A few years ago, I was reading Plato’s Phaedo and I came to a passage that goes like this:
For whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? For wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body. (Translation of Benjamin Jowett)
I was immediately struck by a parallel passage written some 400 years later in James 4 from the Bible.
From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? (KJV)
Now granted, both of these passages are English translations of two different versions of Greek. However, I very much doubt that this similarity is a coincidence. The phrasing is similar and the context is similar. My guess is that James was quoting Plato. I may be wrong, but I do not think so.
Whether James was flagrantly plagiarizing Plato is debatable and not my point. To give him the benefit of the doubt, it is quite possible he was quoting some text that he knew his readers would recognize as Plato and therefore felt no need to credit Plato. It would be like me repeating Patrick Henry’s famous quote “Give me liberty or give me death.” I would not necessarily credit Henry because everyone would already know I am quoting Henry.
Regardless of James’ intentions, I am merely pointing out how Greek philosophy started influencing Christianity very early and managed to make its way into the Bible itself (this is not the only example). That influence would continue to strongly shape Christian theology for as long as there has been Christianity.
Let me talk about two very critical intersections between these two pillars of western civilization. The first was the theology of St. Augustine in the early 5th century. Augustine was a convert to Christianity from Neoplatonism, a system of philosophy based on Platonism. There were many other Christian theologians who were also influenced by Neoplatonism during those early centuries (Origen is a famous example), but Augustine was the giant among them.
I recently read Augustine’s The City of God, an astounding book written in the sunset of the Roman empire. From a historical, philosophical, and theological perspective, it is a gold mine. If you are a Protestant and wade through the book, you will be surprised at how much of his theology you recognize. Even some of his phrasing (or at least the interpretation of his phrasing) of theological concepts has largely survived the last 1500 years effortlessly.
At some point, I will try to write an entire post about The City of God, but one of the most striking things about the book is Augustine’s obsession with Plato. He briefly mentions a few theologians of the day (Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and a few others), but much of the book is both a refutation and appreciation for Plato. He clearly respected Plato as a worthwhile opponent, and he readily admitted the many similarities between Platonism and Christianity.
In fact, in one entertaining spot in the book, Augustine is trying to explain how the Christian/Judaism account of creation matches up so well with Plato’s creation account (the Timaeus). He actually proposes a somewhat ridiculous theory that Plato may have met the Jewish prophet Jeremiah on a trip and gotten the Jewish creation story from him.
So what is Platonic in Augustine’s view of Christianity? There are several things, but here are just a few more notable ones:
- a focus on beauty and ideals (reminiscent of Plato’s forms)
- an emphasis on personal relationships/communion with God
- an emphasis on heaven (as an eternal, perfect place)
- predestination (yes, the subject of predestination vs free will is a philosophical question that far predates Christianity)
I would have to write a long time about Plato’s view on these topics, and there are more qualified people than me that would do a better job. However, Augustine seemed to be heavily influenced by Plato in his positions on these theological questions.
Furthermore, it is important to understand that while Protestants take Augustine’s teaching for granted today, Christianity has often struggled with most of these doctrines. It took centuries after Jesus lived for this kind of theology to fully develop, and a lot of it really does seem to originate with Augustine. Again, when you read Augustine, you will note that he does not quote other theologians to bolster his theology.
While Augustine was influential during his era, western civilization was about to enter the Dark Ages and his theology would hibernate for centuries and then get replaced entirely by a very different approach.
Before I get to that big change in direction, let me talk briefly about the Dark Ages, a period in western civilization where among other things, Christianity took a back seat. During that time, Islam was far more dominant in culture and arts, science, and other disciplines. Very interestingly, it was Islam that preserved Greek philosophy through those years. In fact, Greek philosophy was almost forgotten in the Christian-dominant side of western civilization during that time.
After the Dark Ages ended, there was a second major intersection of Christianity and Greek philosophy. The Christian swing from Plato to Aristotle actually started with Scholasticism in around 1100 AD. It is very ironic that this was at least partly due to some Islam-preserved texts of Greek philosophy making their way back to Catholicism.
While Thomas Aquinas was hardly the first in the movement, he represented the pinnacle of Scholasticism. Aquinas revered Aristotle to the point where he simply referred to him as the philosopher.
Scholasticism was a logical approach to theology, using elaborate logical rules and proofs that originated with Aristotle. That should not be a surprise; to this day, rules of formal and informal logic trace back to Aristotle. In fact, the theologians of that time tried to answer theological questions in a similar way that a geometry student might try to prove a theorem.
As you can imagine, such a rigorous, cerebral approach to theology ruled out all but elite scholars from being capable of obtaining knowledge of God. It is no surprise that Catholicism moved away from the more Augustinian idea that a common person could know enough to have a personal relationship with God. This ill-fated change would of course become a major impetus to the spark of the Reformation.
Somewhat surprisingly, the Scholastic approach to theology is still the dominant approach in Catholic seminaries today. However, on the Protestant side of things, at the start of the Reformation, suddenly, a Platonic-tinged Christianity was in vogue again. Martin Luther loved Augustine. And to this day, Protestants love Augustinian teaching, even if they do not take the time to read Augustine himself.
If you are looking for it, you can see Platonism in many places in Protestantism. For example, when I read C. S. Lewis, I am struck by the not-subtle Platonic ideas. The picture of heaven in The Last Battle where there are worlds stacked in each other, each bigger and better than the last is very similar to Platonic metaphysics. It is an interesting example of how Platonism and the Bible itself sometimes get combined/confused in the teaching of Christianity.
What to make of all this overlap is a subject for another post. But for myself, while I am not quite sure about theological ramifications, I have a strong suspicion that they are enormous, especially in the realm of the sufficiency of the Bible. In other words, if the Bible is sufficient in itself for faith and practice, why has Christianity always been so tightly woven with and influenced by Greek philosophy?
These are the kinds of questions that I like to ask theologians. For the most part, I get politely rebuffed. But in my opinion, at a minimum, Christianity needs to meet these kinds of challenges head-on rather than ignoring them.