The results of Palestinian parliamentary elections are in, and Hamas has achieved apparent victory. Today's New York Times carries President Bush's response, as he urged Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to stay in office. A government has not yet been formed, and the president has stated that "a political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which we will not deal."

Things are changing faster than ever before, it seems. Compare a map of the world today with one 20 years old. A new web site is created every two seconds. The world's store of knowledge doubles every eighteen months. More knowledge has been accumulated in the last thirty years than in the preceding 5,000. Not long ago my two sons got my father's World War II manual typewriter out of the closet and looked at it. One said, "Dad, what is it?" I've never felt so old.

Yet human nature does not change. A newspaper article described change this way: "Try as you will, you get behind in the race, in spite of yourself. It's an incessant strain, to keep pace…and still, you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The political world is news seen so rapidly, you're out of breath trying to keep pace with who's in and who's out. Everything is high pressure. Human nature can't endure much more!"

Sounds like yesterday's news, doesn't it? It is--from the Atlantic Journal, June 16, 1833.

Despite all that has changed about our culture, our most basic questions remain unanswered today. What happens when we die? How can we live meaningful lives? What are the best ways to raise our children? How do we govern ourselves as individuals and as a nation?

The most influential answers ever proposed for these perennial, ultimate questions came from a man nicknamed "the Broad," and his most unruly pupil. And everything else in Western philosophy is largely a footnote.

Aristocles was born in 427 B.C., and later given the nickname Plato (meaning "the broad," apparently owing both to the size of his intellect and his girth). To call him the son of aristocracy is to understate the case. His family traced themselves to Poseidon, god of the sea, and Solon the lawgiver. When your ancestors rule most of the surface of the planet and the laws of all mankind, you're under pressure to make something of yourself. And Plato did.

As the story goes, he was twenty years old, dark and handsome, when he met Socrates. Immediately he changed his life's ambition to philosophy. So much for family expectations. But no one knew the historic significance of this decision, least of all Plato.

Sparta defeated Athens in 404 B.C. Plato left his conquered hometown, disillusioned and bitter. For several years he wandered across Greece, Italy, Sicily, and Egypt, meditating constantly on the thought of Socrates. He finally returned home to take up the work of his former teacher, founding the first great philosophical school in Western history. This school was named the Academy (for the grove of trees under which it met; does this make them shade tree philosophers?)-hence "academics" today. Plato spent the rest of his life at his school, active in teaching and writing to his death in 348 B.C.

His writings have all been preserved, but little of his oral teaching was recorded. His writing reads like dialogue, however, as it is in the form of conversations between Socrates and others. His literary skills were considerable, but not systematic.

One of the great struggles in understanding Plato is the existence of apparent philosophical contradictions recorded in these dialogues. The other is in knowing when Plato is preserving the ideas of Socrates and when he is putting his own thoughts in Socrates' literary mouth. While questions remain about some of his ideas, no doubt remains about his influence.

Plato thought that you and I inhabit a world which is but a shadow of the real world. Here's why.

Plato was convinced by Socrates that the objective Good exists. But he couldn't find it anywhere in this corrupted, decadent world. And so he concluded that it must exist someplace outside the material universe. But where? Borrowing from the Pythagoreans their Orphic belief that the soul is a fallen, preincarnate god, he found his answer.

According to Plato, a world of eternal, unchanging, perfect realities exists, but in the realm of ideas, not physicality. This "place" he called the world of Forms or Ideas. It must by definition be separate from the sensible world, and is known only to the intellect. These Forms are unchanging realities, and the only objects worth knowing.

What of our changing, non-ideal (literally) world of experience? It is only a shadow of the Forms, a physical and thus imperfect reflection of the Ideas it represents. The way to escape the shadows and experience the Forms is through philosophy (naturally), specifically by seeking the true, universal definition of a thing or experience. When we understand an entity in its perfect, unchanging essence, we have glimpsed the Form which it reflects.

