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

by Arthur Herman

headline bout between Aristotle’s most outspoken champion and the stern warrior for the faith of Saint Augustine.

Abelard had tried to use the ancient pagan philosopher to pry open the most delicate divine mysteries.

to explore with his reason what the devout mind grasps at once with a vigorous faith.”

“apparently holding God suspect, will not believe anything until he has first exam...

Philosophy had no business trying to lift the veil from mysteries beyond human understanding. The way to get to those, Bernard affirmed, was not through the mind but through the heart.

He sure is trying to protect something

He fought hard to keep women out of the Cistercian order;

All the same, it was Saint Bernard who put the image of the Virgin Mary, the nurturing Mother of God, at the center of the Catholic faith

with God. This, Bernard

“Nothing in heaven or on earth is hidden from him, except himself.”

inquiry is doomed to run off the track. Worldly wisdom, he liked to point out, teaches only vanity.15 By contrast, by making

Thanks to Saint Bernard, the anonymous The Miracles of the Virgin became one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages.

Then there was music. Plato had always been aware of the power of music to stir human emotions, both for good and for ill. Pythagoras had also made Plato and the Academy aware of how music expressed the same divine order of number and proportion as in geometry. Plotinus had passed this Platonic fascination with music and number to Saint Augustine, who saw both as reflections of a divine order catastrophically disrupted by Adam’s Fall.

new series of proofs of the existence of God, uncovered not through logic,

This was light.

October 3 as the forger’s feast day.

To them, he is still St. Dionysius the Areopagite, the first bishop of Athens, who had been converted

Great Chain of Being.*

Celestial Hierarchy.

“The aim of hierarchy is the greatest possible assimilation to and union with God … to become like Him, so far as is permitted, by contemplating intently His most Divine Beauty.”

a higher reality. And “every divine [movement] of radiance

The answer is light: nothing more or less than the radiance of God’s presence in the world.

Good in Itself was the source of all light in the material realm.

Irish translator.†

the Pseudo-Dionysius’s promise of a knowledge of God achieved through the senses rather than the mind and reason found its most lasting home in the realm of stone rather than words and parchment. It is still visible today in the Gothic churches at Saint Denis and at Chartres.

The pointed arch came from the East, from Islamic builders. Its rival the standard semicircular arch was the product of Aristotelian and Roman engineering. The pointed arch, by contrast, is the product of Platonic geometry.

The pointed arch, by contrast, is the product of Platonic geometry. It results from the intersection of two arcs drawn on the same straight line—for French builders like the ones who built Sens and Saint Denis, essentially two quick swipes of a compass. Any builder worth his pay could then use a set of calipers to reproduce a series of those same arcs within the regular rectangle of the church’s outside wall, or crisscross a pair of pointed vaults inside a series of perfect squares in the interior, enabling him to prop up the roof with far less stress than the old barrel vault of the Romans.

It results from the intersection of two arcs drawn on the same straight line—for French builders like the ones who built Sens and Saint Denis, es...

businessmen. By the fourteenth century, they were already calling themselves free masons.‡

“There must be no decoration,” he said, “only proportion.”34

Pythagorean of all geometric figures, the pentagon)

The monks were outraged and drove Abelard out of the abbey. The assertion that the Celestial Hierarchy had been written by a Frenchman and the founder of Saint Denis became a matter of national dogma, one might almost say national theology.

He also put the first Gothic rose windows over the west portal and at the rear of the church, over the sanctuary.

Rose in crucean

sun-filled church, he described his feelings: “It seems to me I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe.”

thanks to the mediating power of light—or what later will be called the beauty of holiness.

“and having seen the light, [the mind] arises from its former submergence.”

the Timaeus.

Later, some would claim they tried to replace theology with geometry.

1:1:1:1 ratio, which every student of Plato or Pythagoras knew was the symbol of divine unity or Oneness.

The hexagons that result do much more than define the line of columns across the transepts of Chartres. When

called “golden rectangles,” since all their sides are related as a ratio of 1:2:4:8.)46

including Geometry, clearly the queen of the arts just as Mary is the queen of heaven.

mystic Hugh of Saint Victor, “All human learning can serve the student of theology.”48

Crusaders went on a spree of murder and mayhem until the blood, an eyewitness said,

playing chess and polo,

astrolabe.

Phaedo and the Meno

He turns to theology and dialectic; he seeks to reconcile his reason with his faith but ultimately is content if faith wins out.

Averroism will be the taproot of Enlightenment Deism and

University of Oxford. In Paris, Franciscan

Robert Grosseteste,