Theorein and Therapeuein

When we speak of philosophy and therapy, or of philosophy as therapy, the usual intent is to suggest that ‘philosophizing’ is or should be a way to clarify the mind or purify the soul. While there may be little point in arguing with psychoses or deeply-embedded neuroses our more ordinary misjudgements, biases and obsessions may be alleviated, at least, by trying to ‘see things clearly and to see them whole’, by carefully identifying premises and seeing what they – rationally – support, and by seeking to eliminate the residual influence of premises that we have long since, rationally, dismissed. I don't intend to argue with this account – though of course it may be as well to remember that ‘philosophizing’ may have more dangerous effects. It is not obvious that philosophical argument will always help us ‘see things straight’, and the Athenian democracy was not altogether wrong to think that some of Socrates' followers or pupils learnt quite the wrong things from him.

My goal here is rather to reconsider what it was that ‘therapy’ once meant. I shall begin from Aristotle's declaration, at the end of the Eudemian Ethics, that our task is ‘ton theon therapeuein kai theorein’Footnote ¹. Standard modern interpretations of Aristotelian ethics either ignore this and similar injunctions or interpret them solely as requiring us to be ‘rational’, without much effort to say what ‘rationality’ amounts to. Older, and especially Platonic, interpretations are more demanding. Perhaps the phrase can be translated differently, more shockingly? Theoria, ‘contemplation’, after all, is not mere, neutral noticing: it carries the clear suggestion that what we are drawn to ‘contemplate’ we must admire, or love. So Aristotle is, in effect, concluding his meditations on right action, character and ‘happiness’ with the simple injunction ‘to love and serve the Lord’! What God is it that Aristotle suggests we should love (theorein) and serve (therapeuein), and what does ‘service’, in this context, mean?

By Aristotle's account elsewhere God actually is theoria, and in living thus ‘theoretically’ we live by what is most divine in us, and at the same time what is most really human. ‘We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.’Footnote ² So ‘contemplating God’ is the same as ‘contemplating contemplation’: ‘knowing God’ is the same as ‘God's knowing.’Footnote ³ And what is it that God knows? According to Aristotle's analysis, Himself.Footnote ⁴

This notion was criticised very early. According to the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian Magna Moralia Footnote ⁵ ‘whoever is preoccupied with himself is counted as insensible: a god like that would be absurd.’ But later Platonic and Aristotelian tradition lived happily with the supposed absurdity, recognizing that God's knowledge, if it is to be incontrovertible, must somehow contain its objects. God is not, as we are, merely externally related to the things He knows, for if He were He could not Himself be sure that reality was as it was represented, even to Him. ‘If intellect (nous) were not the same as what it intuited (ta noeta), there will be no truth; for the one who is trying to possess realities will possess an impression different from the realities, and this is not truth.’Footnote ⁶ God's thinking, the divine thinking, is one with what is thought.Footnote ⁷

But this is not merely the conclusion of an abstract argument. As I remarked over thirty years ago,Footnote ⁸ this description of ‘divine intelligence’ is strikingly like Buddhist (and other mystagogic) accounts of enlightenment. It is a ‘knowing without touching things: that is, without making things into objects in one's consciousness’Footnote ⁹. ‘Śūnyatā [‘emptiness’] is experienced only when it is both subject and object… ‘Knowing and seeing’ śūnyatā is śūnyatā knowing and seeing itself'.Footnote ¹⁰ And as Aristotle also said, ‘on such a principle depend the heavens and the world of nature. And it is a life such as the best that we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time… So that life and aion continuous and eternal belong to the god, for this is what the god is.’Footnote ¹¹ God is Eternity – as Boethius also said some centuries later: ‘the entire and perfect possession of endless life at a single instant.’Footnote ¹²

It follows that we ‘know’ God when we experience the life that identically is God, when God lives us. Or remembering for a moment that other parallel to which I gestured: ‘God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.’Footnote ¹³.‘Theorein ton theon’ is not to reason one's way to a conviction that there is a god, an ultimate authority or good, but to experience, to live, a certain sort of life, the sort to which all other lives aspire, and which does not depend for its existence on our experiencing it – since it is experienced, exactly, as something that is forever. And what is forever, for Plotinus as well as for St. John, is love: the One, Plotinus says, is at once beloved, lover and the love between (erasmion kai eros ho autos kai autou eros).Footnote ¹⁴

