism, whether Christian, universalist or religiously humanist. For one thing, Plato’s thinking might help us resolve the following perennial dilemma: If we try to make a representation of God, we risk fetishising an object among other objects. But if we follow the ‘via negativa’, the theological approach which refuses to identify God with any human concept or knowledge, God disappears as a focus of attention. That attention is vital to non-mystics like me.
But, let’s suppose we take Plato’s idea of the Good as the end-point of the religious quest. In that case, God might be seen as a culturally-localised resource that points beyond itself to the Good. Surely that is specific enough to engage with.
God might then also reference the fullness of life that we read about in John’s gospel – a fullness of life shaped, but not exclusively defined, by the moral priorities of the historical, albeit elusive, Jesus of Nazareth. These priorities would include, for example, pre-emptive forgiveness, empathetic solidarity with the marginalised, and valuing and affirming enemies as well as friends.
Reservations about the pervasive influence of Plato on Western philosophy and culture is in many ways healthy. But it’s probably a mistake to reject his thinking out of hand. In Iris Murdoch’s Acastos, Socrates’ concluding words to his fellow seekers, including an excitable young Plato, are ‘Let us enjoy our gods while we can’. Since we’re not in any case able to get away from his legacy, might Quakers allow Plato to help us do just that?
