The central position of Plato

The now little-known Paul Elmer More (see for example this article by Brian Domitrovic) was one of the leading American conservative thinkers of the early part of the twentieth century. His major work was a series of volumes on "the Greek tradition from the death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon", an attempt to provide a philosophical history of Western culture, through both its Hellenic and Christian phases, that has some parallels to Voegelin's (much larger) project. More's work seems more accessible, however, than that of Voegelin, whose manner is often less that of a systematic teacher than of someone discussing ideas with which the reader is assumed already to be familiar. Reading More might be a good way of learning about Platonist philosophy.

Here is More issuing a kind of "Platonist manifesto":

I can foresee no restoration of humane studies to their lost position of leadership until they are felt once more to radiate from some central spiritual truth. I do not believe that the aesthetic charms of literature can supply this want, nor is it clear to me that a purely scientific analysis of the facts of moral experience can furnish the needed motive . . . . Only through the centralizing force of religious faith or through its equivalent in philosophy can the intellectual life regain its meaning and authority for earnest men. Yet, for the present at least, the dogmas of religion have lost their hold, while the current philosophy of the schools has become in large measure a quibbling of specialists on technical points of minor importance, or, where serious, too commonly has surrendered to that flattery of the instinctive elements of human nature which is the very negation of mental and moral discipline.

It is in such a belief and such a hope, whether right or wrong, that I have turned back to the truth, still potent and fresh and salutary, which Plato expounded in the troubling and doubting days of Greece—the truth which is in religion but is not bounded by religious dogma, and which needs no confirmation by miracle or inspired tradition.

—From the preface to Platonism, 1917.