God, Godlessness, and Philosophy in Plato and Machiavelli

• In Event: Plato, Philosophy, and Democracy

Abstract

Most political theorists think that Machiavelli was a non-believer and that Plato believed in a perfectly rational god. Machiavelli is cast as the modern and familiar, while Plato represents the ancient and foreign. However, some interpreters of each thinker have reasonably defended the opposite perspectives, namely, that Machiavelli was a devoted, albeit unorthodox, Christian, while Plato was, in the end, an atheist. These perspectives have been unfairly dismissed by Straussian and analytic scholars, respectively. Indeed, virtually any contemporary reader of Machiavelli’s Prince is hard-pressed not to smirk in disbelief at Maurizio Viroli’s Machiavelli’s God, just as any graduate student in an analytic philosophy department is hard-pressed not to scoff at Leo Strauss’ interpretation of Plato’s Laws. Yet, as I demonstrate in this paper, the Straussian, analytic, and contextualist interpretations of Plato and Machiavelli are all grounded in adequate textual evidence. That these seemingly opposite views can be found in their texts reveals a commonality between Plato and Machiavelli: they each present mutually exclusive doctrines concerning the divine and its relation to the natural and human world. Rather than seeking to resolve this contradiction by showing that each thinker truly subscribed to only one of the conflicting views, I investigate the meaning of the contradiction itself.

Ultimately, I argue that their texts, at least at the metaphysical or theological level, promote inquiry into the divine by presenting the reader with a problem and refraining from resolving it. By allowing both materialist and theistic doctrines to be discovered, these texts prevent the interpreter from finding evidence that would conclusively demonstrate that their authors were, in the final analysis, convinced of either the one or the other. In this sense, while Plato and Machiavelli emphasize the authority of opposite doctrines concerning the divine, they are aligned in promoting a kind of philosophical reflection that diminishes the authority of all such doctrines.

Author

• Max John Edward Morris, The University of Toronto