








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.1 (2009) 5–21] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.5 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

JAmES WEtzEL

Villanova University 
james.wetzel@villanova.edu

Abstract

The usual way to relate Platonism to theism is to contrast an impersonal 
conception of the Good with a God of absolutely benevolent will. I call into 
question the usefulness of that contrast and argue for a reading of Plato that 
takes centrally into account Socratic service to the god. My overall aim is 
to suggest that a genuinely philosophical faith tends to defy the distinction 
between an ethics of will and an ethics of vision.

Keywords: Plato; Socrates; theism; ethics; will; murdoch; Korsgaard

Augustine assumed that Plato was a monotheist or at least that Plato’s 
philosophy required monotheism as its working presupposition. The 
most apparent conclusion to draw from Plato’s dialogues, however, is 
that he, like his teacher Socrates, believed in many gods and never 
singled out a particular one of them to be the sum and substance of all 
goodness. In the Euthyphro, Plato’s dialogue about the proper object 
of piety, Socrates encounters a self-styled seer by the name of Euthy-
phro, who is about the odd business of prosecuting his own father for 
impiety. Since Socrates himself is on his way to trial, to face a charge 
of impiety, he is naturally anxious to profit from a supposed vision-
ary’s insight into what piety is. As all readers of the dialogue know, 
Euthyphro never delivers on the goods, and the dialogue founders on 
an unresolved choice: “For consider,” says Socrates to Euthyphro, “is 
the holy loved by the gods because it is holy? Or is it holy because it is 
loved by the gods?”1

Long after philosophers have ceased to care about gods and the way 
that gods may be said to love, the choice, in altered form, still beckons 
us. It could be put this way: do we create the values that shape and 

mailto;james.wetzel@villanova.edu


6 If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

regulate the life we call human, or do we, as human beings, come to 
discover these values? This is a choice, seemingly stark and inescap-
able, between will and vision. most modern readers of Plato place him 
squarely on the visionary side of things, and that is largely the reason 
why Plato has become, in modern times, a distant, if sometimes fond, 
memory of a more innocent age in the history of philosophy. The mark 
of the modern in philosophy is a skeptical disposition, directed espe-
cially towards alleged revelations of what is good or right. Whenever it 
is possible to question and thereby to discredit knowledge of value, it 
is a peculiarly modern fixation to want to do so.

Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard situates the modern in 
philosophy at the end of what she calls “a very concise history of west-
ern metaphysics.”2 I recount here a very concise synopsis of her very 
concise history. Western metaphysics begins with Plato, who inherits 
from his teacher Socrates a fundamental puzzlement about value: it is 
the question of how we arrive at the notion that there is an ideal way 
for things to be. Plato’s framing of this question is what makes him 
into a metaphysician. He assumes that the ideal world is identical to 
the real one and that a failure to perceive the convergence of reality and 
the ultimate good is a curable human blindness. It falls to philosophy 
to offer that cure. Korsgaard attributes to Plato a doctrine of the Fall, 
or some accounting of why anyone would have needed that cure in 
the first place, but she reserves for Augustine and the Christian era a 
new focus on human resistance to goodness, styled by Augustine and 
his like as defiance of the will of God. In the turn from Plato’s Form of 
the Good to Augustine’s God, we begin to see, claims Korsgaard, the  
beginnings of a revolution in the history of western metaphysics, 
though one that has to wait to the modern period, and more par-
ticularly to the inspiration of Immanuel Kant, for its completion. The 
revolution, in essence, is this: philosophers cease to think of ethics as 
a task of discerning what the good is and come to the unambiguous  
realization that values are wholly an expression of human will. “The 
real,” writes Korsgaard, “is no longer the good. For us, reality is some-
thing hard, something which resists reason and value, something which 
is recalcitrant to form” (Korsgaard 1996, 4). Her name for this some-
thing is matter. We live by her reckoning in a material world, not in a 



James Wetzel 7

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

world of ideal forms and not in a providential universe. 
Korsgaard goes on to detail the peculiar form that will must take in 

order to be expressive of someone’s values, and here she develops Kant’s 
insight into the legislative character of moral freedom. I am free in the 
Kantian sense of freedom only if I can conform my desires to a law of 
my own making—a law that not only obligates me to act in certain 
ways, but also obligates any other free being likewise situated to act 
in those same ways. The alternative is to be so tyrannized by my own 
desires that my desires fail to express who I am and so, in effect, cease 
to be desires that are mine. I set out this much of Korsgaard’s Kantian-
ism just to indicate that she has no fear of the usual complaint against 
an ethics of will: that it always ends up being an ethics of coercion. She 
insists, on the contrary, that her interests define an ethics of autonomy 
and that an ethics of autonomy is the only kind of ethics that makes 
modern sense. 

