Here is the script I wrote for my episode of “post platonic”, with my preferred versions of the songs, PLUS a bonus song that wasn’t available on Spotify - “worlds in collision”, inspired by the book of the same name, written by Immanuel Velikovsky.
the link to listen on Spotify is here:
This is post platonic, and I am your host, Michael Sartori
Dedicated to Immanuel velikovsky, who sought the truth, at the cost of respectability.
In Greek mythology, the reason for all the sorrows and evils in our world is laid at the feet of Pandora, a beautiful woman who was created by the gods, and bestowed with special gifts, two of which bear special significance. The first was an insatiable sense of curiosity given to her by the goddess Hera, and the second, given by Zeus, was a beautifully decorated box that she was not supposed to open under any circumstances. She was presented to the Titan Epimetheus as a gift. Epimetheus had been warned by his brother Prometheus never to accept a gift from the gods. Yet when he saw Pandora’s beauty, his brother’s wise warning evaded his mind. While Pandora was able to follow her command to not open the box for a while, eventually the influence of her curious nature proved impossible to ignore. One day, she decided to glimpse the contents of this box. She was determined to merely peek inside, but as soon as her fingers touched, the lid of the box flung open, and out came all the evil spirits and terrible things that cause pain and suffering in our world. This whole scenario paints a picture of an ultimately powerless version of humanity, who are nothing more than the pawns in the games played between rival gods. The distance between the gods and men was almost insurmountable, and the only ones who could stand in their presence were the kings who claimed a lineage of descent from the gods. In all the ancient world, the attention of gods and kings was not something to be desired, but feared, and this was true most of all in the land of Egypt.
Moses was a man who lived in two worlds. He was a Hebrew child, yet he grew up in the palace of the king of Egypt, raised by the daughter of a man who hated Moses’ people. Perhaps the king viewed this as a perverse experiment, nature versus nurture - The gap between Moses the pharaoh was more than just the difference between two cultures. The pharaohs were living gods, and they had a nation of servants to prove it. The presence of a Hebrew child in his household was no threat to his power. It was a novelty. As rich people might keep strange and exotic animals as pets, a god might have a pet human. We don’t know many details about the life of Moses in Egypt, but chances are, it was not like the story portrayed in the Ten Commandments, or the Prince of Egypt. For one thing, we know that Moses had a stutter. Perhaps a better movie comparison might be “The King’s Speech”, the 2010 film about King George VI. Like Moses, king George had a stutter. He also was never meant to become the king. He grew up in the shadow of his older brother, the heir. When his brother decided to abdicate the throne, George was thrust into a position he had never expected to be in, and the film dramatized his efforts to overcome his speech impediment, and become the leader that his nation needed during the terrible events of the Second World War. As a younger son who was never meant to rule, Moses lacked self confidence. He was an oddity to both the Egyptians and the Hebrews. As an adult, when Moses first encountered the horrible suffering of his Hebrew brothers, he tried to correct an injustice by killing an Egyptian who was beating one of the hebrew slaves. When he learned that this act had been witnessed by others, he knew that his position in the Pharoah’s household would not protect him from the consequences of killing an Egyptian - In the eyes of the king, this act of betrayal confirmed that Moses was not the equal of the true sons of Pharoah, descendants of the Gods - by choosing to identify with the Hebrews, he proved that he was not a true Egyptian. Moses knew right away that in the brutal hierarchy of ancient Egypt there was no concept of mercy. Despite his royal upbringing, he was still a slave to the power of Egypt and her gods. Fearing for his life, Moses abandoned everything he knew and fled to the wilderness. Like Pandora, Moses had been playing games with gods, and he failed to realize that the fix was in.
Moses lived in the wilderness for as long as he had lived in Egypt. He had just as many years to unlearn what he thought about the nature of gods and men, and at the right time, he had a radical encounter with the true God, the one who created the cosmos. He became a mighty hero, returning to Egypt and freeing his people from their bondage. Through Moses, God gave the Israelites the law, a law that if followed, would keep the people from falling into the sort of evil that had seduced the Egyptians. Every year they were to remember the story of how God had used Moses, the frightened, stuttering, imperfect leader, to free the Israelites from their slavery, and to bring low the Egyptians and their gods. Through many generations, and through many, many failures, the Israelites finally learned to trust in the God who had delivered them, and they began to enact systems to help make sure that they would never fall into the mistakes of Egypt, Greece, and Babylon again. They developed traditions and practices, studying the words of Moses and the prophets, constantly expanding and refining their understanding and knowledge of God’s law. When Israel finally got another chance to inhabit their promised land, they were determined not to lose it again. This was the time in which Saul of Tarsus began his career. Like Moses, Saul was also a man of two worlds - a citizen of Rome, and a son of Israel. In the midst of the chaos of Greek culture, where all the evils of Pandora’s box were still spilling out and multiplying, Saul looked to his heritage as a Jew to make sense of the world. Saul’s God, the true God, the God of Moses, was not like the cruel, petty gods of Greece. In the Law of God, he found structure, beauty, and logic.
