Augustine’s Christian Platonism Revisited

Any serious study of the history of Christianity must come to terms with the complex role that Platonism played in the development of Christian philosophy and theology. While Platonism was a formative presence in the development of early Christian thought, its influence has waxed and waned through the centuries. Recently Platonism has again become a subject of compelling interest to Christian thinkers. To help gain a perspective on this development, I propose to sketch out briefly some aspects of our contemporary intellectual climate. Then we can reflect on the tradition of Christian Platonism – its ancient origins and its continuing significance.

Secularism and the Loss of Transcendence

Augustine regarded the Platonists as allies in the struggle against materialism and skepticism. Share on XWe live amidst a society that has become increasingly secularist. Ours is a culture that often regards the world as part of an exclusively materialist universe. Belief in God has now become a contested option, and, among progressive elites, a dead one. In its place a rigidly materialist account of human reality has taken hold, one that seeks to offer a comprehensive account of reality independent of any non-material source.

There are several important aspects of this materialist outlook on reality that should be noted. First is the assertion that we live in a physical universe that is closed off from extrinsic, non-material influences. In addition, the modern self is seen as individually autonomous and enclosed in its own interiority. The idea that an immaterial God could have knowledge of our inner self is regarded as implausible and repugnant. Moreover, contemporary materialism rests upon an impersonal outlook on reality, one that privileges an ‘objective’ perspective – what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the ‘view from nowhere.’ As a result, natural science has come to be considered not only as the most prestigious form of knowledge, but as the only real knowledge worthy of the name. And any openness to a non-material reality has become just ‘magical thinking’.

This contemporary materialism is in essence nihilistic. It has no answers to the abiding questions of human existence. It can offer no account of the meaning of life, of the grounds of morality, of the nature of love, of the exercise of human self-understanding. Yet its bleak representation of human reality has frequently been obscured from view by rhapsodic depictions of nature, endorsements of ecological pantheism, predictions of a bright humanistic future, and so on. But these accounts only spread an unsupportable patina of meaning over materialism’s systemic nihilism.

Ancient Transcendentalism

It was this intellectual environment that induced some Christians, beginning in the middle of the Twentieth Century, to return to the original sources of “Christian transcendentalism,” that is, the belief in a non-material, non-temporal, and non-spatial level of reality. That was the conceptual foundation for the thought of the great Nicene thinkers – Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, etc. Their works offered a rich and detailed account of Christian orthodoxy grounded in a God whose being was entirely distinct from the physical conditions of the material universe, but who had created the world of space and time. Moreover, these ancient Christian thinkers were no strangers to materialism and skepticism. To come to terms with the ancient Christian rejection of materialism, there is no better source than St. Augustine of Hippo. He explained his struggle with the pervasive materialism of his own times in his spiritual autobiography, the Confessions. That ancient materialism had left him unable to conceive of any sort of reality that was not physical. As a result, he could find no way to think of God except as a material being, and he could find no adequate solution to the problem of evil, and no conclusive foundation for truth.

Platonism has been the most powerful form of transcendentalism in the history of Western philosophy. Share on XIt is here that Platonism enters into the story. Platonism has been the most powerful form of transcendentalism in the history of Western philosophy. In antiquity, the Platonic schools first articulated a variety of metaphysical theories based on a core commitment to levels of reality – the “great chain of being,” as it has sometimes been called. The Platonists were responsible for promulgating the revolutionary idea that there exists a higher plane of intelligible reality that is more real than the physical world. That is the world of true being, the perfect and unchanging source of the dependent beings that exist in the flux of our earthly cosmos.

As Augustine vividly recounts, it was his reading of some books of the Platonist philosophers that introduced him to the idea of a reality beyond the changing world of space and time. That recognition allowed him to conceive of God as immaterial, unchanging, and eternal, and to recognize that God was spiritually omnipresent in the world that he had created. Moreover, Augustine maintained that God had led him to read the Platonists’ books before he read the scriptures so that he could come to see the deeper spiritual meaning that they contain. By listening to St. Ambrose, the Catholic bishop of Milan, Augustine first encountered the idea of an immaterial God. Ambrose’s preaching explained the scriptures using this transcendent understanding of God, and it was his followers who recommended that Augustine read some Platonist texts that had been translated into Latin by Christians.

Once Augustine read them, he was stunned. Thereafter, he abandoned materialism and started to take orthodox Christianity seriously. But this change was not merely intellectual. Indeed, he says that God drew his soul out of the spatio-temporal world and into communion with divine Wisdom. He recounts how he saw God’s “invisible nature understood through the things that are made” (Rom. 1: 20). In a moment of deep understanding within the depth of his soul, he says he recognized that God is eternal and really real, not temporal, spatial, or material. This was, he realized, the God of Exodus 3:14, and once he had grasped that God is “I am who am,” all doubts left him. He says that it would have been easier to doubt his own existence than to doubt the transcendent being of God.

