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

by Arthur Herman

In addition, the Timaeus’s insistence that physical matter is simply inert material waiting for the imprint of nous, or reason, in order to have any significance or motion became a central theme of ancient and medieval science. Even Plato’s rival Aristotle will make it a starting point for his own work.27 Likewise, the idea of planetary motion as a harmonious system of circles or spheres (later called “the music of the spheres”), and of man as a microcosm of the universe with a body, mind, and soul in tune with the larger harmonies of creation, marks the start of long, influential chapters in Western thought. 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...