God Is More Real than Anything Else: The Essence and Enduring Value of Christian Platonism
How we conceive of the nature of reality shapes virtually everything we think, say, and do. The Christian understanding of reality is primarily informed by the Bible. In the pages of Scripture, we learn that there is a God and that He exists in three persons. This triune God created the world and revealed Himself to men. Man was created in a state of innocence and righteousness, but he fell from this state and required a rescue that only God could provide. Accordingly, out of sheer love and mercy, God undertook a great work to redeem mankind. God the Son became incarnate and died to expiate the sins of the entire world. In light of this work, we are to trust God’s promises, share the message of His salvation, and perform acts of service. In the future He will raise the dead, put a final end to evil, and renew creation. The ultimate purpose of human life, both now and forever, is to know, love, and glorify God. These are all extraordinary truths of great significance. To know them and take them to heart is to be wise.
The Bible is not the only source of knowledge about reality, however. We can also study and contemplate the universe and our place in it. We can learn important truths about God and ourselves by examining God’s other book—the tome of creation or nature. Within this book of creation God has provided a natural revelation to confirm and supplement his word to us in the Bible. Natural revelation in fact provides an important basis and context for interpreting Scripture. Just as redemption presupposes creation, so special revelation presupposes natural revelation. If we neglect to contemplate the book of creation, and eschew the study of logic, metaphysics, history, languages, literature, ethics, and other topics, we will be hindered in understanding the book of Scripture.
This view of the relationship of these two books does not mean that the book of creation and the knowledge gleaned from it are more authoritative than the Bible. Nor does it mean that the book of creation informs us of truths we need to believe to be saved. Nor does it mean that the Bible has nothing to add or improve regarding our understanding of creation. All it really means is that the book of creation provides useful knowledge for understanding and interpreting the Bible. Our understanding of scriptural truths, in other words, will be enhanced if we approach the Bible with relevant knowledge of God’s natural revelation.
If the book of creation is helpful in interpreting the Bible, an important question is where should we look for the best interpretation of the book of creation? Outside of Scripture, I believe the best answer is the Christian Platonist tradition.[i] Christian Platonism is an ancient outlook that affirms that the Greek philosopher Plato and his followers grasped several important truths about the book of creation. It holds that these philosophical discoveries are consonant with the book of Scripture and can even be of use in interpreting Scripture. It also maintains that Scripture sometimes confirms and aids in understanding these truths. Since the book of Scripture sheds light on the book of creation, it is reasonable to think that Plato’s philosophical teachings would have been even more cogent if he had been able to study the Bible. We indeed see the benefits of scriptural knowledge in the writings of later Christian Platonists. But even without knowledge of Scripture, the Greek philosopher uncovered important verities about reality, and many of his teachings are consistent with Scripture.[ii] Augustine asserts in his City of God that “none of the other philosophers has come so close to us as the Platonists have.”[iii]
Some Christians, of course, resist the idea that any pagan or unbeliever can teach us important truths about creation. They deny that philosophical ideas should have a role in a truly Christian perspective on reality. But the truth is that we all constantly employ and benefit from natural knowledge that had its origin in the minds of unbelievers. How many important cultural, political, technological, and medical advances have been pioneered by unbelievers or nominal Christians? To find value in such things and yet to denounce Platonism simply because it originated with a Greek pagan who never had access to the Bible is to be inconsistent.
It’s also true that Christian Platonism has had a long and impressive history in the church. Any claim that Platonism and biblical Christianity are antithetical is discredited by the the lives and writings of many eminent saints. Most ancient fathers of the church were Christian Platonists in some sense or other, including Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and the aforementioned Augustine.[iv] It was a popular outlook during the patristic era because it resonated with Scripture, helped to commend the faith to educated pagans, and bore good theological fruit. Combining the insights of the Platonic tradition with the truths of Scripture enabled the church to develop a comprehensive and inspiring vision of reality that was both defensible and attractive. Although Platonism finds little favor with most philosophers and intellectuals in our time, this has much more to do with the anti-Christian and naturalistic spirit of our age than it does with the merits of a Platonic outlook. Platonism enabled a intellectually robust view of reality in the ancient church, and it can still do the same today.
