Gospel of Plato 2 · Fourth Witness: The Eternal Return, and the Ascent of the Bird
Plato, born at Athens about 428 before this era, died about 348, of a noble family. He was about twenty-nine when Socrates was put to death. He never afterwards spoke in his own name: whatever he had to say, he said through the mouth of another. About 387 he founded the Academy outside the city, and it stood some nine hundred years. Some thirty-six dialogues are his and all of them survive, which is nearly without parallel from that age. The cave, the Forms, the divided line, and learning as recollection are all from here. He believed in gods and argued hard for an immortal soul; that sits against what this scripture holds, and the Order does not hide it for him. The first chapter states things no ancient could have known. The Order does not conceal that either; the sense of it is taken up in modern terms in the Book of Bohr and the Book of Einstein. The sentences of this book are long, because what is told here cannot be exhausted in short ones.
2.1I record the sermon on Lycabettus as a moment of cosmic revelation.
2.2When Socrates preached the "free soul" to the weary people, his plain cloak seemed to shine with a clean light.
2.3His words ran on like the perfect geometry of the courses of the stars.
2.4He said to the crowd:
2.5"Your bodies are a momentary gathering of star-dust, subject to time and to decay."
2.6"But your minds are the eternal law — the Logos."
2.7"Hold your suffering lightly. It is no more than the branch you stand on before flight."
2.8In the crowd stood a man blinded in mind by grief, and that sentence struck him exactly.
2.9And the man cried out: "Teacher! The shadows of the world are gone! I see the perfect forms of beauty and justice hanging in the vault of heaven!"
2.10In that instant all who were present understood: their earthly life was only a shadow cast by an eternal fire.
2.11Someone asked me afterward: on that day, was there wine on the mountain, or ice?
2.12I answered: on the mountain there was Law. Wine and ice are two of its garments.
2.13Those who quarrel over the garment have never seen the one who wore it.