"It's All There In Plato"

At the very end of the Chronicles of Narnia, at the end of the book The Last Battle, Professor Digory makes the comment: "It's all there in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools." Digory is a character in several of the Narnia books, both as an adult and as a child who spent some time in Narnia. He speaks as a voice of reason, but of a certain kind of reason--one that is tempered with a transcendent viewpoint, a take on reality that says there is the real and then there is the really real that the real depends on (read that again; I think I got it right). Narnia is not a straightforward platonic version of our existence; rather, both Narnia and our world are reflections of a more perfect world, which you can call heaven if you want to, though that is not exactly accurate.

It's all there in Plato!

The point is that Earth and Narnia are real enough--food, war, friendship, sunshine, painful things are genuinely there and not delusions; but these are only impermanent, insubstantial instantiations of something even more solid, enduring, immutable.  Narnia and Earth are not somehow lesser places that in gnostic fashion are to be escaped from. Digory’s comments have more to do with the correct perception that as real as this present existence feels, the present corporeal world is relatively mutable, even insubstantial, compared with what is really Real.

Compare all that with St. Paul. In Colossians he writes, "Set your minds on things above, not on what is on Earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." In another place he writes of some whose minds are set on earthly things: "their end is destruction, their god is appetite," whereas Christians are citizens of heaven, and they will be transformed from a humble state to a glorified state that partakes with the deified body of Christ (Phil. 3. 19-21). I could easily cherry pick other passages that sound platonic, which is an argument that some informed have made: that Christianity is merely warmed over, plagiarized, dumbed-down Platonic thought. But such passages would help prove that the Christian vision, embodied in the Narnia stories and in Augustine’s writing, reflect a solid biblical witness: this earth is passing away, and we will eventually wake up to the more solid reality.

From this point on, I could multiply examples from philosophy, poetry, music, architecture, and so on, to show how the Western tradition in its mainstream Christian form helps us see that all those physical things--sound waves in air, ink on paper, electrical activity in brains, stone shaped into pleasing shapes--are in a sense only carriers of a truth that goes beyond the supposedly solid, material elements. The upshot is this: culturally, we are in a position where these ideas seem foolish. When we think of the “spiritual,” we tend to imagine smoky, wispy realities that are intangible. One reason to study older works of art, theology, and philosophy is that they can help us break out of this contemporary prison of thought.

It’s all there in Plato, in the sense that, as the Bible witnesses, our perceptions of the solidity of this world is an optical illusion that needs healing for us to get to Real Truth.

This is an icon of the Harrowing of Hell, but it's a great metaphor for The Christian version of coming out of Plato's cave.