REVIEW OF BOOKS
Religous books
Richard Luckett on two paths to wisdom
Two Classes of Men was originally the title of a celebrated essay by Charles Lamb, but the division examined by David Newsome* is not that postulated by Ella when he observed that there were those who borrowed and those who lent, and that all men went through life in the one category or the other.
Rather, he is concerned with Coleridge's view that: "Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. .. They are the two classes of men, besides which it is next to impossible to conceive a third."
The remark, originally made by Coleridge in the course of conversation, may seem to have only _a passing interest. But in the 1830s the distinction was important enough to be put to a young man as the essential difference between the two universities: in Oxford, according to F. D. Maurice, there was "nothing but Aristotelianism"; there were better things to be had at Cambridge. Maurice went on to say that "all little children are Platonists, and it is their education which makes men Aristotelians." Expressed this way Coleridge's antithesis becomes a statement about a debate which continues, unresolved, into the present. He never pushed the point so far as did his contemporary Blake, who considered that: "There is no use in education. I hold it to be wrong. It is the great sin. It is eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil." It was over this, in fact, that Blake parted company with Plato's shade, arguing that the philosopher's failing was to for ever insist on the distinction between good and evil, when all was good in the eyes of God. But as a dramatisation, Blake's view does well enough; the natural imaginative sense of the child, which the Romantics discovered and celebrated, stood to be marred by chop-logic and cramping classifications.
When Shelley and his friend Jefferson Hogg were up at Oxford in 1810 there was no Plato in the curriculum. They started to read him in a French translation, and in an English version of that translation; their knowledge was founded on a mere handful of the dialogues. Yet it was sufficient to capture the poet's imagination, and he paced slowly around his room, shaking his long hair and discoursing solemnly and mysteriously on anamnesis and the secrets of pre-existence. Mr Newsome reminds us how, crossing Magdalen Bridge, Shelley seized an infant from its mother's arms and enquired whether the baby had anything to tell of his experiences in this earlier condition. There was no reply, but this did not prevent him going on to acquire that deeper knowledge of Platonism which irradiate his later poetry; Hogg, who also continued his studies, made the more prosaic claim that his knowledge of Platonism helped him to a better understanding of the Law.
Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought David Newsome (John Murray £3.75)
Mr Newsome, then, is concerned both to investigate the influence of Platonism on the Romantics and to chart the process by which, in the course of the century, Plato became a respectable subject for study even at Oxford. In doing this he has to offer a number of fundamental definitions: of what we mean when we talk of Platonism in the first place; of what Platonism meant to Coleridge, or Shelley, or Blake. His exposition of these difficult matters is in itself sufficient to recommend the book. If the definitions that emerge are not clear cut, it is because it is one of Mr Newsome's merits that he does not confuse precision with neatness.
The problem is inherent in the nature of Platonism. Coleridge distinguished between Platonists and Plotinists, meaning by the latter category those who were principally NeoPlatonists, and by the former those who professed allegiance to the true doctrines of Plato. Yet some of his beliefs seem characteristically Neo-Platonic, and his endeavour to reconcile Platonism and Christianity is particularly Neo-Platonic in flavour. Here Coleridge, as Mr Newsome notes, seems to have been wilfully blind: his description of St Paul as an Aristotelian and St John as a Platonist ignores a vital truth about St Paul, and it is astonishing to discover that Bishop Westcott, at the end of the century, compounded the error by attempting to make a , similar distinction between St Augustine and Origen. But what is Augustine's Fuimus ille unus — we were in the one when we were the one — if it is not a Platonic utterance? And where in Origen can we find anything to match Augustine's vision of the real world that is veiled in the mystery of Godhead?
Coleridge's difficulty, of course, was with original sin; since he was committed to a view of the child which credited him with unsmirched imaginative faculties he found it hard to accept that a child could be born a sinner, rather than born into a sinful world. Theologically, then, his inclinations were incarnational rather than redemptive, Joannine rather than Pauline. But the direct equation of this distinction with that between Plato and Aristotle is facile. We are inexorably led to question the reality of the 'two classes'. It is here that Mr Newsome discerns an essential paradox. If we ask what it was that Coleridge most valued in Plato, the best answer is that it was Plato's sense of dialectic, his perception that truth can reside at both the poles, that it is "Yes and No, but neither." It was this that so fascinated Coleridge's Cambridge disciples, and in due course it was this no0on which was used by J. S. Mill when he Wanted to describe the respective influence of Coleridge and Bentham. There was no profit in isolating them; they were "opposite poles of one great force of progression." It would be foolish to represent the division between Platonists and Aristotelians as a matter of big-endians and little-endians. But,
as Mill's view shows, oppositions which, within one generation, seem irreconcilable, maY present no difficulty in another. Over a celltury before Coleridge wrote, John Aubrey was happily using arguments derived from Plato to recommend an educational system which I laid stress on the works of Ar.stotle, and seeing nothing untoward in this. In Coleridge's own time the contemporary whom he most admired and whose opinion he most valued. Wordsworth, looked on his friend's "subtle speculations, toils abstruse/Among the schoolmen, and Platonic forms/Of wild ideal pageantry" with a sceptical if affectionate eye. The mind that lived on its own sustenance ' and ignored Nature's living images wa5. a mind disadvantaged. What is so refreshing about Mr Newsome's , approach is that he sees and gives full weight to such dissenting opinions, yet is never lacking in sympathy for his material. No one who reads his book is likely to treat Coleridge's classification as more than aS interesting aphorism, but it is equally the case that no one who has occasion to read even little modern theology or literary criticism is likely to ignore the hold that Platonism con' tinues to exercise today. Mr Newsome takes the story to the end of the nineteenth centur3i,' tracing in the thought of Newman and 0' Matthew Arnold some elements of synthesis. He does not have occasion to remark the recent efflorescence of Platonism, though his bibliography demonstrates that he is nni unacquainted with it. When he quotes Byron's castigation of Platonists from Canto I of Doo Juan, he adds that "one must sympathise W1O1 Byron at times." He might have gone furtheL, and pointed to the ways in which Platonisn' can become nothing but a licence for loose thinking and idle speculation, a certificated refuge for respectable woolly-mindedness. Mr Newsome, in achieving sympathy, avoids env pathy; he maintains that sharpness of defini' tion on which Coleridge always insisted, yet to which Coleridge found it so difficult to adhere.
Two Classes of Men is short (and, I must add, inexplicably expensive), but it lacks ncis virtue consonant with brevity. It is full 0' ideas and facts; there are no concessions tg slow wits or academic pomposities. It is we" and plainly written. It should prove equallY interesting to students of theologY. philosophy, history and literature. Nor is the the least reason to suppose that the matters with which it deals are any the less relevant' today than they were in the nineteenth cell' tury.
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