I am not going to pursue Korsgaard’s ethics much further. I happen 
to think that any attempt to resolve the tension between will and vision 
in ethics in the direction of will is bound to fail. more fundamentally, 
I believe that this resolution uncritically preserves a bad or at least 
misleading way of casting the problem. The tension between vision 
and will in ethics is not as stark as it seems to be, or so I will argue, 
and without the starkness of that tension, the modern turn in ethics 
away from reflection upon the religious life is no longer an obvious 
advance.

much of what I have to offer in this essay is a reading of Plato that 
makes it hard to resolve Plato’s Platonism into a purely philosophical 
mode of thought, if “purely philosophical” is taken to mean “not reli-
giously invested.” In this regard, I set myself against a Platonist I much 
admire, the novelist and philosopher Iris murdoch, who spent a good 
bit of her career at Oxford trying to convince moral philosophers that 
they needed to reorient ethical reflection to a sovereign conception 
of the good, something like the traditional notion of God, but more 
impersonal. In her famous essay, “On God and Good,” she defines 
her ideal good as “a single perfect transcendent non-representable and 
necessarily real object of attention.”3 Her definition is her presumptive 
answer to the question that Socrates poses to Euthyphro: it is the holi-



8 If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

ness of the holy that the gods love, and that holiness is goodness itself. 
murdoch pitches her cathartic Platonism against an unholy modern 
fascination with sovereign conceptions of will, and she includes Kant 
in her indictment. “His enquiry,” she writes, “led him back again to the 
self, now pictured as angelic, and inside his angel-self his followers have 
tended to remain” (murdoch 1998, 368).4

Korsgaard’s Kantianism and murdoch’s Platonism represent the two 
modern ways of resolving Euthyphro’s dilemma. Korsgaard opts for 
will over vision, murdoch vision over will, and both trade in the gods 
for free and human agents. Neither of the two encourages us to imag-
ine that philosophical piety is itself a cross-roads. But what if the sense 
of holiness that they are each trying to distill is a sense that emerges 
only when the question of what the gods love becomes inseparable 
from the question of how they love what they love. Any leave-taking of 
the gods in ethics would first have to take in the force and significance 
of that conjunction.

For all the differences in their theoretical orientations, murdoch 
and Korsgaard share a remarkably similar sense of ethical practice. For 
both the enemy in ethics is egoism, and for both, the ironic result of 
surrendering to that enemy is debasement of personality, dissipation 
of agency, and ultimately an irredeemable loss of self. The governing  
assumption here is that ego is not true self, but a parody of that self. 
Soul is the traditional name for true self, and as long as soul is not 
defined against body, murdoch and Korsgaard could associate their 
respective interests in moral philosophy and practical reason with soul-
craft. They would resist a dualism of soul and body not because they 
are materialists and believe that only matter exists, but because the idea 
of a bodily self—or a self defined solely in terms of a desire to perpetu-
ate indefinitely one particular body—is not a coherent idea of self, and 
so there is, strictly speaking, no self to be pitted against soul. Egoism 
is self-defeating. One important implication of all this is that death is 
not the worst thing that can happen to a self. “Sometimes doing the 
wrong thing,” observes Korsgaard, “is as bad or worse than death. And 
for most human beings on most occasions,” she continues, “the only 
thing that could be as bad as death is something that for us amounts to 
death—not being ourselves any more” (Korsgaard 1996, 17).



