Reconciling with Plato

One of the interesting findings of Patrick Fletcher’s Resurrection Realism, a study of Ratzinger’s Augustinian views on the resurrection, has to do with Ratzinger’s changing views of Platonism.

Early on, Ratzinger saw Platonism as an enemy of Christian faith. He attempted to construct a “de-Platonized” eschatology that did not rely, as much traditional eschatology did, on the Greek notion of the immortal soul. It’s not as if the soul is immortal; Christian faith affirms resurrection not the power of soul-substance (74-5). 

Greek thought, he argued, taught an illegitimate dualism: “Viewing man as a being composed of body and soul,” Ratzinger wrote, “and believing in an ongoing survival of the soul between the death of the body and its resurrection . . . would be a fall from the biblical idea of creation into Greek dualism, which splits the world into spirit and matter” (quoted, 77).

In his 1977 Eschatologie, by contrast, Ratzinger argues, in Fletcher’s summary, that “Plato’s own teachings were often different from the dualistic doctrines popularly attributed to him. . . . while Plato made use of the Orphic tradition, he ‘philosophically refashioned this religious tradition and related it to his fundamental theme, justice’” (77-8). He added, “The true target of Plato’s thought is completely misunderstood when he is classified as an individualistic, dualistic thinker who negates the earthly and counsels a flight into the hereafter. The particular point upon which his thought is built is in reality the rejuvenation of the polis, establishing politics anew. His philosopher, which revolves around justice, develops in political crisis and out of the awareness that the polis cannot endure if justice is not reality and truth” (quoted, 78). He came to see that the uses of terms “body” and “soul,” and the notion of an intermediate state were not Hellenistic but “was a thoroughly proper development of the guidelines of biblical anthropology” (quoted, 80).

There is some shift in the substance of Ratzinger’s eschatology here, but perhaps the more important shift is in his understanding of Plato. Plato is not an enemy of Christian faith, he concludes, because Plato doesn’t denigrate the body or teach a dualism that treats matter as an evil to be escaped. Whether he’s right about Plato is debatable and debated; but throughout the development, Ratzinger remains (rightly) hostile to dualism and hostility to God’s good matter.