I stopped and thought for a moment, trying to examine my own feelings with philosophical rigor. It wasn’t easy. I asked myself whether I could forgive him. I found that I could—I did understand what he had been thinking, and also I appreciated the effort he had made now to understand what he had done and accept that it was wrong. “I don’t know whether it’s possible for me to trust you enough to be your friend,” I said, after a moment. “But I do understand what you did, what you were thinking. And I suppose I forgive you.” He closed his eyes for a moment when I said that and his face went slack. I realized that my forgiveness really did matter to him. He was so naturally playful, even at his most serious. It was rare to see him this unguarded.

He opened his eyes again and looked at me. “So if I’m wrong about my theories about why you disagree, and you disagree logically, what’s wrong with my logic?” he asked.

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, and sat down tailor-fashion on the wall, leaning back against the pillar. “It’s not your logic-structures, it’s your axioms. I’ve said this before. Examine your assumptions. You say Athene is an angel, and you say angels are perfect. I can’t see how you can believe that after the way Athene behaved in the Last Debate.”

“She’s an angel, and she’s perfect. What she did may seem imperfect to us, but that’s because our perceptions are imperfect. If we had complete knowledge, we’d be able to understand what she did.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. We know she exists. We know we can trust what she told us directly. And she said in the Last Debate that the gods don’t know everything, and that part of her motivation in setting up the City was to see what happened. That’s not something we don’t understand because we’re not perfect.”

“She’s of a lesser order of perfection than the Persons of the Trinity,” he said. “But she’s still perfect.”

“She turned Sokrates into a gadfly!” I said.

“If we understood more, we’d understand why.”