Strangely, despite our modern respect for ‘reason’, we are usually less respectful than the ancients, and too easily suppose that ‘reasoning’ is in the end a tool or set of tools for achieving other goals. ‘Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions’, according to Hume. But that is not what the ancients—or at least the Platonists and Stoics—thought. Reason, on Plotinus' account, is not to be valued because we can, with its help, perform socially useful actions, nor yet because we can, with its help, win more food, water, sex or shelter than less ‘clever’ creatures. It is to be valued because it is the presence in us of beauty. ‘Nous is our king. But we too are kings when we are in accord with it; we can be in accord with it in two ways, either by having something like its writing written in us like laws, or by being as if filled with it and able to see it and be aware of it as present.’Footnote ¹⁵Nous, remember, is yet another name for God.

How are we to come to ‘see it and be aware of it’? And what sort of laws might be written in our hearts to make us accord with it? There is a – relatively – clear answer in the Hebrew Scriptures:

The Hebrews were reckoned ‘a nation of philosophers’ because they were dedicated to love and serve the Lord in something like the way that a Platonic or Aristotelian philosopher would wish. But the Hebrew rules, it may well seem, were rather different from the Hellenistic. The justice that they embody is for the benefit of the fatherless, the widow and the homeless stranger. And it seems that their God is a lot more active in enforcing justice (in the end) than the God of the Philosophers could be, and more concerned about the details of ordinary life.

So what did the Greek philosophers have in mind? Where are we to look for God, and what are we to do?

How are we to ‘serve’ God? After all, we can hardly do Him good, nor does He need our help to see things clearly! ‘If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine!’Footnote ¹⁸ The God of the Hebrews requires us to be thankful – and to keep our vows. Above all He requires us to treat others well, not to steal or slander. Can we suppose that the God of the Greeks had a similar requirement? To serve God is to obey His commands, and to love His offspring.

Divine Commands

One of the earliest lessons that first year philosophy students learn, as they suppose, is that Plato refuted the idea that the moral law could be derived from the command of any god. Why ought we to obey the commands of God unless it were true that He commanded only what was already right? If His commands weren't right we would be obeying only from fear. Oddly, in other contexts modern moralists don't seem to mind that we obey from fear: proper behaviour, they often seem to suppose, is only the best way of avoiding all the dreadful consequences of vice, cruelty and injustice. What difference does it make that it is the laws of nature rather than the laws of God that guarantee a dreadful end? Even more oddly, it is likely to be to the traditional ‘God-fearers’ who find fault with this. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, warnings about the perils of this or that activity ‘only affect that small minority which will accept any virtue as long as we do not ask them for the virtue of courage. Most healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes.’Footnote ¹⁹ The proper and far more reliable motivation for virtuous conduct is not fear but love – the love, specifically, of what is good. Acting out of reverence is not the same as acting out of fear, even if – as Socrates proposes – ‘he who has a feeling of reverence and shame about the commission of any action, fears and is afraid of an ill reputation.’Footnote ²⁰

Those first-year students are misled. They are generally taught that a dilemma faces all those who found their conduct on the ‘will of God’: either what God commands is right in any case (and would still be right even if He changed His mind), or else His commands are ‘arbitrary’ and imaginably changeable, and the only motive to obey Him an immoral one. This gesture towards an absolute moral demand or absolute objective good is usually forgotten by their second year, when they will be told that some moralists are Kantians and others consequentialists (usually of some utilitarian kind), but that there is no real ‘fact of the matter’ to concern them. They will be told that the end of moral action is to do what can be supposed to be required and enacted universally, or else that it is some summated advantage of a kind that only an omniscient, disinterested and universally benevolent judge could be sure to see: ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’. How either of these maxims differs from the original claim, that what is right is what would be (and maybe is) required by God, is very rarely explained. If the rightness of an action just is its being what would be required of us by an omniscient and impartial judge, why is it not right to do what is required by such a One?

