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Plato and Christianity
Plato's Influence on Christianity
While not arguing that Plato had a direct influence on Jesus Christ Himself, there are scholars who believe the Christian movement per se was influenced by some of the philosophies put forward by Plato.
In his scholarly article published by Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, critic K.W. Harrington points out that the Humanist movement ("humanists" adhere to "a philosophy advocating the self-fulfillment of man within the framework of Christianity") considered Christianity "to be the culmination of the Platonic philosophy." Members of the humanist movement, who included Irving Babbitt, Walter Lippmann, Robert Shafer, Norman Foerster, T.S. Eliot, among others, believed that Plato prepared future thinkers for "the deeper truth revealed through the teachings of the Christian religions." Plato's moral philosophy culminated in the theology that Christ himself advocated, according to the humanist movement, Harrington writes.
Platonic scholar Paul Shorey said that Plato's ethic "resembles that of Christianity not only in content, but, with one slight exception, in spirit. Both are...the ethics of renunciation, negativity of the will, and the turning away from the world and the pride of life." Shorey went on, saying both Platonic ethics and Christianity "are a gospel of salvation...from sin by keeping the soul unspotted from the world."
Meantime, Platonic scholar Paul Elmer More, in his book The Religion of Plato, develops the idea that at the very heart of Plato's philosophy is a "moral dualism" (there is a higher soul, the spirit, and a lower soul, the body) upon which Plato fashions ideas that link up with what was later known as Christianity. "Philosophy then may be defined to be the [higher] soul's discovery of itself, as an entity having a law and interests of its own apart from and above all this mixed and incomprehensible life of the body," More wrote (More, 48). That concept of a soul discovering itself and its worth in spiritual terms, he continued, "...is the beginning of the Platonic religion and, if not the beginning, certainly the consummation of Christianity." More even saw Christianity as "the completion of the philosophy of Plato," according to Harrington's article.
Works Cited
Harrington, K.W. "Santayana and the Humanists on Plato." Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 38.1 (1977): 66-81.
More, Paul Elmer. The Religion of Plato. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1921, p. 48.
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