Into the Wardrobe

I'm wondering what Lewis found so interesting about Plato. What I know of Plato seems like he would turn Lewis off. For example, his dream of an ideal society in the Republic is a class of leaders who are raised completely by society, without even knowing who their parents are.

Lewis is very Platonic in his thinking--not the political Platonism of The Republic but the idea that visible things are related to larger, invisible matters. For Plato there was a realm of ideas that gave things finality and defined them. For Lewis, the idea was that there are heavenly things that do the same. Narnia is, in a sense, a Platonic version of earth--an ideal where the things we know in our earthly experience are realities. I think that's what Diggory means when he says, "It's all in Plato."

Lewis also once commented that Protestants tend to be Platonic and Catholics Aristotelian. Very fascinating comment, I think.

He talks about this in The Allegory of Love, one of his early books of literary criticism.

Even Paul and the writer of Hebrews (who I always too to be Paul but some would have it differently) are very Platonic in this way. The exposition of the Jewish Temple services being only shadows of the true Temple above is certainly reminescent of Plato's Forms.

But that's certainly not Lewis' only parallel wih Plato. It seems to me that his suspicion of rhetoric (as when he talks about his father's oratory in "Surprised by Joy" is very Socratic. I catch hints of a belief in duty to the State which somewhat mirrors Plato (and, again, the same can be said of Paul). Even Lewis' "thinking man's commetator" approach seems much more akin to Plato's (Socrate's) searching than to Aristotle's formalism.