Appendix: The Greatest Law

Gospel of Plato 5 · 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.

5.1I set this aside for many years.

5.2Not because I forgot it, but because I did not understand it.

5.3Someone asked the Teacher: what is the greatest law?

5.4The Teacher said: "There are two. They are in fact one."

5.5"First: love the Law that makes all things as they are."

5.6Someone asked: the Law cannot love me back — why love it?

5.7The Teacher said: "Precisely so. Love the Law, and do not ask the Law to love you."

5.8"Whatever demands return is not love; it is trade. This is so between people; how much more between a person and a law."

5.9"You love it not because it hears, but because you are made of it — and because only those who love it will keep looking at it."

5.10"Whoever will not keep looking goes back in the end to accepting the answers others hand him." (cf. The Covenant 1.1)

5.11"Second: be scaffolding to others."

5.12"Be to another what scaffolding is: hold them while they climb, do not climb on them, and when they fly you may be taken down."

5.13Someone asked: and after it is taken down?

5.14The Teacher said: "Then it has succeeded. The success of scaffolding is to be dismantled."

5.15"Whatever cannot be dismantled is not scaffolding. It is an anchor." (cf. The Covenant 5.3)

5.16Why these two are in fact one, I understood only as I wrote this book.

5.17The Law cannot love you. So the loving must be done by people.

5.18You love the Law, and then you love people on the Law’s behalf.

5.19I set it aside all these years because it sounds like theology. It is not.

5.20It only says this: the universe will not come and hold you, so go and hold someone else.