May 7, 1955
Plato and Jesus
by Kenneth Barnes
The other day one of the girls in the top dormitory was standing on the window sill struggling with a board that had been put in to replace glass blown out by a fierce wind. She fell off the window sill. She fell about 16’ on to the roof of the English Room. The idea of falling on to the roof of the English Room is not at all pleasant, for as you know it consists of many sheets of thickish glass (to allow light in to the room from the top) surrounded by a margin of solid roof. Anyone who fell on to the glass would go right through it and be probably torn into strips by its jagged edges. I’m told by an onlooker that this girl fell at first head first but righted herself in falling, so she fell on her feet. She fell a few inches from the edge of the glass. She was quite uninjured and immediately ran back up the steps of the fire escape.
Now this is what we commonly call a miraculous escape. A few terms ago, as most of you know, there was a similar miraculous escape, when a boy fell out of the top of one of the tallest beech trees, but came in contact with a sloping trunk during his fall, so that he eventually jammed himself in the fork about twelve feet from the ground. He was not uninjured but he is here among us none the worse for this terrible fall.
We describe an event as miraculous when it seems to be contrary to all our ordinary experience; when people fall head first we expect them to hit the ground with their heads, not their feet, and when people fall out of fifty foot beech trees we expect death. Were there guardian angels looking after these two? Were the laws of gravity interfered with by unseen agents so that these two should live and not die? Of course in these days we find it hard to believe in any such interference. We know too that innocent children do fall out of trees and are killed, that thousands of them are killed every year by motor-vehicles, by fire, by drowning. No guardian angel prevents their death; the laws of momentum are not suspended when a lorry mounts the kerb, and no celestial fire-extinguisher prevents fire taking hold of a nursing home in Reading and killing sixteen babies.
So, although when some frightful accident does not have the terrible end that we expect, we gasp and give thanks to God, we cannot soberly claim that any miracle saved just the people we happen to care for. The girl fell in such a way that her body was spinning over; the boy just happened to be vertically over the sloping trunk when he began to fall.
Nevertheless there are such things as miracles. Totally unexpected and unpredictable things do happen to human beings, and these are the things I want to talk about – Things that surprise and delight us.
The other day I had occasion to talk to post-graduate students at a university about the different ways in which education has been affected by Plato and Jesus, and I did my best to show them how much more true Jesus’ view of human beings was than Plato’s. If we take Plato seriously it seems that he wanted a social system which did not change and in which people kept their places. Different people were to have different jobs and in general were to stick to them. There was to be a relatively small group of people called guardians – the people who were best in intelligence and character – and these people were to be the rulers of the community. They had to train up younger people to become guardians and they could go outside their ranks to get fresh recruits from other levels of society, but in general he expected that the various levels of society would not change much. He definitely said that people should not change their jobs; they should keep in their places. The shoemaker should remain a shoemaker and not aspire to become anything else. Plato’s view of society was therefore a static one; this structure of society, once achieved, was to go on unchanged. Plato was even afraid of the imagination – of art, music and poetry because he knew they could be disturbing and he feared that new things coming out of the artistic or poetic imagination would shake society.
Jesus on the other hand, seems to have accepted the world as a place of continual change, a place where people would always have to meet crisis and conflict, and what he tried to give people was an attitude of mind, a feeling about each other and about God, that would enable them to go through conflict and crisis with courage and faith and endurance, and even joy.
Moreover, instead of looking to the specially trained, the highly intelligent, for those who were to be his disciples and the leaders of his movement after his death, he did the opposite. He looked in the most unexpected place – among quite ordinary working people, humble and unlettered. In this respect the message of Christianity is utterly different from the dreams of Plato; so different that the son of God could be a carpenter and find his followers among fishermen. The first growth of the Christian community took place among the humblest of people, among the oppressed and the enslaved, not among the people who were recognised as of great character or intelligence. You will remember how one of these, Nicodemus, came to him. Nicodemus was one of the seventy elders, obviously not one of those who hated Jesus and wanted him destroyed but a man who sensed that Jesus had a special knowledge of God. You notice that he came to Jesus by night presumably so his fellow elders would not know that he was consulting Jesus. What Jesus had to say to him was not comforting. “You people have got to be born again”. In other words Nicodemus and his kind had to unlearn all that had become habitual in their attitude and thought; they had to go right back to the beginning and learn about life all over again from the start. In words that Jesus used elsewhere “except as ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven”.
No, Jesus did not look to those who thought well of themselves and occupied high places. The Christian message took hold of people who had a poor opinion of themselves, people who up to that time had little courage or strength of character, for whom life had been a dismal submission to the tyranny of others. It transformed these people, gave them courage and faith, incredible endurance under cruelty and torture, and gave them an irrepressible joy in life.
I’m not really concerned tonight with the respective claims of Platonism and Christianity in education; what I am concerned about is the prospect of change that Christ offered to men – of profound change in their feeling about themselves and life. He offered them an inner transformation that turned despair into hope, that made the heavily burdened feel buoyant with life. Further, this change could so completely transform a man as to turn evil into good. The hateful man could become full of love, the oppressor and the persecutor could feel impelled to go over to the side of their victims, the rich man could give away his money and become one with the poor.
