The Case for God by Karen Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

toils of the body, he could “leave it alone, pure and by itself, to get on with its investigations, to yearn after and perceive something, it knows not what.” 56
    Like the Pythagoreans, Plato regarded mathematics as a spiritual exercise that helped the philosopher to wean himself from sense perceptions and achieve a level of abstraction that enabled him to view the world in a different way. Geometry was the hidden principle of the cosmos. Even though a perfect circle or triangle was never seen in the physical world, all material objects were structured on these ideal forms. Indeed, every single earthly reality was modeled on a heavenly archetype in a world of perfect ideas. Plato departed from Socrates in one important respect. He believed that we did not arrive at a conception of virtue by accumulating examples of virtuous behavior in daily life. Like everything else, virtue was an objective phenomenon that existed independently and on a higher plane than the material world.
    Plato’s “doctrine of the forms” is an extraordinary notion to usmoderns. We regard thinking as something that
we
do, so we naturally assume that our ideas are our own creation. But in the ancient world, people experienced an idea as something that happened to them. It was not a question of the “I” knowing something; instead, the “Known” drew one to itself. People said, in effect, “I think— therefore there is that which I think.” 57 So everything that was thought about had an objective existence in an ideal world. The doctrine of the forms was really a rationalized expression of the ancient perennial philosophy, in which every earthly object or experience here below had its counterpart in the divine sphere. 58 For Plato, the forms were in a realm apart. Numinous and timeless, they became manifest in the imperfect realities of our world but were not themselves involved in the endless process of change. The philosopher’s task was to become vividly aware of this superior level of being by cultivating his powers of reason.
    Plato’s vision of the transcendent forms seems to have been influenced by his experience of the Mysteries, which, like his philosophy, helped people to live creatively with their mortality. In the
Phaedrus
, he has left us one of the fullest—albeit discreetly veiled—accounts of the Eleusinian experience. Most people, he explained, were unable to see the forms shining through their earthly counterparts because “the senses are so murky.” But during their initiation, the
mystai
had all glimpsed their radiant beauty when,
    along with the glorious chorus … [we] saw that blessed and spectacular vision and were ushered into the mystery that we may rightly call the most blessed of all: And we who celebrated it were wholly perfect and free of all the troubles that awaited us in time to come, and we gazed in rapture at sacred revealed objects that were perfect, and simple, and unshakeable and blissful. That was the ultimate vision, and we saw it in pure light because we were pure ourselves, not buried in this thing we are carrying around now, which we call a body, locked in it like an oyster in its shell. 59
    Plato’s pupils were not required to “believe” in the existence of the forms but received a philosophical initiation that gave them a direct experience of this vision.
    Plato did not impose his ideas on his pupils or expound them systematically, like a modern academic, but introduced them playfully and allusively in the course of a conversation in which other viewpoints were also expressed. In his writings we find no definitive account of the “doctrine of the forms,” for example, because each dialogue was addressed to a different audience with its own needs and problems. His written work, a mere teaching aid, was no substitute for the intensity of an oral dialogue that had an emotional aspect that was essential to the philosophical experience. Like any ritual, it was extremely hard work, requiring