Did Plato have any influence on early Christianity?
The short answer seems to be yes.
First of all, let us define what is to be considered the Early Church?
There are two basic definitions is use by historians of church history. The first one being that the Early Church takes into consideration the historical era of the Christian religion up to the First Council of Nicaea in 325. The second one describes Early Christianity which contains the Apostolic Age and is followed by, and substantially overlaps with, the Patristic era.
The Apostolic Age is traditionally known as the period from the death of Jesus until the death of the last of the Twelve Apostles is called the Apostolic Age.
The Patristic Era is also known as the Era of Patrology, a branch of theological studies focused on the writings and teachings of the Church Fathers, between the 1st to 8th centuries A.D.
It is without hesitation that I will be dealing here with the Early Church of Patristic Era which also contains what is known as the Age of the Apostolic Fathers. It is within this historical time frame that the Apostolic Fathers and early Church Fathers first started making inroads into developing Christian doctrine and Christian thought or philosophy.
It is here that Plato made inroads in helping early church intellectuals to form the intellectual teams and concepts to have better intellectual understanding of christians terms that explain God, the Sacred Trinity, immortality of the human souls, etcetera and etcetera.
Not only Plato, but also Aristotle and even Plato’s master Socrates had some influences on the Early Church.
Many Platonic notions were adopted by the Christian church which understood Plato's Forms as God's thoughts (a position also known as divine conceptualism), while Neoplatonism became a major influence on Christian mysticism in the West through Saint Augustine, Doctor of the Catholic Church, who was heavily influenced by Plotinus' Enneads, and in turn were foundations for the whole of Western Christian thought. Many ideas of Plato were incorporated by the Roman Catholic Church. - Platonism
Origen, Boethius and Augustine, all were influenced to some degree by Plato works.
As regards From Plato to Christ, however, what’s important is to view the works of Plato as proto-Christian. Plato was a pagan worshiper of the Greek pantheon, but his idealism, conception of the afterlife, and the way he abstracts principles are remarkably influential in Christian thought. For the second half of the book, Markos tracts how Plato’s works have trickled into the writings of men like Augustine, Origen, Boethius, Dante, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and finally C.S. Lewis.
“Such thinkers are generally referred to as Christian humanists – or to be more accurate humanist Christians – for they yearn to draw together the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord with the mandate that Socrates and Plato learned from an inscription at the Temple of Delphi; know thyself. They acknowledge the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man while yet believing in the power of human reason and creativity to order human society through the establishment of laws, institutions, and ethical codes and the cultuvation of arts and sciences. (120)”
For some classical theologians and poets, Plato’s ideas were taken quite literally. Wordsworth and Origen both took away heterodox theological concepts from Plato such as the preexistence of the soul before birth. Other theologians like Augustine were drawn out of heterodox and heretical Christian movements because of their studying Plato. Dante dramatizes concepts like the “parable of the cave” and “the myth of Er” to philosophically set up the backdrop for his Divine Comedy and uses them to explore the Catholic afterlife by means of an internal and spiritual pilgrimage.
How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith
Plato’s influences:
If you’re interested in Christianity’s origins, there are some very good reasons to be interested in Platonism:
Plato understood the self as divided between body and soul, with the soul more closely related to goodness and truth; this made Christianity’s later soul-body division easier to understand. (Some early Christians, like Justin Martyr, even regarded the Platonists as unknowing proto-Christians, though this conclusion was later rejected.)
Plato’s theory of forms prefigured the Christian understanding of heaven as a perfect world, of which the physical realm is a mere imitation.
Both world views assume the existence of absolute truth and unchanging reality; again, Plato’s thought helped prepare people for Christianity.
Augustine, at the end of a line of influence that began with Plato and passed through Plotinus, understood logic and reasoning—disciplines concerned with absolute truth—as important complements, not enemies, of faith. That faith-reason partnership would characterize Christianity through at least Kierkegaard. (Francis Schaeffer argues that the early existentialist brought modernity past the “line of despair” by conceiving of Christianity as accessible only through a leap of faith, beyond reasoning.)
This idea—Plato as important precursor to Christianity—is far from new. Let’s look at a few other thinkers who’ve found Plato important:
Augustine
“The utterance of Plato, the most pure and bright in all philosophy, scattering the clouds of error . . .”
“I found that whatever truth I had read [in the Platonists] was [in the writings of Paul] combined with the exaltation of thy grace.”
Eusebius of Caesarea
“. . . before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it becomes conducive to piety; being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain to faith . . . . For God is the cause of all good things, but of some primarily, as of the Old and New Testaments; and of others by consequence, as philosophy. Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily . . . . For [philosophy] was a schoolmaster to bring ‘the Hellenic mind . . . to Christ.’ Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.” (Emphasis added)
The following may be of some interest to those in this subject matter:
