This is a discussion thread about similarities between Platonism and Christianity:
CHURCH FATHERS: City of God, Book VIII (St. Augustine)
"There is no one, who has even a slender knowledge of these things, who does not know of the Platonic philosophers, who derive their name from their master Plato...those who are praised as having most closely followed Plato, who is justly preferred to all the other philosophers of the Gentiles...It is evident that none come nearer to us [Catholic Christians] than the Platonists...
We prefer these [Platonists] to all other philosophers, and confess that they approach nearest to us....Certain partakers with us in the grace of Christ, wonder when they hear and read that Plato had conceptions concerning God, in which they recognize considerable agreement with the truth of our religion."
Plato is considered by many to be the most significant philosopher in the history of the West. His student Aristotle is basically his only competitor in that department, followed - one could argue - by the Nominalist Franciscan William of Ockham (of the 'razor' fame).
St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Justin Martyr and many other Fathers of the Christian Faith before the rise of Thomist scholasticism (which was heavily Aristotelian in character, albeit still suffused with Platonic assumptions) and Franciscan nominalism, were all Christian Platonists.
So durable has Platonism's legacy proved in the canon of Western thought - whether politically, in terms of his social-republicanism / theories on the ideal state and epistemoligically with regards to his assertion (contra later nominalists) of truth-value realism - that even today, around three-quarters of pure mathematicians are said to be 'Mathematical Platonists' rather than formalists, according to the surveys.
As such, these mathematical luminaries - typified by the likes of Kurt Godel, Georg Cantor, W.V.O. Quine and Hilary Putnam, Roger Penrose, George Ellis and most recently Edward Frenkel - still adhere to Plato's Theory of Forms, at least so far as its math element is concerned: the conviction that mathematical objects and relations exist abstractly, independent of space, time and human perspectivism; that mathematical truths are objective and constant realities of the universe, rather than a formal system with invented signs and rules (kinda like chess playing) and that these propositions thus have a truth-value prior to their human conceptualisation (such as, prime numbers or Pythagoras's Theorem), which we come to access through intuition and rational deductions. Professors Penrose and Ellis go further in swallowing the entire Platonist paradigm
The Ockhamist Catholics were the first post-Platonist school to challenge truth-value realism and a number of modern secular theorists outside mathematics and theoretical physics (as in other scientific fields and the social-sciences) therefore follow a formalist, social-constructivist model in the tradition of Ockham. But mainstream Catholicism, whilst embracing copious elements of both Thomist Arisotelianism and Franciscan Nominalism (for according to John Paul II: “The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others.” (Pope St. John Paul II. "Fides et ratio, 49)), has never quite lost its grounding in a set of thoroughly Platonic fundamental axioms (such as the distinction between the changeable material world - the 'Seen' - and the unchanging eternal world of the divine ideas - the 'Unseen', as defined the Nicene Creed: "We believe in one God...maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen") and on account of St. Augustine's towering theological legacy, which decisively set the course of subsequent medieval Christian thinking.
F.C Happold, in his 1970 opus magnus on mysticism, went so far as to hail Plato "The Father of Christian Mysticism", in the following words:
But what formative influence did Platonic philosophy really have on early Christian thought in your judgement?
CHURCH FATHERS: City of God, Book VIII (St. Augustine)
"There is no one, who has even a slender knowledge of these things, who does not know of the Platonic philosophers, who derive their name from their master Plato...those who are praised as having most closely followed Plato, who is justly preferred to all the other philosophers of the Gentiles...It is evident that none come nearer to us [Catholic Christians] than the Platonists...
We prefer these [Platonists] to all other philosophers, and confess that they approach nearest to us....Certain partakers with us in the grace of Christ, wonder when they hear and read that Plato had conceptions concerning God, in which they recognize considerable agreement with the truth of our religion."
Plato is considered by many to be the most significant philosopher in the history of the West. His student Aristotle is basically his only competitor in that department, followed - one could argue - by the Nominalist Franciscan William of Ockham (of the 'razor' fame).
St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Justin Martyr and many other Fathers of the Christian Faith before the rise of Thomist scholasticism (which was heavily Aristotelian in character, albeit still suffused with Platonic assumptions) and Franciscan nominalism, were all Christian Platonists.