What are the key features of this outlook? At the heart of it is the idea that reality exists in a hierarchical structure. It is not the case simply that some beings have more power or ability than others, but that some beings have more being than others. Some beings exist more truly and perfectly than others. At the very top of this hierarchy is God, the first cause and final end of all things. God’s ontological perfection ensures that He is more real than anything else, so real, in fact, that relative to Him the being of everything else is more like non-existence than existence. Although modern people tend to think that sensible or material things have the best claim to being real, the Christian Platonist insists that this is to get things backwards. Sensible things are actually much less real than God. They certainly exist, but only in a derivative and very limited way. They are glimmers of light; God is the eternal sun.[v]
In between God and sensible things are immaterial realities like angels and human souls. Spiritual things always have more being that material things because material things are more marked by imperfections such as transience, finitude, and inactivity. This not to say that material things are evil or without value. Although some pagan Platonists have asserted such things, Christian Platonism has always recognized the error in such beliefs. Sensible things are divine creatures, gifts from God, and instruments of His salvation. We must give thanks for them and steward them carefully. However, there is nothing wrong in holding that they are ontologically inferior to incorporeal realities. It is the human soul that lends dignity to the matter of the human body, not the other way around. To affirm the superiority of the immaterial is simply to acknowledge the truth of what St. Paul says in 2 Cor. 4:18: “we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal” (NKJV).
Christian Platonists also affirm that God possesses certain attributes and must have them if He is to be the Creator of all things. At the top of the hierarchy of existence must be a simple, independent, necessary, eternal, immutable, and infinite reality. It must be an existence that can rightly be named I Am (Ex. 3:14). Only such a reality, completely self-sufficient and unconditioned by time and change, can account for all composite, dependent, contingent, temporal, mutable and limited things. This perspective on God is typically called classical theism, and it is essential to a Christian-Platonic outlook.
God’s simplicity consists in His being without parts. God exists in an incomprehensible unity and cannot gain or lose qualities. His attributes, moreover, are not distinct aspects of His being but various concepts used by us to characterize the undivided and ineffable plenitude of His being. Independence is God’s having His existence through Himself and being totally free of any need. Necessity refers to the fact that He must exist and could not begin or cease to exist. His eternity is His transcendence of time. God possesses His entire life simultaneously and sees all of created time at once. For Him there is no past or future. Immutability is His absolute resistance to change. Nothing can affect God, nothing can alter God, nothing can make a difference in God. Infinity is God’s being without limits of any kind. In no way can God be said to be bound. He never is exceeded by anything and never fails to be perfectly all that He is.[vi]
These attributes are sometimes criticized because it is thought they have little to do with the biblical portrait of God. Some also claim they are difficult or even impossible to reconcile with human freedom. In response it must be said that the Bible clearly teaches that God is very different from His creatures. While there is anthropomorphic imagery used of God in the Bible, there are also strong contrasts drawn between God and creatures. It makes much more sense to take the former in a figurative sense than the latter, because only the statements which contrast God with his creatures are compatible with an intelligible account of reality. A God truly marked by human limitations would be a dependent God, and as such He could not be the self-sufficient Creator of all things. With respect to human freedom, it can be acknowledged that it is mysterious how freedom can obtain if God is necessary, eternal, and immutable. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to affirm both that humans do have freedom in some cases and that God has these attributes. If it is difficult for us to see how these can be reconciled, we can attribute this to our own substantial limitations as knowers.
Christian Platonists also affirm that there are universals, and that these universals have their home or foundation in God’s timeless self-knowledge. A universal is an essence or nature that is shared and exemplified by all particular things of a given kind. All human beings, for example, share a human nature that makes them human and accounts for what they have in common. The ultimate source of all natures is the divine intellect. In God, there is a perfect and eternal idea of everything that is possible. These ideas form an intelligible world that eternally subsists in the divine Logos. They represent different ways in which things can receive being from God and thus in some very imperfect way imitate Him. It must be understood that God’s ideas are not distinct from God Himself—He knows them in and through knowing the simple unity that He Himself is. Although they are infinite in number, He knows them at once and as one. These divine ideas provide the eternal standards which measure all truth claims. To know the truth about anything, one must have knowledge of timeless truths in the divine intellect, and thus one must have some knowledge of God Himself.[vii]
God’s knowledge of universals is the ground of order in creation. All created realities are structured according to these uncreated patterns in the divine intellect. The divine ideas furnish the blueprints that created realities are made to conform to. The universe everywhere evinces design and regularity, and everything we witness testifies to the unlimited understanding and love for order of the matchless Architect who made it. When we generalize and discover abstract features of things, we are approximating in our minds these ideas in the divine intellect. All the great students of the universe, whether believers or not, have in some way been engaged in tracing the patterns found in the divine mind and expressed in the divine handiwork.
