ABSTRACT
In his Timaeus and Republic, Plato set the basis for Spenser’s psychological model. (1) The soul, originating in an eternal realm of pure forms, has descended into the body at three levels (brain’s reason, heart’s irascible passions, belly’s or liver’s concupiscent appetites), comparable to the tripartite hierarchy of the social organism and cosmos. (2) The soul’s highest power, intellect, is capable of grasping the Ideas of transcendent reality (including the Form of its own nature), dimly perceived in the shadowy appearances of sensory reality. (3) Mathematics and geometry provide special insight into the soul’s essence and structural relation to the body. (4) Orphic myth and allegory, in spite of Plato’s denigration of poetic fictions in Ion, contribute revealing parables of the human condition (the soul as winged, or as flying chariot, descending through the spheres into a confusing fleshly ‘cave’ or a divinely ordered ‘castle,’ and eventually reascending to the realm of pure Ideas). (5) The purpose of moral philosophy is to sustain the hierarchy of the embodied soul (ie, as ‘castle’) and ultimately to enable the rational essence to transcend its fleshly housing altogether.
