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From Plato’s Cave to the Cave of Bethlehem: Wise Men and the Quest for God
Around the year 330 B.C., the great Greek philosopher, Plato, gave us the famous allegory of the cave. In this allegory, Plato describes a man who is within a cave, always seeing shadows of images being cast onto the wall by a burning fire and by someone holding up different puppets. One day, tired of the same old images, the man decides that he wants to leave the cave. He gets up from his place and journeys out of the cave to find this blinding light from the sun. Once he adjusts his eyes, he looks around and sees that the reality that he thought he knew was all just a shadow of what he is viewing now.
Plato, like many Greeks of his day, saw that there was more to reality than what they had in front of their eyes, yet they could not exactly pinpoint what it was. They had ideals of transcendental concepts like “the True”, “the Good”, and “the Beautiful”, but there was never any real notion of what those concepts would represent, and they always felt as though what they were taught and understood were just mere shadows of something more.
Three hundred years later, around 30 B.C., a Roman poet, Virgil, wrote a famous poem, known as his Messianic Eclogue, which bore the mark of prophecy:
The last age, foretold in the Sibyl’s verse, is come, and the great order of the ages begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn recurs; now from the heights of heaven a new generation descends. Only do thou, pure Lucina [goddess of childbirth], show thy favor to the child that is to be born, the child under whom the race of iron shall at last cease and a race of gold shall arise all over the world. . . . He shall receive divine life; he shall see heroes mingling with gods and himself be seen of them; and he shall rule a world that has been given peace by the virtues of his father.
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