Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/291

 Reminiscences of Plato in Goethe's "Faust" 285 tion of his long-cherished conviction that the absolute truth, symbolized in the sun is accessible to us only through the medium of its reflected radiance in the image, the Schein. Moreover, we may easily recognize a certain relationship between Goethe's primal phenomenon and the Platonic theory of ideas. 22 Finally, there is an unmistakable parallelism in the fact that both, Faust and the truth-seeker in Plato's parable, are dazzled by the light and, with aching eyes, turn back, the latter "to the things which he can look at" and the former to hide himself in the "veil 23 of childhood." At this point, however, a marked difference in the sub- sequent attitude of the two becomes apparent, a difference which in the last analysis goes back to the diverse ways in which life and the world are viewed by Plato and Goethe. There can be no question that there runs a strain of pessim- ism and ascetic renunciation through Plato's thought which reverberates in the doctrines of the mediaeval Church as well as in the ethical views of certain protestant denominations. This beautiful, sunny world, a place of bliss to the average Greek, appears in our parable as a deep, gloomy cave rilled with prisoners whose necks and legs are in chains and who can see only the shadows thrown against the wall before them. If one of these prisoners by chance gains his freedom and after labori- ous efforts comes to see the real light and the real objects, he will pity his former fellow sufferers and refuse to go back to the world of shadows. In case he were forced, however, again to descend to the cave his eyes would be full of darkness and unable to distinguish between the shadows. According to this view only the philosopher and the few whom he may rescue from the cave attain the enjoyment of light and truth, while the great multitude of men, a sort of massa perditionis, remain in the bonds of the perishable world of the senses. To be sure, Plato insists that the leadership of his Utopian state should be placed into the hands of the philoso- phers, but it is only by compulsion that they leave the imaginary 22 This relationship has been ably discussed in Elizabeth Rotten's instruc- tive study Goethe's Urphaenomen und die platonische Idee, Giessen, 1913. 23 It may be worthy of note that Plato in two passages of the Republic uses the figure of the "veil" (TrapeucaXhrrew), IV, 439 E, VI, 503A, though not in the symbolic sense of Goethe.