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Plato's Influence
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Ancient Philosophical Influences on Christianity: Plato
In this course, Professor Lewis Ayres (University of Durham) explores Plato’s Influence on the Philosophy of Religion and Christianity. In the first module, we consider the idea of influence, and the context of Plato’s life and work. In the second module, we explore some of the major themes in Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus. In the third module, we look at Plato’s reflections on the forms, and their significance to his philosophical worldview. In the fourth module, we examine the reception of Plato’s work in Judeo-Christian thought, and the relationship between Platonic and religious traditions.
Plato's Influence
In this module, we explore the notion of influence and Plato as a figure, focusing in particular on (i) the conquest of Alexander the Great, and spread of Greek influence across the empire (ii) Plato’s influence on Hellenistic Judaism (iii) the influence of Socrates in Plato's life and work (iv) the significance of Plato’s use of dialogue (v) allegory and myth in Plato.
My name is Luis, says
00:00:06I'm professor of Catholic and historical theology at the University of Durham.
00:00:07In this first lecture on Plato's influence,
00:00:13I want to begin by talking a little bit about the concept of influence.
00:00:15And then I'm going to talk about Plato himself.
00:00:20Sometimes we think about influence,
00:00:24as if one writer
00:00:27sits down in a nice, quiet library
00:00:29and reads a book by another writer
00:00:32and says, Ha, ha,
00:00:34that's a really helpful idea. I will copy it into my own
00:00:36writing,
00:00:40and
00:00:42sometimes that does occur, and sometimes in the ancient world that occurred.
00:00:42But there are other kinds of influence,
00:00:47and one of the most important ways of understanding
00:00:50Plato's influence
00:00:54is to think about the time
00:00:55between Plato himself
00:00:58and the rise of Christianity
00:01:00in order to understand the sort of influence that Plato had.
00:01:03You need to know about one key figure between Plato's time
00:01:06and the rise of Christianity,
00:01:10and that figure is Alexander the Great.
00:01:12Alexander was the king of Macedon
00:01:15to the north of Greece,
00:01:17and in the three thirties BC, he conquered the whole of the Persian Empire,
00:01:19which covered what we think of as the middle east
00:01:25all the way east as far as Afghanistan.
00:01:28At the same time, Alexander conquered conquered Egypt,
00:01:33even though Alexander then died fairly young,
00:01:38the empire and eventually empires that he left behind
00:01:42spread Greek influence both Greek language
00:01:45and Greek culture throughout those regions.
00:01:49One of the most important cities
00:01:52in the eastern Mediterranean at the time was Alexandria, which was in Egypt.
00:01:55Alexandria was a huge city with a significant Jewish population,
00:02:01and over the centuries, which followed
00:02:06Greek influence shaped much Jewish culture in the region.
00:02:09Scholars have come to speak about Hellenistic Judaism
00:02:14to describe the phenomenon of a Judaism deeply influenced by
00:02:18Hellenism by the philosophy and culture of the Greek world.
00:02:22In that context, Plato was a very influential figure
00:02:27in some cases because Jews had read Plato in
00:02:31other cases because they had absorbed passages from Plato,
00:02:34ideas from Plato, even simple bits of vocabulary and concepts from Plato that were,
00:02:38as scholars say, just in the air.
00:02:45So the influence that Plato had on Jews,
00:02:49and then on Christians was often of a very piecemeal kind.
00:02:52A Jewish or Christian writer who had never actually sat down and studied Plato might
00:02:56be very influenced by him
00:03:02if
00:03:05he took on board
00:03:05concepts from Plato that he might have learned
00:03:07from other Jews or from other Christians.
00:03:09So the influence of Plato is very diverse, often piecemeal,
00:03:12and doesn't necessarily depend on directly reading Plato.
00:03:16Now, having said all of that,
00:03:21we need to go back to the figure of Plato himself and get a sense of who he was
00:03:23and
00:03:28what he wrote.
00:03:29Plato lived probably between the years 4 28
00:03:32and 3 48 BC.
00:03:36He lived around 80 years, which was, for his time, a long life.
00:03:39He lived a very rich life,
00:03:44but Plato was a philosopher who was also
00:03:47deeply involved with someone of an earlier generation
00:03:50called Socrates.
00:03:53Socrates had been executed by the Athenians for quote
00:03:56unquote corrupting the youth in the year 3 99
00:04:00and he was a philosophical figure who was of immense influence to Plato himself.