There is a concept of relationships called “the law of least interest”, which posits that in any relationship, romantic or otherwise, the person who is the least interested in making the relationship succeed is the one who holds all the power. If you have ever pursued a friendship or romance where the other person was not as interested as you were, you will know this to be true. The measure in which your heart can break is proportional to how much you love. The inverse of this principle is evident in the ancient myths of Greece and Egypt. With all the power at their disposal, the gods couldn’t care less about the wants or needs of the humans. So what happens when you find yourself in a relationship where the other person holds the power? There are two options - the first is to steel yourself against rebuffs. Don’t let your pain show, try not to care so much. Some even find success in purposefully treating others with indifference, to gain the upper hand. It’s easy to see how this could cause a downward spiral of despair. As humans begin to emulate the gods they worship, they become more callous, cruel, and indifferent towards others. The only way to gain status is to climb your way up the bodies of your peers. For those at the bottom, there is no way up. But what is the other option? The only other option is to own the imbalance in a radical way. To determine that no matter what the other person does or doesn’t do, you will love them, provide for them, and do what is best for them. William Shakespeare portrayed this method in his comedy, “The Taming of the Shrew” - The bachelor Petrucchio picks the most hot headed, Ill-mannered and unladylike woman in all of Padua to become his bride. As the play progresses, his words and actions towards her are always full of praise, he compliments her beauty, her gentleness, her sweetness. The audience laughs because these compliments clearly stand in stark contrast to the behavior that Katherine portrays on stage. And yet, by the end of the play, she has transformed, and she has become every bit as sweet, gentle, and beautiful as her husband proclaims her to be. We can imagine that a person might have a devotion like this to their god, a truly irrational faith contrary to all the evidence. But can we conceive that a God could love us in such a way? Yet this is the God that Moses encountered in the desert. A God who cares for the lowest of people, who rescues slaves, who protects the downcast and marginalized. And like the husband, He suffers the curses and blows of a wounded bride who does not know how to respond to such a love.
Jerusalem was the center of Saul’s tradition. And at the heart of Jerusalem, was the temple - the most Holy place in the world. And yet, disruptions were happening all over the city. A sect had emerged, worshiping a popular rabbi they claimed had risen from the dead, and this was disturbing many of the leaders. Saul looked at the chaos spilling forth from this group and saw it for what it was - evil. He knew that what escapes from the box cannot be put back in, so the only thing to do was stop it. With the approval of his leaders Saul began arresting and killing these new cult members - called “christians”, with great zeal. He knew that what he was doing was right. It all made sense. Saul had served the God of Moses all his life. He knew that this was the true God. Yet he didn’t know Him the way that Moses did. He knew him from a distance. He related to Israel’s God the way that the Egyptians had related to their gods - fearful to ever fail, lest he encounter their wrath. Albert Camus once said that his biggest problem was trying to figure out how to be a saint without a god. Saul was working on the same problem. All the rest of the world viewed their gods as dangerous and wrathful beings to be feared - if the gods were sufficiently satisfied with their people, then their attention might be turned on their neighbors and enemies instead. Saul had put all his effort into keeping himself safe from an encounter with God. But as is often the case, encountering our greatest fear is often the thing we need most. On a road to Damascus, Saul encountered the God of Moses - He understood the depths that God loved him, that he would become a man, suffer, and die. It was the ultimate imbalance of love. A powerful enough act of love and self sacrifice that would impact not only the future, but everything we understand about the past. In the sudden realization that he had been wrong, Saul’s life changed forever. And yet in a moment Saul encountered a God who did not act like the callous, cruel and indifferent gods of greece and egypt. This God was a loving father, who was willing to take all the suffering, all the punishment, and all the abuse on himself, to show how much he loves his children. In time, Saul would describe what God had done, not just for him, but for all of humanity, in a letter to a church in in Galatia.