James Wetzel 9

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

In the Apology, Socrates makes sure that his accusers know of his will-
ingness to suffer death if his alternative is to commit what his guardian 
spirit—his daimonion—suggests to him is unjust. He likens a Socrates 
who would do otherwise to a soldier-citizen who would desert his post 
during a pitched battle, preferring his city’s defeat to his own death. 
He draws the moral of his analogy as follows: “I should indeed have 
wrought a fearful thing, Gentlemen of Athens, if then, when the god 
stationed me, as I thought and believed, obliging me to live in the pur-
suit of wisdom, examining myself and others—if then, at that point 
through fear of death or any other thing, I left my post” (Apology 28e–
29a; Allen 1984, 91–92). The limitation of this kind of piety, if I may 
for a moment affect the side of the Greeks who distrusted Socrates, is 
that service to the god seems defined only in terms of what it is not: 
it is not, for instance, service to the city, or the body politic. In that 
light, the analogy that Socrates holds between courage in battle and 
perseverance in philosophy is apt to be misleading, for it seems to mask 
the fact that philosophy and politics aim at very different ends. to the 
lover of the body politic—of the nation, the city, the tribe—there is 
no higher goal than the perpetuation of this body; to the philosopher, 
however, there are worse things to suffer than the death of one’s polis. 
It is the job of the philosopher to help others not to confuse soul with 
the various forms that a body takes: political and otherwise. Socra-
tes deems himself to be divinely commissioned to perpetuate only the 
philosophical life, and this life, as he construes it, is neither one of 
politics nor of private ambition. 

The chief accuser of Socrates in the Apology is meletus, who speaks 
on behalf of the poets, the supposed visionaries of Athenian society. 
meletus has an inconsistent sense of the impiety that he hopes to pin 
on Socrates. He speaks of Socrates as an atheist, or one who acknowl-
edges no god, and as a heretic, or one who acknowledges gods that 
are unfamiliar to the traditions of the city. It doesn’t take a dialectical 
giant to poke holes in his indictment. When Socrates pays his respects 
to the god who launched him upon his philosophical vocation, he pre-
sumably refers to the god of the Delphic oracle, the Olympian who is 
traditionally associated with the art of prophecy. Apollo is not new to 
Athens by any stretch of the imagination. And a man who invokes this 



10 If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

god’s authority and stakes his life upon it can hardly be considered an 
atheist. But there is a logic behind the apparent confusion of meletus, 
and the real poverty of his indictment lies other than in its inconsist-
ency. 

Suppose that you lived in a society where personal ambition had 
come to supplant the rule of law, and a minority of powerful individu-
als used violence and the threat of violence to tyrannize everyone else. 
What would it take to transform the politics of such a society? Perhaps 
a start would be to remove the tyrants forcibly, either by way of internal 
revolution or by way of external intervention. Such a start, however, 
would be only a start. If the vision of the people liberated remained 
limited to the happiness of personal ambition, a game where someone 
has to lose in order for someone to win, then the forcible removal of 
tyrants would simply pave the way for new tyrants. A likely first trans-
formation of this hypothetical society’s political vision would be a col-
lective move from personal egoism, where soul and body get conflated, 
to political egoism, where soul and body politic get conflated. In the 
move from personal to political egoism, individuals begin to identify 
their individual happiness with the prosperity of their polis, and it is 
this identification that gives them their sense of a higher self or soul. 
Political egoists can envision something worse than their own physical 
deaths, but nothing worse than the defeat of their collective. 

Athens is fabled in the narrative of the western civilization for its dem-
ocratic politics; the darker side of its story, more rarely underscored, is 
the imperialism that led Athens to exercise and eventually overtax its 
military might against its neighbors, most famously the Spartans. The 
Athens that condemned Socrates to death in 399 BCE was a fragile 
democracy, exhausted from its long years of conflict with Sparta and 
her allies, barely recovered from the indignities of a military coup—
the reign of the so-called Thirty tyrants, and no longer buttressed by 
its once heady sense of imperialistic adventurism. In the abstraction 
that I am calling “political egoism,” there is an essential connection 
between the transcendence of personal egoism within the polis and 
its re-emergence, on a larger scale, in the relationship of one people or 
polis to another. The Athenian male citizen who identifies with Athens 
out of political egoism is going to view the citizens of other city-states 



James Wetzel 11

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

as rivals to be exploited or conquered. Political egoism is the rule of 
every polis for itself; preemptive conquest is its ideal. 

I will leave it to historians of ancient Greece to determine the actual 
degree of intimacy between Athenian democracy and imperialism. For 
my purposes, it is enough to note that Plato’s character meletus, who 
represents the Athens who feared and hated Socrates, seems to be a 
political egoist. Of course it makes no difference to meletus whether 
Socrates is an atheist or a heretic. If Socrates does not endorse the civic 
theology of Athens, or some notion of powerful gods who favor the 
City’s interests, he will seem to the likes of a meletus to be reverting to 
personal egoism and therefore failing as a citizen. to a political egoist, 
the essence of impiety is not disbelief or wrong belief but a privatiza-
tion of belief. In that regard, Socrates clearly didn’t do much to help 
his case when he invoked the authority of his daimonion, his guardian 
spirit, at his trial. to the political egoists in the jury, his daimonion 
would seem a dangerously private source of religious authority.

