Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics according to Plato
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.
We are going to attempt to cover all the rest of Plato that we have not already – no, that’s not what we’re doing. We have chosen three specific Platonic ideas to bring to you today. There are three of them and they’re arranged according to the three branches of philosophy, sort of – more accurately the three aspects of the image of God in man because those are the three things that Plato messes up essentially. It’s the three things everybody messes up – prophet, king, and priest.
We’ll start with the branch of philosophy that corresponds to man’s prophetic nature, the nature of knowledge and truth and how we know what we know. That would be epistemology. Plato’s most famous contribution to epistemology would be the allegory of the cave. How does that go? Apparently if you’ve seen The Matrix it’s that. I haven’t seen The Matrix.
No. Everything I know about The Matrix is from Bible and philosophy classes.
Don’t watch any of the sequels, but the first one is worth it. And then I can give you my book that shows you how it’s a blend of ten different philosophies and worldviews.
It’s called The Matrix and Philosophy. I read it in one of my political science college classes that was called From Marx to the Matrix, basically tracking the infiltration of Marxism into lots of different places in our culture.
That would be so fun. Hillsdale College just released a free online course that’s the history of Marxism and Communism and I’m so excited. It’s free and asynchronous. You don’t even have to finish the course. You’ll just get annoying emails if you don’t. It will be like, “Hey, you’re 20% done with this course.” Ask me how I know. But let’s get to the allegory of the cave.
Emily, didn’t you read the Republic a couple weeks ago? So you’ve read the allegory of the cave more recently than the rest of us.
I was kind of thinking I might, yes, because people like to hear you talk. One listener said, “She’s a sharp woman.” I said, “Of course.”
The allegory of the cave is a story that Plato tells in the Republic. The concept is basically you have a cave, surprisingly enough, and in the cave there’s a fire and the fire is casting light on one of the walls of the cave – presumably all the walls of the cave, but there’s one that matters because between the cave wall and the fire there are shadow puppets passing back and forth images. As the images move, the shadows are cast on the wall.
In the midst of the cave, shackled for some reason, are some people who can see the shadows moving on the wall of the cave, but they can’t see the fire and they can’t see the puppets. It’s like a movie theater. You just see the image cast on the wall in front of you. You don’t see what’s casting the image, and that is kind of what Plato suggests reality is like, that what we perceive is kind of a shadow and we don’t really see what’s making what really is.
But then he goes on to tell a story where someone who was shackled for some reason is suddenly free and finds his way out of the cave. He escapes and he sees the sun, real light, for the first time in his life, and real ducks going by – “quack quack quack” as Gretchen would say. We know a song about that.
So he sees the realities that were imitated by the shadows on the wall, and once he has seen the reality he goes back into the cave and tries to tell the people who are still chained there about the real life that he’s seen, the truth behind his situation. Now he sees the fire. He sees the puppets casting the shadows.
The other people think he’s crazy because they’ve never seen anything like what he’s describing. It’s totally foreign to them, and that’s kind of what Plato suggests the life of a philosopher is like. You’ve got this knowledge and nobody believes you.
One more layer of cohesion to the story I think is that coming back into the dark place from the light place, the guy’s eyes would have to adjust. He’s coming back into the darkness and suddenly he can’t even see the shadows as clearly as he used to because he’s become accustomed to the outside world.
Yes. I appreciate that you compared it to a movie theater because that’s basically what Plato did. He described a movie theater 2,000 years or more before they were invented. The lessons are, first of all, that most of us live in a world of shadow, of appearance, of illusion, and we’re okay with that. Of course there’s truth to this. We’re satisfied with sound bites and commercials and celebrity status, and are generally quite incapable of thinking deeply or critically anyhow.
The next step is there’s this fire, but it’s pretty close at hand. The man turns out eventually to be the philosopher and is able to break out and to go look at that. Then he sees that there’s more to what’s going on than the average person can discern.
The big thing though is when he goes to the surface world and sees the original of all these things – the real duck, the real bear, the real horse, the real man, to see himself – and then finally he lifts his eyes to the sun, which is absolutely dazzling and is the source of all light, heat, and life for everything. He tries to tell people and, if it’s possible, they actually try to kill him because no one wants their worldview upset.
