Plato, Plotinus, and Christianity

Cosimo de Medici wanted to revive the School of Plato and chose Marcilio Ficino to implement it. As such neo-Platonism informed the Italian Renaissance and subsequently European philosophy.

I am very much a neo-Platonist and see much in Plato that foreshadowed Christianity. Yes, he was not a Christian but his understanding of the Nous is a pre-Christian description of John's Logos: the Spirit-Word made flesh. Likewise Plato's Form the GOOD, from which all other Forms flow, is the pale remembrance of a higher pre-existing reality (the ONE - God) that corresponds to the Gnostic myth of the Heavenly Anthropos.

The neo-Platonist, Plotinus, embellished on Plato's work and Plotinus’ pupil Prophyry's editing of the Enneads established a school of neo-Platonism that influenced all Christian theologians who came after him including the Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas until Aquinas successfully replaced Platonism with Aristotelianism as the philosophical base of Christianity.

The link between Plato and Medieval Metaphysics is clearly articulated by the Scholastic John Duns Scotus Erivgena's masterwork On the Divisions of Nature. Erivgena correctly identifies God and specifically the Logos as the locus of Platonic ideas and the Stoic logio spermatikoi. He cites as his authority Richard of St. Victor's De Trinitate.

The Christian understanding of the soul is deeply indebted to Plotinus. It is predicated on what Plotinus identifies as emanation or beaming which in turn informs his understanding of here and there. Here contains souls and bodies because many bodies, including the perceptible universe itself, are alive or ensouled and their souls have spontaneously descended from and can return to there. Soul depends on Intellect which in turn depends on the ONE or GOOD. The ONE himself is beyond being because attribution of being or any other predicate would make him more than ONE.

Consequently, it is easy to see how Plato's Form of the GOOD and understanding of the Nous and ONE corresponds to John's Logos when combined with Plotinus' construct of the soul juxtaposed with here-there with the ONE being beyond being is transformed into the Being/being of Christian Medieval Metaphysics wherein Being implants in all [human] beings a spark of its essence which we call the soul. Thus the "heavenly sparks" of the myth of the Heavenly Anthropos become the soul for Plotinus and the eventual gathering of the sparks and their return to the source is the Gnostic understanding of the resurrection we will share with Jesus when our soul returns to its source.

What is interesting to me in all of this is that orthodox Christianity, to become credible outside Palestine in the greater Greco-Roman world, embraced Platonic philosophy and made much of it its own especially Plato's understanding of dualism that was the source of the dualism of the hyperstatic union of the body and soul of Jesus; that is, Jesus as one being both fully human and fully divine. Subsequently, the neo-Platonism of Plotinus informed Christian theologians including Origin, Augustine, Gregory of Nazianzen, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil, John Chrysostom, Ephrem, Ambrose, and Jerome.

The irony is that while the Pagans Plato and Plotinus were informing the theology of the Fathers of the Church, the Council of Ancyra in 314 published 20 canons that discriminated against Pagans, Jews, and Christian heretics. However, the Council went farther than simple discrimination in that it forbade any social interaction between Christians and Pagans, Jews, and Christian heretics by legitimizing the destruction of their houses of worship, personal property, and physical assault. Thus it is the Council of Ancyra that legitimized Christian destruction of Paganism including the Gnostic sects and codified anti-Semitism as Christian doctrine.