from the darkness and suffering of human life.
Nowhere is this social preoccupation more insistent than in the religious tradition of the West, and it is to be found even in the most abstract and intellectualist type of religious thought. It is to be seen above all in Plato, the perfect example of the pure metaphysician, who, nevertheless, made his metaphysics the basis of a programme of political and social reform. Indeed, according to his own description in the Seventh Epistle it was his political interests and his realisation of the injustice and moral confusion of the existing state which were the starting point of his metaphysical quest.
But though Plato realised as fully as any purely religious teacher the need for bringing social life into contact with spiritual reality and for relating man’s rational activity to the higher intuitive knowledge, he failed to show how this could be accomplished by means of a purely intellectual discipline. He saw that it was necessary on the one hand to drag humanity out of the shadow world of appearances and false moral standards into the pure white light of spiritual reality, and, on the other hand, that the contemplative must be forced to leave his mountain of vision and ” to descend again to these prisoners and to partake in their toils 59