It is also possible for us to understand why, in Plato's Republic, music plays such an important role in the kind of education that leads to justice, and why, in order to achieve this goal, "we must seek out craftsmen who are...able to pursue what is fine and graceful in their work."³⁵ It is because "rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul more than anything else...so that if someone is properly educated in music...it makes him graceful, but if not, then the opposite."³⁶ For Plato, education in music is education by music. It is preparation for a kind of seeing. This is the further reason why such education is "most important":

[B]ecause anyone who has been properly educated in music...will sense it acutely when something has been omitted from a thing and when it hasn't been finely crafted or finely made....And since he has the right distastes, he'll praise fine things, be pleased by them, receive them into his soul, and, being nurtured by them, become fine and good.³⁷

To "become fine and good," for Plato, is to participate in a vision of the ideal Form of the Good. It is to participate in a vision of kosmos. The person who "looks at and studies things that are organized and always the same," Socrates says, will not simply cognize but "consort with" and "imitate" them. For how can one gaze with admiration at such a spectacle without being moved to imitate what one sees? It is "by consorting with what is ordered and divine," Socrates says, that one "becomes as divine and ordered as a human being can."³⁸ This takes work, in the way that theoria and techne both take work. It is not a useful result that is produced—a practical accomplishment, in that sense—nor is it a purely theoretical accomplishment, in the modern sense. The function (or ergon) of education, as Plato describes it, is the liturgy—the "spectacular work"—of theory. It is also the work of liturgy itself. For, as the Athenian Stranger notes in Plato's Laws, the effects of even the best education can wear off or be lost altogether—in the same way that the original meanings of words can be lost. It is liturgy that reconnects us with these sources. "The Gods," the Stranger suggests, "took pity on the human race...and gave it relief in the form of religious festivals to serve as periods of rest from its labors. They gave us the Muses...[B]y having these gods to share their holidays, human beings were to be made whole again, and thanks to them, we find refreshment in the celebration of these festivals."³⁹

"O taste and see that the Lord is good" (Psalm 34:8). Whether one sings these words, or hears them sung, their being sung beautifully should provide for a realization of what they are saying. The psalmist invites us to taste and thus to see. The philosopher invites us to see and thus to pray.⁴⁰

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