Plato on Early Christianity

 (copied from 2019, to edit)
--- PLATO on early christianity:
Dean Inge, the famous professor of divinity, writes that:
“Platonism is part of the vital structure of Christian theology . . . . [If people would read Plotinus, who worked to reconcile Platonism with Scripture,] they would understand better the real continuity between the old culture and the new religion, and they might realize the utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces. The Galilean Gospel, as it proceeded from the lips of Jesus, was doubtless unaffected by Greek philosophy . . . . But [early Christianity] from its very beginning was formed by a confluence of Jewish and Hellenic religious ideas.” 
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 worldviews 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.)

Early Christians certainly used some of Plato’s ideas, such as his theory of the forms, to construct defences of Christianity against competing philosophies. Platonism was one of those philosophies that competed with Christianity in the early centuries of the church. Because of this early church fathers almost always modified Platonic ideas in light of the data of Scripture.

The big difference between Christianity and Plato is Plato’s Form of the Good as an impersonal object, instead of viewing God as personal. But this also provided Christianity with several advantages. As an example, Plato’s realm of distinct forms could all be internalized into God as His ideas, making ultimate reality much simpler. God’s personhood also means that God, unlike the Form of the Good, can act and create, and even create from nothing. This does away with the need for eternal matter, so that time, space, matter, and the forms are all ultimately dependent on God, whether as His thoughts (the forms) or His creations (space, time, and matter). It also means that Plato’s Demiurge is a superfluous concept; a poor substitute for the God who makes all things from nothing. As such, in many ways, Plato was on the right track, but the specifics of biblical theism he didn’t have access to better explain many of the things he ‘saw as through a glass darkly.'

Christianity has a long and interesting interaction with platonic ideas; sometimes fruitful, many times detrimental. But the true ideological grounds for Christianity are not to be found in Plato; they are found in the Old Testament.”

Neo-platonism
Neoplatonism became the dominant philosophical ideology of the period, offering a comprehensive understanding of the universe and the individual human being’s place in it. 

Plotinus
- school of thought (600 years after Platos death)
- Platos thought of the "one" a single entity, perfect unity, where all things good are derived (not like God, so far from consciousness that theres no way it could create). it brings about the intellect - emergence of soul. soul comes matter.
"the highest transcendent principle began to be called the One"

Thales of Miletus
(thae-lees of my-lae-tus)
- philosopher, mathematician, scientist, entrepreneur - around 600 BCE (100 years before socrates)
- Aristotle credits him as the first philosopher
- Herodotus records him as the first man to ever predict a solar eclipse before it happened
- Greece named him as one of the Seven Sages for all of his work
- religion and EVERYthing was explained by the Gods, not now, philosophy and other sciences fill in the gaps.Thales the first to try to explain phenomena through natural scientific theories

(the astrologer who fell into a well) - fables about thales
- wanted to explain the natural world through laws not of religion - beginning philosophy and science