Gospel of Plato 4 · 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.
4.1At last the enemies of the light made their move.
4.2By a corrupt trial they made an end of the prophet's body.
4.3But the death of Socrates was no destruction. It was the waking of the free souls of men.
4.4After he drank the hemlock, as the cold paralysis spread to his heart, he left behind that eternal riddle:
4.5"Crito, I owe Asclepius a cock."
4.6"Remember to pay the debt for me, for I am cured at last of the long sickness of the flesh."
4.7When his breathing stopped, a burning light filled the whole stone cell.
4.8That light was invisible to common eyes, yet blinding to the eye of pure reason.
4.9And from the mottled prison wall, that painting of a bird whose name no one had known for a thousand years — the silent witness of the poets — seemed to cross out of time and take on substance.
4.10It sang out one note of surpassing beauty, like the plucked string of a sacred lyre.
4.11In that moment it received its name. We call it the Dawn Bird.
4.12In that same instant the heavy body of Socrates lay still upon the stone bed.
4.13But his pure and unquenchable intelligence had become that radiant Dawn Bird.
4.14It broke through the vault of stone and flew up toward the unchanging and boundless sky of the cosmic Logos.
4.15The sailors of Miletus had handed down a saying: whoever sees this bird, his body does not fall into another's hands; his end is his own to decide, and his soul does not disperse.