Despite the rich anecdote that Socrates recounts about his experi-
ence with the Delphic Oracle and his subsequent service to the god, 
the Apology tells us relatively little about the substance of Socrates’ 
theological convictions. Plato gives us there a Socrates who believes 
in the existence of gods and purports to serve one god in particular, 
but we don’t know what kind of being Socrates takes a god to be. All 
we know is that a majority of the citizens in Athens come to be con-
vinced that the Socratic notion of what a god is must be dangerously 
different from what their notion is. In other dialogues, notably the 
Symposium and the Republic, Socrates does appear to have clear and 
definitive theological convictions, and most students of Plato—both 
ancient and modern—have tended to assume that these convictions 
must have been Plato’s as well, if not Plato’s alone, and put by him into 
the mouth of his departed teacher. In books II and III of the Republic, 
Plato depicts Socrates as wanting to discredit the educational value of 
stories that make gods out to be lusty and competitive beings who vie 
with one another and with mortals for sex, power, and glory. Those 
who listen to Homer and the other great poets of Greek society would 
hear stories like that, and this worries Socrates. We know from the con-
versation he reports having had with the priestess Diotima, a shadowy 



12 If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

figure in the Symposium, what Socrates himself is apt to teach about the 
gods: that they are perfect beings, content and complete in their beauty 
and goodness, and beyond all prospect of loss. Such beings would be 
constitutionally incapable of competitiveness and envy, in that they 
lack the motive that is essential to all competitive beings: the desire to 
be the one and only.

For most of the years I have been reading Plato, I have passed over 
his critique of Olympian fundamentalism with something of a yawn. 
I took it to be self-evident that abstractly perfect beings would be bet-
ter representatives of hypothetical divinity than the colorful characters 
who populate the Greek myths, and that the Greeks who read their 
myths as history were, to put it charitably, naïve. more recently I have 
come to believe that my own presumption of philosophical sophisti-
cation here—which betrays a very conventional intellectual prejudice 
against anthropomorphic theology—is itself naïve. It is in fact not self-
evident at all that perfect-being theology is always educationally or even 
intellectually superior to anthropomorphic alternatives. Consider that 
what’s behind Plato’s strictures against, so to speak, the use of Homer 
in the classroom is a worry about too uncritical a reliance on mimetic 
or imitative strategies of education. One plausible way to make citizens 
into better citizens is to offer them exemplars of the most desirable 
behavior, heroes for them to emulate. mimetic strategies of education 
dramatize the ethical life and reward aspiring actors—or citizens in the 
making—for playing their parts well. The surface problem with using 
Homer or the Greek tragedians for dramatizing the ethical life is that 
the dramatization will be inconsistent. Homeric or tragic heroes seek 
to be like gods who are driven by conflicting forces. The gods don’t get 
along with one another, and at times they seem not even to get along 
with themselves. Perfect-being theology seeks to remedy the problem 
by cleaning up the way the gods are represented: perfect gods will  
inspire perfect heroes, and perfect heroes will inspire model citizens. 

A little reflection, however, will betray the limits of this solution. You 
can train people from an early age to act in ways that are deemed by the 
community at large to be noble and generous and self-disregarding, but 
you cannot expect that all the teachers of the people will have them-
selves learned about what is noble and generous and self-disregarding 



James Wetzel 13

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

through imitation. At some point someone in the polis must have sim-
ply seen and recognized goodness for what it is and been transformed 
by the recognition. The poor soul in Plato’s cave analogy who is forci-
bly dragged from the familiarity of a shadow world of values and into a 
harsh and unfamiliar light is perhaps Plato’s representation of just such 
a person: this is not someone who sees because of having suffered but 
someone who has not let his suffering eclipse his desire to see. maybe 
Socrates is this kind of person, but bear in mind that it is Socrates who 
reminds us in book X of the Republic, the book on the nature of mime-
sis, that the best kind of life is both hard to imitate and hard to recog-
nize when imitated. The characters in the Platonic dialogues who look 
to Socrates to mimic their connection to the good come off either as 
faintly ridiculous (if they are young and naïve) or as dangerously needy 
(if they are young and clever). Plato’s Socrates appears to be a different 
kind of hero. You do not become a better person by imitating how he 
acts; you become a better person by coming to love what he loves, and 
that is not a matter of imitation.

Although Plato was clearly alive to the dangers that bad examples 
posed to education by example, he was more concerned, I think, to 
expose the confusion between education and acculturation. mele-
tus is right to suspect that Socrates does not share the conventional  
piety of the city, but not because Socrates is some wild-eyed iconoclast 
in search of new gods. Piety that is philosophical cannot be conven-
tional, for conventions are conveyed by habit and philosophy is a self-
reflective art. Piety that is other than philosophical is a veiled form of 
egoism. It is not surprising that meletus cannot give the right name 
to the way that Socrates worships. meletus has no conception of what 
it would mean to serve gods bigger than his city’s ambitions for self-
promotion. 

If you stick your nose into a culture that has sanctified some form 
of political egoism, the egoism of the tribe, you are likely to see sem-
blances of courage and self-restraint, but little that resembles justice, 
and you won’t get even a whiff of wisdom. Socrates makes himself 
unpopular in Athens by pressing his fellow citizens—the politicians, 
the entertainers, the technicians—for the whole of wisdom, or some 
accounting of the good of goods. They offer him the sort of accounts 



14 If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

that one might expect from politicians, entertainers, and technicians 
who presume to know what the whole of wisdom is, and he leaves 
them resisting the knowledge of their own ignorance.

Philosophy is risky as a vocation, and Plato tries to take some meas-
ure of that risk in the philosophical dramas we call his dialogues. The 
risk to Socrates in the Apology is partly to his own life, as he is on trial 
for a capital offense, but more fundamentally it is to his sense of his 
life’s worth, his commitment to philosophy. One striking aspect of the 
Platonic dialogues is Plato’s willingness to dramatize the failure of Soc-
rates to convert the hearts of those who are overtly hostile to the philo-
sophical life or even to move very much the hearts of those who profess 
an interest. From a philosophical point of view, the apology of Socrates 
before the Athenian assembly seems to fail; he does not dissuade the 
city he loves from unjustly condemning him. Socrates believes that 
it is injustice, and not the physical separation of the soul from the 
body, that is truly harmful to the soul, and yet he lacks the words to 
prevent many of his peers from acting wrongly and inflicting the harm 
of injustice upon themselves. If his commitment to philosophy is to 
be other than an exotic form a personal egotism, a private quest for 
wisdom, he has to care about this lack. Plato does depict him as car-
ing. When Socrates reappears in the Phaedo, the dialogue that recounts 
his execution-day discussion with a small group of his more devoted 
students, we are met at first with a Socrates who is uncharacteristi-
cally unsure of himself. He wonders whether he had understood the 
god correctly. Perhaps he should have been devoting his life to a more 
popular form of art, such as the setting of Aesop’s fables to verse—
the ancient equivalent of composing nursery rhymes. He pulls himself 
together as his friends and followers engage him in a reflection on the 
soul’s immortality, and by the dialogue’s end, he departs his mortal life 
with some assurance that he leaves behind a few people who have yet 
to despair of philosophy’s promise.

But the cautiously hopeful ending of the Phaedo does nothing to  
diminish the sense I have from many of the dialogues, the Phaedo in-
cluded, that philosophical faith is a rare and fragile beauty. I use the 
word “faith” deliberately here, and for now I take knowledge or illu-
mination to be faith’s contrast. The students of philosophy who visit 



James Wetzel 15

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

Socrates on the day of his death want his final words to them to con-
quer their own respective fears of death. He cannot do as they want, 
however, in that fear of death is conquered only in the knowledge of 
what is supremely alive, some vision of soul; words can redirect the 
attention, but they cannot be its object. All so-called arguments for 
the immortality of the soul, as most every reader of the Phaedo comes 
to recognize, are bound to be inconclusive. If some of the characters 
in the Phaedo manage not to be discouraged by this inconclusiveness 
and the lack of vision it exposes, it is because they have let their love of 
Socrates make up for some of what their vision lacks. modern readers 
of the dialogue, or the least the ones who wish to live a philosophical 
life, will have to find their own analogue to this love.