Augustine read the Platonist philosophers who introduced him to reality beyond the changing world of space and time. Now he could conceive of God as immaterial, unchanging, and eternal. Share on XAugustine’s story can help us gain an historical perspective on the enduring appeal of Platonism to orthodox Christianity. But before we reflect further on that subject, there are several important caveats that we must keep in mind. The first point is that our modern terminology does not always fit well with the ancient world. We are, for example, accustomed to differentiating philosophy from theology as separate disciplines. But that was a medieval innovation. Moreover, ancient Platonism was not just a matter of philosophical theory. Philosophy was “a way of life.” A philosophy like Platonism was a complete package, as it were, including a code of ethics, ascetical practices, meditative exercises, and even in some cases a distinctive type of dress. So, becoming a philosopher involved joining a school and converting to its prescribed pattern of life.

The upshot of this is that Augustine would never have been considered a Platonist in antiquity. He belonged to a different, rival school – the Christian school – and he was keen to present his philosophy as superior in all respects. As he said to one of his Christian opponents: “Let not the philosophy of the Gentiles be more respected than our Christian philosophy, which is the one true philosophy since its name means the desire or love of wisdom.” He ranked the Platonists above all other schools, but he also rejected their soteriology, their continued embrace of polytheism, and their ritual practices. Yet he also regarded them as allies in the struggle against materialism and skepticism, for “none come closer to us than they do.” As he stated in his City of God: “…the Platonists, with their knowledge of God, are the ones who have discovered where to locate the cause by which the universe was constituted, the light by which truth is perceived, and the fount at which happiness is imbibed.” They were the initial proponents of transcendentalism, and though they may have perceived the divine One, they had nonetheless failed to find the way for the human soul to secure eternal life. Only the school of Christ could offer that.

The Enduring Significance of Christian Platonism

If Nicene thinkers like Augustine were not considered Platonists in antiquity, why do scholars call them Christian Platonists today? The answer is, again, a matter of our modern perspective. The ancient idea of philosophy as an all-encompassing endeavor dissolved in the medieval period. As already noted, philosophy and theology came to be regarded as separate theoretical disciplines and, as a result, were categorized in purely conceptual terms. Theologies were sometimes described by historians in reference to the principal philosophy employed in their articulation. Terms like “Christian Aristotelianism,” “Christian Existentialism,” and “Christian Phenomenology” came into use. Thus, it was natural, in surveying the history of Christian thought, to describe those thinkers who were influenced by Platonism as “Christian Platonists.”

Augustine's story helps us gain an historical perspective on the enduring appeal of Platonism to orthodox Christianity. Share on XWhy has Christian Platonism been a continuing presence through the centuries, and why is there renewed interest in it today? The short answer, as should now be evident, is Platonism’s forceful assertion of transcendence. Once again, Augustine offers us a clear vantage point to grasp its enduring significance. For Augustine, the notion of transcendence involved not just the postulation of degrees of reality but also the recognition that these are correlated with levels of knowledge. Empirical knowledge of temporal things, the knowledge generated by the natural sciences, is grounded in the analysis of the physical universe. However, while its exceptional value is unquestioned, it is not the only form of knowledge. That is the mistake of contemporary materialism. It ignores the fact that the human intellect can also exercise its capacity for rational reflection, yielding non-empirical forms of understanding in logic and mathematics. The rational insight that supports theory formation in the natural sciences also sustains our capacity to recognize fundamental values in ethics and aesthetics. The intellect can also identify enduring patterns amidst the temporal flux of human life, discovering the eternal realities that sustain human experience through time – including justice, beauty, and goodness. And most importantly, the human intellect can engage in self-disclosure through its continuing exercise of self-consciousness. The intellect can, therefore, recognize the depth of its own interior life and, in doing so, discover the presence of an immutable truth deeper than the self.

God led Augustine to read the Platonists' books before he read the scriptures so that he could come to see the deeper spiritual meaning that they contain. Share on XFinally, Christian Platonism regards even this level of knowledge of intelligible reality as penultimate, for the real purpose of knowledge is not the intellect’s observation and theoretical grasp of truth but the soul’s unmediated participation in eternal being itself. Yet, to aspire to this highest level of knowledge, the human soul must be reformed through divine grace and purified by scriptural meditation and sacramental practice. The ultimate goal of Christian Platonism is, therefore, not to know about God but to come into communion with God. That is the beatific vision, something that Augustine described as having occurred to him and his mother in a fleeting moment through divine grace just before her death. That immediate union with God, that “intersection of the timeless with time,” can ordinarily be hoped for only after our earthly life has come to an end.

Christian Platonism has, therefore, offered a sharp alternative to materialism throughout its long history. Today it can once again invite us to recognize that we do not live in the interstellar coldness of a closed material universe. Neither is empirical knowledge of that perishable world the only kind there is. Nor should we accept a constitution of silence forbidding us to believe that our ethical values are valid. Christian Platonism bids us to observe the discordant harmonies within our world and then to discern the underlying intelligible patterns established by its eternal source and creator. And it lays claim to the full range of experience in our lives, directing us to raise our focus above the flux and confusion of earthly existence and to reach upwards to the eternal and perfect being of God, the only true source of happiness and peace.

Image credit: Retro Space | Paulo Marquez.