00:04:04He occurs as
00:04:10the main figure in a lot of Plato's writings,
00:04:11and often when Socrates says something in Plato's writings,
00:04:15we don't really know whether what is being expressed at the opinions of
00:04:20Socrates himself or whether Plato is putting his own views into Socrates his mouth
00:04:24Scholars are divided,
00:04:30and it's not clear how.
00:04:31It's not clear whether a consistent
00:04:33interpretation a consistent answer to that question
00:04:35is actually possible.
00:04:38Already, I've given you a clue about the character of Plato's writings.
00:04:40Plato's writings are mostly in the form of dialogues
00:04:45plays
00:04:51in which there are a multitude of characters who interact
00:04:52in some of the dialogues.
00:04:56One character speaks at great length, and the others just say Yes,
00:04:57yes and tell us some more.
00:05:02But some of the dialogues are very,
00:05:05very interactive and different opinions are expressed
00:05:07and explored.
00:05:10And one of the first questions you need to ask yourself is why
00:05:12Plato wrote in dialogue form.
00:05:15No clear answer is possible,
00:05:18but it's pretty clear that Plato's intended
00:05:21readers are not simply specialist philosophers.
00:05:24He's trying to reach a more literary audience of the elite
00:05:28in the Athens of his time and in the Greece of his time.
00:05:32He wants people to engage with the process of thinking
00:05:35that really preoccupies him,
00:05:40and so he sets out as much a process of thinking
00:05:42as he does a series of doctrines
00:05:46in dialogue form
00:05:48you. The reader can then engage with that dialogue and take it forward
00:05:50yourself.
00:05:55So
00:05:56dialogue tells us something really important
00:05:57about the character of Plato's philosophy.
00:06:00He's not simply telling you what he thinks and persuading you of it.
00:06:03He's encouraging you
00:06:07into a particular form of investigation and discussion.
00:06:09At the same time,
00:06:14the dialogues are quite complicated to read
00:06:16their written in very elegant, very clear Greek in some ways,
00:06:19and when you watch his characters argue amongst themselves,
00:06:23they do it with real precision.
00:06:28But then, in some dialogues and some of the most important dialogues,
00:06:30there are long
00:06:34sections of allegory
00:06:36and myth.
00:06:38An allegory
00:06:40is where Plato sets out a description of events
00:06:41and then often says.
00:06:46But of course I'm not talking about those events as if they were real.
00:06:47I'm using them to make a point.
00:06:51So the allegory of the cave with which you will be familiar is one of the most famous.
00:06:53Myth is a much more complicated genre.
00:07:00When we say that something is a myth, we often mean it's not true. It's just a story.
00:07:04Myth is a far more complicated genre for Plato.
00:07:10Plato lived in a world in which mythical
00:07:15stories were a traditional way of conveying truths.
00:07:18So
00:07:24Plato is in part
00:07:25taking onboard
00:07:27what was a significant cultural form in his odour in his own day,
00:07:28trying to convey truths
00:07:33through plausible myths.
00:07:35And he himself divides myths up into those which are false and are just stories
00:07:38and those which are storage, which contain all sorts of plausible opinions.
00:07:43Myths aren't necessarily just decode herbal
00:07:48into five simple truths, say,
00:07:52but they are vehicles of truth for Plato,
00:07:54and often he uses the mythical
00:07:57so that
00:08:00you will be invited to think with him
00:08:01and invited once again into the process of exploring possibilities
00:08:05that sees that he has laid out for you.
00:08:09But you won't have the easy recourse of simply saying This
00:08:12is what Plato thought.
00:08:17And so Plato is a thinker who's very deep thinker
00:08:19who writes in genres that are not easily familiar.
00:08:23Very unlike most modern philosophers,
00:08:26and
00:08:29in many ways Plato is a thinker who has things to convey to you.
00:08:30But above all, he wants to convey to you a method of thinking, a call to thinking
00:08:35and so simply trying to trying to decode Plato into a series of propositions
00:08:41is a very problematic affair, although to some extent we all want to do it
00:08:48
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ayres, L. (2022, July 12). Ancient Philosophical Influences on Christianity: Plato - Plato's Influence [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/ancient-philosophical-influences-plato
MLA style
Ayres, L. "Ancient Philosophical Influences on Christianity: Plato – Plato's Influence." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 12 Jul 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/ancient-philosophical-influences-plato