Butler's Lectures on Ancient Philosophy [pp. 261-279]

1858.] Butler's Lectures on Ancient Philosophy.
nature can omit without fatal imperfection. We saw how, in
the scheme of social life advocated in the Republic, the whole
body of domestic affections are annihilated by a single provi sion, (the community of wives)."...
"Much, doubtless, of this practical deficiency in Platonism
arose from its illustrious author's extravagant conceptions of
the essential evil of Body, in all its'possible human forms.
Wholly engaged with the immortal essence it imprisoned, and
attributing to matter the organization of almost all which
restrains that glorious stranger from asserting its native skies,
Plato was accustomed to regard with coldness and suspicion
every principle which could not trace its connection directly
with the rational part of our complex constitution.... In
proclaiming the bodily organization, the Christian system has
for ever dried up the source of those delusive dreams of superhuman purity, which proceed, more or less, upon the supposition
that there is something inherently debasing in the very possession of a material frame. And when we enumerate the internal
proofs which establish the fact that this divine system never
could have been the natural growth of (at least) the fashionable
or popular philosophy, we ought not to forget that, so universal
and so deep were these impressions of the ineffaceable malignity
of body, that the earliest internal dissentients from the general
creed of the Christian Church were those who could not believe
it possible that an Immaculate Redeemer could have been
invested with an earthly body, and therefore maintained that
the Divine Sufferer was but the shadowy apparition of a human
frame.
"After all-it must be said in behalf of Plato-and I rejoice
in a qualification which allows me to close this subject in that
tone of sympathy and admiration in which I began it-after
all, it must in fairness be allowed that these errors are rather
the tendencies of his system, than his own original representation of it." Vol. ii., pp. 281-5.
279