The Discovery of the School of Athens

Part 11 - the Conclusion of our Tale

THE DISCOVERY OF THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS

Part 11 - the conclusion of our Tale

For a moment let’s just sit back, and look back over the path we have taken in our journey to discover the School of Athens.

In walking through the three scenes, we saw thirty persons who we called onlookers:

- three onlookers around Diogenes Laertius,

- four onlookers, around Pythagoras, at the first scene,

- three announcers, and sixteen followers of Plato, at the second scene,

- and four persons around Archimedes, at the third scene.

And in our walk, we saw and named twenty-seven Greek persons:

- the two statues of Hephaestus and Athena, the founders of the city of Athens,

and our opening bookend – our announcer of the play, Diogenes Laertius,

- four persons who lived before Socrates - Thales, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides,

- twelve persons who lived at the time of Socrates – Xenophon, Protagoras, Socrates, Aeschines, Crito, Phaedo, Alcibiades, Critias, Plato, Aristotle, Antisthenes, and Diogenes,

- and eight persons who lived after Socrates – Speusippus, Xenocrates, Theaetetus, Eudoxus, Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus and Eratosthenes.

And, there are three important persons who we have yet to name:

one is the observer of our first scene, standing behind Pythagoras, that we decided to call the ‘messenger from the House of Wisdom’,

and two are the observers of the last scene, standing to the right of Aristarchus and Eratosthenes - the last two persons of our painting.

And as we called Diogenes Laertius our opening bookend, I’m thinking that maybe we should take a closer look at these last two persons in the last scene - our closing bookend.

Now, this first person we see, actually we only see his head and he’s wearing a black cap, turns out to be a self-portrait of Raphael who painted himself into the picture!!! and we also see that he is looking out at us (the viewer) and this also seems to draw our attention to this final part of the scene. 

Now, to the right of Raphael, is someone standing, wearing a white hat and a white cloak. 

Both Eratosthenes, with his earthly globe, and Aristarchus, with his celestial globe, are both looking at ‘him’, while ‘he’ is looking back at them, as if he was in their time and place, and discussing with them the estimate of the circumference of the earth and how the earth moves about the sun. Yet, he's dressed and wearing a hat similar to Raphael’s, as if they were contemporaries !?! 

Who could possibly be living in two different time periods? Who could be living at two different places? Who could this person be? Perhaps, it was someone, recently deceased, who should be remembered? 

The only person that I could adduce, or guess at, would be Christopher Columbus.

The following is from Lyndon LaRouche – ‘Why We Must Colonize Mars’, November 1996 :

“Columbus's discovery of the Americas began toward the close of the third century BC, with the estimate of the Earth’s curvature by the celebrated member of the Platonic Academy at Athens, Eratosthenes. Employing Eratosthenes’ and other ancient experiments as his guide, Paolo Toscanelli (1397-1482), the leading astronomer of the fifteenth century, created the maps of the world which guided Columbus to his successful voyage. Toscanelli's map had but one notable flaw; it was based upon a nearly accurate size of the Earth, as determined by astronomical observations of the Earth's curvature, but, it relied upon the highly exaggerated reports supplied by Venice, on the distances from Venice to China and Japan, placing Japan and the islands of the Indies in the middle of today's United States! 

Columbus learned of Toscanelli's maps nearly two decades before his famous voyages of discovery. This included Columbus's access to the correspondence between Toscanelli and Lisbon's Fernao Martins, on the subject of exploration westward across the Atlantic Ocean to the Indies. Columbus wrote to Toscanelli and became fully informed, in the last years of Toscanelli’s life, of the collaboration which had been ongoing for decades before, and which had begun with the immediate Florentine circle of Nicholas of Cusa during the years before the Council of Florence of 1439. Columbus added to this scientific knowledge, his experience and knowledge as a navigator for the Portuguese, knowledge of ocean currents and prevailing winds, which clearly implied the probable location of, and route toward land on the other side of the Atlantic. His use of Toscanelli’s map, indicates that his original goal were the islands of the Pacific far to the south of Japan. Columbus's discovery of the Americas was, thus, a ‘scientific discovery’, in the strictest meaning of experimental physics.”

Because the (re)discovery of the Americas by Columbus was a project that really goes back all the way to Eratosthenes and Aristarchus, I think that this last person should be Columbus.

So now, if we include our ‘messenger from the House of Wisdom’, and Raphael and Columbus, we have named thirty persons in our painting, as well as thirty onlookers.

But now, looking back again, starting with Thales’s left foot on a block, and then Pythagoras’s left foot on a block, that are seen as the stepping stones to begin our journey, we arrive here at Columbus. And there, behind Eratosthenes and to the right of Columbus, we see one other block – but no one has their foot upon it.  Not yet.

