Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The common life
- 2 Communion: Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and ecumenical consensus
- 3 Plato's vision
- 4 Aristotle's revisionism
- 5 Covenant and community
- 6 Little communities and the Catholic church
- 7 Cappadocian koinonia
- 8 Augustine and the story of communion
- 9 Ecumenism and the practice of communion
- Select biblography
- Index
3 - Plato's vision
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The common life
- 2 Communion: Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and ecumenical consensus
- 3 Plato's vision
- 4 Aristotle's revisionism
- 5 Covenant and community
- 6 Little communities and the Catholic church
- 7 Cappadocian koinonia
- 8 Augustine and the story of communion
- 9 Ecumenism and the practice of communion
- Select biblography
- Index
Summary
There is a well-known passage in Plato's Gorgias where Socrates takes issue with Callicles. For Callicles, society is the arena of struggle between individuals; for him ‘might is right’. His refusal to recognise the demands of social participation may be a throwback to an older, heroic code of behaviour, but it is more likely to represent the ‘new morality’ of the Sophists, to which Socrates is deeply opposed. Callicles will admit no link between friendship (philia) or communion (koinonia) and what he sees as virtue. By contrast, Socrates argues that the man who pursues neither justice nor temperance, and who does not restrain his desires, in effect leads the life of a robber. He can be beloved of neither man nor God, for with him there can be no koinonia – no social bond. Socrates goes on:
Where there is no communion (koinonia), there can be no friendship (philia). And wise men tell us, Callicles, that heaven and earth and gods and men are held together by communion and friendship, by orderliness, temperance and justice; and that is the reason, my friend, why they call the whole of this world by the name of order (kosmos), not of disorder.
For Socrates, the individual is a micricosm and the universe a macrocosm. Koinonia is the world he uses to express the bond which holds all things together, in whatever way, as kosmos, as an integrated whole.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000