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

by Louis Markos

Publisher:

IVP Academic

, 2021

Overview

What does Plato have to do with the Christian faith?

Quite a bit, it turns out. In ways that might surprise us, Christians throughout the history of the church and even today have inherited aspects of the ancient Greek philosophy of Plato, who was both Socrates’s student and Aristotle’s teacher.

To help us understand the influence of Platonic thought on the Christian faith, Louis Markos offers careful readings of some of Plato’s best-known texts and then traces the ways that his work shaped the faith of some of Christianity’s most beloved theologians, including Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Dante, and C. S. Lewis.

With Markos’ guidance, readers can ascend to a true understanding of Plato’s influence on the faith.

Key Features

• Examines Plato’s influence on the faith
• Offers careful readings of some of Plato’s best-known texts
• Traces the ways that his work shaped the faith of some of Christianity’s most beloved theologians

Contents

• Preface
• A Note on Translation

Part I: Plato’s Pre-Christian Vision

• Socrates, the Sophists, and the Presocratics
• The Republic
• The Myths
• The Laws
• The Timaeus

Part II: Plato’s Christian Legacy

• The Rising Path
• Origen’s Musings
• Plato in the East: Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Palamas
• Plato in the West: Augustine, Boethius, and Dante
• From Renaissance to Romanticism: Erasmus, Descartes, and Coleridge
• C. S. Lewis’s Christian Platonism

• Conclusion: Plato the Sub-Creator

Top Highlights

“Though Plato’s solution would fuel some of the Gnostic heresies of the early church, it would also help orthodox Christian theologians to understand the true nature of earth and heaven, of time and eternity, and of spiritual growth. Indeed, his solution reads like a pre-Christian commentary on 2 Corinthians 4:18: ‘For the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.’” (Page 15)

“I often assure my students that if they will just concentrate harder and focus their minds more firmly that the meaning of what they are reading will emerge and become clear to them. What I am telling them, in effect, is that the knowledge they are seeking is already there, hidden and embedded in the work they are studying. If they can only strip away what is preventing them from seeing it, the knowledge will be released, and they will reap the fruits of their labor.” (Pages 4–5)

“With the skill of a master painter and the precision of a master stonemason, Plato built a glorious palace of philosophy, but he could only do so because his teacher, Socrates, had done the hard work of preparing the walls and floors. Philosophy, as Plato practiced it, meant a search after Wisdom: not after those thousand-and-one little systems that compete for supremacy in the marketplace of ideas, nor those relativistic, man-made opinions that masquerade as divinely revealed standards, but that one and eternal Truth that transcends our ever-shifting world, that abides and endures.” (Page 4)

“Parmenides, who held, counterintuitively, that the universe is fixed and static and reality is one and unchanging. In the language of philosophy, Heraclitus’s position is referred to as pluralism, for it holds that the cosmos is composed of many different substances that are in motion. Parmenides, on the other hand, was a monist: the universe, he believed, is composed of a single uniform substance that does not move or change.” (Page 13)

Product Details

• Title: From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith
• Author: Louis Markos
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2021
• Logos Release Date: 2021
• Pages: 234
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Plato › Influence; Christianity › Philosophy--History; Theology
• ISBNs: 9780830853052, 9780830853045, 0830853057, 0830853049
• Resource ID: LLS:PLTCHRSTCHRSFTH
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T02:15:49Z

About Louis Markos

Louis Markos is professor of English and Honors, and scholar-in-residence at Houston Baptist University, where he holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan.