Why should a contemporary Christian spend any time at all thinking about Plato (424-348 BCE)?

The issue is, in part, recognizing where the contemporary Christian mind came from, and why people think the way they do about God issues, human issues, moral issues.

Once upon a time, you're absolutely correct, Christianity didn't care the slightest about Plato, and people still lived moral lives, worshiped, and "went to Heaven."

Some might say more easily than after their brains got messed up by philosophy.

Probably the fault (glory) lies in the fact that all sorts of people converted to "The Way," including Hellenized (profoundly Greek) Jews and, of course, all sorts of "pagans."

The insightful sociologist Rodney Stark wrote "The Rise of Christianity" and other wonderful books on Christian origins. He's pretty eloquent in describing the searching populations of the Mediterranean. They included Jews, and Greek and Roman "God-Fearers," fed up with unbelievable gods, but with nothing to take their place.

Among them were very well educated people of all these groups, and one of their most revered teachers was Plato, for all the fact that he was about 350 years dead when Jesus was born.

So great was the appeal of such thought as Plato's that the brilliant Roman Christian lawyer and writer Tertullian (c. 160-235) exploded with "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Cannot one's intellectual theorizing positively interfere with one's faith? Why not get back to that simple faith of those earliest communities?

Well. Platonism was by then unchangeably involved with every aspect of the life of the Christian mind. And it got there initially because some of Christianity's bravest and brightest defenders were highly educated converts from paganism.

It really is somewhat surprising when one looks at the barest outline of Plato's thought, how much of what we consider just ordinary religious common sense may derive from Plato.

So let's assume, gentle reader, that you are indeed a gentle reader, just emerging from the homeland of Jesus and entering the pagan mainstream of Mediterranean culture. Lots of Jewish co-religionists were deeply immersed in Greek philosophy, such as Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (20 BCE to 50 CE).

But as a follower of Jewish Jesus, you stumble upon Plato for the first time. What do you find?

Well, for starters, you find very interesting things which he says apparently about God, creation, morality, the soul, and living in a just society. Hmmm. Markedly similar to your religious experience, but much more rationally spelled out.

Plato writes profoundly on:

1) A divine creator who is ultimately unknowable by a human mind.

2) A created universe which operates rationally, and is dependent upon the mind of the creator. The human mind can know things clearly because the divine mind contains universally valid templates ("Ideas/Forms"), according to which everything on earth makes sense.

3) The things of earth are independent and finite. They are less "real" than the Ideas/Forms and The Good.

4) The human mind is enlightened by the divine mind ("The Good/The Sun"), and thus knows things truly. Some things can be known clearly, but truly "divine" realities can only be known through visionary experience (mythos).

5) True knowledge demands predictable, changeless "being," and yet it experiences a world of "becoming," change.

6) Human moral integrity is discernible from the transcendent "Ideas" which indicate a proper human lifestyle. Human morality should be in synch with the divine mind. The human mind itself should be in synch with an ordered universe.

7) This lifestyle is validly correlated with a just society.

8) The human soul is immortal, and affected by human morality, earning reward or punishment.

9) Plato's sublime model, Socrates (469-399 BCE), lived, taught, and gave his life in support of a moral life in a moral society.

10) Soul and body exist in "union without confusion." (This is to be profoundly relevant to the Christian experience of the "hypostatic union" of divinity and humanity in Jesus.)

Does not lots of this sound like Christianity? It should, because lots of Christian doctrine was patterned upon Plato.

Christian theology could use Plato to clarify what is, and what is not, acceptable to Christianity. His thought enormously clarified human experience. There was, however, never any illusion that his thought clarified God.

Very early on, Christianity recognized the limits of philosophy, thereby dramatizing for itself the limits of ("ungraced") human thinking and action, and the trans-rational extent of divine love and divine revelation.

Early Christian experience included the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures, Plato, and Christian improvisation upon all three.

We cannot extricate Plato's own thought from whatever he may be handing on as the thought of his own socially eccentric and intellectually provocative teacher, Socrates. But it is surely accurate to see Socrates as a searcher and a critic. Socrates sought a solid foundation for what Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was eventually going to call "clear and distinct ideas."

