Well of course it does one_conscience! But don’t blame Plato for never having heard of Jesus Christ, since he lived ~400 years before the coming of our Lord. Plato had no awareness of God as Personality. Until the Incarnation of Christ, God as Person was not made fully manifest to mankind. Instead, Plato was aware of God as the Beyond of the Kosmos, the Source of its life (being) and order. He sensed Him as “Mind,” as the divine Nous. And thus he reasoned that, since man also possesses nous, divine–human conversation is possible. (Many Christians would testify to this.) And because the world is divinely ordered by Nous, it is discoverable by means of human nous. (That presumption lies at the very root of modern science.)
It’s as if Plato is to be blamed for repudiating Christ — which he never got an opportunity to do since our Lord did not come until four centuries after his death.
I have noticed a decided antipathy to the great classical thinkers among many Reformed Church sects/confessions; and by extension, antipathy for the scholastic philosophical tradition of the Roman Church, as if it had claimed for itself a “new, improved revelation” to be super-added to the Holy Scriptures (it does not make that claim and never has). Your characterization of Thomas Aquinas as somehow arguing that God is co-extensive with His creation appears utterly false to me. You realize, of course, that this would be a prescription for pantheism. Saint and Doctor Thomas, Trinitarian to his roots in spirit and intellect, would never make such an egregious mistake.
Thomas — as all the great doctors of the Church, e.g., Augustine and Anselm — is on bended knee to the “aseity” of God, His a se, complete, total, eternal self-subsistence and self-completeness, needing nothing to be eternally perfect. He is Creator and sustainer of all that there is, the tetragrammatical god YHWH, “I Am That Am,” the Father of Being, “beyond” the world of created things, and inaccessible to human reason; He is the Logos of creation, the Son of God Who is the Word of God, for whom and by whom were all things made, the Alpha and the Omega; He is the Spirit of God with us, bringing us into relation with the Son and, by His sacrifice, restoring us to our Father.
As for Plato’s position on the matter,
In the Republic, the beyond is imagined as the ultimate creative ground, the Agathon, from whom all being things receive their existence, their form, and their truth; and since by its presence (pareinai) it is the origin of reality and the sunlike luminosity of its structure, the Agathon-Beyond is something more beautiful (kallion) and higher in rank (hyperechontos) of dignity and power than the reality that we symbolize by such terms as being, existence, essence, form, intelligibility, and knowledge…. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, the beyond is the truly immortal divinity from whose presence in contemplative action the Olympian gods derive their divine and men their human immortality. In the puppet myth of the Laws, finally, “the god” becomes the divine force that pulls the golden cord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the immortalizing, noetic order of is existence. In this last image of the noetic “pull” (helkein) Plato comes so close to the Helkein of the Gospel of John (6:44) that it is difficult to discern the difference. — Eric Vöegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” Collected Works Vol. 12.It seems where you see a dualism — e.g., the division of man into body and soul, and the dualism of form and matter — I see a complementarity. A complementarity is a situation where one has two seemingly mutually exclusive entities, both of which are necessary to the total description of the system which they together comprise. The fact is that, although we can conceptually separate body and soul in order to study them, a living man cannot be separated into the entities body and soul and still live. He exists in spatiotemporal reality only while they are conjoined. Here I take you to task for the same error you charged me with in my earlier discussion of the Great Hierarchy of Being, that I was focusing on the four partners as if they were separable — which they are not. To see them as separable is to miss the point that it is their mutually dynamic relations that constitute spacetime reality as human beings experience it.
As my dearest sister in Christ Alamo-Girl puts it, what is needed for understanding here is “context, context, context.”
In closing, I’d only like to suggest that “the uniquely Christian ontology that refers all created reality to its dependence on God” had been anticipated by Plato.
Thank you ever so much, one_conscience, for your excellent, thought-provoking essay/post!
This dispute reminds me of Euclidean geometry which is still useful to us even though we know space/time is warped. Likewise, Newton's theories are useful despite what we have learned by Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Precious few great thinkers had that quality of work. Plato is one of them. So is Aristotle.