The following is an edited excerpt from Dr. Louis Markos’ article “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in Plato’s Myths,” in the 2025 issue of Meliora, the academic journal of Memoria College.
Apart from the order, balance, and harmony that unite Truth to Goodness and Goodness to Beauty, there would be no center around which to organize our thoughts, perceptions, and desires. Apart from the eternal, essential, unchanging nature of the transcendentals, we would possess no touchstone against which to measure the fleeting things of our earth. Apart from the ability of the broken bits of truth, goodness, and beauty that are scattered across our world to participate in their divine Originals, we would be unable, to borrow a phrase from Blake, to see eternity in a grain of sand.
But what exactly are these transcendentals, and why have they exerted so great an impact on the West and, through her, the world? Normally, I would look to the dialectical sections of Plato’s dialogues for answers. In those sections, Plato, usually through the mouth of Socrates, engages in a vigorous volley of questions and answers meant to scrub away the false, the fragmented, and the fleeting and so catch a glimpse of the pure, the perfect, and the permanent. Much is to be learned from these sections, but I prefer to cast my eye past the philosophical debate to the myths (or allegories) that Plato conjures up to climax and incarnate his dialogues.
Through his dialectical gymnastics, Plato defines, deconstructs, and discerns, but in his myths, he yearns and soars, defying all limits that would keep him from those greater realities that transcend even reason and logic. It is in the myths that Plato teaches us what it means to love the True, pursue the Good, and long for the Beautiful. Each myth is a journey of desire and a voyage of discovery that opens on to a new vista.
In the sections to come, I shall follow Plato as he embarks on three pilgrimages that will draw him, and us, closer to the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that await us at the end of the road….
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