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| Chapter XXVI.—Plato indebted to the prophets.
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And let no one wonder that Plato should
believe Moses regarding the eternity of God. For you will find him
mystically referring the true knowledge of realities to the prophets,
next in order after the really existent God. For, discoursing in the
Timæus about certain first principles, he wrote thus: “This
we lay down as the first principle of fire and the other bodies,
proceeding according to probability and necessity. But the first
principles of these again God above knows, and whosoever among men is
beloved of Him.”2560
| 2560
Plato, Tim., p. 53 D, [cap. 20]. | And what men does he
think beloved of God, but Moses and the rest of the prophets? For their
prophecies he read, and, having learned from them the doctrine of the
judgment, he thus proclaims it in the first book of the Republic:
“When a man begins to think he is soon to die, fear invades him,
and concern about things which had never before entered his head. And
those stories about what goes on in Hades, which tell us that the man who
has here been unjust must there be punished, though formerly ridiculed,
now torment his soul with apprehensions that they may be true. And he,
either through the feebleness of age, or even because he is now nearer to
the things of the other world, views them more attentively. He becomes,
therefore, full of apprehension and dread, and begins to call himself to
account and to consider whether he has done any one an injury. And that
man who finds in his life many iniquities, and who continually starts
from his sleep as children do, lives in terror, and with a forlorn
prospect. But to him who is conscious of no wrong-doing, sweet hope is
the constant companion and good nurse of old age, as Pindar says.2561
| 2561 Pind., Fr., 233, a
fragment preserved in this place. | For this, Socrates, he has
elegantly expressed, that ‘whoever leads a life of holiness and
justice, him sweet hope, the nurse of age, accompanies, cheering his
heart, for she powerfully sways the changeful mind of mortals.’
”2562
| 2562 Plato,
Rep., p. 330 D. | This Plato wrote in the first book of
the Republic.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