In Iris murdoch’s Platonism, the real object of philosophical love is 
not a person or a thing but the good that is necessarily beyond repre-
sentation. She is prepared to call this good God, but only on the pro-
viso that God not be understood in personal terms or as any kind of 
agent of purpose. The recognition that “All is vanity” is, in her words, 
“the beginning and end of ethics” (murdoch 1998, 358). Her under-
standing of God is far enough from the more traditional notion of a 
creator who gives order and purpose to creation that she is quite pre-
pared to concede that she has given up on God. “We are,” she writes, 
“what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to necessity 
and chance. This is to say,” she goes on to explain, “that there is, in my 
view, no God in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional 
sense is perhaps the only sense” (murdoch 1998, 365).

I recall murdoch to your attention for two reasons principally. First, 
she has been illustrating a peculiarly modern theological turn: belief 
in sin, disbelief in grace. murdoch is ready to presuppose the ethical 
disfigurement of the human psyche, or the universal human disposi-
tion to confuse ego with soul, but she is loathe to credit the redemp-
tive side of the religious mythology: the part that invokes divine aid 
and intervention. Second, because she herself represents this theologi-
cal turn as an exclusively philosophical maneuver and does so at least 
partly under Plato’s authority, she reinforces the prejudice, common 
among philosophers, that more modern and more philosophical read-
ings of Plato will down-play all talk of gods in the dialogues. I have 



16 If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

been giving you a reading of Plato, the Apology especially, that does not 
down-play philosophy’s connection to religious service—service to the 
god, as Socrates puts it. I now want to consider more carefully whether 
this service to the god is finally, upon analysis, a way to keep a god 
from becoming the love-object of philosophy. Socrates does not, after 
all, equate Apollo or any of the Olympians with wisdom. Wisdom is 
what a god has, not what some god is. The possibility may still exist, 
however, that Plato himself is not ultimately opposed to the deification 
of wisdom.

First let’s pause to consider the virtues of what I have been calling 
“Olympian fundamentalism.” Suppose that you live in a culture that 
venerates Homer as an educator, that you yourself take his epic works, 
the Iliad and the Odyssey, as your Bible, with some Hesiod thrown in 
for good measure, and that you tend to revere your Bible more than 
you struggle to interpret its narrative possibilities. What sort of theol-
ogy are you likely to think of as biblical? I suspect that you wouldn’t be 
able to help but notice that your gods are a factious and spirited lot of 
beings whose desires for sex and conquest can be sources of heavenly as 
well as earthly chaos. One of those gods, the Olympian zeus, will seem 
to you mostly more clever and powerful than the other gods of his gen-
eration; zeus imposes his own order of patriarchal law upon Olympian 
diversity and then shapes the interactions of gods with mortals to suit 
his own, often inscrutable, ends. You wouldn’t have to be a terribly 
astute reader, however, to notice that zeus’s power is limited by the 
very forces he hopes to control. The desires of both gods and mortals 
for an ever greater share of love and beauty, desires that are mythically 
associated with the goddess Aphrodite and her son Eros, make for a 
less-than-secure Olympian order and in fact ensure its mortality. 

The theology I have just sketched, which pits the patriarchal law of 
zeus against the chaotic but also generative powers of Aphrodite, is a 
particularly good theology for you to take to heart, if you happen to be 
a political egoist. Your temptation as a political egoist will be to strive 
for the unqualified dominance of your tribe’s way of life over whatever 
is felt to rival it, but your theology will remind you that unqualified 
dominance escapes the rule of even the most powerful of gods and so 
is not a human possibility. If you were a deep reader of your myths, 



James Wetzel 17

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

you would realize that a unified, undisturbed, eternal rule of a willful 
god or coalition of gods would not even be an ideal possibility. If zeus 
were to be able to regulate the lives of gods and mortals perfectly, so 
as to rule out both good and bad surprises, he will have deprived all 
beings, himself included, of visions of the beautiful. It does zeus no 
good to, in effect, kill off Aphrodite, for then he rules over a stagnant 
and lifeless world and becomes a parody of his brother Hades. But if 
you were able to think about zeus this way, you wouldn’t be much of 
a political egoist.