Creatures receive their intelligibility from God when He grants them the gift of being. Christian Platonists teach that all created things have their limited being due to their participation in His unlimited being. To say that creatures participate in God does not mean that they are parts of God or divine beings themselves. Creation is out of nothing (ex nihilo), not out of God (ex Deo). It would be impossible for God to share His being with any creature, given the divine attributes we have discussed. Consequently, there can be no ontological identity between God and creatures. Participation is essential to creaturely existence, but the relation it highlights consists of dependence not oneness. In fact, participation underscores the great difference between God and creatures because it indicates that creatures exist in a state of absolute receptivity. Their existence is wholly derivative and gratuitous, while His existence has its foundation solely within Himself. Creatures can truly be said to be reflections of God’s being, but only because they exist through His causal power and instantiate His ideas.[viii]
Participation is key to understanding creaturely existence, but it also extends to other properties of creatures, such as their truth, goodness, and beauty. All creatures are true to the extent that they conform to God’s eternal patterns. Human beings, for example, are true to the extent that they conform to the divine idea of what a human being ought to be. Only one man, of course, has done this perfectly—Christ the Mediator. But all men do it to some degree by virtue of their nature. Creatures are good to the extent they imitate the matchless generosity of God. God constantly fills the universe with a ceaseless outpouring of gifts, and creatures are good to the extent that they mirror this activity in offering blessings of love and beneficence to those around them. Beauty is found in creatures to the extent that they bring glory to God and thereby offer a finite reflection of his glory. They can do this in many ways, but all are conducive to the adoration of God. True beauty always presents itself as an invitation to worship.
No matter how true, good, and beautiful, finite things are, however, they cannot satisfy the hearts of men. Christian Platonists believe that human hearts are created by God with an inborn desire for infinite truth, goodness, and beauty. Man longs for truth that is all-encompassing, for goodness that is boundless, for beauty that is absolute and unqualified. As St. Augustine famously writes in his Confessions, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”[ix] God implants this yearning in our souls so that our hearts will always be oriented towards Him like a compass pointing north. As long as we wander through this world, we find ourselves longing for more than earthly things can provide. Sadly, pride, impatience and unbelief often lead us to make finite things our ultimate ends, but this hunger and thirst can only be fully satisfied by the beatific vision—in our having an immediate and intimate knowledge of God in all His perfection.
God and God alone is our true and lasting happiness. For Christian Platonists, it makes no sense to believe in God for the sake of going to heaven, as if God were a means to some enjoyment that might be experienced apart from God. On the contrary, God Himself is the source and fount of all joy. He is the centerpiece of heaven, and nothing compares to Him. To be wise is to believe in God for the sake of God Himself, because God promises to give Himself to all who believe and in Him every need and legitimate desire of human hearts is fully and conclusively met. Since He is our highest good, everything must be assessed and measured by how conducive it is to bringing us closer to Him. Since He is our ultimate destination, all else of true value must be either a means or a companion on the way to Him.[x]
God is the goal, and what is good for us is what leads us to Him and makes us like Him. In the ancient world, pagans and Christians both understood that growing in likeness to the divine is how we are perfected. Needless to say, Christians differed from pagans in how they understood God and where they looked for knowledge of Him, but it was commonly accepted by all that human well-being is intrinsically connected to godliness.[xi] This is a truth that can be gathered from the book of creation.
Of course, Christians affirm on the basis of the book of Scripture that godliness is always a divine gift. We are not justified by anything but faith in God’s Son, and our consequent spiritual growth is made possible solely by the Means of Grace. Moreover, Scripture reveals that our growth consists in imitating the Son through maturation in fidelity, wisdom, and virtue. Christ is always first and foremost our Redeemer, but He is also our example, and our flourishing in this life and the next depends on our becoming like Him (Eph. 5:1-2, 1 John 2:6). God calls every Christian to be a representative of Christ to those around us (2 Cor. 5:20). As C.S. Lewis put it, “every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”[xii] Answering this vocation is difficult because of our flesh, but it is for our own good and is a task to be embraced wholeheartedly. It is in and through the imitatio Christi that we become “partakers in the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).
