More on Plato

A few posts back I said I'd post some more details of CS Lewis' comments that Plato could have been a believer.  Before I do that, though, I want to point out another option.  Contrary to what Lewis said, it very well could be that God used people like Plato to demonstrate that truth is ultimately something that comes from God, and man cannot get there through his own powers.  Taking the pursuit of truth as far as humanly possible is not far enough.  As insightful as Plato might have been, it could be that God just used him the same way he used Roman roads to spread the gospel.  Greek ideas contributed to the theology of the early church.  If you doubt this, just think about the Trinity.  But to take the pursuit of truth as far as humanly possible still falls short, and we find that the truth of the gospel really is "foolishness to the greeks."  

But Lewis' argument, and a similar one from Peter Kreeft, deserves another look.  Here is what Lewis said in Reflections on the Psalms, in the chapter "Nature":

"We do of course find in Plato a clear Theology of Creation in the Judaic and Christian sense; the whole universe -- the very conditions of time and space under which it exists -- are produced by the will of a perfect, timeless, unconditioned God who is above and outside all that he makes...; it is not ordinary Pagan religion."

Plato (and Socrates before him) recognized the failure of any of the Gods in the Greek Pantheon to meet the qualifications of the true God.  The gods of mythology are themselves just created beings.

In the chapter "Second Meanings" Lewis also recounts Plato's talk of "...a perfectly righteous man treated by all around him as a monster of wickedness.  We must picture him, still perfect, while he is bound, scourged, and finally impaled."  Just a coincidence?  Remember, Plato died about 350 years before Christ.

The test of whether or not Plato was really a believer is, what would he have done if he was confronted with Christ?  Would he have bowed down in worship and said, "this is what I have been talking about."  Who knows?  I do know that people continued to believe in Plato's "Demiurge" well after the time of Christ.  One of them, Galen, a Roman physician, seemed to believe in Plato's God, but didn't recognize Christ.  To my knowledge Galen never became a Christian (he died about 200 AD).   

But if Plato himself was as devoted to Truth as some people think, he very well might have recognized Christ for who he is.  The intro to the book Socrates Meets Jesus by Peter Kreeft suggests that Socrates likely would have recognized Christ.  (What one man says of Socrates another man says of Plato.  Most, if not all, of what we know of Socrates comes to us from Plato.  Socrates didn't write the way Plato did.)  Again, who knows?  But it is an interesting argument.