Assuming that Olympian fundamentalism has the modest virtue I 
am attributing to it—some ability, that is, to set an imaginative limit 
to egoistic fantasies about power—it is all the more remarkable that 
Plato’s Socrates would have offered to his fellow Athenians a theology 
of perfectly compatible beings, all of whom love the same good. Plato 
must have assumed that the political egoism of his potential readers 
would not be native to their souls, but would instead represent a par-
tially remembered knowledge of the good, taken prematurely by them 
to be complete; otherwise his dialogues offer no hope of an expanded 
political vision, and Plato risks corrupting his readers in the way that 
many Athenians thought Socrates was corrupting their city. The doc-
trine of a mysterious good, known only to someone intimately famil-
iar with divine psychology, supports theocracy or rule by a tyrannous 
priesthood. I say “tyrannous” because here the power of the priesthood 
rests on priests claiming an exclusive knowledge of what the gods want 
and on everyone else buying into their claim. Being subject to wisdom 
that is alien to your knowledge is the classically Greek conception of 
being tyrannized. The Athenians who fear Socrates fear that he either 
possesses such an alien wisdom or that he is able to convince others, 
especially young, ambitious men, that he does. Readers who distrust 
Plato generally distrust what they read as his priestly devotion to a 
single, unifying Form of the Good, vision of which is given only to the 
rarest of philosophers.

murdoch tries to disencumber her Platonism from its traditional bur-
den of suspicion by being prepared to insist on the difference between 
loving the one good and loving the one God, but more fundamentally 
by distancing philosophical love of the one good from claims to special 



18 If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

or privileged information. If the love-object of philosophy really is, 
in her language, “a single perfect transcendent non-representable and 
necessarily real object of attention,” then either this object altogether 
falls outside the categories of knowledge, and no one can ever be said 
to know what the good is, or the knowledge is so highly idiosyncratic 
and personal that it fails to suggest possibilities for the common good. 
Neither possibility gives much aid or comfort to theocratic ambitions.

Still it seems odd for murdoch to claim that an object that is both 
transcendent and non-representable is also necessarily real and an  
object of attention. Objects that offer themselves to human attention 
can hardly be said to transcend human attention, and her designa-
tion of one singular object of attention as “necessarily real” sounds 
very much like an attempt at representation. But I don’t think that  
murdoch is really being inconsistent. I take her description of the 
good, or her impersonal god, to be an educational directive and not 
some report of an extraordinary, apparently mystical, discovery. Let it 
be stipulated that there is a good beyond all corruption and that this 
good is eternally other to any good that any one of us seems to possess 
or is able to manipulate to serve private or political ends. The force of 
this stipulation is to depersonalize goodness and direct the ethical life 
away from ego-interests. The actual object of attention here is the ugly 
partiality and imperfection of ego-interests; the beauty of goodness  
itself is assumed to be beyond representation. It is, in fact, the stipula-
tion of the good’s transcendence that makes sustained attention to the 
partiality of ego-interests possible. 

I have already alluded to murdoch’s sense of her own distance from 
a traditional theism. It should be clearer now why she wants to keep 
her distance. Personified notions of the good, such as that of an exalted 
father or a beloved son, cater to the ego’s need to be singled out and 
adored. Let’s say that I resolve to debase myself in order to serve a being 
I consider uniquely worthy of adoration; I am not psychologically too 
far from turning my debasement into a uniquely worthy and meritori-
ous kind of service—a form of indirect, yet potent, ego-gratification. 
The psychological irony I am referring to here is, I suspect, familiar to 
most anyone who has reflected on the virtue of humility. It may seem 
obvious at first that the depersonalization of God into the good would 



James Wetzel 19

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

circumvent the irony and help humility’s cause. We do not expect, after 
all, to be praised or rewarded by an impersonal object of attention. Seen 
from a different angle, however, service to an impersonal good hands 
the work of ego-reform over to the ego. I work at seeking the good, but 
since I cannot expect the good to aid me in my work, it is easy enough 
for me to slip into the idea that my seeking is the real good. The best 
part about the impersonal good will then be its absence.

It seems to me that if the main question in ethics is, How are ego-
interests to be kept at bay?, then the choice between fidelity to a sub-
limely impersonal good and submission to a sovereignly divine will 
isn’t finally much of a choice. The options are equally good and equally 
bad at answering the question. It is nevertheless a peculiarly modern 
fascination to be fascinated with this kind of choice and to pit an ethics 
of vision against an ethics of will. Part of what drives this fascination 
is a failure, or perhaps a refusal, to recognize that the ethical difference  
between vision and will can’t really a difference between vision and 
will. If we find ourselves having to choose between seeing the good 
and willing it, we are left, in effect, with a choice between paralysis and 
blindness. my own inclination, when faced with this crossroads, is not 
to choose a direction, but to turn around and retrace my steps. How far 
would I have to go back before the stark choice between vision and will 
would begin to seem other than inevitable? The longstanding preoccu-
pation I have had with history of philosophy has been sustained by my 
hope that there is such a point, a period in time, to be recollected, and 
that its recollection might ease the iron grip on the mind of some mod-
ern dichotomies: particularly the ones that have made modernity such 
an impoverished time for thinking philosophically about religion.