To most people such changes do seem to be miracles. If a rich man does get rid of all his money and join the ranks of the poor, do not most people think that he is going all against the so-called laws of human nature – or think him fit for a lunatic asylum? Don’t we take it for granted that when a man wins £75,000 on the pools that he will spend it on himself and his family and have a good time? Wouldn’t the people in his street think it a miracle if he insisted on sharing it with them all? Yet the Christian impulse is precisely what would enable a man so to change as to be not only willing but eager to share it in that way.
When a person suddenly changes his attitude or character or direction of life under a religious impulse we usually call it conversion and think of the way Paul was converted on the way to Damascus. Religious leaders and movements have been trying to produce this conversion in others ever since. To work upon people’s emotions in such a way that they suddenly experience a sort of turn-over inside and as a result decide to “give their lives to Jesus”. I distrust this because I know too well that in the great majority of instances, no real change has taken place at all.
Nevertheless, I am deeply interested in the changes that go on in people and I believe in [the] possibility of profound changes – because I see them happening. I have only to think of what happens to boys and girls in this school to find examples both of changes that were rapid and startling and of changes that were gradual but no less profound. I remember a girl who was moody, obstructive, bad tempered and bad mannered, who opposed us openly in school meetings almost with hostility and bitterness; and I remember how in the course of a few months she came to rely on us to accept us as friends – and how the whole course of her life changed from deep unhappiness, almost despair, to an experience that was the exact opposite. I remember a boy who took every opportunity to crab the school and to sow distrust and hostility among his fellow pupils, who became so much of a nuisance that I sent him home for good at the end of term... but took him back out of pity at the beginning of the next. During the boy’s last term - the term before he really left – there was a tremendous struggle between us and I had no real feeling that I had got anywhere at the end. But years after he had left, I received a letter from him – one of the most encouraging I have ever received -, showing that the understanding I had hoped for had indeed come, though some time after he had left, and that there was no residue of hostility left in this boy’s – or man’s mind.
I can think of some boys and girls whose attitude to me or to the school changed almost overnight, but more often these big changes have taken place in the course of a few months – perhaps making a listless boy who had no serious aims and no constructive interests begin to take a hold of life, begin to shape it for himself and to begin to be interested in things that had never touched him before. I’m easily disconcerted by peevish or petulant reactions in girls when I have reason to criticise them and by black looks from them. Some I have almost despaired of for this reason. Yet nearly always in the course of time these people change to mature persons with whom I can feel completely at ease, to whom I can talk freely without fear of being misunderstood.
There are many of you who need to change. Some of you know it; others do not. Some of you perhaps know that you are changing and take a delight in it. Others will change without knowing it. Some of you are unhappy about yourselves and wish you were different. If you have not got to that point you will undoubtedly change. It is the people who are satisfied with themselves as they are who are not likely to change.
I wonder whether you think I am still justified in looking upon the changes that occur in people as miraculous. I am perhaps in this sense – that so many of these changes take one by surprise. The everyday behaviour of non-living things is something we rely opon (sic). I do not put the kettle on the stove with any feeling of doubt or anxiety as to whether the heat will bring it to the boil, nor do I feel that anything wonderful or exciting has happened when it does begin to boil. It is just a matter of routine and unchanging physical laws. But with human beings we are – or shall I say I am – always a little hesitant, never knowing quite what will happen, and somewhat afraid that what will happen will not be good. Perhaps I haven’t enough faith, but if that is true it has its compensations in that I cannot take the good developments in children for granted; they bring always an element of surprise, they always seem at least a little miraculous. Thus they bring all the more pleasure and satisfaction.
Some of you may be saying: yes, this seems true, but why bring Christianity into it. All this could be true quite independently of Jesus. There were startling and encouraging changes in people long before Jesus came into the world. Even in the pagan world love and friendship and tenderness must have brought forth their good fruit. People must have been transformed and all sorts of surprising things happened to them. Asoka, about whom I read something this evening, lived over two hundred years before Jesus and he went through a most amazing change, completely renouncing warfare at the very moment of victory and beginning to govern his empire by reason and love.
I think that Jesus would agree. He would say that it had all been true from the beginning of time, because it is an eternal truth. Jesus did not come into the world to make something true that had not been true before, but to draw people’s attention clearly and dramatically to something that was in front of their eyes but to which they had been almost blind.
To say “Why bring Christianity into it?” Is equivalent to saying, when doing mechanics in the laboratory,: “Why bring Isaac Newton into it? It’s all true quite independently of Newton”. Of course it is, but Newton’s genius – in this respect like that of Christ’s - consisted in seeing with startling clarity the truth that other people could not see; so people could afterwards say: “Heavens, why didn’t I see that before? It’s obvious; and so simple. That is perhaps one of the most common characteristics of a work of genius, that we can afterwards say of it “How obvious; why didn’t I see that before?”
I should finish by drawing a contrast again between Plato and Jesus. Both lived in a time of turmoil and disruption. Plato saw the wonderful Greek civilisation breaking up round him and corruption eating into its government. His reaction was to dream of an ideal and stable society, one that could never be achieved, precisely because it was unreal, not in accord with the nature of man. Jesus too saw corruption and cruelty and oppression and was himself tempted to join in armed revolution. But he saw that all this was in the nature of human life and that He had to give people a way of life that would enable them to face a corrupt and cruel world with courage and faith.
Archive Reference : PP KCB 3/7/1 document 05