Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” compares the reality that we experience with our senses to shadows on the walls of a cave. Plato describes prisoners chained underground so they can only look in one direction. The prisoners see flickering shadows on the wall and think that they see reality. Behind them is a great fire and puppeteers who hold up the real things that cast the shadows.
One of the prisoners, we’ll call him the philosopher, is unchained and forced to look at the fire. The brightness of the fire hurts his eyes. Then he’s taken outside, and the brightness of the Sun blinds him even further, but he eventually perceives the true reality and even the Sun itself. When he goes back into the cave to tell the others about the Sun and the true things, they mock him and refuse to leave. Plato even predicts that they will try to kill a person who tries to free them.
When I discussed this allegory with my wife, who has a degree in philosophy from Christendom College in Virginia, I had a funny thought. An apostle would do things differently than the philosopher.
The philosopher fails in his mission to free his brethren because they find it hard to believe the stories that he tells about the true reality. They believe their eyes. Their chains are familiar, if uncomfortable. But an apostle doesn’t have to convince his brothers to leave the cave. After he escapes the cave and encounters the Light, he turns back to the mouth of the cave and commands that the mountain sitting on top of his friends be lifted up and cast into the sea. SkaDOOSH! Mountain be gone. The prisoners look up and see the Light for themselves and recognize that their chains have to go.
An Apostolic Example
This summer, my community hosted the Unity Forum, which brought together leaders from several different denominations to discuss Christian unity. One of the guests was Dr. Randy Clark, the founder of the Global Awakening Ministries, who has been doing miracles of healing and deliverance for decades. He travels around the world, and enormous crowds show up. When he prays over people, they frequently experience miraculous healing. He described seeing people stand up out of wheelchairs, legs lengthen, and even full limbs grow out.
This shouldn’t surprise us. When Jesus was preparing to ascend into Heaven, He told His disciples, “These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (Mark 16:17-18)
Dr. Clark believes. So signs accompany him. He shared very humbly that he has never performed a miracle. The Holy Spirit does the miracles. He never felt that more keenly than when he prayed for a healing, and nothing happened. He recognizes that sometimes the miracle doesn’t happen because God is working on something through the suffering.
Some might contend, “But Nathan, he’s not Catholic. How could he perform miracles?” The Gospels report the apostles telling Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.” (Mark 9:38) Jesus tells them not to stop the other exorcists, because if they’re doing miracles in His name, they’re certainly not going to work against Him.
At one point, Dr. Clark was on stage with bishops from several different denominations. He joked that even though he doesn’t have Apostolic Succession, he’s had more than a little apostolic success.
The Tradition of the Apostles
Interestingly, Randy originally attended The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, where he learned that all miracles stopped with the apostles. He was as surprised as anyone else when miracles started happening around him. But as Catholics, we have a long and rich history of the miraculous continuing throughout the ages, first in the lives of the apostles and then in the lives of the saints.
You don’t have to look any further than the book of Acts to see St. Peter’s shadow healing the sick people who lined up along the roadside where he traveled (Acts 5:15-16). St. Paul raised Eutychus from the dead (Acts 20:7-12), which was really only fair because his preaching had put the boy to sleep and caused his fatal fall. The Baptists will agree with us on these stories, because they’re found in scripture. But Church history contains further testimony. God wasn’t done.
Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) wrote a series of dialogues that recounted dozens of stories of virtues and miracles in the life of the Church. He devoted an entire book to the life of St. Benedict, whose life was richly supernatural. The Pope was writing to encourage the faithful in a time of plague and trial, and to point to the fact that God was still at work among His people.
Another example is my patron saint, St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. Stories abound about the miracles that he performed, including a time that he evangelized a group of German pilgrims, despite the fact that he didn’t know a word of German and they didn’t know a lick of Spanish.
This sounds so bizarre, but I recently heard a story about a priest who went to Medjugorje. He saw a young woman who looked quite despondent and went over to minister to her. They talked for some time, and when he learned that she was from Ukraine, he commented that she spoke beautiful English. Her eyes widened, and she replied that she’d never spoken English in her life. While this isn’t a confirmed and verified miracle yet, it does point to the fact that God is still working miracles in order to reach people with the Good News.
(Some) Knowledge is Power
The philosopher’s hard-won understanding of the Good is the product of right reason and observation. In seeking the Good, he can come to an understanding that the Good exists and that the Good is the source of everything. That is marvelous in itself, but it is not the height of understanding.
The apostle has a different kind of knowledge, which doesn’t contradict the philosopher’s knowledge. It fulfills it. Because the Good is not simply an object, an essence, or the perfect Platonic form. The Good is the Most Holy Trinity, a community of three Divine Persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – who are perfectly One God.
When writing the allegory of the cave, Plato couldn’t anticipate that the Good would enter into the cave, take on the form of a slave, and reveal Himself there in the darkness. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5) Perfect Being reveals Himself to the apostle, sharing a mystery that could never be discovered through reason alone. The apostle believes this revelation, and his title “apostle” contains the further mystery that he is one who has been sent by the Great Revealer to continue the work of revelation (apostolos means “one who is sent”). After obeying the words, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10), the apostle receives the promise, “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and has no doubt in his heart but believes that it will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:23-24)
When I was an atheist in Los Angeles, I was intellectually chained in the cave, and I wanted to stay there. I had arguments upon arguments for why Christians were idiots for believing that a magic sky fairy had created everything. I clung to the shadows I saw on the cave wall. One of my biggest fights with my mom in my twenties was when she introduced me to her pastor and asked for prayers. I’m not surprised by my response anymore. Plato predicted it 2,400 years ago.
I needed to be set free, but couldn’t be convinced to seek freedom. The path to freedom was closed by my own stubborn ignorance. When my life exploded in a ball of fire and I ended up on my parents’ couch in Augusta, GA, my little sister didn’t try to convince me of the errors of my ways. Instead, she extended an invitation. “You’re going to be on that couch until you figure out what God’s trying to teach you. Why don’t you ask Him? You’re an atheist, so if He doesn’t answer, you don’t lose anything. But what if you’re wrong?”
That night I prayed for the first time in many years, maybe ever. “God, if You’re there, if You’re real, teach me. Teach me, teach me, teach me, TEACH ME!” And He answered. “Stillness.” It was the still, small voice. And I knew it was God. I knew that Jesus is who He says He is. And I knew that the Gospels are true. God lifted up the mountain of my ignorance and cast it into the sea. I’ve never been the same.
The afternoon before that revelation, my sister had done an apostle’s work by posing the question, extending the invitation to knock on the door to the heavens. Before that, I know my mother was in her prayer closet like St. Monica, begging God to reveal Himself to her atheist son. She knew she couldn’t talk to me, so she talked to God instead.
Faith, this deeper kind of knowledge, separates the work of the philosopher from the work of the apostle. The philosopher tries to move the man, but the apostle moves the mountain.
