Odkrywać Boga. Filozoficzno-teologiczne intuicje Platona

Abstract

What is the Plato’s God like? To deal with this question we should first analyse all the author’s statements, in which problems of God appear. Next, we ought to select the texts in order to interpret only the fragments that are crucial for further work. We skip those phrases, in which the word ‘God’ (θεος) is used in expressive way, or as particular references to mythological gods, or as expressions, in which words like ‘divine’, ‘godlike’ do not have any theological meaning. In some cases, however, Plato says about God, about his attitude to himself and to a human. Out o f these short statements, thrown about in almost all his works we will try to create a systematic portrait o f the Plato’s God. We discover that Plato’s theology isn’t a systematic religious lecture. A number of its researchers tried to give this theology a particular shape, and in result they deformed the original message of the philosopher. All the ancient Christian tradition perceived Plato as a proto-Christian, who as any other philosophers moved towards Christianity not through the Revelation, but with his own mind. In our research we do not try to ‘christianise’ Plato, because it would neither bring any benefits, nor clarify the philosopher’s standpoint. From the perspective o f the former research we can believe that the ancient philosophy in fact didn’t consider itself to be something totally separate from religion, nor anything contrary to it. On his way of religious study Plato encountered a myth. He couldn’t reject it, neither could he accept it entirely. He made an extraordinary modification. He divided from the myth something that was the myth’s essence, and then he put on it a myth that he had made up himself. However, Plato didn’t treat the myth as some kind of complement to the science. He didn’t make any divisions between rational and mythical philosophy, he didn’t make use of mythological philosophy, while he wasn’t able to use the rational philosophy properly. The philosopher found that there are topics (and the problem of God is one o f them) about which one could say more using the language o f mythical philosophy, only because this language is appropriate to the reality it describes. Would anyone dare to say that all his philosophy is nothing but unimportant myth, which can be at the same time probable and impossible?