El mito del Político (268 D-274 E) y la historia de las religiones

Abstract

The importance of a religious-historical approach for an appropriate understanding of the myth in Plato's Statesman has not been sufficiently emphasized yet. The myth substantially describes the life of the world as two revolutions of the same circle, the ane forward and the ather backward. In the forward revolution God accompanies the world; during the latter he remains in his watch-tower. Within the framework of this myth, which establishes the current philosophical doctrine of the alternating world-periods, we find more or less developed allusions to other well-known themes of the Greek lore: the Golden age, the kingdom of Cronus, the Earth-born Men (gegeneis) ... My aim is to reassess the specificity of this Platonic mythopoeia setting it in the general context of ancient religion. In the first part I characterize the motif of the absence of God against the background of the phenomenological -and historical- category of the deus otiosus (with examples derived from the middle-Platonic and gnostic domains). In the second part 1 consider the problem of the source (or sources) of evil: apparently the corporeal principle (τὸ σωματοειδές), more properly the state of precosmical chaos. Finally, the question is raised of Plato's dualism in this context: whether radical or mitigated.