St. Peter of Alcantara, Confessor

St. Peter, a Spaniard of noble birth, entered the Order of St. Francis at the age of 16. He re-established the primitive Franciscan rule, and gave St. Teresa powerful support in her work of reformation. He died in 1562.

Today I finished reading Plato's Republic. The goal of this particular Platonic dialogue is to uncover the nature of justice, particularly for the sake of finding out whether it is good for a man to be just without consideration of the external rewards given to the just man by other men or by gods.

The hypothetical founding of the perfect Regime, which is actually a monarchy not a republic, is undertaken on the premise that the city is the soul writ large. That is to say, whatever justice is in the city it will be the same in the soul. This is in fact a false comparison, because the relationship of part to whole is decidedly different in a man and in a city. The city is composed of parts which are also wholes in their own right.

The regime which Socrates goes on to describe as the best regime is one in which the philosophers rule as kings, the class of men characterized by spiritedness tempered with philosophy serve as warrior auxiliaries, and the class of tradesmen, or wage-earners, characterized by desire are simply ruled.

The great Socratic irony of this work is that the most just city ends up involving eugenics, infanticide, incest, abolition of private property and of the family, in short, all manner of injustice! If there is a political point to be made in this work, i.e. if Plato has something to say about politics, it could well be that the attempt on the part of men to construct a utopian society in which injustice is completely eliminated, ends up bringing about even more injustice. Marxism comes to mind among other 20th century movements...

The main point of the work, though, is not about how a city should be ruled but about how one's own soul should be ruled. The account of the soul here is paralleled to the city, which was itself constructed with this end in view. The best soul should be ruled by the rational part, by philosophy - the search for wisdom, while the spirited part of the soul should be used as an ally of philosophy in mastering the soul's unnecessary and excessive desires.

The highlights of the work occur mostly in books V-VII, which is actually a digression from the main argument. These of course are the famous Platonic line of knowledge and the image of the cave from which the philosopher emerges into the light of the sun, the idea of the Good, only in whose light can anything be truly known.