This will be more academic than is usual for this blog, but I think I shocked a few folks in class yesterday by declaring that Plato was looking for a church and I don’t know that my subsequent explanations cleared things up satisfactorily. So here, as an exercise for myself in clarity, is a rundown.
A problem with classical political philosophy as advanced by Leo Stauss is that it had little or nothing to offer the common man, the man with an IQ of 95. What Plato (the dominant figure in the amalgamation Strauss calls classical political philosophy) was looking for was a church, and unfortunately there wasn’t one yet.
To explain this, we must first assume that Voegelin was correct in the third volume of Order and History when he identifies Plato’s philosophy as not only an intellectual pursuit, nor even a way of life like Stoicism but rather as a mystical or religious experience of a theophany. Consider Plato’s treatment of the divine madness of philosophy, the turning of the soul, the erotic desire for the good and the like not as academic philosophy as it is understood today, but rather as experience of divine revelation, or at least akin to such. The order of the soul and the good are experienced passionately and mystically, not just academically or doctrinally.
However, this new order of the soul has no realistic expression beyond the individual life of the philosopher who inhabits the city in speech. At most there may be a small philosophic community, but the realization of the just regime of a society ordered by philosophy is extremely unlikely. Thus, the mystical experience of philosophy is not only unavailable to nearly all men, but its ordering influence will probably not be even indirectly present in their lives. Politics and the idea of the best regime (the city in speech of philosophy) is a burden for philosophy. It is tempted to realize the city in speech in the mundane world, or to despair at the wickedness of the world. The spiritual experience of philosophy expresses itself politically, but it cannot be realized politically.
Christianity offers freedom for philosophy. Leaving aside the Christian revelation as the fulfillment of the spiritual experience of philosophy described by Plato, Christianity relieves philosophy from the burden of expressing the spiritual experience of the right order of the soul in a temptation to reorder society in its image. Political philosophy is free to focus on the realization of a tolerable and peaceable order within the City of Man, while the Church meets the spiritual needs of man by being the mundane expression of the eschatological City of God. The right order of the soul is made available to all, imperfectly in this life, perfectly through grace in death.
