Mentioned briefly above was one of humankind’s beacons, Pythagoras, the

Mentioned briefly above was one of humankind’s beacons, Pythagoras, the intellectual and spiritual progenitor of Plato. He taught the disciples of the Pythagorean Brotherhood in Crotona, Italy, that reality at its deepest level was mathematical thought. Studies there included philosophy, geometry, music and astronomy, all at the service of achieving closer union with the Divine. Pythagoras and his school, only his student’s writings remain, was said to be working at unifying elements of the ancient tribal mystery cults with the observables of worldly events through meditative, mathematical, philosophical mysticism. Knowledge was gained through spiritual intuition made harmonious with formal systems of thought. As Plato later said and as quoted by Thomas Heath in his 1921 History of Greek Mathematics, about the study of the motion of stars, “...leave the heavens alone...” because what one sees is only an approximation of the real and more perfect mathematical structures involving points, lines and circles. To which Newton added an elongated circle, the ellipse, and Nineteenth and Twentieth Century mathematicians and physicists, the geometries of positively and negatively curved space. It is perhaps not an accident that debates about evidence for the existence and location of God and where the ideas and structures of mathematics live and breath generally involves a stand off between those that believe that both are out there and can be seen, like thoughtful, humanistic actions and caring service for needful others, versus those that feel the phenomenology of both are projections of the psychobiologically intuitive Brain God and can be felt like an ecstatic rush of insightful illumination. Further Reading for Faith And Rationality Introduction of Comparative Mysticism. Jacques De Marquette, Philosophical Library, N.Y. 1949, 183 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013683