The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

Stay on the steep ascent to the One,

Logos who had made everything in the world and is “the true light, which comes into the world to light every man.”

Philo then took the next leap by identifying this Logos as the offspring of Plato’s Demiurge from the Timaeus, the creative source of all being and intelligibility in the universe.

“Thanks to the Logos, the whole world is now Greece and Rome.”

Socrates’s daimon,

More than any other Church Father, Origen established the sermon as a principal focus of Christian service and the Bible as the central subject for discussion. He was also one of the first Christian

He taught his students to read the Bible allegorically,

saying from his old rival Plotinus, that when bodily pain seems beyond endurance, it can lead to a spiritual cleansing,

Church). He drew pointed parallels between Constantine leading Christians to victory and Moses leading the Jews to the Promised Land, and between the battle of Milvian Bridge and pharaoh’s armies being swept away by the Red Sea.10

This reminds me of every president trying to immitate that preacer style

shores of the Atlantic to the Urals. This was an ideal of government serving divine ends, with God appointing and anointing a ruler to exercise supreme authority in His name.

monarchs are Platonic copies of a higher invisible perfection. Not

Today doctor fauci

Cicero’s On Moral Obligations

Lactantius’s ideas there lurks another earlier figure, namely Aristotle.

religion (religio) comes from the verb religare, meaning “to tie or bind.”

Christianity was already making the world more civilized and wars less violent, because its teachings had softened men’s hearts and awakened their consciences. One day, the old man predicted to Lactantius, wars will be unnecessary. Swords really will be beaten into plowshares, just as Scripture predicted; and mankind would realize its full potential through virtue, self-restraint, justice, and excellence.

Individual choice and social distinctions have no place, either. Indeed, Lactantius seeks to abolish them both, especially the division between rich and poor.

Socialism

Licinius, his only remaining rival and a pagan,

323,

Lucifer Light is Named Capitalism Pet Goat Cult Captain Kirk Adolf Hitler The cube Catholicism I hate people An enchanter

361.

Math is a gift Atlantis Stars Hierophant Amour Sampson Chattanooga

Julian had lived in Athens, where pagan disciples of Plotinus taught him the old Hellenic tradition of literature and philosophy along with Neoplatonism’s criticism of Christianity, including the works of that now-despised figure, Celsus.

Julian the Apostate,

But the whole thing had an air of artificiality and insincerity.

Rome, mistress of the world, had fallen to the blast of trumpets and the howling of the Goths,

The City of God.

It begins with Romulus murdering his brother Remus in founding Rome and continues through one gruesome scene of bloodshed, murder, cruelty, and betrayal after another.

Augustine said, since he knew full well Rome had been governed then by the same pack of killers and thieves who governed it later.

From Plotinus, Augustine had learned that man’s reason is like the soul’s flashlight, beaming out into the surrounding gloom.

Hierophant

truth.

Logos

“I believe, in order that I may understand”

Augustine’s formula, with its conscious echoes of Plato’s Republic,

church as a community, whose members share the same values and beliefs and who are bound together in their dedication to love God as they love one another; and to serve His commands rather than those of some bureaucrat or politician.

Above all, Boethius treated Plato and Aristotle as the essential anchors of a civilized education.

527.

Gerbert had a deep interest in its more advanced elements, the so-called quadrivium. For arithmetic, he revived that lost ancient calculator the abacus. For the study of music, he invented a stringed instrument, the monochord, for demonstrating to students the Pythagorean precision of musical intervals. For geometry, Gerbert wrote a commentary on Euclid and helped to revive an interest in astronomy in the West by telling friends about a marvelous Arab device he had discovered on his travels to Spain, the astrolabe.17 However, Gerbert’s first loves were the subjects of the trivium, especially rhetoric and logic.

and quoting favorite one-liners as they wandered the narrow streets, their minds filled with Aristotle, Boethius, Porphyry—and Abelard.

By using logic and dialectic, he told them, they could open new vistas in the study of theology.

man’s reason was what made him the image of God. “In fact,” Abelard once told his class, “you are gods!”

“no one can believe something which he has not first understood.”

“Careful and frequent questioning is the basic key to wisdom.” He added what is probably his most famous maxim: “By doubting we come to question, and by questioning we perceive the truth.”

Abelard’s most famous work, Sic et Non, compared 150 passages from Scripture and the Church Fathers that contradicted one another.

through reason and logic. The only way Christianity could make itself a believable faith was by responding to our natural inclination to question its foundations.

and the “theoretical” or speculative philosophy, like metaphysics, natural science, and theology. In Greek, pragmatika begins with a pi and theoretika with a theta.

1464 that Plato’s own writings once again became part of the Western cultural arsenal.

It wasn’t until the twelfth century and Gerard of Cremona’s translation of 1187 that this crucial text on inductive logic finally entered the mainstream. See

Mathematical deductive truths, like 2 + 2 = 4, very rarely do.

The seven were grammar, rhetoric, and logic; astronomy, music, geometry, and arithmetic.

“there was to be seen over almost all the earth, but especially Italy and France, a great renewal of church buildings. It was as if the world had shaken itself, and, casting off the old garments, had dressed itself again in every

The New World Order. This is what it looks like . This is how they change from obe thing to the next.

revival of the wool trade

1140,

That meant a return to first principles, especially those of Saint Augustine, that “from this hell on earth there is no escape except through the grace of the Savior Christ, our Lord and God.”