Something undeniably happened in 397BC, when the final words of the Old Testament were written, then the book closed, because what followed was a four hundred year silence from the heavens. Until God opened the new book of the New Testament and instructed the angel Gabriel to appear to Zechariah in the Temple, there had been no universally accepted Holy Scripture, prophecy or divine visitations for four centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what did happen in this four century gap was very significant. It was as if the devil had seized the moment to act, taking God\u2019s apparent leave of absence as a license to cause mischief. And, boy, did he give it some!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us focus on that year, 397BC. Malachi was the last great prophet of ancient Israel. In the meantime Artaxerxes II was ruling the mighty Persian Empire, the Romans were slowly building up their Republic, the Carthagians were suffering defeats, King An of Zhou was bossing China and, in Athens, Socrates, the first great philosopher of the modern age, was nearing the end of his controversial but influential life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this is where we go next because the spotlight in those \u201cdays of silence\u201d switches from Israel to Greece. Around that time an awful lot of very clever and capable people had appeared on the scene, people who thought long and hard about the world around them and what made it tick. These were the philosophers and although they had already been around for a couple of centuries before this time, the stage had been prepared and set for the drama to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Socrates, take your bow. Enter stage left a pug-ugly little man in flowing robes. He stands there under the glare of the lights, blinking awkwardly but unbowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Socrates, why were you so significant?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ll have to ask others. I couldn\u2019t possibly comment.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Enter stage right, Plato. Taller, younger, more dignified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll speak up for Socrates. He is my teacher, my inspiration. In fact all my early work features the man himself in dialogue with others \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Socrates bows briefly and allows Plato to speak up for him \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before my learned teacher entered the scene, we philosophers concerned ourselves with the world around us. Is the world made up of earth, air, fire and water, or are there smaller building blocks? Does mathematics govern everything? What about poetry? Socrates changed all that. What he taught us is to look within, at our moral beings, at what makes us tick \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Socrates was indeed influential, even for modern day thinkers. So key was he that all who preceded him were lumped together in a single classification, the \u201cPresocratics\u201d, the string of warm up acts, preparing the audience for the main performer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Socrates was a familiar figure in the streets of Athens. He was an effective teacher, his classrooms mainly the public spaces, his pupils taken from the rich young men of his day, with time on their hands and rebellion in their hearts. He taught them logic and the ability to reason. On the positive side one effect of this teaching was the jettisoning of the sorry, pathetic and argumentative bunch of Greek gods that had held sway for so long. Not so positive for him was that he was condemned to death by a repressive city government for \u2018corrupting the young\u2019 and, most tellingly, \u2018neglecting the gods\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plato was Socrates\u2019 disciple. He was his biographer and recorded his ideas and became, in his own right, perhaps the most influential of all Socrates\u2019 pupils. He founded a school in Akademia, a suburb of Athens, the very first \u201cacademy\u201d. There people were instructed in mathematics, geometry, law and the natural sciences, as well as philosophy. He also wrote much. Much of his early writings were expanding on the ideas of Socrates, who wrote no books himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plato never realised it, but his ideas were to become almost as influential as Jesus in the development of Western Christianity. He said a lot of stuff, wrote an awful lot of stuff, but it\u2019s his one big idea that we are going to focus on because this was to become a tiny seed that somehow got into the fertile soil of early Christianity and grew and grew until \u2026 you\u2019ll have to wait and see!<\/p>\n\n\n\n His one big idea was the Theory of Forms<\/em>. Here\u2019s the story \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n We tend to label these clever Greek thinkers as cerebral giants, masters of thought and reason and defenders of human logic. We expect them to think through all matters of the inner world of the mind and body in terms of the natural world, of just what can be seen, heard and perceived by the senses. Actually, that isn\u2019t true for this man. Plato was a man of ideas, but thought little of the world that surrounded him. He believed that there were two worlds, the obvious one that we live in and a \u201cperfect\u201d one, somewhere else in the Universe<\/em>. I suppose this would be his concept of heaven and in this heaven exists what Plato called Forms<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To understand what these are, we need to think about everything that we see around us in our world, from actual objects like chairs and diamonds, to geometric shapes like squares and triangles, to concepts like beauty and goodness. Now you must realise that, according to Plato, all of these things are just imperfect copies of perfect chairs, diamonds, squares, triangles, beauty and goodness, that exist in the other \u201cperfect\u201d world. These items of perfection are Plato\u2019s Forms<\/em>. Get your (imperfect) head around that, then!