GREAT ISSUES CHAPTER I MYTHS WHEN Plato desired to utter some truth which lies deep in the mystery of being he was accustomed to glide into what he called a myth. Such myths, "truths embodied in a tale," are among the masterpieces of his style, or, one might say, of all literature. He uses the myth, not to avoid speaking truth, but in order to speak it. There was no other medium through which he could convey realities which belong, not to the phenomenal, but to the noumenal world. Well he knew the difficulty of dealing with that spiritual background of human life. Dialectic was no adequate instrument. Logic missed the mark. Science, if he had known the meaning of science in the modern sense, made no pretence to penetrate that region, or to report on it. And yet men wished to know, and he for one felt able to tell, much that lay thus beyond the confines of scientific inquiry or of logical discussion. This vague stuff of the soul and of life, these certainties which admitted of no proof, these dogmas which could never be formulated, he brought into the plane of common observation, if not of common understanding, by means of tales - the Greek word μûeos, which in English takes the form of "myth" is only a tale tales beautiful in form, sparkling with wit and wisdom; tales which, not affecting to be true, yet conveyed the deepest, the ultimate, the ineffable truth. For example, the "Gorgias" ends with the myth of Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Eacus. "Listen," says Socrates to Callicles, "as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale which I daresay that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only, but which, as I believe, is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth.” There the myth begins. Formerly men were judged in their bodies and clothes before death, with the result that the soul frequently reached the wrong destination. The judges were awed by the trappings, and also misled by the clothes which they themselves had on. Zeus therefore determined to make a change: "In the first place, I will deprive men of the foreknowledge of death, which they at present possess; that is a commission of which I have already entrusted the execution to Prometheus; in the second place, they shall be entirely stripped before they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge, too, shall be naked - that is to say, dead: he with his naked soul shall pierce into the other naked soul, and they shall die suddenly, and be deprived of all their kindred, and leave their brave attire strewn upon the earth; con |