Plato and Platonisms

 

The trick with Plato is that one must learn to love him without becoming too smitten. The Cambridge Platonists and Paul Elmer More are examples of the latter problem. Hoping against hope that Plato could make Christianity intellectually respectable again, they could not find the golden mean.

Edmund Wilson's deft sketch of More's "Greek Tradition" project in his essay "Mr. More and the Mithraic Bull" catches More at tea in Princeton expressing this fond hope--but not as hope; rather, as a settled conviction.

Yet, Wilson--the old fox--knew better. He knew that Plato had once made Christianity respectable (a fact which probably would have surprised Plato himself), but that the magic had worn off due, in part, to the corrosives set loose by Plato's disciple, Aristotle. 

The latter knew his Plato only too well and, once Christians became acquainted with the Stagirite, there was no turning back.

Wilson knew that and, in addition, he knew that More knew it too.

Paul Elmer More, "with his lifelong consecration to that great world of culture and thought which he had succeeded in making real to others but which he could never quite rejoin himself."