Plato, Plotinus, & St. Augustine

Plato (428 B.C.E. - 348 B.C.E.) Born in circa 428 B.C.E.He died in Athens circa 348 B.C.E.

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato was a student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle.

His writings explored justice, beauty and equality, and also contained discussions in aesthetics, political philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology and the philosophy of language.

Plato founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Western world.

Plato’s metaphysics, there are two worlds;

On one hand, there is the cave, that is, the world of changing appearances: the world of sensation, ignorance, error, illusion, and darkness.

On the other hand, there is the light, that is, the world of Forms: the world of intellectual, knowledge, truth, reality, and brightness whose ultimate source of existence and essence is the Form the Good.

Plotinus (205-270)Plotinus is the great

philosopher of Neo-Platonism.

He is one of the most influential philosophers in antiquity after Plato .

He is the Greek philosopher who believed in “THE ONE.”

The ONEPlotinus further specified the Good

of Plato as god or the One, from which everything came.

For him, god is above and beyond everything else utterly transcendent.

He added, god is indefinable and indescribable, because to define or describe god would be to place limitations on what has no limits.

St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430)He was born in

Tagaste, a small town southwest of Carthage in North Africa.

He transferred Platonic and Neoplatonic themes to Christianity.

He believed that God is beyond time. In this way the timeless attribute of Plato’s Good and Plotinus’ One was transferred by Augustine to the Christian God.

Platonic TraditionPlato, Plotinus, and St. Augustine are the three greatest figures in the ancient world in the history of Platonic Tradition.

By the fourth and fifth centuries, however, the genuine teachings of Plato had been overlaid with Neo-Platonic language and Neo-Platonic conceptions.

The genius of St. Augustine consisted in combining that philosophically sophisticated Neo-Platonic tradition and much more simple, almost naïve theism of the Judaic-Christian tradition. (two traditions to which the learned Christianity of scholars and the popular Christianity of the masses respectively have tended to return).

He combined them with great skill, if not with entire success. And each of these two traditions served to benefit the other which St. Augustine associated it.

The Judaic-Christian tradition, with its firm monotheism and its reliance on the words of Jesus, saved Neo-Platonism from adsudities of theurgy, soothsaying, and superstition into which, in the later writers of the school, it was more and more drifting.

The Neo-Platonic tradition, with its rationality and its emphasis on the glory of the intellectual life, saved Christianity from the crudities of anti-intellectualism, unreasoning dogmatism, and brutal authoritarianism into which, in some of its untutored leaders, Christianity was tending to be snared.

In effecting something of a synthesis of these two great traditions, St. Augustine was enormously aided by the conception of the Church as the repository of the world’s wisdom, a conception which, however much transformed by St. Cyprian, was a legacy left to subsequent centuries by the Roman idea of empire.

Plato, Plotinus, and St. Augustine, although three interdependent figures in the history of Platonic tradition, represent three quite different forms of that tradition. Briefly and perhaps therefore somewhat inadequately expressed, the different froms are these;

Plato is the locus classicus in the history for a vision of the spiritual values which define the ideal fulfillment of man’s natural resources and powers.

Plotinus is the locus classicus in the history for the argument the in spite of the seeming multiplicity of finite existences everything has its respective status in one all-inclusive and spiritual world.

St. Augustine is the locus classicus in history for the faith that above and beyond all the changes in the live of men and nations lie the wisdom and the goodness of one spiritual power.

Spiritual values, a spiritual world, and spiritual power are not themes which excluded or necessarily contradict one another; but they are distinguishable themes. Neither are vision, argument, and faith incompatible enterprises; but they give distinguishable qualities to those whose work is primarily one rather that the others.

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prepared by: Sem. Jesus F. Berdin

The Sons of Divine Providence