If you have spent any time in this little corner of the internet, you have probably encountered the work of John Vervaeke. In his series awakening from the meaning crisis, he walks through history and notes the development of many different psycho technologies. These are not physical things, but concepts and ideas, and once they come into practice, they change things rapidly. Through Moses and the Hebrews, the world changed. The development of the Alphabet meant that no one would bother with hieroglyphs any more. When Saul of Tarsus encountered Jesus Christ, another psycho technology was developed. We still use the words written two thousand years ago to explain this event. “The scales fell from his eyes” After his encounter, Saul was left blind. When his vision was restored, he viewed the world through different eyes.
Like Moses, Saul was suddenly ejected from the life and circumstances he knew. He could not go back to his colleagues. He went into the wilderness to contemplate what he had learned, to re-evaluate everything he knew about the Law of Moses, and about the nature of the God who revealed Himself in those texts. Saul knew that there was no way to put the truth that he had discovered back into the box. He would have to relearn everything he knew, go back to being like a child, and rethink what his life was all about.
This new way of looking at reality has shaken the foundations of civilization for two thousand years. There was no more distance between God and men. People in power could no longer control the masses through a claim of divinity. Like the spirits that escaped from Pandora’s box, these psycho technologies can’t be packed up and put back on the shelf once people become aware of them. For good and for ill, they change the world. And like all tools, they are only as good or as evil as the person using them. The words of Saul, more commonly known as Paul, have been used for evil as well as for good. For this reason, many people have sought to limit and contain their spread. But at the bottom of Pandora’s box, there was something more, something that has been found by many in the words of Paul of Tarsus - Hope. Sometimes, great minds can make intuitive leaps that are so far beyond the understanding of most people, that it takes centuries and millennia to unlock. This was true of Moses, and it is also true of Paul. A true word can be spoken in a moment, but it may take centuries to be believed. Yet the power of his words is not in their complexity, yet in their simplicity. The evidence of that power is not realized in buildings or armies or institutions, but in the lives of the people who have simply believed his words to be true. Words that are more powerful than any lock, or any chain. When Bob Dylan decided he didn’t want to pander to the protest crowd that first gave him success, he wrote a controversial song called “my back pages” When asked reason why, he said this: “I was still keeping the things that are really really real out of my songs, for fear they'd be misunderstood. Now I don't care if they are." If we could ask Saul what was different before and after his encounter, he might have quoted Bob Dylan: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”
There is a cost to being used by God, and for both Moses and Saul, the cost was that they were not able to see the ultimate fruit of their efforts. God makes use of broken vessels. These men were not perfect. There were consequences to their mistakes. Moses led his people out of bondage, but he did not get to enter the promised land. Saul, is more commonly known to us as Paul. This was his name among the Greek speaking part of the world. Among the first generation of Christians, Jerusalem was sent fishermen and tax collectors. The greatest Jewish thinker among the followers of Christ, the one who knew the law of Moses better than anyone, the one who could see a million connecting threads woven together by the work of God’s hands through the tapestry of history, was sent to all the nations of the world. All the nations but one - his own. Like the great hero Odyseus, Paul suffered many things on his journeys across the known world, beatings, stonings, imprisonments and shipwrecks. Unlike Odyseus, Paul did not make it back to his homeland. His final visit to Jerusalem resulted in his arrest, and his deportation to Rome, where he was ultimately executed for his faith. There is an old adage that says “you can never go home again”, and Jesus famously said “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house.” And yet, a contemporary of Paul, Pliny the elder famously said “Home is where the heart is” Paul of Tarsus did not return to a position of honor and acceptance amongst his peers, but he found his home amongst those who, like him, had become a part of God’s family. He was truly home at last.
OUTRO text: This has been Post Platonic with your host ... For more content from this little corner of the Internet, please visit this-little-corner.com. There you will find a search engine that will let you explore some of the communities which are engaging the cutting edge of human thought from many different perspectives, including a post-nominalist Neo-Platonic perspective. We invite you to join us in the dialogue. You can leave a voice message through the Spotify app. We also invite you to engage with the Discord servers, YouTube channels and various social media online. There are also real life meetups and estuary discussion groups around the world. May the One grant us the strength to change that which we can, the grace to accept that which we cannot and the wisdom to know the difference.