Plato’s contributions are indispensable, pointing us to a world beyond what we immediately sense and teaching us of our dignity and worth. But what parts of Plato are good for us, and what parts are not? Where does Plato end and Christianity begin? Those are the questions which thoughtful believers need to ponder.
It has been said, with some justice, that the basic worldview of many people in the West today is not Christianity but a belief system known as moral therapeutic deism (MTD for short). Other essays and books have described the contents of that worldview in detail. But I think that it could be argued with equal justice that the underlying worldview of many who call themselves orthodox is something we might call Popular Christianized Platonism (PCP) rather than the robust Christianity of the New Testament. Christianity and Platonism have interacted, often fruitfully, from the Church’s very beginnings. The influence of Platonic thinking on Augustine and other Church Fathers is widely acknowledged. The Jews of Jesus’ day lived in a cosmopolitan culture in which both Jewish and pagan belief systems interacted. The scholar John Peter Kenny points out that “Jews in the period of Christ were immersed in Hellenistic culture across the Mediterranean world” and that even biblical texts, like the Wisdom of Solomon and even John’s Gospel, were influenced by Plato’s thinking, whether directly or indirectly. Plato informs even scripture itself!
But in more recent times, religious thinkers have pointed out the sharp distinctions between Platonism and Christianity. Biblical scholars studying the period of Christ have come to a more detailed view of how various forms of belief and various philosophies interacted and related to each other in that era, and how they differed.
The problem, I believe, is when Platonic ideas are taken in the wrong way, misapplied, or filtered down into the popular consciousness in a simplified form that distorts rather than illuminates the Christian faith. The problem is truly not with Platonism as such but with what I am calling “popular Platonism,” a belief system often bearing traces of Platonism’s cousin, Gnosticism.
There was a strong tradition from early on in Christian thought of discerning seeds of the Divine Word in non-Jewish and non-Christian belief systems, including Greek philosophy (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Stoic). Far be it from me to contradict this noble tradition of “Logos theology,” which I believe is deeply true.
Of all the elements of our faith, our understanding of the future life is perhaps the one that has become most heavily imbued with Platonism. In fact, what spurred me to write about this subject was the experience of hearing yet another homily at Mass about how we “get to heaven.” It sounds innocuous, but such language can be misleading when we start to study the philosophical background of the New Testament. Such words as “soul” and “heaven” are so deeply ingrained in our religious rhetorical vocabulary that we don’t stop to ask ourselves what they actually meant to Jesus and his contemporaries. Yet if we want to be intelligent and informed believers, we must ask such questions. We must scrutinize our popular religious language in the light of scripture, tradition, culture, and history.
Plato’s legacy lives on in our minds and hearts, regardless of whether we have read his works or not. Nietzsche went so far as to write that Christianity was Platonism for the masses—a quote that Bishop Robert Barron has called an indictment of all of us for our misrepresentation of our own faith. I believe that popular Platonism has obscured as much as it has illuminated in Christianity. Everywhere one finds Platonic ideas presented as authentic Christianity, the two systems of thought conflated. “Christians despise this world and place all their hope in a future heaven after they die.” Well, of course that is true, isn’t it?
Well, not quite—in any case, it shouldn’t be. Christianity teaches the goodness and intrinsic value of the visible world which God created and sustains. We believe in the transformation and elevation of space, time and matter, not their destruction or abandonment.
It seems to me that the most problematic area of Platonism for Christianity is its strict separation of (to use Kantian terminology) the phenomenal and noumenal world. According to Plato, the visible world around us is an illusion, a mere shadow or imperfect copy of the eternal realm. The wise man or philosopher must transcend this phenomenal world in pure contemplation of the Eternal Forms. To its credit, Platonism fosters a deep intuition of the inadequacy of the world as we presently experience it, of our alienation from true goodness and beatitude. This intuition has helped a good many Christians as they connect the idea up with the Christian intuition of the fallenness of the present world.
Yet Plato’s idealism is, on its face, incompatible with orthodox Christianity, which teaches that God created the world and called it good. This Platonic idea has all sorts of ramifications. The dualism of the phenomenal and noumenal in Platonism is also articulated in the form of a dualism that pits spirit against matter. One often hears Christian believers express the sentiment that “we were made for another world.” There is a sense in which this is true, and another sense in which it is not. Strictly speaking, we were made for this world: the world of space, time, and matter. As has been well stated in a popular phrase, God does not make junk. The Christian sentiment points to the present fallenness of the world, and that is right and just. But it is all too easy for this attitude to slide into a contempt for material creation that runs contrary to the classic Judeo-Christian worldview.