So durable has Platonism's legacy proved in the canon of Western thought - whether politically, in terms of his social-republicanism / theories on the ideal state and epistemoligically with regards to his assertion (contra later nominalists) of truth-value realism - that even today, around three-quarters of pure mathematicians are said to be 'Mathematical Platonists' rather than formalists, according to the surveys.
As such, these mathematical luminaries - typified by the likes of Kurt Godel, Georg Cantor, W.V.O. Quine and Hilary Putnam, Roger Penrose, George Ellis and most recently Edward Frenkel - still adhere to Plato's Theory of Forms, at least so far as its math element is concerned: the conviction that mathematical objects and relations exist abstractly, independent of space, time and human perspectivism; that mathematical truths are objective and constant realities of the universe, rather than a formal system with invented signs and rules (kinda like chess playing) and that these propositions thus have a truth-value prior to their human conceptualisation (such as, prime numbers or Pythagoras's Theorem), which we come to access through intuition and rational deductions. Professors Penrose and Ellis go further in swallowing the entire Platonist paradigm
The Ockhamist Catholics were the first post-Platonist school to challenge truth-value realism and a number of modern secular theorists outside mathematics and theoretical physics (as in other scientific fields and the social-sciences) therefore follow a formalist, social-constructivist model in the tradition of Ockham. But mainstream Catholicism, whilst embracing copious elements of both Thomist Arisotelianism and Franciscan Nominalism (for according to John Paul II: “The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others.” (Pope St. John Paul II. "Fides et ratio, 49)), has never quite lost its grounding in a set of thoroughly Platonic fundamental axioms (such as the distinction between the changeable material world - the 'Seen' - and the unchanging eternal world of the divine ideas - the 'Unseen', as defined the Nicene Creed: "We believe in one God...maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen") and on account of St. Augustine's towering theological legacy, which decisively set the course of subsequent medieval Christian thinking.
F.C Happold, in his 1970 opus magnus on mysticism, went so far as to hail Plato "The Father of Christian Mysticism", in the following words:
"...Few, if any, thinkers have had a deeper and more permanent influence on European thought. Much of his writing was concerned with politics; has sometimes been called the Father of the Modern State. Behind all his writings on political issues, however, lay a profound spiritual philosophy. It was his intense sense of the world of spirit which impelled him to strive to create on earth the sort of state in which the life of the spirit would be possible.
The fundamental issue with which Plato concerned himself was a dual one; what was the nature of the truly Real over against appearance, and what and how do we know about it. What was Plato's basic theory? It has been called the Theory of Ideas, or better, Forms...That is not to say that there were no mystical strains in the Greek transition from a primitive polytheistic naturalism to rational philosophy. There is, for instance, a marked mystical element in Plato, which later developed into that Neoplatonism, which, as we have seen, profoundly influenced Christian mysticism. It was inevitable that there should be, for no rational philosophical system can alone satisfy the deep religious and psychological needs inherent in mankind....
Plato may not be a mystic in the way St John of the Cross was a mystic; he was, however, the Father of Christian mysticism. The pure Platonism of Plato himself was the stem from which branched out that Neoplatonism, of which Plotinus is the greatest exponent, on which much of the later speculative mysticism of Christianity was founded..."
The fundamental issue with which Plato concerned himself was a dual one; what was the nature of the truly Real over against appearance, and what and how do we know about it. What was Plato's basic theory? It has been called the Theory of Ideas, or better, Forms...That is not to say that there were no mystical strains in the Greek transition from a primitive polytheistic naturalism to rational philosophy. There is, for instance, a marked mystical element in Plato, which later developed into that Neoplatonism, which, as we have seen, profoundly influenced Christian mysticism. It was inevitable that there should be, for no rational philosophical system can alone satisfy the deep religious and psychological needs inherent in mankind....
Plato may not be a mystic in the way St John of the Cross was a mystic; he was, however, the Father of Christian mysticism. The pure Platonism of Plato himself was the stem from which branched out that Neoplatonism, of which Plotinus is the greatest exponent, on which much of the later speculative mysticism of Christianity was founded..."
But what formative influence did Platonic philosophy really have on early Christian thought in your judgement?
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