The allegory of the cave leads directly to what most people think about Plato, although he didn’t spend all that much time talking about his doctrine of forms and ideals or ideas. Plato in the Republic is not so concerned about epistemology. He ends there. He talks about how great it is to be a philosopher and how philosophers should be kings, and kings philosophers and all that, but mostly he’s looking at the way you make a city-state or polis work, and tries to find justice in there, the idea of justice. Those who know the idea – philosophers who have studied such things – obviously incarnate that virtue, that abstraction, better than anybody else and so we should trust them.
To generalize then, he postulates that there are ideas, universals, original analogs, archetypes for everything. There’s the ideal chair. There’s the ideal dog or dog-ness, if you will – the ideal human being, the ideal hairdo, the ideal wedding.
Plato isn’t concerned about most of that. He’s concerned about justice particularly, and beauty and truth and goodness, the idea of the good. What is that? If we could lay our minds on it then we’d all be good, so let’s all be philosophers and contemplate goodness in the abstract, and the consequence is that we will all be good, society will be good, and the polis will be good.
Oh wait, we just slipped into ethics, too, so epistemology to metaphysics (what’s real) to ethics (how shall we then live?) The philosophers and historians of philosophy spend a lot of time talking about these forms and these ideals.
A couple things just in passing, because I think it’s easy for Christians who do a superficial reading of Wikipedia or Brittanica or something to not understand what Plato is saying. These are not ideas in the mind of God. These predate or antecede or have precedence over whatever gods there may be. These things exist as ideas or ideals, forms he calls them, that are the archetypes for everything in physical reality.
So you could even extrapolate that there is a form of godhood to which the gods should conform if they’re good, and that comes up in Plato. He does have this idea that there should be a god that’s good, which is his preconceived notion that this is the form of God, so there should be one that’s good.
When Christians approach this it’s easy to say, “So what he’s thinking about basically is we would say ideas in the mind of God.” Well, we would, he wouldn’t, so we’re confusing categories there big time when we try to do that. For Plato there is no absolute self-contained infinite God who is self-defining. There may be gods of some sort, but as you just said, they have a standard outside themselves to live up to if they really want to be gods. They need to get their act together and be more god-like.
They need to perceive the idea of god-ness or the good or justice or truth or beauty, and as they come to know it they will be more god-like, and thus us. We need to perceive these things too and we will be more truly human in the best sense of the word, and our city-state will be more truly a good society.
Plato also talks about a character he calls the demiurge, which is a Greek word that basically means city worker, those people who have hardhats and orange jackets and hold signs and move things around make things happen. This is the closest he gets to talking about a god.
This demiurge contemplates the forms, the ideas, the archetypes, and then he takes pre-existent matter – he does not create out of nothing; that’s not on the table anyplace – but with the pre-existent matter he tries to mold a universe, a cosmos that approximates that, but he’s working with inferior materials. He himself is not self-defining and infinite so, you know, we get what we get and shouldn’t throw too much of a fit over it.
It’s his assumption that matter is less than form, so a god would be dirtying his hands to be working with matter and so the demiurge comes in.
Yes. The demiurge is not exactly a god. He’s not God. He’s hired help or something, but he will show up in other philosophies and Christian heresies and such as the step in-between, because as you say, because matter is icky a good god can’t touch it so we have this in-between thing that works with it.
Some of the Gnostic heretics later identify the demiurge with the God of the Old Testament. He was allowed to do stuff like that, but the God and Father of Jesus Christ who is sheer love and truth would never make a world or interact with sin or have anything to do with such things. He is just pure overflowing goodness. And if the Old Testament God, who was something of a bully, wants to work with that, maybe that just means that he’s sane. The Gnostics were, as my wife would say, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
People have written whole books on Plato just to sum up what we’ve done. There’s not a lot left, honestly. You can talk through fine points and you can argue “Did he mean this or did he mean that?”
For instance, here’s one. The demiurge and all of that – did he really believe that or is it just an allegory for the way reason structures reality? Can we know and do we care? Well, a lot of people do because they think Plato was some kind of prophet, but for the rest of us, no.
Another question sort of along those lines is did Plato read Moses? The early church fathers generally thought he had, and they probably were right. The only problem is they thought that he profited, I think we would say, and he distorted. He stole/borrowed/twisted and completely ignored what Genesis 1 actually says about the God who made the universe.