It should be noted that Plato in his Timaeus was the first to introduce the idea of Creation into Greek thought, so much so that some early Church Fathers actually believed the Greek philosopher had read the book Genesis. But it’s safe to say that the idea of an Incarnation—that God or the gods would bother to descend into the world of matter—is unthinkable within Platonism. I am not sure, either, that Plato saw the world as fallen and in need of redemption, as opposed to inherently flawed and inferior to the world of the Eternal Forms.
That is why commonly used poetic phrases within Christianity like “our heavenly homeland” need to be carefully interpreted. St. Paul says that “our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). Note that St. Paul says that the Savior comes from heaven to us. Jesus never spoke of heaven as a place to which we “go,” and such an idea was not part of his culture’s thinking. In ancient Jewish thought, heaven meant the realm of God and the angels, what has been expressed in a wonderful modern phrase as “the control room of the universe.” Jesus spoke not of “going to heaven” but of the coming of the Kingdom of God to earth. That this strikes us as surprising is due to our religious thinking having become heavily inflected (or perhaps infected) with Platonic ideas of escape from this earthly realm.
Most believers today would be surprised if you told them that the idea that human beings possess an “immortal soul” comes from Platonism rather than from scripture. To say that “soul” as we popularly understand the term (the immaterial part of me) is not really an issue in scripture is simply to say that the men who composed the scriptures, good Jews all, did not conceive the issue of human anthropology in exactly those terms. The word used by Jesus that is translated in English as “soul” denotes a complex series of ideas, but it could be summed up as referring to the “whole person” in all his or her dimensions, body and spirit, as seen as standing before God.
In contrast to the holistic view of the human person in the ancient Hebrew worldview, Platonism saw the “soul” as a separate, immaterial entity within the human being that merely inhabits a body during life. A human being is a soul trapped in a body. As the scholar Marc Biemiller describes the Platonic view, “The soul longs to escape the imprisonment of the mortal body and be satisfied in the next world.” Although plenty of people mistake such a view for Christianity, it is far from the Hebrew way of seeing things, which was much more earthy, much more embodied than Platonism ever could be.
It is important that we understand Plato’s view of the future life in the context of what it replaced: the view, found in Homer equally as in some passages of the Old Testament, that the dead continued a shadowy existence in the netherworld. Compared to such a dark view, Plato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul was a liberation, offering hope and eternal dignity. But it was not, and is not, the view of Christianity that came to replace it in turn.
For the Platonist, the ultimate goal was a life freed from the body, lived in pure contemplation of the Forms. But the fullness of the future life as revealed in the New Testament is rather more than this. It is not individual but communal, not “purely spiritual” but richly corporeal. It has to do not simply with my individual soul but with the renewal of all creation. Simply put, there is no parallel to the “new heavens and new earth” and “New Creation” anywhere in Plato or the classical worldview. The sense that God was actively remaking the world, that his kingdom had been officially launched and his future was coming to meet us in the present, is what animated the early Christians to do the extraordinary things they did and to declare the good news even to the point of martyrdom.
Underlying the differing views of human destiny among the two worldviews are differing views of the nature of God himself and our relationship with him. The abstract, impersonal character of God in Platonism (and Greek philosophy generally) couldn’t be more different the personal God of Judeo-Christian belief. The Greek-philosophical God is characterized in such terms as the Form of the Good or the Uncaused Cause; never as Shepherd, Rock, Fortress, Light, Father, or King.
Accordingly, the way the believer relates to such a God is abstract and contemplative rather than relational. The Catholic tradition, taking the cue from texts like Psalm 17 that speak of beholding God’s face, developed the idea of the Beatific Vision as the reward of a virtuous life. But it is the vision of a personal God, a God deeply involved in his creation and desiring to bring it to justice and fulfillment. Leading a virtuous life is important in both Platonism and Christianity; but in Platonism the philosopher affects his own salvation and beatitude without any help of grace, such as Christianity conceives it.
Fortunately, these are not areas in which Platonism has made inroads in the faith and thinking of ordinary Christians. Most believers, as they should, think of God in personal rather than abstractly “philosophical” terms.
But what conclusions should we draw from the Platonic influence on Christians’ thinking in other areas, particularly eschatology? The gospel was preached in a world with many competing belief systems, in which the Jewish faith coexisted with pagan religions and the wisdom traditions the philosophers. Sensing a commonality between the gospel and the teachings of Plato, the Church Fathers drew on those teachings to shape their understanding of their faith and engage with the wider culture. The wisdom of Plato continued down the ages to be an important part of education and philosophical inquiry in the new Christian culture of the West.
