Divine Epiphany and Pious Discourse in Plato's Phaedrus

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Divine Epiphany and Pious Discourse in Plato’s Phaedrus ANDREA NIGHTINGALE In this essay, I will focus on the divine epiphany of the Forms in Plato’s Phaedrus. As Plato indicates in his middle dialogues, the Forms are “divine” (theios).1 Indeed, they are ontologically higher than the gods and thus could be called “ultra-divine.” To set forth the soul’s epiphany of the Forms in the Phaedrus, Plato incorporated the terminology of poetic narratives of divine epiphanies and also ritualistic discourses used in religious festivals to evoke the epiphany of a god. By analyzing Plato’s use of epiphanic discourses and rituals, I show that he created an epiphanic narrative in his account of the philosophic soul’s vision of the Form of Beauty. To set up this argument, I examine two key passages in the Phaedrus that focus on a god who seizes and/or inspires a human: first, Socrates and Phaedrus ’ conversation about the myth of the wind-god Boreas ravishing Oreithuia; and second, Socrates’ claim that the local divinities inspired his discourse in the palinode. I then analyze Socrates’ assertions that he must speak “piously” and “truthfully” about divine beings, both the gods and the Forms. Given Plato’s radical claim that the gods are rational and good, and that the Forms are “divine,” he must offer a new mode of discourse for speaking about divinity. Just as the Greeks paid careful attention to speaking “piously” about the gods, Plato showcases the right and wrong ways of talking about divine beings. In this essay, I take seriously Plato’s claim that the Forms are divine beings. In my view, we cannot fully understand Plato’s metaphysics—his ontology and epistemology—without acknowledging its theological aspects. arion 26.1 spring/summer 2018 DIVINE ENCOUNTERS in the opening scene of the Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss a traditional story of a god who ravished a human being. This discussion sets up later scenes that focus on a god seizing, inspiring, or manifesting itself to a human being. We must therefore look closely at the opening scene. Here, Socrates and Phaedrus leave the city and find a “beautiful ” (pankalon, 230b) spot along the Ilissus River. They enter a “sacred place” that has a shrine for the nymphs and the river:2 as Socrates observes, “based on the female figurines (korai) and statues (agalmata), this place appears to be sacred (hieron) for the nymphs and the river Achelous” (230b). Socrates also notes that there is an altar nearby of Boreas, the wind god that snatched and ravished Oreithuia (who, according to the myth, gave birth to the winged “Boreads”; 229c). Thus, this natural area has been ritually marked out as sacred to various deities. As Susan Cole has shown, for the Greeks, “the landscape was a living world, alive with the possibility of divinity.”3 Indeed, many places in ancient Greece were marked as belonging to the gods by way of shrines and mythic narratives: Geographically based narratives, probably as old as the institutions they claim to explain, locate the individual community in its landscape and connect it to mythic representations of the larger universe . Anthropomorphic representations of divinity and personifications of features of the natural world encouraged the belief that the world of the gods and the world of nature were parts of a single continuum.4 In the Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus sit down in a holy spot that features this “continuum” between the gods and nature. Indeed, upon arriving in this place, Socrates and Phaedrus launch into a discussion of the story of the wind god Boreas snatching up the maiden Oreithuia. We should note that the Athenians had set up the altar for Boreas on the 62 divine epiphany and pious discourse Ilissus River because the god had responded to their prayers during wartime, providing divine aid in two important battles (Herodotus 7.189.3). The story of Boreas and Oreithuia had particular importance for the Athenians: in their civic theology, Boreas had “married” the Athenian maiden Oreithuia and was thus a divine relative (and helper) of Athens (Herodotus 7.189; Pausanias 1.19.5). Indeed, Aeschylus wrote a satyr play on Boreas and Oreithuia...