We need an example, preferably as mundane as possible. So, consider the fingers with which you type on your computer. What is unique or at least unusual about your hands? (fingerprints, shape, etc.). What is the unchanging essence of the "perfect" hands? You are this moment contemplating the Form of hands, of which your physical appendages are but a poor representative. Just as a shadow is not the real thing, so your hands are not real in themselves. Alas, they only copy the ideal hands you have discovered by philosophical reflection. And they are not the way you wish they were (ask any arthritic).

How did we get in this sorry state of affairs? Remember Orpheus' strange idea that our souls "sinned" in their pre-mortal existence and are punished by being put in such fallen hands (and eyes, and ears). Pythagoras believed Orpheus, and Plato believed Pythagoras. You may not believe Plato, but millions of people for eight centuries did.

Here is Plato's most popular illustration of our world of shadows. Imagine that you are exploring some caves in a park. You walk into one very strange cavern, finding inside a group of people who are chained to the back wall. Their captors have arranged things so that these unfortunate people cannot turn their heads to see behind themselves. Thus they do not see you, or even know that a "you" might exist. The only world they can see is the back wall they face. Behind them roars a giant fire, casting their shadows on this wall. Because they have lived their entire lives seeing only these shadows, they assume them to be all the world there is. But you know better. You want to unchain them and show them the larger world they cannot see. So did Plato.

How do we rattle such chains?

Plato is sure that your soul not only lived once in the world of Forms, but can remember it (with a little help). When you contemplate the beautiful, or reflect on the ideal, your soul is reminded of that perfect Idea it once knew. This is the theory of "anamnesis" ("remembering"), and it constitutes the first epistemology (theory of knowledge) in Western history.

To help your soul remember its roots, you need a little discipline. Plato offers these helpful hints. He thinks that your intellect is the rightful ruler of your soul, aided with the higher emotions (such as love, nobility, sacrifice, and the like). However, the lower emotions of lust and pride want to hijack the whole enterprise. So you must discipline your soul through the use of reason and logic, temperance and virtue.

Plato likens your soul to a charioteer (your mind) and two horses (the higher emotions, which help steer, and the lower emotions, which want to take the whole thing into the ditch). So long as your thoughts and feelings take the high road, so to speak, all is well.

Let's try this theory out. Think for a moment about the table at which you are sitting, or last sat. Who thought of such an odd idea as a piece of wood held up by four others? How did he or she come to design the first such thing? What design did the builder attempt to execute? Probably a more perfect table than you are seeing or remembering right now. That "ideal" table was composed of a perfect rectangle, supported by perfectly designed and created legs. But such perfection is impossible in this world of imperfect wood, nails, and hands.

So where did such a perfect design come from? Not visual, physical experience, for no such entity exists. If Plato is right, the first architect of the first perfect table contemplated the idea of "tableness," if you will. Such contemplation caused his or her soul to remember the "idea" of the perfect table. The result was a design only imperfectly executed in wood.

The only hope for us in this flawed world is that our souls can also remember the unchanging moral standards which regulate life in the world of Forms. An absolute morality, learned from Socrates, permeates Plato's world view. But that morality has no reference in God or our personal relationship with him, for reasons we'll soon examine.

Why does any of this matter to you and me today? For this simple and important reason: if Plato is right, the way Christians see God, themselves, and their world is wrong. Tragically, for nearly five hundred years the church saw God through Plato's eyes, not Plato through God's. And we're still paying for that mistake today.

Let's see why, and how.

Plato's way of seeing the world works itself out in theology and everyday life with disastrous consequences. First, think about where all of this puts God.

If physical reality is a flawed shadow, then a perfect God cannot be definition have any part of it. If he made it with all its imperfections, he clearly is imperfect as well.

And so Platonic thought relegates God to the realm of ideas only. He can have nothing to do with this shadowy place. The very idea that he would intervene in the natural world you and I must inhabit is absurd by definition. The miraculous is rendered impossible, and any hope you and I have to know God while in this shadowy cave is dashed. Think about him, but don't try to experience him personally. Doesn't much of our culture today agree?

