“For me, certainly,” he acknowledged. “I was dying. She brought me here and healed me. But this is part of her goodness, her perfection.”
“But we also know she can be unkind and imperfect, as witness losing her temper. You have to acknowledge that too.”
He frowned, and reached toward his eyes then drew his hand back. “We don’t understand everything she did, so it seems to us unkind. But if we knew more, we would understand. Exactly like the way Klio explained my actions so that I understand I committed an injustice, only the other way around. If it were explained to us properly, we would see that what she did was just, however it seems.”
“I don’t think there’s any need for such an explanation—” He rubbed his eyes hard and I broke off. “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”
“Just a little tired and sore from so much close work. It’s getting all the theses straight all day, and then working by lamplight translating Aquinas. I’m nearly done. At this rate I’ll be done by spring. Or next summer anyway.” He sighed, and squinted at me.
“You should try bathing them in warm milk at night,” I suggested.
“Does that work?”
“It’s what my father used to do.” I could remember him so clearly, dabbing at his tired eyes when we’d been poring over a book all day.
He smiled at me. “I’ve been using oil. But I’ll try it. Go on. You were going to give me the reason you don’t believe the angelic orders are perfect. Do you believe that God is perfect?”
“Plato talks about the world of Forms and the nature of reality, and the perfect God that is Unity. You think that’s the same God as the Christian God the Father, but I see no evidence for it.”
“It makes logical sense. Why do you want evidence?”
I shook my head. “Why do you deny the need for evidence, and try to explain away evidence that doesn’t fit your structure? We know Athene exists, and we know she’s pretty much the way Homer describes her, and so we can make a reasonable guess from that and from the way she behaved and the way she talked when she was here and from things like encouraging us building temples and having festivals and sacrifices, that the Olympians exist and are pretty much, if not exactly, the way the Homer described them. Plato was wrong about that. Plato would have censored Homer because of showing the gods behaving exactly the kind of way Athene behaved.”
“But the angels, and Homer’s gods if you want to call them that, are on a level between us and God.”
“Perhaps. What I think is that in the Allegory of the Cave, where we are the prisoners watching shadows flickering on the cave walls, perhaps the gods are the things behind the fire casting the shadows.”
“There are entire hierarchies of levels, with different angels, and the Forms are part of that.” He reached toward his eyes again, and again stopped himself.
“I’ve read your theses. I agree that the internal logic makes sense. You don’t have to go through it all again for me now.”
“But if you can follow the logic—”
“I can follow the logic and still continue to disagree, when the logic doesn’t fit the facts! What we know about Athene does not lead us to be able to deduce anything about unlimited omnipotent deities that may or may not exist, and may or may not be in overall control of the Olympians. You didn’t ask her about this, did you? You had plenty of chances. She came to almost all your debates.”
“All of them unless they were about metaphysics,” he said, and smiled. “She never wanted to talk about that. And I like to work things out for myself.” Suddenly the palaestra was full of children, running and shouting, as they were released from their lute lesson.
“But you must see that when you build huge complex structures of dialectic that purport to reconcile Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Buddhism with the presence here of Athene, it has to fit the evidence as well as making logical sense.” I raised my voice a little and leaned forward eagerly as the children streamed past us.
“It fits the facts if you acknowledge that all the wise are in agreement about everything essential. It’s just a case of understanding how and reconciling supposed contradictions. And the reason we see supposed contradictions and don’t understand everything about what Athene did is because we’re too imperfect,” he said, also leaning forward until our foreheads were nearly touching.
I moved back and sat up straight again. “In saying that, you have left the path of philosophy. Literally. You’re denying sophia, betraying what she really was.”
“If we became angels ourselves, which in my system we might be able to achieve, then we could understand what she was. For now, we don’t fully understand. We can’t.”
“I can’t believe that,” I said. “And that’s why I’m going to leave this city, because this isn’t just a disagreement where I can accept the majority vote was against me, this is about our own beliefs and practice. I can’t believe it, and I can’t practice it.”
“You don’t have to leave, even though you disagree. We’ve voted to accept it as the majority religion and practice it at festivals, but we’ll have freedom of conscience. You can believe what you want.” He reached out to pat my arm, then thought better of it and drew his hand back.
“But I’d have to teach it, and I can’t do that,” I said.
“You wouldn’t have to believe it to teach it!”
“You might not, but I would.” I stood up. He stayed where he was on the wall.
“Don’t go. Plotinus and Sokrates and Tullius and Myrto are dead, and I almost never see Ficino. Klio’s marvelous, and some of the Children are coming along, but there are too few people here who can stretch my mind.”
“Are you really suggesting I stay here just to argue with you?”
“Yes!” He laughed suddenly. “How absurd this is.”
I laughed with him. And then I left the City of Amazons and went to the Remnant, to start again.
17
ARETE
All my life I’d heard people talk about Kebes and the Goodness Group and the Lost City as if they were all one thing, and it took a lot for me to take it in that they weren’t. Kebes was a person, a person now calling himself Matthias, and the Goodness Group consisted of a hundred and fifty people with divided opinions about things, and they weren’t one Lost City, they were a whole network of civilization. It was a bit of a shock. The other thing I had never thought about until I talked to Aristomache was that of course they had left during the Last Debate, or at the very end, at the moment when Sokrates turned into a gadfly. They didn’t know anything about what had happened afterward. They didn’t know that we hadn’t seen Athene since, until Father told them so. They didn’t know that theirs was only the first defection, nor that the rest of us had lived in a constant state of warfare. They hadn’t taken any art when they left, they hadn’t taken anything but the Goodness and their own skills. All this time they’d been doing what Mother had always said people ought to do and making more art instead of squabbling over the art we had. They’d been doing the same with technology too, starting with what they had and knew and going on from there.
I slept in my hammock on board, ready for my watch that began at dawn. I woke early and went up on deck before the sky began to pale. I had thought of a safe way of testing to discover whether I could fly, but I needed to be alone with my brothers to try it. Of course, wonderful as sea voyages are, being alone is almost impossible to manage. Even conversations are constantly being interrupted. I wanted to try diving from the deck, which I had done several times to go ashore, but instead of diving, fly. If it didn’t work then I’d hit the water as normal. I had forgotten that the deck lights would be on, and that Neleus and the other members of the Nyx watch would be around, even with the ship safely tied up at harbor.