Anyone who wants to fully comprehend the Christian heritage must examine Platonism's important, formative influence. Platonism has served as an important philosophical and theological resource for Christianity at various times, providing it with a foundational intellectual framework that has aided its early growth and later eras of renewal.
It has also been viewed as a compromising influence, at times contradicting the faith's revelatory underpinnings and misrepresenting its intrinsic meaning. The primary relevance of Platonism as a force that Christianity defined itself by and against is obvious in both positive and negative examples. Similarly, this impact process is not one-way.
While Platonism was important in the development of Christianity, it was heavily reliant on Christian intellectuals to continue the development of Platonism beyond antiquity. The significance of this discussion answers Tertullian's famous question, 'Quid ergo athenis et hierosolymis?' ('What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?'). Everything is the strong answer, which is explained in the chapters of this volume and differs from Tertullian's. The name 'Christian Platonism' is used in this book to emphasize the complicated link between Christian thinking and Platonism, as well as the historical variations in that relationship.
The meeting of Platonism and Christianity moved diachronically, as the chapters in this collection demonstrate, with various themes emerging at different times in history. As a result, 'Christian Platonism' took on a conceptual structure shaped by the philosophical and theological challenges of the day. But, despite everything, one continuous and basic aspect has remained constant and fundamental.
That is Platonism's commitment to transcendence, its belief in an ontology that acknowledges the presence of a higher plane of reality beyond the physical world's apparent image.
Platonism has been and continues to be the most significant tradition of realism and anti-materialism in Western thinking in this sense. Platonism has appealed to Christians since antiquity because it provided a conceptual framework through which to describe the deeper truth of God, Christ, and the human person in a more systematic way than the sacred scriptures could. The precise nature of this transcendentalism, as well as its epistemic roots, have long been a source of contention among both pagan and Christian Platonists. This is a fundamental theme that runs across all of the writings in this collection.
To use a term from Iris Murdoch, Platonists' forceful statement of ontological transcendence included the sovereignty of the Good. Platonism has been devoted to an ultimate first principle, one that is completely good and the foundation of all reality, both in antiquity and in its later acceptance into Abrahamic faiths.
Platonism acknowledged that this transcendent existence must be anchored in Goodness itself, the perfect source of all subsequent reality, rather than just asserting the presence of a plane of being higher than the terrestrial sphere. Platonists came to understand the divine absolute – whether referred to as the One, the Good, the Beautiful, or God – not only as a theoretical construct posited at a distance, but as infinite reality itself, in which human souls participate simply by being. The infinite Good was sensed in a way that was beyond knowing, transcending finite description or conscious judgment.
Only by inward reflection, in the conviction of its deep presence to the soul, could the Good be perceived. The soul participates in the unchangeable, eternal, and transcendent as it loses the contingency of materialism and strengthens its inner experience of the Good. Platonism therefore established and nurtured a transcendental philosophical and religious culture centered on the Good or the One. This transcendentalism proved to be a valuable resource for Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers, resulting in a separate line of thinking as a result of its adoption into the Abrahamic faiths.
Christian Platonism, rather than being a strictly essentialist philosophical-theological concept, can be seen as a branch of a larger culture of transcendentalism, resurfacing in different historical periods whenever Christians sought to emphasize or restore that dimension to their theological tradition. Augustine of Hippo, arguably the most influential voice in the Christian Platonist tradition, affirmed this transcendentalist perspective in crucial teachings –often adumbrating many of the most ingenious ways in which Christian thinkers would discover not only the fulfillment but also the conversion of reason's greatest aspirations in the mystery of the Word made flesh. The genuine and imperishable prototypes of all that is live in the Word, claimed Augustine (and many other Christian Platonists throughout history).
This significant fulfillment and adaptation of Plato's ideas became the driving factor for apparently endless theological inventiveness over the years for the Christian Platonist tradition. It shows itself in works that celebrate the creation's dazzling goodness and irresistible beauty, mirroring its everlasting importance in God. It can be found in both incisive criticisms of human injustice and local xenophobic evasions of actual, more global justice. It may also be seen in the boundary-breaking claims about the genuine role of want and love in epistemic success.
In many respects, finding the Christian Platonist elements at their heart is the only way to properly appreciate the inner conceptual beauty and significance of Christianity's greatest major theological achievements. Whether this leads to a deeper knowledge or to critique and modification, neither would be conceivable without an appreciation of the Christian Platonist's position in Christian thinking history.
This article provides a comprehensive introduction of Christian Platonism. There are several reasons for Christians' reluctance to acknowledge and interact constructively with the Platonic heritage. Protestant scholarship has sought to separate what it saw as authentic biblical Christianity from what it saw as philosophical traditions' distortions since the Reformation (even if a number of Protestant thinkers continued to embrace and develop Christian Platonist perspectives; though these sometimes flourished most recognizably in more marginal, often esoteric, schools of thought, coming to be regarded uneasily in both academy and church).
With the academic influence of Adolf von Harnack and the desire for a purportedly pure and simple core of Christianity, devoid of Hellenistic influences, this inclination to downplay the importance of Platonist components in Christianity received a significant new push. Furthermore, the twentieth-century critique of Christian Platonism may provide further intellectual explanations for the scarcity of literature on the subject. Kierkegaard opposed the highly Platonized German Romantics in the nineteenth century, while Nietzsche attacked Platonic metaphysics. Heidegger formed his major ontotheological charge against the metaphysical project under the impact of both. The postmodern attack on metaphysics that followed, led by Derrida, was aimed squarely against Platonism. Likewise, twentieth-century positivism demolished metaphysics and the notion of transcendent knowledge.
The force of these tremendous critiques may be waning in today's world. The social, cultural, and ecological problems of the past century, as well as the first decades of this one, have led to a reexamination of twentieth-century assumptions, most notably in the case of secularization. Within and beyond the Christian tradition, concepts like post-secularism and re-enchantment have opened up opportunities for the rebirth of metaphysics in general, and Platonism in particular. The 'immanent frame' of contemporary cognition (obscuring any basis for reference to a transcendent reality), to use Charles Taylor's words, has suddenly become an object of critical observation and debate. The current intellectual environment implies that a thorough introduction to one of religious thought's most transcendent-oriented features is long overdue.
This volume's rigorous examination of Christian Platonism attempts to give essential insights into a major facet of Christianity's lengthy relationship with Western thinking. It is broken into three portions to do this. The first, titled 'Concepts,' is a critical and synthetic examination of Platonic topics by a variety of authors and times. It does so by introducing readers to Christian Platonism's conceptual structures. The second portion, titled 'Histories,' covers the history of Christian Platonism from antiquity to the present day, overcoming the overabundance of attention paid to its early expressions at the expense of its subsequent evolution. The third portion, 'Engagements,' focuses on a constructive series of interactions with the tradition, with the goal of demonstrating the tradition's enduring value, validity, and potential.
The architect and artist Leo von Klenze's Der Camposanto in Pisa (1858) gives an excellent chance to study the Christian Platonic tradition's multi-layered impact, both philosophically and historically. In essence, it explains what the numerous pages of this volume are attempting to explain. The Camposanto Monumentale, located on the northern outskirts of Pisa's Piazza dei Miracoli, is erected around the hallowed field that bears its name. The consecrated soil of Calvary is claimed to have been carried back to Pisa in the holds of archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi's sixty-three galleys returning from the third crusade.
Lanfranchi's reasoning reflects the Christian tradition's enthusiastic adoption of methexis metaphysics. It was believed that created reality was intertwined with divine reality, and that some elements of creation concentrated the divine presence. The sacred field was encircled by the cloister-like Camposanto edifice, with its four covered colonnades, commencing in 1278, as seen on the right of the image. The beautiful tracery of the quatrefoils that round the cloister represents creation's upward journey back to its heavenly source.
The Camposanto, together with abbot Abbé Suger's reconstruction of Saint Denis' abbey church a century and a half earlier, shows the evolution of the gothic form, which epitomizes this upward striving. A portrayal of the fresco known as the Cosmographia Teologia, estimated to have been painted by Piero di Puccio in 1390, lies in the center ground of von Klenze's work, drawing the attention slightly to the right. It represents 'God who holds the sky and the elements in his arms, or rather the entire machine [machina] of the cosmos,' according to Vasari. The heavens, angels, zodiac, and then the elements of fire, air, and ultimately earth are portrayed in a hierarchical structure, with the heavens, angels, zodiac, and then the elements of fire, air, and finally earth in the center. Two of the key contributors to the tale of Christian Platonism, Saints Augustine and Aquinas, are depicted underneath these successive emanations of God, as though sustaining the image from below and communicating heavenly reason to human comprehension.
Finally, with the two characters depicted in the right of the middle foreground, we are drawn to the perspective and presence of von Klenze himself, who witnessed the philhellenism of Neoclassicism and the Romantic revival of Platonism while living at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Von Klenze attempted to create a middle ground between the rationality of the French enlightenment and the idealism of Hellenistic classicism as court architect and then director of construction for Ludwig I of Bavaria.
Von Klenze drew inspiration from the Christian Platonic tradition he observed in his frequent trips to Italy in his writing, such as in Anweisung zur Architectur des christlichen Cultus (Instruction on the Architecture of Christian Worship, 1822), his design, such as in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and here in his painting. The mother's and child's details serve to both contrast and complete the image. Their presence contrasts sharply with the painting's quiet and structural tone, as well as the historical and philosophical layers of Christian Platonic meaning shown.
Nonetheless, they encapsulate Christian Platonism's core message, which is a concentration on the incarnational, participative, and sacramental quality of being, which draws us back to its driving power in love, rather than an intellectualizing and abstract inclination.