If Plato is right, God is a figment of your imagination, literally. Your idea of God may be very different from mine. Who's to say who's right? And what difference does it all make anyway? Can you see why Greek philosophers had such little interest in personal religion? And why our Western culture has a built-in suspicion of it as well?

Growing up, I thought that religion was a crutch for cripples. So did Plato. What neither of us realized is that we're all crippled. And Plato's God is no help at all.

So, how did this cave of shadows come to exist? It seems that God created a divine craftsman, a figure who made both souls and bodies from pre-existing materials. This craftsman did the best he could, but he had rusty nails and warped two-by-fours to work with. This material world is the source of evil in our lives--it is irrational, chaos in perpetual movement. And there's nothing either God or his carpenter can do about it.

The divine craftsman modeled his work on the Forms which exist in the world of Ideas, but he could make only imperfect copies of them. This is why when you contemplate a table you can imagine the "tableness" he was attempting to reproduce. Your soul remembers the Ideal table and is drawn from this chaotic cave of shadows to the real world of Forms.

Here's what Plato's theory of creation means for Christians: this world is a bad place, and you want to spend as little time here as possible. You want to break the philosophical chains which tie you to the shadows you see, by thinking about the world you cannot. You cannot change the world, so don't try. Just don't let it change you.

This is the most popular definition of spirituality I know today. Retreat from this fallen, sinful world. Spend as little time in it as possible. Live at the church, raise your kids there, go to school there, socialize there. Shop from the Christian Yellow Pages; listen only to Christian music; read only Christian books; have only Christian friends. And somewhere Plato is cheering.

Didn't Jesus warn us that salt is no good in the saltshaker?

How would Plato rule a country, given his ideas about ideas? Rather sternly, it turns out. Just as the soul is governed by reason, so society should be governed by the reasoners. The philosophers make up the "guardian" class and order the government and its citizens. They are aided by the "warrior" class (akin to the higher emotions we saw in Plato's epistemology), who work in close cooperation with the guardians to keep the masses in line.

The "working" class (like the lower emotions) must be governed closely. They do the farming, manufacturing, trading, and other mundane work which makes the city-state possible. And so they feed the guardians and warriors who rule them.

How are we to produce these classes? Guardians are deprived of all natural marriage, private property, or family life. They are mated to other guardians. Their offspring never know their parents, but grow up in a general nursery and so are protected from all concerns but the rational.

To make all this happen, the city-state should be located on an island, with all foreign contact strongly discouraged. And you thought democracy was flawed.

The best thing about Plato's theory of politics is that it was never enacted. Makes our politics look better, doesn't it?

What of aesthetics, a theory of art? Plato saw all visual art as a distraction. After all, if an apple you can see is but a shadow of "appleness," then a painting of that apple is a shadow of a shadow. A royal waste of time.

But Plato knew that art, for all its flaws, has great influence on our souls, especially the lower emotions. So he wanted it tightly censured. And music most of all, since it bypasses the eyes and goes straight to the soul. If he thought so poorly of the ordered, mathematically-oriented music of his day, what do you suppose he'd think of rap?

Plato was more helpful when he did science. He was convinced that the earth is not stationary, but revolves around an axis. It would take the Western world nearly two millennia to agree. He urged the standardizing of weights and measures, and was sure that 365 days make a year. If only he'd stuck to science and left politics alone.

The central tradition of Western thought owes its very existence to Plato. He was the true philosopher of beginnings, since he started the serious discussion of almost every great philosophical question. He wanted us to focus on our souls, and to live out the unchanging standard of morality he first learned from Socrates.

But his God bears no practical relationship to our lives. His world of Forms has no connection with this physical universe, except through his epistemological speculations. The world wanted a more concrete explanation. Enter Aristotle, next week.

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