Socrates did this in the public marketplace of ideas, and not in an ivory tower, irrelevant to a just human society.

What is justice, and how can we know it? How, without dependable knowledge, do we know very practical civic virtues, how can we live in a civilized city?

If I might leap ahead somewhat, Socrates and Plato communicated what their worthy successor, St. Augustine (354-430), recognized in the mind of God and in God's universe.

If you are a traditional, or even a progressive, Christian, you may take it for granted that things make sense because they make sense in the mind of God. For Plato, things made sense because they could be correlated with an ideal of whatever you were searching into.

For example, everyone reading this column knows what a triangle is. Mathematics and geometry were favorite examples for Plato, and some of what we sent out of our solar system with the space probe Voyager I were scientific and mathematical data presumably relevant everywhere in the universe. The underlying supposition is profoundly Platonic: There is a credible and predictable correlation between the mind (any extraterrestrial mind) and reality (any extraterrestrial reality).

A roomful of people, asked to draw a triangle, will very probably all draw different triangles, but all of them can be correlated with the "Idea" of "triangle." In other words, while Plato obviously never located such "Ideas" in the mind of the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ, still Plato understood that we actually could know things certainly because of our ability to compare mentally whatever it was that we were trying to understand with the ideal of that reality.

And so we all know what a "horse" is, even though there are many varieties of horse, and all sorts of in-between shadings such as mules and zebras, which are not "horse."

The same goes for "human."

Relevance: Because of an ideal "humanity" in God's mind, Christianity developed the philosophical insight that homosexuality is "unnatural," even though it occurs frequently in nature. This obviously bolstered the apparent condemnations of homosexuality in Scripture.

Homosexuality is understood to be "unnatural" because we presume that there is some transcendent criterion/Idea (in the mind of God) against which we understand "nature," and that "Idea" of "nature" must dictate what is "normal," and therefore moral or immoral.

So Plato's "Ideas" have become a fixture of the Christian mind, especially since they have been understood to be "the way God sees things." This is more or less the way Plato understood his Ideas or Forms.

Plato also has fascinating things to say about immortality and the existence of the soul.

It may come as a shock to contemporary Christians that they often believe in a pagan Greek experience of immortality and not the miraculous resurrection which is the Christian experience.

In pre-Christian Platonic thought, the soul was separable from the body, and being a spirit, would not decompose, while the body obviously did decompose.

If the soul is simple and immaterial, then it can't decompose and so we have souls naturally immortal. This makes sense, but it's not Christianity, and it's not the Jewish experience of united soul and body.

This is Greek dualism, duality of soul separable from the body, which is contradicted by the Christian concept of "the resurrection of the body."

In such a scenario, we are not experiencing what St. Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15, or what Jesus sees when the "grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies" (John 12:24), and the statement that "he who loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39).

This is not about a seed germinating, or a Greek naturally immortal soul, but about utter irretrievable death, and the miracle of resurrection. Platonic thought was sometimes discerningly included, sometimes discerningly rejected.

Plato also had fascinating things to say about the creation of the universe in his dialogue The Timaeus.

"But the Father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible. ... If the world be indeed fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal; ... Everyone will see that he must have looked to the eternal; for the world is the fairest of creations, and he is the best of causes. And having been created in this way, the world has been framed in the likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable. ... For which reason, when he was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, that he might be the creator of a work which was by nature fairest and best. ... Wherefore, since you are but creatures, you are not altogether immortal and indissoluble, but you shall certainly not be dissolved, nor be liable to the fate of death ... the only being which can properly have mind is the invisible soul. ... "

Given such insights, early Christian converts from paganism believed that pagan cultures had unknowingly been, under God's providence, prophetic anticipations of the coming of Jesus Christ, "in the fullness of time."

Plato gave the human mind a rational system for the knowledge of reality, but he also guaranteed profound awe in the face of transcendence, the sublime, and religious mysticism.

As Alfred North Whitehead observed, all of Western philosophy, Christian and otherwise, is "a footnote on Plato."

— — —

Dr. George Gilmore, Ph.D., is professor of humanities at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. Send an email to {email ggilmore@shc.edu}ggilmore@shc.edu{/email}. © Copyright 2008 by George Gilmore.