03/02/2015

SIX

Something strange happens in Book IX of Plato's Republic.  Socrates and his cohorts are comparing the various kinds of government - oligarchy, democracy, timocracy, aristocracy and tyranny - and at this point in the text, they are specifically concerned with the characteristics ("appetites") of the people inclined towards these styles of leadership.  As with all of Plato's writings, the dialogue is sober and methodical, proceeding one logical step at a time towards consensus on some issue of philosophical concern.  Suddenly, Socrates announces:
"[If] some person...measures the interval by which the [philosopher] king is parted from the tyrant in truth of pleasure, he will find him, when the multiplication is complete, living 729 times more pleasantly, and the tyrant more painfully by this same interval".
It's an odd comment, apparently without context.  Before the modern reader has time even to wonder how truth and pleasure can be measured to such precise degrees, let alone how the figure of 729 was calculated, Glaucon responds:
"What a wonderful calculation! And how enormous is the distance which separates the just from the unjust in regard to pleasure and pain!"
Socrates replies:
"Yet a true calculation...and a number which greatly concerns human life, if human beings are concerned with days and nights and months and years".
The conversation quickly moves on.  It's as if, having established that the life of the philosopher is 729 times "more pleasant" than the life of the tyrant, that's all that needs to be said.  For Plato's readers, the number 729 must have had a powerful significance, and one too obvious to need stating - but the modern reader is left only with the tantalising clue as to its meaning - that the number "greatly concerns human life, if human beings are concerned with days and nights and months and years".  It's not the sort of thing we expect from the man Western civilization honours as the father of clear-headed rationalism.  The idea that a number, in and of itself, can have not only a symbolic but also a literal power, the kind of power that can settle a discussion on something as subjective as the merits of one psychological state relative to another, is about as alien to the modern mind as it is possible for an idea to be - but here it is, at a crucial juncture in one of the fundamental texts of our civilization.

Matthew's gospel opens with "a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham", purporting to show that, "there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile in Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to Christ".  Problems emerge for anyone unwilling to look past literalistic considerations of texts like this.  Matthew isn't mistaken, however: the 'mistake' is deliberate. [1]

The organisation of the genealogy into three groups of fourteen is the key.  In Hebrew gematria, where numerical values are assigned to the consonants of a word, D = 4 and V = 6, so the consonants of the word "David", give the word a total value of 14 (4+6+4).  The number 3, as everybody is knows, is magic.  Pythagoras is known for his mystical adoration of triangles.  Bad luck comes in threes, but the third time also charms.  There are three dimensions of the space in which we move.  The genie grants three wishes.  Three magicians are present at the birth of Christ.  Peter, James and John are Jesus' "inner three" [2] disciples: and, of course, Christians worship the Holy Trinity, the Three in One.  The number 3 is saturated by symbolism.  So the three fourteens Matthew presents do what they are designed to do: emphasise the idea of Jesus as the "Messiah", the last King from the line of King DaViD.  To his original readers, as with Plato's, the message would have been immediately clear.

This matters.  Not so much because we need to remember that the literal is rarely the only important level of meaning but because, especially for the ancients, the non-literal is often more important in ways that, since the Enlightenment, it just hasn't been for us.  Just as Matthew rewrites history to fit his numbers, Socrates also breaks his own rules to arrive at his.  There are five kinds of government in his system - oligarchy, timocracy, democracy, tyranny and aristocracy - but to arrive at the number 729, he needs six.  So what he does is simply count the oligarch twice, giving him two groups of three rulers [3] (there's the magic number again).   2 x 3 = 6, and 3 raised to the power of 6 is 729 (as is 9 raised to the power of 3).  729 divided by 2 is 364.5, which is the number of days in a year (so far as Plato's contemporaries knew).  It is also exactly the number of months in a "great year" according to the lunisolar calendar of Philolaus - who was to Pythagoras what Plato was to Socrates (or what an apostle was to Jesus) - and 27 to the power of 2; the number 27 being the Pythagorean number for the moon.  Hence why 729 matters a great deal, "if human beings are concerned with days and nights and months and years" - calendars, in other words.  What time it is.  Which we very much are.



14 x 3, incidentally, is forty-two.

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