Plato.
One of the most gifted of mortals was Plato. His followers believed him to be of divine descent. Concerning his parentage, Dr. Draper says: “Antiquity has often delighted to cast a halo of mythical glory around its illustrious names. The immortal works of this great philosopher seemed to entitle him to more than mortal honors. A legend into the authenticity of which we will abstain from inquiring, asserted that his mother, Perictione, a pure virgin, suffered an immaculate conception through the influence of Apollo. The god declared to Ariston, to whom she was about to be married, the parentage of the child” (Intellectual Development, Vol. I, p. 151).
Concerning this myth, McClintock and Strong’s “Cyclopedia” says: “Legend, which is traced back to Spensipus, the nephew of Plato, ascribed the paternity of Plato to the god Apollo; and, in the form in which the story is told by Olympiodorus, closely imitates the record in regard to the nativity of Christ” (Art. Plato).
Immaculate conceptions were common in Greece. “The furtive pregnancy of young women, often by a god,” says Grote, “is one of the most frequently recurring incidents in the legendary narratives of the country.” The Christian story of the miraculous conception has not even the merit of originality. With the Platonic legend before him, all that the Evangelist had to do was to substitute Jehovah for Apollo, Joseph for Ariston, Mary for Perictione, and Jesus for Plato.
The philosophy of Plato is a strange compound of profound wisdom concerning the known and of vague speculations respecting the unknown. The latter form no inconsiderable portion of the religion ascribed to Christ. The Christian religion is supposed to be of Semitic origin; but its doctrines are, many of them, the work of Greek theologians; its incarnate God bears a Greek name, and its early literature was mostly Greek. Draper recognizes three primitive modifications of Christianity: 1. Judaic Christianity; 2. Gnostic Christianity; 3. Platonic Christianity. Platonic Christianity, he says, endured and is essentially the Christianity of to-day.
The following are some of the principles of Plato’s philosophy:
There is but one God, and we ought to love and serve him.
The Word formed the world and rendered it visible.
A knowledge of the Word will make us happy.
The soul is immortal, and the dead will rise again.
There will be a final judgment; the righteous will be rewarded, and the wicked punished.
The design argument, the chief argument relied upon by Christians to prove the divine origin of the universe, is a Platonic argument.
In a letter to the author twenty-five years ago, James Parton wrote: “Read carefully over the dialogue, Phaedo. You will see what you will see: the whole Christian system and the entire dream of the contemplative monk.”
Phaedo deals chiefly with the soul—its nature and destiny. The following quotations are from the translation of Henry Cary, M.A., of Oxford:
Death is defined by Plato as “the separation of the soul from the body.”
“Can the soul, which is invisible, and which goes to another place like itself, excellent, pure, and invisible, and therefore truly called the invisible world, to the presence of a good and wise God, (whither if God will, my soul also must shortly go), can this soul of ours, I ask, being such and of such a nature, when separated from the body, be immediately dispersed and destroyed, as most men assert? Far from it.”
“If that which is immortal is imperishable, it is impossible for the soul to perish, when death approaches it.”
“When, therefore, death approaches a man, the mortal part of him, as it appears, dies, but the immortal part departs safe and uncorrupted, having withdrawn itself from death.”
After death, Plato says, the souls are conducted to a place where they “receive sentence and then proceed to Hades.”
If the soul “arrives at the place where the others are, impure, ... every one shuns it, and will neither be its fellow traveler or guide, but it wanders about oppressed with every kind of helplessness.... But the soul which has passed through life with purity and moderation, having obtained the gods for its fellow travelers and guides, settles each in the place suited to it.”
“If the soul is immortal, it requires our care not only for the present time, which we call life, but for all time; and the danger would now appear to be dreadful, if one should neglect it. For if death were a deliverance from everything, it would be a great gain for the wicked, when they die, to be delivered at the same time from the body, and from their vices together with the soul; but now, since it appears to be immortal, it can have no other refuge from evils, nor safety, except by becoming as good and wise as possible.”
Christ, it is claimed, “brought immortality to light.” Yet Phaedo was written nearly four centuries before Christ came.
McClintock and Strong’s “Cyclopedia” concedes Plato’s “near approximation to the doctrines of Christianity—some of which,” it says, “he announces almost in the language of the Apostles.” Continuing, this authority says: “We know no more terrible and sublime picture than the passage in which he depicts the dead presenting themselves for judgment in the other world, scarred and blotched and branded with the ineradicable marks of their earthly sins. Yet this is but one of many analogous passages. This approximation to revealed truth is among the most insoluble problems bequeathed to us by antiquity.... We offer no solution of the enigma, which awaits its Oedipus. We only note the existence of the riddle” (Plato).
Prof. Gunkel, of Berlin, says: “‘Christianity is a syncretistic religion. It is providential that it passed safely over from the Orient into the Greek world. It imbibed both influences, and acquired many features that were foreign to the original gospel.’”