[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you, dearest sister in Christ, for your beautiful essay-post and that insightful excerpt from Voegelin! And thank you for your encouragements.

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.

Personally, I find Plato's insights to be the best a man's can be absent the direct revelation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Based on Justin Martyr's description of the various schools of Greek philosophy he reviewed before becoming Christian, Plato's was especially concerned with the divine. Seems to me Plato would have been ecstatic to know what we Christians know.

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.

[betty boop]

Seems to me Plato would have been ecstatic to know what we Christians know.

Seems that way to me, too, dearest sister in Christ!

Michael Novak recently wrote, "What Jewish and Christian revelation adds to philosophy, which philosophy has sometimes gained a hint of but hardly dares to assert on its own, is that God reveals himself as the love that impels us to show love to one another." Plato got as far as he could possibly get, absent the revelation of Christ. It seems to me he got pretty far. I believe if he had lived in the time of Christ, he would have confessed Christ, just as the philosopher (and saint) Justin Martyr later did. FWIW

Thank you so very much for your insightful essay/post!