So we’re back to this modern Christian infatuation with Plato. It’s not far distant from what we find in the church fathers, who were always looking for something in Greek culture that they could see as a Greek/pagan equivalent of what God had done for Israel in the lambs and the feasts and the sacrifices and the temple and the priesthood. Surely God gave them some kind of forerunner, some kind of idea that laid down the path, the breadcrumbs to the cross. Not really, no.
Well, he gave them Israel and the scriptures to Israel. That’s how they were supposed to find out.
Yes, they could go talk to Israel. In the days of Solomon, in the days of the Persian kings, the Bible was there. It was available. We sometimes think, “Well, God kept his Word reserved for Israel until Jesus came.” No, he didn’t. That’s kind of like saying no one in the world has ever heard of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Everybody’s heard of them. Now whether or not they do them any good is something else.
Exactly. The ideas contained in scripture were very familiar to the ancient world, except the ancient world usually, like today’s world, simply despised them and didn’t want to listen.
Yes. Hammurabi at some point just photocopied from Moses. Some of Rome’s laws are almost word-for-word from Moses.
Of course liberals will say, “Oh, so that’s where Moses got the idea!” No, it works the other way.
Yes, so we know who came first and who borrowed from whom, or stole from whom without credit, without footnoting. That’s why footnotes are important, by the way.
So if you’re keeping track on the roadmap at home, we’ve covered epistemology and metaphysics, and now we’re going to cover briefly something sort of ethic-y, if you will, which would be Plato’s doctrine of the soul, which is vaguely what, Greg?
Let’s skip the vagueness and go directly to what he said. He thought that the human soul was divine and eternal, that is there is the spark of a deity which exists before a man is born. It’s thrust into this world, thrust into a body of clay, and that’s rather shocking, and in the process this little spark of godhood forgets where it was and what it was and how it was, and it spends the rest of its life remembering. What it needs to remember is this very world of forms, archetypes, ideas or whatever you want to call them that we’ve been talking about, because as an immortal piece of God it once was face-to-face with these things.
One thing in passing – because we want to make the connection between Plato and Christianity, sometimes we think of this place where forms exist as a sort of form heaven. In this corner of heaven are the form animals, and over here are the form pieces of architecture, and over here are…
Ideas don’t exist in places. They’re ideas and there’s no single divine mind that contains them, so the whole question is where are these things? They’re not anywhere because where-ness involves material existence. What is their mode of existence? We don’t know except we did once, but then we got born and we forgot everything.
Christians can talk in a very different strain about God’s eternal knowledge and his plans, his ideas, his definitions, but it’s not what Plato is talking about.
Can we talk for just a second about how sad this is? For Plato, dog-ness is good, but your dog, eww. Your neighbor’s dog, gross. There’s no room here for the delights of diversity. If there’s a form of grape-ness you only get one variety of grapes.
I was just enjoying some grapes from our friend’s grapevine that are the same varietal that my mom grew in my backyard growing up. You can’t buy them in a store because they’re too fragile, but they’re the best grapes in the world, in my opinion. I love that there are all these different kinds of grapes and apples and peaches and strawberries. You don’t get that if there’s a form of apple that’s ‘the one.’
No, because the ideal apple or the ideal grape is ideal. And despite the fact that you’re deluded by the diversity of the world you encounter into thinking that these individual things are the best there could be, there’s something wrong.
Also it means that there’s no incentive to actually develop this creation and to make it better and to improve, because it’s the shadow, not the substance, and it’s not worth anything so why would we try to improve on what we have or cultivate and grow and take dominion? There’s no point to it.
Footnote: see Ecclesiastes. It’s just so fortuitous that we’re doing Ecclesiastes in Bible study at the same time we’re talking about Plato. It just keeps coming back.
So the soul for Plato then is the spark of divinity that’s trapped in some kind of material existence and is trying to remember the world that was. And as it encounters this dog or that dog, this grape or that grape, it is reminded of ideal dogs and the ideal grape from its prior existence. That’s the nature of learning. That’s how we come to learn and know things. We’re remembering what we already knew, because, you know, god-like and all that. We were more or less omniscient. We knew everything. We were in touch with everything, but we’ve lost it and we’re trying to remember.
One thing to say about Platonic mysticism is that since the Romantic era in Western civilization we tend to think of the soul in terms of emotion. We think of mystical experiences and emotional experience. There’s a touch of that in Plato and the Greeks, but primarily for the Greeks or Plato the soul is intellect. It is reason. It’s abstract reason.
Abstract reason can get pretty weird, but this isn’t about having an emotional experience or a drug trip as such. You can go see the mystery cults if you want to do that.
But it would be an intellectual experience. However, we must remember that the Greek word for soul is psychi, so it would be a psychic experience, because that distinction was not a distinction.
Let’s get to the ethics. What rises out of this then is that the soul, the reason, needs to remember or understand these ideals – justice, goodness, truth, beauty and all that – and in understanding them and remembering them it becomes identified with them and thus becomes those things. The man who studies true justice becomes more just. The man who studies beauty becomes a conveyor of beauty. There’s the ethical dimension.
We are tied to a reality by a thin line, and as we nurture that thin line we become sort of like these ultimate realities, and they are ultimate. They are absolute. They are archetypical. We can say we don’t like them but we didn’t make them. Neither did anybody else. They’ve just always been there for some reason or no reason, and our ethics, our “how shall we then live?” comes out of our conformity to that other dimension, that intellectual psychic realm that contains all these archetypes of beauty, truth, love, justice, and go down the list.
There are no rules. There are no laws. There are no commandments. Plato is never going to turn around and say “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” let alone condemn homosexuality. That’s another story that we’re going to have to talk about next time.
As you come to know these things you will simply become what you ought to be, and if you don’t have the time to study them, poor you. Isn’t it too bad you’re not a philosopher? Which is to say isn’t it too bad that you have an independent income so that you can sit around and think about these things, write about them, talk about them, and let slaves and women do all the work. It stinks to be you, I guess, but one day when all philosophers are kings and all kings are philosophers then the Republic may see the light of day. This should be kind of scary, I think.
One of the things that came to my mind immediately is that he is presuming that education will always lead to a positive end, and that as we are educated it basically sparks something within us that pushes us towards the ideals. But I was thinking how untrue that is, in that we see those who study the beauty of art, and nowadays so much of the art produced is honestly ugly. They look at the beauty of the past and they want to be new and different, so they make things that are ugly because that’s how they actually see the world.
Or you have lawyers who study the law, but that does not make them just. There’s a reason they have the reputation they do. Most of them know how to manipulate it in order to get around justice. You even have those who go to seminary and therefore should be, we would say, the best of Christians, and they’re often those who lead everybody astray and are at the front of all the heresies.
We know in general that education is not what makes us good and it’s not what sparks the divine goodness in us, even from a Christian perspective, because our minds are as fallen as any of the rest of us. But that’s been one of the things that the West has held up as the unfallen part of man, and so that’s where Plato has really fed the Western ideas within the Church and outside. We love our intellect and our mind, and where we see lots of things to this day where we truly hate our bodies and the physical world.
I was just listening to a podcast and reading a book that is discussing how all of the modern trends that we’re seeing are all variations on Gnosticism and hatred of the body, and basically our true identity is somewhere else besides our body. You can think of the whole transgenderism thing that my body does not define who I am. My identity is this other amorphous thing, so I need to make the world conform to what I know to be true out there somewhere. With all of these things we’re presuming that we have this capacity to know that is disconnected from the physical world.
Yes. I remember asking my Western Heritage professor, I think, while we were reading Plato’s Republic. She was Roman Catholic and the Roman Catholic church has done a lot to preserve the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. I asked, “So is man’s reason fallen?” and she legitimately I think did not understand the question. It was just like, “Reason? Reason isn’t a capacity of man. Reason is out there. Reason is its own thing.”
The idea that man’s intellect has been tainted by the fall is pretty key and pretty noisesome in its absence and noisy in its absence, both, in Plato.
Anything else before I start my own tirade? Those are excellent points, both of you.
I’m just going to throw out that I feel like my personality is anti-Gnostic. The Gnostics are like, “Oh, we’ve got to preserve the secret knowledge for the elites,” and I’m like, “I’ve been inflicted with this information and you need to hear it too so you can be made unhappy also.” I do feel like I’m not quite the person to go critiquing Gnosticism because I will do it for the wrong reasons.
An interesting observation. I guess I find myself in-between. I’m interested in the screwy and bizarre and such, but then I do feel that probably there’s something there that people should know and I need to tell them. But as I grow older I’m learning not to make too much of a fuss about it because “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” It’s really not going to change a lot anyway. What’s far more important is the gospel. What Plato does, despite what many of our Christian brothers and sisters seem to think, is he completely undermines and destroys the gospel.
First of all, the soul is divine for Plato. For scripture it’s created. The Bible originally uses ‘soul’ simply to mean the person. God formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his body the breath of life, and man become a living soul. The soul is the person and all that he is – the immaterial and the material, the heart and the body, the mind and the senses and all of that is man.
And man by his own choice is fallen, and that fall has tainted everything about him, but most immediately his mind, emotions, and will, so that he seeks to play God. He rebels against the God who made him,and has incurred true moral guilt before God as a result, and he deserves to go to hell forever. He deserves the wrath and curse of God, and unless God intervenes that’s what will happen.
Plato just wants us to get rid of our physical sensual entanglements, remember what we were, and then rise above this physical world. The Bible says no, this world is given you as your possession, your inheritance, a place for dominion and service. You don’t get to give it up because you’re too lazy to do something about it, or too self-centered or whatever.
Thus the nature of salvation is not in avoiding the physical universe. “Well, if I don’t touch things that stimulate my body, if I stay away from alcohol and sex, even marital sex…”
I won’t go down that path but the whole list of do’s and don’ts that have been popular in American Christendom and in other places in the world. A lot of it started with us, we just passed it on. That becomes how you get holy. You avoid the physical universe. You don’t get involved in politics because that’s dirty. You don’t have a lot of money because money is evil. You don’t listen to music that has any kind of beat because that appeals right to your body and that’s evil.
We just keep going through this whole catalog of things that appeal to our senses, and one by one we mark them as wicked and evil and at the very least temptations to sin, and we all know that we shouldn’t even want to be tempted. So it may not be wrong but let’s not go there, nor should we let anyone else go there, nor should we ever let anyone think we might go there because of our testimony, because people see us drinking and they might conclude all kinds of horrible things. Salvation becomes this list of rules, and Jesus comes to save us from being creatures, from having physical existence in a physical world.
If you ask the average young child – and unfortunately often the Christian adult – “What does it mean to be saved?” they will answer, “It means that when you die you go to be with Jesus.”
Or even more vaguely, you will die and go to heaven, without even mentioning Jesus.
Without even mentioning Jesus, sure. There’s a word for that. It’s called death. That’s not salvation, and yet that’s often what we have reduced it to.
Over the years now when I have asked incoming freshmen classes to define the gospel and things that Christians must believe to be Christians, I get a lot of good answers. I occasionally get some really wacky ones. “Well, God is this force…” The thing that for years and years I simply did not get was the resurrection of the body. The first time I got that was when one of my students paraphrased the Apostle’s Creed – “I believe in God…”
All right, that was a pretty cool way of making sure you hit all the bases, but that tells you how many students to that point had not even thought of using the creeds. Either they were ignorant of them or they didn’t connect them with what I was asking, and they certainly did not see them as an outline of the gospel. Jesus came to save us from sin and its consequences, the obvious consequence being God as our enemy and we die and go to hell.
God accepts us, receives us, forgives us, and loves us. We don’t die. We live forever in our bodies in a physical new heaven and new earth, a redeemed creation, and we obey and live and serve God and love God in that environment. That’s salvation. Simply escaping this world and going to heaven – that’s a lot closer to Plato than it is to anything in scripture.
Of course it leaves out a lot, but to say, “Well, so when I die…” we’re presupposing death. How did death get into the picture? There’s a whole history of how Jesus defeated death, and how we as man brought death into the world by our sin.
And do we even make that connection? We know that Jesus died because he loved us, but then there’s the next gap – “So what does that have to do with going to heaven?”
I’ve gotten into that tight little circle and they cannot see. They’re usually teenagers who have never been asked to think like this before. They don’t get it. They don’t understand the question. This is the sum total. “We love Jesus because he died for us.” They don’t know what that means but they know that somehow that means when I die I go to heaven.
They’re not quite sure what heaven is like. I get all sorts of interesting things there. “Is it true that in heaven we won’t recognize anybody?” No.
Over the years the two topics that students will keep asking questions about generally, until I say “I’m sorry, that was last class. We’re finishing this class. We’ve got to stop” are sex and marriage, and eternity.
My surmise is that 1) these things are important to young people, and 2) no one talks about them, so they have real questions. “Well, what about this? What about that? Does that mean this? Someone told me this. What do you do in this situation?” and it just keeps going on and on.
But when you think about man realistically, which is to say biblically, man is the image of God. We’re told that. “Let’s make man in our image.” What’s the first thing God says to man after saying, “We’re going to make him in our image – boom! There he is and now…” what does he say?
And replenish the earth. Have children, have children, have children, or to put it a little more roughly, “Have sex, have sex, have sex. You’re my image. Have sex, have sex, have sex. Produce my image in a godly fashion within the context of marriage, but do it. Have kids.” It’s not, “And get rid of that body as soon as you can so you can come and meet me.” That’s suicide.
Going back, Rachel, to some of the things you said earlier, we have a culture that despises the body and bodily existence. It doesn’t want to define itself in terms of what used to be simple humanity. Man is a creature who works and talks and lives and breeds and marries and creates art and architecture and societies and laws in a physical universe, and who worships God, the center and focus of all of it.
We’re trying to define man as something else and we’re going to fail and it’s already becoming disastrous, and there’s no hope in Plato. He did not give us anything to work with.
The answer doesn’t start with, “Man is a creature.” We’re not going to get where we need to go.
We ran into a friend of ours at a local restaurant, who pastored one of the local churches, and we were talking about this concept of the gospel and he pointed out something that once he said it it was like, “Oh, of course,” but I had never thought of it in these terms.
My wife had brought up a process of enrolling children in your Christian school and how important it was that the Christian school and the parents and the teachers believe in the 6-day creation. Our pastor friend said, “You know, the last time the gospel is mentioned as the gospel in the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible it’s ‘Fear God. Give him gory and worship him who made the heavens and the earth and the fountains of water and seas.’”
There’s nothing there about justification by faith. That’s not to say it’s not part of the message, or even the blood of Christ. It’s fear God who is the Creator. The gospel brings us back to fearing God who is our Creator.
A gospel that doesn’t do that is not the gospel, and any kind of compromise with the gospel that says, “And how you look at the physical universe and where it came from and how it’s here and the underlying metaphysics behind it…”– that’s something for speculation. It’s not a salvation issue, but God thinks it’s a salvation issue.
He died in a physical body to save a real universe and to save a real people, to live as real people in a physical universe with him forever and ever.
I think we’re just about out of time for this discussion. Unless you two have some recommendations that you are just chomping at the bit to share, I’m going to subvert our usual pattern and ask you a question. The true King Arthur has returned. Keeping in mind that he is from the 6th century and we are in the 21st century, what is the first thing you do when you meet King Arthur?
The first obvious thing is there’s a language difficulty. Probably he speaks Latin, probably a lot better than I do, in fact, so that’s going to be an issue. I don’t do Celtic at all.
First I grab a random Roman Catholic priest who actually got A’s in his Latin classes to come interpret for me. I think I’d ask him, “So where have you been?” and “You’re back. Oh no.”
“World War II was not Britain’s greatest hour of need. What brings you back now?” I don’t know. Rachel, how about you?
I don’t know that I have a great question to ask either, other than I would love to know which of the stories are actually true. “Can I tell the ones I know to you, and you can tell me if any of them are true?”
“We’ve been told that Lancelot and Guinevere had this thing, but we think that was a French invention. Can you give us the inside on that?”
It was an interesting question that came up on the internet this week. Do you want to know what I would do?
I would get an amendment to the US Constitution that would allow me to swear fealty to the true king of England if he returned.
But the thing is he’s king of Britain, not king of England, so there’s a problem there. I mean Wales would receive him.
But we’ve clearly seceded from not the true king. The true king would not have committed all the offenses listed in the Declaration of Independence, so the true legal line of loyalty would put us back under the authority of King Arthur in the event of his return. That’s my legal theory. It’s novel.
Thank you both for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure and a delight, as always. A big thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, and to our financial supporters who keep the show rolling and pay for the editing software that we very much need.
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