If we look back once more, at Raphael, we notice that he is looking out of the painting – at us. And, if we walk through the painting once again, wherever we are, Raphael is still looking at us.  So that now, if you look at all the people in the painting, living at different times, in different scenes, and all at once, and with Raphael still looking at you, you then realize that there is one more person in this painting – you, the viewer.

The question now posed is, ‘Who will come forward to place their foot on this block – this stepping stone on our new future journey?’

Will we be one of the un-named onlookers, or do we want to be one of those ‘named’ persons?

[The following is from Lyndon LaRouche – ‘The Truth About Temporal Eternity’, March 1994]

“Stand in the old papal apartments, now part of the Vatican museum. Stand facing the famous ‘School of Athens’, a subject on which a bit has been said here already. The reasons you must be there in Rome to receive in full the message being sent personally to you across nearly five hundred intervening years, should be obvious to anyone who sees it there. In the meantime, as very few of you are presently visiting that Museum, concentrate upon any of the better reproductions of this mural; the less the reproduction in scale, relative to the original, the better for our purposes here.  It will help you to situate yourself mentally, as if you were actually standing in that great hall depicted there.  As you stand there, call that mural to life. Look around inside that mural; which of these are old friends of yours? You never met any of them face to face, but most of those in the hall never met one another in the flesh, either. Yet, you have relived a most intimate moment of the mind of each of some of them, reliving one or more of their creative moments of discovery. 

First, pick those whom you know in that way. You know Plato, and are acquainted with Aristotle. Are there not two or three in the foreground? As you focus upon the ideas, especially those ideas which represent original axiomatic-revolutionary discoveries, or something proximate to that, one figure after another within this busy hall comes alive for you. As for the others, I believe you know most of them by reputation. Think of the number of generations of history spanned by the personalities gathered here within this hall! Radiating from that hall, there is a sense of being embraced, where you stand, by some living intelligence proximate to Temporal Eternity. That radiance fills the small room in the old papal apartments. Raphael understood the point well enough to design and transmit a message, this mural, which would reach both of us, nearly five centuries later, standing with our minds within that mural’s assembly within the great hall. It is no fantasy; it is a painting of a scene the like of which this writer has seen within his own mind, many times. It is a scene which Raphael painted from life, with the gathering of the inhabitants of his mind as living models. It draws from life those relationships within Temporal Eternity which are higher, and more efficient than any drawn in ordinary space or ordinary time. 

Those are the direct relationships of creative minds’ ideas, which dissolve centuries into the span of a pleasant day’s assembly, and bring vast spaces comfortably into a room no larger than that which contains this mural. This mural is no mere symbolism, nor an imagined room in Paradise. It is a moment of deja vu! It is a portrait of Raphael's relations to the most intimate acquaintances of his daily mental life, all captured so to share the companionship of a moment in Temporal Eternity. That mural is also a religious experience. When the social reality of Temporal Eternity compacts centuries into a morning’s gathering in such a fashion, the universe of time and space is shrunken to such a smallness that we seem almost to wrap it all within our mind. In such a circumstance, we are compelled to hypothesize higher hypothesizing in such a way, that an eerie sense of a timeless Absolute Intelligence’s efficiency is aroused within us. When the relationship of the individual person to mankind in general, and other persons in particular, is measured in the space and time of the generation and transmission of those qualities of ideas associated with valid axiomatic-revolutionary discoveries, what a short distance a mere few centuries becomes! The order of necessary predecessor and necessary successor is preserved: The intelligence of the timeless Absolute is not zero-motion; the lack of spatial division is the consequence of being simultaneously everywhere, such that there is nothing in between any two experiences which would require us to experience time, except as, for us the onlookers, a sense of timeless ordering of development. 

For us, the onlookers, just so, the duration of space and extent of time shrink almost to the vanishing-point. So, if the mind of any among us is sufficiently developed to grasp the transmission of a valid axiomatic-revolutionary discovery, effected by one person, to cause the reliving of that act of discovery of that conception in the mind of a single person hundreds of years, or even millennia later, whoever has gained those qualifications is able to see the world as that mural portrays its more essential features. Once that step is made, he or she is able to see the essential relations of humanity as Raphael portrays that viewer's relationship to his ‘School of Athens’.”

And, so let us end our journey through the discovery of the ‘School of Athens’, by recalling that earlier, in part 1, it was shown that:

“Prometheus therefore, being at a loss to provide any means of salvation for man, stole from Hephaestus and Athena the gift of skill in the arts, together with fire and bestowed it on man” (from Plato’s Protagoras dialogue),

and  it was then asked – ‘What was this gift to man from Prometheus?  Perhaps, we shall find out in the course of studying this painting.’ 

Next, we should return to that question, where it would seem that this gift of ‘skill in the arts’ is connected to man’s ability to master Plato’s ‘poetic principle’.

[next week - part 12 - Athens and Prometheus]