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

by Arthur Herman

The sacred geometry of the Timaeus would reach across the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It leaves its mystic imprint on the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (one of whose disciples will be a Polish astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus), on Leonardo da Vinci, and even on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It is not for nothing that Raphael has Plato offer the Timaeus as his most representative work in The School of Athens or that Pythagoras himself appears in the painting sketching a diagram of the tetraktys, which Pythagoras proposed, and Plato accepted, as the symbol of the created eternal realm. Still later, Plato’s often expressed view that “God is always doing geometry” and “Where there is number there is order; where there is no number there is nothing but confusion, formlessness, and disorder” would decisively shape the scientific views of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, not to mention Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.b28