I have returned to Plato, as I have many times before, hoping to  
remember something different about the difference between vision and 
will, something different about the crossroads between the good and 
God. It may seem to you that I have gone too far back, that I should 
have stopped with someone like Augustine, for whom Plato’s Good is 
God’s idea—an idea that incarnates perfectly in Christ and so confirms 
humanity as a human ideal. I have in fact pondered Augustine’s Chris-
tian Platonism a great deal, and I have come to two fundamental con-
clusions about it, both quite controversial: one is that his Christianity 



20 If the Good were God:  Platonic Meditations on Theism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

is unintelligible apart from his Platonism, and the other is that his 
Platonism is less a doctrine than an expression of philosophical piety. 
So while I tend to think that Augustine was wrong to think that Plato 
was a monotheist, I nevertheless believe that Augustine’s theistic Plato 
is better than the modern alternative. 

Iris murdoch has been my representative modern Platonist. She takes 
as Plato’s cardinal virtue what many others have considered his worst 
vice: his near obsession with visual metaphors for ethical transforma-
tion. to become better is for Plato always to see more fully, more soul-
fully; to grow worse is to become narrow-sighted, dazzled, or blind. I 
happen to share murdoch’s enthusiasm for the visual register of eth-
ics, but not her sense of how this register is to be delimited. In Plato 
you won’t find a contrast between vision and will; instead you will be 
invited into the drama that a difference in ambition makes: there is, 
ideally, the education that seeks the good in beauty and looks to the 
redemption of pleasure, and there is, alternatively, the use of visions of 
ugliness to curb intemperate and undisciplined human desire. 

What if the will is not, after all, an autonomous realm of the psyche, 
overlooked by Plato and discovered by modern moralists, but a strat-
egy of human betterment that privileges negative self-imaging?  Offer 
people the prospect of a self that repels them, and the assumption is 
that they will strive to become something else. The problem with this 
unrelenting war against the ego is that the war heroes, the pure altru-
ists, who live to make an offering of self, can make it only to the war 
criminals, the pure egoists, who would be corrupted by the offering. In 
between fall the rest of us, who must find some utilitarian bromide for 
dulling the pain of this contradiction.

I am fairly certain that shame, suffering, and want will continue to 
be fixtures along the route to human self-knowledge and wisdom, but 
I am equally skeptical of a wisdom that would give us confident use of 
these devices in the cause of education or redemption. In Plato’s cave 
analogy, the necessity that forces a soul’s ascent to better light differs in 
kind from the necessity that compels a soul to bring a torch of philo-
sophical desire into the underworld of human politics and personal 
ambition. The latter necessity, if I understand it at all, has something 
to do with the need to spare others or perhaps a forgotten part of one-



James Wetzel 21

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

self from a painful education, or put more positively, the necessity is a 
reminder that some kinds of desire have to be drawn out rather than 
forced—a question of beauty. We can speak of this drawing out either 
as the seduction of goodness or as the work of God. These ways of 
speaking make different kinds of sense, good and bad, depending on 
what kind of necessity is most driving our sense of ethical urgency. But 
if we take a page out of Plato, we will always try to keep in mind that 
no one ever leaves a cave of ignorance friendless. 

Notes

1. Euthyphro 10a. The translation is Allen 1984, 50.

2. This is the preface to her tanner Lectures, published as Korsgaard 1996. The 
volume includes responses from G.A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, 
and Bernard Williams.

3. Her essay can be found reprinted in murdoch 1998. For her definition of the 
sovereign good, see page 344.

4. From her essay “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”, also reprinted 
in murdoch 1998.

References

Allen, R.E., trans.

1984 The Dialogues of Plato: Volume I. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press.

Korsgaard, Christine

1996 The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

murdoch, Iris

1998 Existenialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Peter 
Conradi. New York: Penguin.




