From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith by Louis Markos

Author:Louis Markos [Markos, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830853045
Amazon: 0830853049
Barnesnoble: 0830853049
Goodreads: 56356219
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2021-05-20T07:58:20+00:00

In Republic, Plato forges a link between virtuous-rational-philosophic behavior and true happiness. Here, he forges a similar link but with reference, not to politics or morality or aesthetics, but to the form and purpose of the human body, which was fashioned to hold our soul. As human beings, male or female, we stand upright, with our head—the center, for Plato, of both our reason and our soul, as the belly is the center of our appetite—reaching upward toward the heavens. The beasts, in contrast, live with their heads close to the ground, a fitting sign for how their lives are controlled completely by their belly (appetite) and the impulses of their flesh.

In distinguishing between human beings and animals, it is significant that Plato insists that men were created before animals, and not vice versa as in the biblical account (Gen 1:24-28). By doing so, Plato posits that we are the pattern for all life on earth, even as the gods (angels) were the pattern for our own creation—though we, Plato explains, are less purely mixed than the angels and thus subject to dissolution and decay.

Again, Plato does not clearly place man between the angels and the beasts as Christianity does; however, Timaeus does allow for the tripartite soul developed in Republic to be read in conjunction with a struggle between the beast below (appetitive) and the angel above (rational). Only when aided by the spirited part of the soul can the rational part control the bestial urges of the appetitive part.

This Platonic psychomachia, this internal war within the soul to put down the bestial side of our nature, would exert a profound influence on early and medieval theologians, giving them a language and imagery for the struggle that could complement, rather than contradict, the struggle between flesh and spirit that Paul describes in his epistles (e.g., Rom 7:18-25). Indeed, it will be the burden of part two of this book to trace not only that influence but the other and varied influences that Platonic thought exerted on the Christian faith.

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