The Friar and the Cipher Read Online Free PDF Page A

unsuccessful flings at poetry and qualifying for the Olympics. (His real name was Aristocles, but he had acquired the moniker “Plato,” which means “broad,” as a result of his prowess as a wrestler.) While looking for something else to do with his life, he happened to meet the great Socrates.
    (In fact, we can only assume that Socrates was great, since he confined himself to the spoken word and never wrote anything down. Most of what we know of his philosophy is from Plato's dialogues in which the character Socrates has any number of extremely profound things to say. The use of dialogue is in itself Socratic—Socrates taught by a question-and-answer method called the dialectic, in which an argument was proposed, then either supported or destroyed during a process of give-and-take.)
    Plato studied with Socrates for the next nine years. After Socrates was forced to commit suicide by the supposedly democratic rulers of Athens, Plato wandered around a bit, was sold into slavery then ransomed by friends, and finally set up a school in the Grove of Academe, just outside Athens. Over the next forty years, he proceeded to produce some of the most provocative, profound, and beautifully written philosophy that the world has ever seen.
    The core of Plato's philosophy revolved around a duality pitting necessarily flawed sensory perceptions against an unknowable reality that was composed of Ideals or Forms. A person looking at a green chair, for example, perceives only an imperfect conception of the idea of a chair and an equally imperfect conception of the idea of greenness. True green and true chairness are beyond his or her capacity to understand. Wisdom is defined merely as progress on this road to the Ideal, as well as the awareness that the Ideal exists in the first place. Plato had no real place for an interactive deity in his construct—God, as He would later be conceived of by Christians, would simply have been the sum of the Forms.
    One surprising aspect of Plato's otherwise subjective construct was his reliance on mathematics, which in his day meant geometry. Over the gate of his school was written, “No one ignorant of geometry shall enter.” To Plato, every Ideal, and thus all that made up the world, had a mathematical base and was held together by geometric elegance.
    There were times when Plato's Ideals—geometrically elegant or no—led him down some slippery paths. The work for which he is best known, the
Republic
, culminates in his call for rule by a philosopher-king. In the
Republic
, personal possessions are eliminated, there is no need for marriage among the elite, and children are taken from their parents at birth to be parented, in effect, by the state. Until age twenty, they would be educated in gymnastics and martial music. Those who showed promise would then be educated in astronomy and mathematics. (Those who did not were sent off to be menials.) After ten years, those who could not handle the schoolwork were sent to the military, and the survivors studied philosophy. At age thirty-five, the budding philosophers studied the practical aspects of government for the next fifteen years. Finally, when the generation reached age fifty the pyramid would be complete when the best of the group was chosen and the philosopher-king took his station to rule firmly but fairly, with wisdom, empathy, and justice.
    The
Republic
, like most of Plato's work, is a dialogue starring Socrates, who here set down his vision of a just society, although whether or not Socrates ever advocated this odd mixture of fascism and communism is open to some question. That in practice this sort of autocracy was not the least bit Ideal but almost always degenerated to some form of ruthless dictatorship was not lost on future generations of scholars.
    When Aristotle arrived, the Academy, as the school was called, was at the pinnacle of Greek intellectual life. It did not take long for Plato (and everyone else) to realize that his new