Sacred Texts
Read What Built the Temple
The texts are not ornaments. They are stones. Each stone must bear weight.
Every reading in this hall becomes one of seven things: a doctrine, a visual rule, a course, a sermon, a festival, a diagnostic question, a work of civilization.
Nothing is quoted merely to sound ancient. Nothing is admired without construction.
Plato Hall — Begin with the soul
- Phaedrus — soul, rhetoric, living discourse, collection, division.
- Republic — soul and city, virtues, cave, line, mathematical education.
- Timaeus — world soul, proportion, body, cosmic order.
- Philebus — limit, unlimited, mixture, cause.
- Sophist — being, motion, rest, same, other, false logos.
- Statesman — weaving and political craft.
- Laws — education, choruses, festivals, civic religion, mathematics, astronomy, lifelong formation.
- Charmides · Parmenides · Meno · Symposium · Theaetetus.
- Gorgias · Protagoras — rhetoric, virtue, justice, persuasion.
- Phaedo · Apology · Crito — soul, witness, law, oath, death, civic obedience.
Euclid Hall — Begin with construction
- Books I–IV — point, line, circle, triangles, figures.
- Book V — proportion and incommensurability.
- Book VI — similarity and proportional figures.
- Books VII–IX — number, ratio, common measure, primes.
- Book X — irrational and incommensurable magnitudes.
- Books XI–XIII — solids and the five regular bodies.
The Translation Project
New translations, source card by source card.
Heath's Euclid is dated. Jowett's Plato is sometimes too Victorian. Help us write them again.
Each translation includes: Greek (or mathematical) source, literal rendering, plain rendering, doctrine, chamber, visual rule, practice, sermon use, course use, diagnostic use.
Beginning with the Phaedrus (because the Temple's own method comes from it) and the Republic Books IV and VI–VII (because they are soul-and-ladder), then Euclid I.1–I.5.
Which text are you ready to read carefully enough to give an account of?