ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment began with de-demonization and it culminated in democracy; it downed the demons and exalted the demos. But the latter did not immediately follow from the former, a long and complex process led from the one to the other lasting from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Plato’s hostility to democracy, which he castigates as the second worst form of government after tyranny, was due to many reasons both theoretical and historical. As initially expounded by Plato and Jean Paul there is an enormous difference between the two conceptions of death. According to Plato, death is the soul’s gateway to immortality; according to Paul, death holds out the promise of resurrection and eternal life. What had been gods for the pagan Plato had in the meantime become devils for the Christian Paul, and they would continue to bedevil the subsequent history of Christianity.
