Texts in Conversation
In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates calls the body a tomb and says we are already dead. The Gospel of Thomas pushes this further, declaring the world itself a corpse that the one who truly knows it surpasses.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Plato Gorgias
Classical
CALLICLES: No indeed, for then stones and dead men would be the happiest of all. SOCRATES: But surely life according to your view is an awful thing; and indeed I think that Euripides may have been right in saying, “Who knows if life be not death and death life;” and that we are very likely dead; I have heard a philosopher say that at this moment we are actually dead, and that the body is our tomb, and that the part of the soul which is the seat of the desires is liable to be tossed about by words and blown up and down; and some ingenious person, probably a Sicilian or an Italian, playing with the word, invented a tale in which he called the soul—because of its believing and make-believe nature—a vessel, and the ignorant he called the uninitiated or leaky, and the place in the souls of the uninitiated in which the desires are seated, being the intemperate and incontinent part, he compared to a leaky vessel full of holes, because it can never be satisfied. He is not of your way of thinking, Callicles, for he declares, that of all the souls in Hades, meaning the invisible world, these uninitiated or leaky persons are the most miserable, and that they pour water into a vessel which is full of holes out of a colander which is similarly perforated. The colander, as my informer assures me, is the soul, and the soul which he compares to a colander is the soul of the ignorant, which is likewise full of holes, and therefore incontinent, owing to a bad memory and want of faith. These notions are strange enough, but they show the principle which, if I can, I would fain prove to you; that you should change your mind, and, instead of the intemperate and insatiate life, choose that which is orderly and sufficient and has a due provision for daily needs. Do I make any impression on you, and are you coming over to the opinion that the orderly are happier than the intemperate? Or do I fail to persuade you, and, however many tales I rehearse to you, do you continue of the same opinion still? CALLICLES: The latter, Socrates, is more like the truth.
Date: 380 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Gospel of Thomas 1:56
Early Christian
55 Jesus said, “Whoever does not hate his father and mother cannot be my disciple; and whoever does not hate his brothers and sisters and take up his cross as I do will not be worthy of me.” 56 Jesus said, “Whoever has come to understand the world has found a corpse; whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.” 57 Jesus said, “The kingdom of the Father is like a man who had good seed. His enemy came at night and sowed weeds among the good seed. The man did not let them pull up the weeds; he said to them, ‘Lest you go to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.’ For on the day of the harvest the weeds will be conspicuous, and they will be pulled up and burned.”
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Notes and References
"... These abundant examples from the Platonist and Platonizing sources demonstrate that Gospel of Thomas 56 and 80 seem to be drawing upon the Platonist tradition. In addition, one more detail seems to demonstrate the extent to which the Gospel of Thomas is indebted to Platonism. While the sources that identify bodies with corpses are quite numerous, none of them employs the word πτῶμα. In fact, there are relatively few Greek texts where the word πτῶμα is used in the same way it is used in Gospel of Thomas 56 and 60 — i.e., meaning “corpse” (the primary meaning of the word is “fall,” “act of falling”) and without a modifier in genitive. The differences between the two sayings are perhaps of even more significance. Indeed, no ancient source except the Gospel of Thomas argues that the world is a corpse. Even though one can easily use the reasoning behind Gospel of Thomas 56 and 80 to construct a syllogism (all bodies are corpses; the world is a body; therefore, the world is a corpse) and even though Platonists would have accepted both premises, they would still have rejected the conclusion ..."
Miroshnikov, Ivan
The Gospel of Thomas and Plato: A Study of the Impact of Platonism on the Fifth Gospel
(pp. 60-61) Brill, 2018
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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