Did Plato Have Views on Christianity? How Plato and Christian Thought Relate

Plato had no views on Christianity. He died around 348/347 BC, and Christianity began in the first century AD, roughly four centuries later. He never encountered it, and nothing he wrote refers to it. The real question behind the search is a different one: how did Plato’s philosophy shape Christian thought after the fact, and where do the two disagree? That is a matter of later reception, and it is where the evidence is.

Why did Christian writers turn to Plato?

The first Christians were mostly Jewish in background and wrote in Greek, in a culture that was already full of Greek philosophy. As the church spread through the Roman world, educated converts looked for a language in which to explain their faith to a Greek-speaking audience, and Platonism became the leading philosophical school of the later Roman period (the movement that modern historians call Middle Platonism and later Neoplatonism). Several threads are worth separating.

• Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC to AD 50), a Jewish thinker who was not a Christian, read the Hebrew scriptures with Platonic concepts. His work was later taken up by Christian writers in Alexandria, and he is part of the background to the idea that Greek and biblical ideas could be combined.
• Second-century apologists such as Justin Martyr argued that Greek philosophers, Plato among them, had grasped part of the truth. Justin, and later Clement, went further and claimed that Plato had borrowed from Moses. That was a polemical claim and not a historical fact: there is no evidence Plato knew the Hebrew scriptures.
• Clement of Alexandria and Origen (late second and third centuries) used Platonic ideas of the soul and of a spiritual reality behind the visible world in their theology.
• Neoplatonism. Plotinus (c. 204-270), a pagan, rebuilt Plato’s thought as a system centred on the One. Christian writers drew on it heavily. See what Neoplatonism is and who Plotinus was.
• Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is the best-known example. In the Confessions (VII.9) he says he read “books of the Platonists” that helped him to think of God and the soul as non-material, though he says they lacked the doctrine of the Incarnation. In the City of God (VIII.4-11) he judges the Platonists closer to Christianity than any other philosophers.

Much later, Nietzsche summed up the relationship with the jibe that Christianity is “Platonism for the people”. It is a hostile epigram and not an academic finding, but it shows how closely the two were linked in the European imagination.

Which Platonic ideas fed into Christian thought?

None of these is a Christian doctrine in Plato, and later writers adapted each one. They are the places where the overlap is most often noted.

1. A non-material reality above the visible one. Plato holds that the Forms, grasped by reason, are more real than the changing physical world (see the divided line and the cave in the Republic). Christian writers read this alongside their own teaching about God and the heavenly realm.
2. God as good and unchanging. In Republic II (379a-383c) Plato argues that the divine must be good, cannot be the cause of evil, and does not change. Later Christian theologians took similar claims as common ground against the Homeric picture of the gods.
3. The soul distinct from the body. The Phaedo (78b-84b) argues that the soul is akin to the divine and unchanging and survives bodily death. See the Phaedo summary.
4. A maker who orders the world. In the Timaeus (28a-29a) a craftsman, the Demiurge, fashions the cosmos looking to an eternal model. Christian writers compared this with the biblical creator. See the Demiurge.
5. Judgment after death. The myth of Er (Republic 614b-621d) describes rewards and punishments for souls.

Where do Plato and Christianity disagree?

Seeing the similarities as influence is easier than seeing them as agreement. Some of the differences are basic.

• Creation. In the Timaeus the Demiurge shapes pre-existing matter. Christianity teaches creation out of nothing.
• The soul’s fate. Plato holds that souls exist before birth and may be reborn (Phaedo, Republic X). Christianity teaches a single life followed by bodily resurrection, which is a different picture of the body from Plato’s, where the body is often a hindrance to the soul.
• Many gods. Plato speaks of “the gods” and keeps civic religion; Christianity is monotheist. Plato’s supreme principle, the Form of the Good, is not a personal God who acts in history.
• Salvation. For Plato the path upward is philosophical education. In Christianity it is a matter of grace, faith and the Incarnation.

Scholars argue about how Platonic early Christian theology really was, and about how much of what looks Platonic in the New Testament (for example, the opening of the Gospel of John) comes from Plato directly, as opposed to Jewish and Stoic sources or from the wider culture that the Platonists also shared. There is no simple answer.

What about medieval and later Christianity?

For much of the Latin Middle Ages only a part of Plato’s own text was known in the West (chiefly a portion of the Timaeus), and Platonism reached readers mainly through Augustine and other Latin Christian writers, and through the Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius. Aristotle came to dominate scholastic theology from the thirteenth century. In 1484 Marsilio Ficino printed his Latin translation of Plato’s complete works, and Platonism returned to Christian thought in the Renaissance. See Plato’s influence on Christian thought and why his ideas are discussed in Christian theology.

Quick answer

• Plato lived and died centuries before Christianity and had no opinion of it.
• Christian thinkers later drew on his philosophy, mainly through Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism, and Augustine is the clearest case.
• The influence is real, but so are the differences: creation, the soul’s fate, many gods versus one God, and the way of salvation.