The argument that Socrates had with Euthyphro, in any case, is not what commentators now suppose.Footnote ²¹ The question is posed ‘whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.’Footnote ²² Commentators almost always equate ‘the pious or holy’ with ‘the morally right’, go on to offer the specious dichotomy that I mentioned a moment ago, and conclude that the gods can only bear witness to moral truth, and not create it. But that is not how Socrates conducts the argument. Instead, he poses a weird dilemma: is that conduct and character loved by the gods because it is loved, or loved because they love it? The likeliest inference is that it is loved because they love it, just as something is being carried because someone is carrying it. It is agency, after all, that is, precisely, active: passivity, precisely, is being acted on. Euthyphro concedes, without argument, that things are loved by the gods (theophiles) because the gods love them, but that they love them because those things are ‘holy’ (hosion). So being holy and being loved by the gods, so Socrates suggests, are different attributes, even if they belong to the same things.Footnote ²³

Actually, Euthyphro need not have conceded so much – and Socrates, as usual, only suggests that some error has occurred, without saying what. Maybe the gods have natural sentiments (so to speak) as much as we: why need there be any other way of characterising what they love than – simply – as what they love? We in our turn may wish or choose to please them by trying to be and do appropriate things – because we love them, just as any lover will seek to do what pleases his beloved, for no other reason than that it does. The underlying thought, of course, is that there should be some consistency in what is loved, that we cannot endure an irresoluble conflict of the sort depicted in Greek tragedy. There must be some way of resolving discord, perhaps by seeking to see some one thing that we all desire. But if there is, what can we say to prove that it is the thing we all desire, except that we all desire it? What could it even mean to ask whether we should desire it? Such questions can only be answered if there is something else that we desire more.

Euthyphro is disturbed that his father left a dependant of his who killed a household slave in a drunken brawl to die, tied up and untended, in a ditch, and is desperate to see the wrong avenged, and his family and father, thereby, cleansed.Footnote ²⁴ This duty, he supposes, he owes to ‘the gods’. Whatever overt dissension there may be amongst the Olympian gods – as Socrates concedes – none of them will approve of murder. Benjamin Jowett was strangely confident that Euthyphro's ‘wrong-headedness, one-sidedness, narrowness, positiveness, are characteristic of his priestly office’ – a judgement that owes more to Victorian anti-clericalism than a clear reading of the text! Quite why he is so sure that Euthyphro stands for ‘the narrow and unenlightened conscience’, and that the father was only ‘accidentally guilty of homicide’ (which is not, I suspect, how any modern court would judge the case), I don't know. Perhaps there is a question whether ‘a servant who is guilty of murder, and is put in chains by the master of the dead man, and dies because he is put in chains before he who bound him can learn from the expositors of religious law what he ought to do with him, is killed unjustly; and that on behalf of such an one a son ought to proceed against his father and accuse him of murder’Footnote ²⁵. Maybe so: but it is difficult to see how a question that can only be settled, if at all, by juridical decision, will be settled without proceeding to the court!

Euthyphro, as depicted, is clearly not a bigot.Footnote ²⁶ He knows very well, and admires, the sort of conversation that Socrates enjoys. Meletus's charge against him, he says, is striking at the very heart of Athens.Footnote ²⁷ He is himself ready to submit to Socrates' interrogation, even at an awkward, or even painful, moment of his life. That Socrates traps him into saying things he probably doesn't mean hardly makes him unique! Even his bragging remarks about his own abilities are openly ironical, as he also concedes that the Athenians don't listen.Footnote ²⁸ If Socrates is allowed his humour, why not Euthyphro? Certainly, by the end he seems impatient, and eager to hurry off about his business, but perhaps with justice!

Piety is giving the gods their due, our service. But what service can we do the gods? We can't do them good. As the Hebrew prophets said, what do they, He, need from us? ‘Is not attention always designed for the good or benefit of that to which the attention is given? As in the case of horses, you may observe that when attended to by the horseman's art they are benefited and improved, are they not?’Footnote ²⁹ Euthyphro can only repeat what he has said before: ‘Let me simply say that piety or holiness is learning how to please the gods in word and deed, by prayers and sacrifices’Footnote ³⁰ – which is very much what the Athenian Stranger tells us in The Laws – but the very context of the dialogue makes it clear that these ‘prayers and sacrifices’ include attempts to purify, to set things right.Footnote ³¹ They are not merely ceremonial. We don't do the gods any good—but we can please them, can be what they wish us to be. And what they wish is our cooperation in making ‘many and fair things’, things they love.Footnote ³²

As so often in the Socratic dialogues, it is what isn't said that is most significant. This is enough to excuse, though not to justify, the standard use made of ‘the Euthyphro Dilemma.’ But we need to read with care. Socrates, though he expresses shock and surprise that Euthyphro should think it so obvious that he should bring a case against his father, is himself depicted—in the Gorgias—as arguing, exactly, that it is our duty to bring a prosecution even against our friends, if they've done wrong.

Certainly this is a shocking thought, especially as regards the relations of sons and fathers. Whitlock has pointed to the analogous dispute in Confucian ethics, and the significance for Chinese and Greek alike of filial piety.Footnote ³⁴ The Athenian Stranger of The Laws endorses laws prescribing filial obedience, and in The Republic Plato openly rejects the stories of Zeus and Kronos, Kronos and Ouranos, to which Euthyphro appeals,Footnote ³⁵ saying that even if they were true, the young should not be told them—but perhaps this is indeed one point on which the historical Socrates was widely reckoned to disagree!Footnote ³⁶ And even in The Laws there is a set procedure for Euthyphro's dilemma:

Which is very much what Euthyphro is actually doing.

And despite the modern philosopher's opinion that Socrates is somehow subverting ‘Divine Command Morality’ he has himself no doubt that he should obey the gods, and that what they require of him is Justice, to do his job, and not desert his post (or escape from gaol). Would these things still be forbidden or required if the gods thought otherwise? Why is that any more threatening than the question whether things would still be right or wrong if the facts of the matter changed? It is not ‘analytically’ true that, for example, the enjoyment of another's agony is wrong: are we to be alarmed at the thought that there is a ‘possible world’ where it's right? If that is alarming, should we not be glad that the eternal being of God makes such a world impossible? The necessity of God's being applies as well to His supreme commands as to His other ‘attributes’. But of course there might be variations in the lesser, derivative commands, and we need not be alarmed by this. How should God or the gods make it right to do another job, or to commit self-murder? Why not simply by requiring this of us? The question should rather be: how would they let us know? And the answer, compatibly with everything that Socrates (or Plato) says, is that they would grant us a different talent, or let it be known that it was time to leave. ‘My job’, as Plato identifies it, is what I do best (implicitly, of the things needed to sustain my city or community): the gods can alter my job by altering my talents. ‘My station’ is assigned by the laws – both civil and natural–under which I find myself.

Why should the gods, and the laws they make for us, be readily obeyed? Might we not have reason to disobey? We may imagine that we could answer this by appealing to an independent good, our good or the good of those we care about: but if it is the gods who have made us as we are, and granted us the attachments appropriate to our sort of being, how exactly are these independent criteria? (The same problem, incidentally, afflicts those neo-Darwinians who urge us to defy the tyranny of ‘the selfish genes’ which have, supposedly, created us: even if we could somehow find some accidental motive for so doing, we know, on the very theory they profess, that we will fail. Out of the muddle of motives and inhibitions only those will last that have a reproductive edge. ‘Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable function.’Footnote ³⁸ Only if there were really a world beyond this world, and values not reducible to the genetic, does it make sense to try and defy the makers. God-fearers have less to fear from argument than evolutionary theorists of E. O. Wilson's sort!)

Plato's later story, in the Timaeus, is that the imaginable Creator (for it is not clear whether he is telling a story he believes, or only offering a thought experiment), in devising the physical universe, was looking toward the eternal Forms of beauty. Later Platonist developments made two things clear: the world He made or makes is guided toward those Forms, seeking to embody them, as far as this is possible within a temporal and spatial setting; and the Forms are nothing other than the very thoughts of God. What the world is imitating, struggling ceaselessly to reflect, is God, conceived as a union of Thought and Thinker. All of us–that is to say, all creatures–are aiming at the only life that is eternal, the divine. The undivided intellect itself, it came to seem, exists in contemplation of the Good, beyond all reasoning and being. Our task, remember, is to reconnect with Nous, with the eternal, undivided intellect – which we do, in part, by looking toward the One, the origin of value and existence. The circle that Socrates presents to Euthyphro is real: the holy is loved by God because it's holy; it's holy because He loves it.

How can we bring these metaphysical speculations a little closer to the practical? What is it, exactly, that we are being urged to do and think? And how did it ever happen that we have an option? What God or the gods love is the best of all things – which is to say they love themselves. And to do and be what the gods love is to be the gods, to live with the life they value. The service they require of us is to be like them:

Ceremonial, Civil and Purificatory Service

The most widespread form of divine service is now poorly understood by post-Copernican urbanites like ourselves. ‘In this city [of the world] virtue is honoured and vice has its appropriate dishonour, and not merely the images of gods but gods themselves look down on us from above.’Footnote ⁴¹ Serving the visible gods, the stars of heaven, is sharing in the complex dance that they perform above and around us, and so sharing in a simulacrum of eternity.Footnote ⁴² The same movements are endlessly repeated, but neither the stars nor those embedded in the ritual year need remember the merely linear, endless process. Seed-time and harvest, Christmas and Easter and ‘the passionless Sundays after Trinity, neither feast-day nor fast’Footnote ⁴³ are permanent realities. Nothing serious is ever really lost, since circular motion is unending without being infinite. Obviously, post-Copernicans look out on an entirely different sidereal universe, and even if we manage to believe the speculative cosmologists who imagine an infinity of worlds or aeons we know that our own personal and terrestrial history passes irrevocably from a far beginning to a distant end. Urbanites expect strawberries at any time of the year, and only play at the repeating seasons. We are, notoriously, in some danger of forgetting that ‘More! More! Is the cry of a mistaken soul’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Plato, Plotinus and other Platonists were both a little closer to the ceremonial year, and readier to acknowledge the presence of the visible gods, the stars, and the periods they ruled:

But they were also ready, as it were, to allegorize that ancient sidereal religion, and we too can glimpse what they saw in it. ‘By contemplating the equivalence of the future and the past we pierce through time right to eternity’.Footnote ⁴⁶ As souls, or as fallen souls, we only see things from particular angles, at particular moments, and are easily persuaded that the world as we see it is all the world there is. But even materialists know better: there are no privileged places, moments or time-scales, and the real world is the one discovered, if at all, through reason, as the complete, well-ordered content of the Intellect. Learning to detach ourselves from sensory illusions, to live in the understanding that each of us is a version of reality, an entity wholly dependent on its membership of that real world and without any special status, is both an epistemological and a moral exercise. We serve the gods by pleasing them. We please them by sharing, sometimes, in their life, and dismissing the charms that bind us to our sensual, solitary delusions. Which is why Mark McPherran was not entirely mistaken in suspecting that the moral of the Euthyphro is that it is Socrates who does God serviceFootnote ⁴⁷—though I think he was wrong in supposing that this is simply by exposing human ignorance, and debunking radical claims to know what is required by justice.

No-one, so Plotinus said, would really prefer the appearance of the beloved to the real thing.Footnote ⁴⁸ This is as much as to say that it is not our feelings that matter most to us, but our engagement with the real. ‘Beautifulness is reality.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Engaging with the astronomical, agricultural or ceremonial year is one way of remembering that there is a real world, that we are a part of it. But even without these aids—of which Plotinus availed himself rather little—it is possible to understand ourselves as elements in a larger, real world. Civil virtue requires us to prefer those public duties to our lesser, personal attachments.

In performing these duties we may also ‘serve the gods’, or at least the gods of our cities. But there are at least three reasons to reckon that even this service is not entirely what Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the rest preferred. First of all, such service is parochial: however glorious our city, however well-deserving of our love, it is not the only one, nor the City Herself of which it is a copy. Its service may even be corrupting. And secondly, all ‘moral action’ is inferior, dependent on the existence of evils that no truly virtuous persons could desire to exist, and all too likely to multiply those evils. All action is subject to the enchantments of the flesh.Footnote ⁵⁰ If there are indeed this-worldly evils to be remedied, the virtuous do not wish this to be so. A truly courageous person (say) would not actually want to display courage—since that depends on there being wrongs to resist or even wars to fight ‘as if a physician were to wish that nobody needed his skill’.Footnote ⁵¹ ‘Pity would be no more, if we did not make somebody poor’Footnote ⁵²—unless pity (or better, liberality) is the name of something better than its practical performance. And thirdly, all action is uncertain—in the sense that we can never be sure of its outcome. It is not the outcome but the intent, the mode of thought, that matters.

