Lucretius thought of his teaching as being "of high matters". The same can be said of Plato's, whose dialogues, as J. N. Findlay said, "point beyond themselves [and] if one does not go beyond, one cannot understand them." Beyond Plato's dialogues we find a deep epistemological fabric that weaves the intellect (the mind) into a complex architecture of knowledge. Plato's luminescent column is, as we understand it, his metaphor for that which binds the intellect with its subsequent ontological categories, first and foremost its daimōn, i.e. the human being's "divine power" according to Plato. In the column, light colligates all the mental categories and also holds the "entire celestial revolution", both bound by the doctrine of Necessity. Plato's poetic, metaphoric, analogic and allegoric writing style - his solution to language's inability to convey the ineffable - shouldn't mislead us into a reductive understanding based on mysticism, whether religious, pagan, or allegorical. What we are confronted with is the first non-fragmented attempt in the West to map out the entire ontological cognitive process, a precise description of the path of "knowing", the path of a science that leads to the "perfect end".
