I hesitate to call Plato "divine" not because I have any doubts about his being a godlike Greek thinker, but because of the prejudice of our twenty-first century "monotheistic" culture against alternative visions of reality.
Next to his student, Aristotle, Plato probably had the greatest influence on the formation of Western culture. The Renaissance used Plato and the Greeks to sail through the fog of a millennium of Christian delusion.
However, no sooner had the Greek-inspired journey of the Renaissance into the wine-dark sea of science, that the Reformation, and the wars it precipitated among the Christian countries of Europe, abruptly caused a storm that nearly ended the honeymoon between the Renaissance Europeans and the Greeks.
The result of those bad feelings is that the faith-based European project pushed aside the Greeks, claiming the Greek achievement as its own, badmouthing the Greeks for being "pagan" and untrustworthy.
Christianity has been at the root of the European ambivalence towards the Greeks, especially Plato.
Plato talked about the soul being the immortal and rational and all-governing part of the intellectual make-up of man, the spirit that remembered the knowledge of a previous life, the connecting link to an ideal world of goodness.
The Christians took over the idea of the soul from Plato, but made the soul the depository of sin, completely disconnecting it from reason and beauty. And much more than Plato, they made the soul the archenemy of the body and material life. That way, Christianity built an edifice of illogical abstractions into its theology. Once in political power, Christianity skinned alive the home of Plato, Hellas, making Greece a palimpsest.
Then Christianity covered up its genocide against the Greeks, putting on a lipstick of Roman imperial vestments, and the use of Greek and Latin for reading and preaching its Biblical doctrines.
My attraction to Plato was his passion for reason at a time of chaos.
In studying reality, Plato explored the entire cosmos. He advocated mathematics and astronomy as keys to the understanding of things on Earth and the heavens.
Plato even created a desired politeia -- a state governed by philosophers, i.e., men who are passionately devoted to wisdom and the common good. This meant no private ownership of land and only modest differences in the size of farms: the largest farm being four times larger than the smaller. Plato also insisted on equality between men and women. Both served in the defense of the state.
Plato inspired me. I tried to lead a good life, though that was not possible. I kept asking myself why should officials in the government and other sectors of society punish those working for the public good, a moral decision that removes these dedicated human beings from acquiring personal wealth while serving the greater good. I resented being ostracized for helping victims of the giant agrochemical industrial complex of America.
Those moments of distress increased my sympathy for the politeia of Plato.
Like Athens after the Peloponnesian War, America has been drifting away from democracy. But unlike Athens, the United States is an empire fighting endless wars. The government is becoming arbitrary and, increasingly, defending a war economy, the moneyed class, and industrial polluters.
Plato would describe the grasp of American government by men of wealth as a plutocratic coup. He would denounce plutocracy as the worst form of government.
Plato was born four years after Athens went to war in 431 BCE. The Peloponnesian War lasted for some 27 years, all the way to 404 BCE. The war of Athens and half of Greece against Sparta and the other half of Greece all but eviscerated Greece.
Growing up in wartime Athens, Plato lived close at hand to the corruption of democracy which turned into tyranny, and which five years after the end of the war, in 399 BCE, put his teacher, Socrates, to death.
Plato met the anarchy of Athens with dialogues touting reason as the king. He urged Greeks to shed their parochial commitments for the one polis of Hellas, the politeia of laws run by philosophers.
So, next to the Greek tradition, it was the fire of war and its dreadful effects that largely shaped Plato. The constitutions of democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, monarchy and tyranny failed his ideals of a virtuous polis governed in the interests and well-being of all. If only he could find rulers advised by philosophers or philosopher-kings.
The thought of Plato is essential. His insight of using mathematics for understanding nature has been invaluable. His cosmological view of the Earth as a living and divine being has the seeds of saving the Earth from destruction.
Plato did not concern himself with nuclear weapons, a plutocratic and industrialized and overpopulated world threatening life with toxic politics and pollution and global warming -- the plagues of today. But he examined closely how people and societies could give birth to such monsters.
We continue ignoring Plato at our peril.