This is the free first hour, while the full interview is for paid subscribers. To hear the full interview, subscribe here for 4.95 a month with access to the archives. Note: There was a technical issue in terms of sound for the first 20 minutes, but this gets corrected. Fr. Chris Moody is a Greek Orthodox Chaplain for the Army whose scholarly focus is the works of St.
In this half talk for free, I detail the 8th book of Plato’s Republic where Socrates describes the degeneration of the ideal city into oligarchy, democracy and chaos. Included in book 8 is the esoteric doctrine of the Pythagorean number of man, based in the cosmology of the Timaeus. Included is an explanation of the metallurgical analogy and the relation to Homer and Achilles’ Shield (in the full talk for paid subscribers).
In Book VI of the Republic we begin to discover the deeper metaphysics of Plato, where geometry and mathematics provide the means by which the truth of the higher realms can be seen by analogy. Socrates engages in a bitter critique of the sophists and their pseudo-philosophy of crowd-pleasing and beastly, herd-like nonsense, lacking any real philosophical education. Rather, the true philosopher is spoken of as grasping the Noetic Light of the Good, the true Sun of the Intelligible realm.