So Aristotle chose to identify the higher, detached, contemplative life as that of the resident alien, not the citizen.Footnote ⁵³ If we are to live the life of gods this cannot be the actively ‘moral’ life: that's not how they live.Footnote ⁵⁴ One of Plotinus's converts, Rogatianus, ‘gave up all his property, dismissed all his servants, resigned his rank … and only ate every other day’.Footnote ⁵⁵ What exactly did he do to practice a superior virtue?

The lesser, ‘civic’, virtues may be a necessary stage on the way upward, but they are not themselves the virtue that Plotinus wishes. True virtue lies in gathering up the energies we have invested in the outward, sensual world. We may or even must begin from beautiful sights, then beautiful ways of life, ‘beautiful works, not those which the arts produce, but the works of men who have a name for goodness, then look at the souls of the people who produce the beautiful works’.Footnote ⁵⁷ But the goal is to go back into yourself and see. ‘Never stop working on your statue till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, till you see ‘self-mastery [sophrosune] enthroned upon its holy seat’.'Footnote ⁵⁸

This work is purification, a waking up from inappropriate images.Footnote ⁵⁹ And Plotinus is not alone in advocating it. According to Nicholas Lash,

By the Platonic analysis of Soul, this is as much as to say that we need to separate ourselves from both lower souls, from the desirous and the spirited parts alike.

The motives and opinions of our sensual and social selves can be put aside, as no more than distorted images of our real life, the life we are to share with gods, the truth:

To serve the gods, which is to say, to live as the gods prefer, is to be stripped of lesser goods:

According to one strand of the tradition, this will not be possible until we're dead:

No doubt Plato meant this fairly literally: that we shall be able to live as the gods live only when we are immortal gods (again). But there is an immediate phenomenological interpretation of his words. To know the truth, to live the life of God, we have to put ourselves aside, to silence that vulgar, chattering goblin who poses as our ego. Speaking scandalously of the god of love, for example, is impious.Footnote ⁶⁶ We have to submit to correction:

Coming Down from the Mountain

Philosophizing may have some ‘therapeutic’ value, in the more familiar sense, to calm us down or reconcile us to our condition. But it may be that we need the gods' assistance to achieve the real goal: the gods must come to us, rather than we to them—which is why Plotinus declined to accompany his student Amelius on a temple-crawl.Footnote ⁶⁸ Porphyry said that that ‘it seems that the gods often set him straight when he was going on a crooked course ‘sending down a solid shaft of light’.'Footnote ⁶⁹ And so he came at last, so Porphyry interpreted the Delphic Oracle to say, to join ‘the company of heaven, where affection rules, and desire, and joy and love kindled by God’.Footnote ⁷⁰

That is an enormous hope. The best that most of us can manage will be civil virtue, obedience to the laws that let us live together in a sort of peace. Those laws, we are told, had better come from God.

The primary purpose of these laws, so Plato tells us, is to encourage virtue, of the sort I sketched before: the precise rules of marriage, property and the rest may be the best that can be managed nowadays, however wistfully we look back on the age of Cronos when no laws were needed, or look aloft to the heavens where obedience is by nature.

For Platonists the world of our present experience is ‘fallen’ and ‘imperfect’. ‘If all things are well done, can the doers act unjustly or err? And how can we assert that some things are according to nature, but others against nature, if all things that happen and are done are according to nature?’Footnote ⁷³ And yet there is no need nor prospect of a ‘better’ worldFootnote ⁷⁴ in which to do our jobs. That job is to join with the gods, as Euthyphro suggested, in the making or remaking of many and noble things. ‘Providence ought not to exist in such a way as to make us nothing. If everything was providence and nothing but providence, then providence would not exist; for what would it have to provide for?’Footnote ⁷⁵

But the point of that making or that attempt at making is in the end to allow the sight of beauty, or reality, the awakening and purification that the schools of philosophy promise. Sensual and civil success is not what Platonists promise, any more than prophets. It is enough to love and serve the Lord, to be awake.