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plato also believed that whereas most of us will never get to see these Forms, some of us would. These are the guardians<\/em>, specially gifted and trained individuals, the philosophers of course! Plato explained all of this in his analogy of the cave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our lives are as prisoners deep inside a cave, where all we can see of objects are their shadows, projected on the wall by a fire. We believe that what we see is reality but we are mistaken. To see reality we have to leave the cave and see things as they really are, though most are content at just seeing the shadow shapes inside the cave.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Plato, the one who makes this step to leave the cave is the guardian, who is rewarded by viewing the \u201chigher Good\u201d, the source of all truth and reason. Here\u2019s an idea that seems vaguely Christian, so perhaps here\u2019s the first clue as to how on earth this idea managed to find a home in the early development of Christian thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This \u201chigher Good\u201d is the ultimate Form, top of the Forms, Plato\u2019s concept of God, though not the personal God as we know Him. This \u201chigher Good\u201d is what we must aspire to. This \u201chigher Good\u201d is an eternal reality that exists in a higher realm and our physical senses are just not equipped enough to see any more than a pale reflection. Plato likens this concept to the sun in two ways. Both cause things to exist and grow and both are sources of light. As it is light which enables our eyes to have a partial sight of reality, then \u201cthe higher Good\u201d enables our minds to have partial knowledge of what is real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So there is space for the concept of God, albeit an impersonal<\/em> one, in Plato\u2019s philosophy. Plato\u2019s God does not answer prayers, or comfort those in distress, or teach his people or listen to the cries of the heart. Plato\u2019s God is most assuredly not our Father in Heaven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plato believed that there are absolute standards for such things as goodness, morality and truth, each of these existing as a perfect Form in this \u201csecond\u201d world. He also believed in the eternal soul. So what\u2019s the problem with Plato? Well it all now starts to go downhill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plato believed that we are body and soul. He thought that these were totally separate entities, bound together temporarily during a person\u2019s lifetime. This was the concept Plato\u2019s Big Consequence: Soul = Good, Body = Bad<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To summarise then, in the four centuries between the closing of the Old Testament and the opening of the New Testament, God\u2019s extended \u201cGap Year\u201d, a whole flood of new ideas and new ideals was pouring out of Greece. You may now start to see the relevance of this, because these ideas and ideals were not going to just impact the world, but the Church too. In the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican is a painting by Raphael. It is known as The School of Athens<\/em> and features a whole gaggle of Greek philosophers. Clearly seen are Plato and Aristotle in conversation. Plato is pointing above to the heavens and Aristotle is pointing down to the earth. The question we need to ask is why they should be commemorated in the capital of the Roman Catholic Church?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Church as we know it today didn\u2019t just pop up out of nowhere. It is today\u2019s snapshot of a continuous historical process that started effectively when the Holy Spirit descended on that small group in Jerusalem a few weeks after the Resurrection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a body whose chief mandate is to gather people of all backgrounds and cultures into its fold, staying pure and unsullied while it focused on its received mission was always going to be an issue. Contrast this with Israel in Old Testament times. Their mandate was to stay pure and holy, by living a separate existence from the world that surrounded them. By living within a wall of regulations, the Torah<\/em> given by God to Moses, Israel was equipped to remain unsullied by the pagan nations around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet ultimately they failed, seduced by rival gods and prostituting themselves to alien lifestyles and were reprimanded by God as a result. But their failure was not a total one, thank goodness. The messianic bloodline was protected and Jesus arrived in the World as a member of the Jewish community, albeit one under foreign occupation and the salvation story was allowed to unfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The point being made here was that a nation socially engineered by God Himself to remain pure and untouched by alien ideas, fails to remain so, thanks to the basic restlessness of the human heart (rather than any fault of God\u2019s). How much more so will another group, the early Christians, whose very raison d\u2019etre is to \u201creach the World\u201d, become tainted in turn by the very people it is trying to reach?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This tainting began fairly soon after that Council in Jerusalem of Acts 15. Paul himself acknowledged that other worldviews would need to be addressed, just two Chapters later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
of the duality<\/em> of man. But, to Plato, the soul was the dominant, superior entity and it is immortal, being reborn again and again in different bodies, gaining in knowledge as it does so, like the concept of re-incarnation in Eastern religions. The soul is our seat of thought and knowledge, associated with the \u201csecond\u201d perfect world. The body interacts through the five senses with our imperfect<\/em> world and, to Plato, restricts the soul from attaining its full potential. So, in his view, the soul is good and the body is bad. Everything associated with the soul is good, everything associated with the body is bad. Fix this in your brain, it\u2019s the Big Consequence<\/em> of Plato\u2019s \u201cBig Idea\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n