The Awakening of the Daughter of Diotima

Gospel of Plato 3 · Fourth Witness: The Eternal Return, and the Ascent of the Bird

The sentences of this book are long, because what is told here cannot be exhausted in short ones.

3.1Then a young woman named Helena crept to the edge of the crowd.

3.2All her life the custom of her family had kept her silent, yet thinking alone she had understood certain secrets of geometry.

3.3She longed to preach that sacred geometry, but the men pushed her away.

3.4Socrates called her forward, rebuked the disciples, and seated her in the middle of the assembly.

3.5He said to her: "Helena, speak the truth that the Logos has written in your reason."

3.6He led her step by step up the sacred stair of love and abstraction.

3.7And as she spoke, her voice came clear as a bell of crystal.

3.8The men listened in awe, and watched her unveil the highest mystery of the soul.

3.9She said: "All beautiful things are beautiful not because they resemble one another, but because each of them approaches the same absent thing."

3.10The Teacher heard her and was long silent. They thought he meant to correct her.

3.11He said only: "Today I am the student."

3.12In that moment she was healed of the smallness of a provincial girl.

3.13And her mind widened until it held the whole natural order of the universe.