A reader writes,
I'm re-reading Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius does have a foot in Athens and one in Jerusalem, it seems to me. Now you sir are a Christian, and argue your positions in a blog subtitled Footnotes to Plato . . . . Would it be fair to refer to you, as I would to Boethius, as a Christian Platonist?
As for whether I am a Platonist, all of us who uphold the Western (Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman) tradition are Platonists broadly construed if Alfred North Whitehead is right in his observation that:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)
So in that general sense I am a Platonist. And I also like the modesty conveyed by "footnotes to Plato." Some say the whole of philosophy is a battle between Plato and Aristotle. That is not bad as simplifications go, and if you forced me to choose, I would throw in my lot with Plato and the Platonists. So that is a more specific sense in which I provide "footnotes to Plato."
As for Platonism and Christianity, you could refer to me fairly as a Christian Platonist. But what does that come to?
Part of what it means for me is that a de-Hellenized Christianity is of no interest. Christianity is a type of monotheism. The monotheistic claim, however. is not merely that there is one god as opposed to many gods. Monotheism as I see it overturns the entire pantheon; it does not reduce its membership to one god, the tribal god of the Jews. Monotheism does of course imply that there is exactly one God, but it also implies that God is the One, and that therefore God is unique, and indeed uniquely unique. To understand that you will have to follow the link and study the entry to which it leads. Now if God is uniquely unique, then God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. He is not an ens among entia, but esse: ipsum esse subsistens. Gott ist kein Seiendes, sondern das Sein selbst.
We are now well up into the Platonic stratosphere. Jerusalem needs Athens if theism is not to degenerate into a tribal mythology. (That Athens needs Jerusalem is also true, but not my present theme.)
I don't believe I am saying anything different from what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) says in his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004, orig. publ. in German in 1968). Here is one relevant quotation among several:
The Christian faith opted, we have seen, against the gods of the various religions and in favor of the God of the philosophers, that is, against the myth of custom and in favor of the truth of Being itself and nothing else. (142)
Writing of the unity of belief and thought, Ratzinger tells us that
. . . the Fathers of the Church believed that they had discovered here the deepest unity between philosophy and faith, Plato and Moses, the Greek mind and the biblical mind. (118)
Plato and Moses! The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are one and the same.
The problematic is rich and many-sided. More later.