As the foregoing hopefully makes clear, Christian Platonism is not something strange or foreign to mainstream, Catholic Christianity. It rather is Catholic Christianity, or at least an important aspect of it. It is a classic view on Christian truth that recognizes that in some areas, Platonic philosophy and orthodox Christian theology maintain a significant harmony. This should not be a surprising or scandalous claim; it is what one might expect given that God has granted us a knowledge of Himself and His Law in the book of creation as well as in the book of Scripture. If creation does bear witness to divine truth, then some philosophy would come nearer than others to capturing that truth. Christian Platonism is simply the view that the Platonic tradition is that philosophy.
Granting that Christian Platonism is a legitimate outlook with an exceptional historical lineage, one might wonder if it is still relevant for the church today. Why should anyone call themselves a Christian Platonist in the twenty-first century? In response, it can be noted that a significant consequence of the accord between Christianity and the Platonic tradition is that both tend to wax and wane together. A culture inimical to Platonism will be inimical to Christianity, while a culture that is receptive to the truths of Platonism will be more hospitable to Christianity.[xiii] Platonism and Christianity are natural allies. Thus, the promotion of Christian Platonism is not simply an effort to advocate for a specific view on how philosophy should be related to theology, nor is it to argue for the repristination of an outmoded worldview. It is rather a movement to promote the ongoing health and vitality of the Christian faith in all of its dimensions through highlighting the truths of the book of creation captured by the Platonic tradition. God’s ontological uniqueness and superiority, creation’s dependence on and participation in Him, and man’s fulfillment in knowing and becoming like Him are truths of the highest importance. In adhering to this august tradition, we do no more than devote ourselves to promoting and serving these venerable truths.[xiv]
[i] Broadly conceived, the Christian Platonist tradition can include philosophers often thought as being Aristotelian, such as Thomas Aquinas. For a defense of the thesis that Aristotle can be considered a Platonist, see Lloyd P. Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists (Cornell University Press, 2005).
[ii] In the ancient church, it was often held that Plato was influenced by the teachings of the Old Testament, particularly the books of Moses. Christians thought this to be true because they saw similarities between biblical and Platonic doctrine. However, there is no real evidence that supports the contention that Plato borrowed from Moses.
[iii] Augustine, City of God, Book VIII, chap. 5. In this same work, Augustine also writes the following: “Perhaps this may be said of the best disciples of Plato—of those who followed most closely and understood most clearly the teachings of a master rightly esteemed above all other pagan philosophers—that they have perceived, at least, these truths about God: that in Him is to be found the cause of all being, the reason of all thinking, the rule of all living." Ibid., Book VIII, chap. 4.
[iv] For a history of Christian Platonism, see Alexander J.B. Thompson and John Peter Kenney, eds., Christian Platonism: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2021). For further discussion of the relationship of Christianity to Platonism, see Louis Markos, From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith (IVP, 2021) and Paul Tyson, Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times (Cascade Books, 2014).
[v] Some Platonists assert that God or the first principle so transcends all beings that He is “beyond being.” This is the language of Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Christian Platonists in the Dionysian tradition. My own preference is for the Augustinian tradition’s view that God is being itself or being without qualification.
[vi] For an accessible study of the classical divine attributes, see Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Baker Books, 2019).
[vii] For a thorough discussion of the role of divine ideas in medieval thought, see Carl A. Vater, God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham (The Catholic University of America Press, 2022).
[viii] For an excellent overview of the significance and applicability of the concept of participation, see Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
[ix] Augustine, Confessions, Book I.
[x] For more on how God alone is our ultimate end and all else should serve this end, see Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I.
[xi] Plato discusses the importance of becoming like God in his dialogue Theaetetus.
[xii] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Touchstone Books, 1996) 154.
[xiii] Nietzsche captured an important element of truth when he said in Beyond Good and Evil that Christianity is “Platonism for the masses.”
[xiv] I wish to thank Eric Phillips for helpful comments on a draft of this article.
Nathan Greeley is the managing editor of The Conservative Reformer.