Gospel of Plato 3 · 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.
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 for years she had worked out certain things about love and beauty.
3.3She longed to say them aloud, 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.