But there has been a tendency in Western thought to revert to a classicism without Christianity. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and beyond, the temptation for intellectuals was to tacitly regard Christ as optional, and even the pre-Christian philosophers as in some sense preferable. Such a reliance on Plato and inattentiveness to the gospel breeds ignorance of the Christian message, which perpetuates itself through time. The true complementary vision of Logos theology gets lost, and one ends up with at best a sub-Christian intellectualism. With time, the Platonic atmosphere filters down to the ordinary Christian, whose beliefs are shaped by Platonism even if he has never heard of Plato. It seems that the revolutionary ideas of the gospel—of God’s kingdom breaking into our world, divinity entering time and space, heaven and earth coming together—are still too much for us. Popular Christianized Platonism is an easier alternative.
But I believe the problem may go deeper than the enduring influence of a great philosopher. There is a sort of thinking Christian who is, perhaps, reluctant to acknowledge the Israelite identity of the Church and the unadulterated Jewishness of Jesus. Judaism becomes equated with narrow legalism and ethnic exclusiveness; Jesus is removed from his Jewish background, ceases to be a Jewish Messiah and instead becomes a kind of Platonic or Stoic sage. Instead of Platonism remaining in its proper place as a helpful handmaid to theology, it takes on a leading role in defining our concepts of God and reality. We even tend to see certain scripture passages through a Platonic prism that essentially distorts their meaning (as one instance, consider Jesus’ “My kingdom is not of this world”).
One of the reasons it is hard to interpret certain New Testament passages is that they do exist in a nexus between Judaic and Hellenic culture and thought. Too, we are often the victim of our translations, which themselves have often cemented Platonic interpretations to certain passages. As stated at the beginning of this essay, Platonism was indeed an influence on ancient Jewish culture. But extricating where Platonism ends and Judaism begins is the work of the intelligent interpreter.
Professor Kenny again: “What Platonism provided to both Hellenistic Jews and Christians was a notion of spiritual transcendence by which they could articulate their own versions of monotheism.” Platonism acted as a bridge for many people, like St. Augustine, to travel toward Christianity. It also created a means of engagement with the intellectual culture of the classical world, giving Christianity an added respectability and weight. It allowed Christians to define their faith rationally and articulate it in sophisticated terms. Christian theology would be unthinkable without Platonism’s input.
But there is a double-edged sword here. On the one hand, Platonism has aided and advanced the Christian faith in innumerable ways. On the other hand, Platonism’s abstract, hyper-spiritual nature, its devaluating of material creation and its positing of a distant, immaterial Heaven as the final goal for humankind—as opposed to the New Testament’s sense of an already inaugurated New Creation—have been a distorting influence. There are millions of believers for whom the essential Judaic character of the faith is all but forgotten.
On the positive side of the equation, there is one area where I believe Platonism can be particularly helpful to Christianity. Plato’s idea of the Forms can be immensely useful in defining the concept of Heaven, understood as the realm of God and the angels that is the source of creation, ideas, and morality. Plato showed how individual things point beyond themselves to a transcendent being. On the other hand, it is important to understand that truth, beauty, and goodness are located in, and originate in, the Heavenly realm, but that they are intended for our world of space, time, and matter. That is what the gospel teaches and what Platonism, I believe, fails to grasp.
If we do our intellectual balancing act well, Platonism can be deeply in harmony with, and deeply complementary to, Christianity. But everything in its proper place. First, “salvation is of the Jews.” St. Augustine and other Christians influenced by Platonism have themselves recognized the limits of Platonism along with its beauties. Augustine went so far as to write, in one of his late works: “the praise with which I so greatly extolled Plato and the Platonists […] was most inappropriate for these impious persons and has rightly displeased me; it is especially in the face of their great errors that Christian teaching must be defended.” No less a figure than St. Paul had confronted Greek philosophy in its home city of Athens, declaring that seekers of wisdom must go beyond the limitations of an “unknown god” toward the God who had revealed himself in Jesus.
Eradicating the Platonic accretions on our own faith is a harder task because they are so often invisible or unconscious, and deeply rooted. Platonism’s (and even more so Gnosticism’s) disdain for the body and the material world has seeped into the attitudes of many Christians; unbelievers in their turn assume that such attitudes are native to Christianity instead of being foreign imports from Greek philosophy. As I have tried to suggest, such attitudes have serious consequences on how we conceive the future life. Such deep-seated attitudes are hard to overcome, but authentic Christian faith demands nothing less.
Platonism has often been employed as bulwark against modern materialism, arguing that there is more to life than evolution and the machine. This is all right and just, but I think that moving back in the orbit of that ancient Jewish thought that formed the worldview of Jesus and his disciples is just as, if not more, important. Plato’s contributions are indispensable, pointing us to a world beyond what we immediately sense and teaching us of our dignity and worth. I particularly cherish his teaching (in line with his student Aristotle) that contemplation is the end and highest pursuit of human life. But what parts of Plato are good for us, and what parts are not? Where does Plato end and Christianity begin? Those are the questions which thoughtful believers need to ponder.
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The featured image is “Philosophy & Socrates” (1799), byAntonio Canova, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.