Review - Plato's Republic

I picked up the Cornford edition of this book, which was laying moldering on my basement bookshelf and reread the thing. What an inspiration! Plato, through dialogue, including Socrates and his other drinking buddies, discusses what Justice is. In order to do this, Socrates states he will 'scale the problem up' by looking at Justice as it would be in a large society, and then 'scale the problem back down' to find what Justice is on a personal level.
Much has been made of the Republic as being a political book. Marx was said to have been reading it when he crafted his Communist Manifesto.
My argument is, the ultimate end of the dialogue was to discover what Justice is on a personal level, and therefore the book should not be judged in a political light.
That said...
Justice is a person whose animal nature, situated in the belly, is ruled by temperance, whose soulful nature is situated in the heart and is ruled by courage, and whose spiritual nature is situated in the head, and is ruled by intelligence.
Plato, through the discussion between Socrates and his neophytes, also lays out a theory of cognition for people.
The base is imagination and is animal. The next rung is belief, followed by knowledge, the capstone being intelligence or gnosis.
In the animal imagination, we have dreams, flights of fancy, gut instincts and so on.
In belief, we have objects of faith. For the christian for example, emanating from belief we would have icons...the cross, the crucifix, images of Mother Mary, and so on.
From knowledge we would consider the ideas that stand behind the objects of belief. The grace of Mary, the pathos of the crucifix, and so on.
Finally in gnosis or intelligence, we would begin to see how all of this, dreams, objects of faith ideas behind icons, and how do these all fit together, and how can we apply them to our lives?
It is easy to me to see how the early church fathers such as St. Augustine, Aquinas and later the medievals found inspiration with Plato's republic and how it's ideas were congruent with their spirituality.
It is also evident that the theories and ideas from this wonderful book impacted western society as a whole, in it's educational system and later philosophy.