It's a fair habit, when looking into the face of a Westerner, to ask: "What did Plato and Saint Augustine do to you?" The point being Saint Augustine of Hippo, although he was alive six or seven hundred years after Plato died, had spent many useful hours reading Latin translations of Greek Texts, which in discussing Plato, was a more mystical and spiritually inspired exploration than the one Plato might have appreciated from readers of his own philosophies.
Augustine was a Baptized Neoplatonist, he'd participated in the self congratulatory ritual special making katharsis of washing away his doubts and ascending spiritually to sit by the side of the One God of the Neoplatonists. Augustine's famous prayer "Lord make me chaste but not yet" has followed him like a dog's tail down through the centuries, made him one of the chaps. But try to trust me, any thought of martyrdom was always the furthest thing from Augustine's mind. The boy was of the middle classes of Roman Citizens, ambitious for wealth and status, and asking a Roman to explain Plato was a little like asking a Victorian to explain the people of the Upper Zambezi to you.
Both Plato and Augustine of Hippo were firmly of the opinion that language did not do much more than describe what was already there. Plato saw language as a reflection of eternal ideal forms and pretty reliable so long as there was precision in the use of words, no incomprehensible mumbling, or poor enunciation, or purposeful deception.
Fur Augustine language certainly reflected eternal ideal forms, it signified real things, but it wasn't a reliable vehicle for transcending the earthly plain, exploring the inner world of the truth behind the signs which required an understanding of God the Creator, who God was, what he meant, what he wanted, and why he was so incredibly important to a person's career, for that God needed to say stuff.
In a sense Saint Augustine, being ambitious for wealth and status in the world of Rhetoric, had an understanding of language which saw language as offering a more creative access to Plato's eternal forms. Plato's world argued for Apollo as the prime source of Divine Truth, he gave Apollo a voice through the Priestess of Apollo who served in the Temple at Delphi, a place of spectacle, games, theater and pilgrimage. All the same you can't get away from the tongue in cheek of a dialogue that saw Socrates as a tourist, reading an axiom on the temple at Delphi's walls that read "Know Thyself." Apparently a friend had been queuing up and had paid for a chance to ask the Oracle the question "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" The Oracle had answered "No!"
Of course Socrates knew very well that he didn't know everything and he certainly wasn't the wisest of men and he also believed that Apollo through the Oracle couldn't lie. This left Socrates with the difficult problem of wondering what Apollo, if he couldn't lie, had meant by announcing that no one was wiser than Socrates.
Socrates in his own journey through life, started asking questions of people who'd always made a point of claiming to be wise. It turned out, Plato noted, they weren't the stable geniuses they thought they were. Soon enough Plato understood what Apollo had meant. Socrates the wisest of men because Socrates by knowing he knew nothing, he clearly knew himself. Henceforth for Socrates, his Divine Mission was to ask difficult philosophical questions of one and all, but mostly of Jackasses who claimed to have all the answers.
The concept of Divine Truth is safe and well with Saint Augustine, less so with Plato. Saint Augustine, like all Neoplatonists, could be extraordinarily creative with his interpretations. He insisted that the Virgin Birth was central to the Christian message and that Mary remained a virgin through the conception of, the bearing of and the birth of Jesus. With out Mary's sacrifice everything else fell apart.
Plato, on the other hand, a man who was concerned with knowing how to understand knowledge, most likely would have considered the story of Jesus' birth a mythical account designed to elevate the individuals involved.
It's kind of like this for me, everyone wants a God or Gods. What Calvin did while God was back up the mountains confidently enjoying a ham sandwich and a bit of respite from his many errors was to give everyone a real powerful interest in experimenting with secularizing idols that offered more immediate comfort than the hellish and endless drudge of making fewer and fewer and less and less worthy people ridiculously wealthy.
But the point I am trying to make is not some obvious economic point about the cliff we've fallen off, the solution to which will be an End Times that offers an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, it's how, as a species, do we understand the space-in-between. To use a term usually understood by the medical profession, how do we understand the interstitial spaces. And I'm not talking God and Man so much as I'm talking the space between "I" and "Me," the recursive to and fro, a backwards and forwards between the two parts of thinking.
My current thinking in the area is finding some comfort in the idea of this interstitial space suffering from an unfortunate confluence with some sort of infectious protein that has become available to out bodies as a result of an industrialization of diet
