THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL
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This is Part 10 of an 11-Part Series
Extracted from Chapter Two of my book The Seven Gates of Soul
Previous posts in this series include:
The Fear of Death in Early Cultures
The Fear of the Soul’s Journey After Death
Toward a Cyclical Conception of Death as a Part of Life
The Cyclical Worldview and the Release From Suffering
Extracting the Myth of Immortality From Its Cyclical Roots
The Embrace of Personal Immortality in the East
The Quest for Immortality in Early Chinese Shamanism
Plato's Influence on Western Concepts of Immortality
Augustine’s Influence on Christian Thought
While today we take for granted the fusion of Christian and Platonic thought, this was actually a transition that spanned four or five centuries after the birth of Christ. Philo Judeaus of Alexandria (c 15 BCE - 45 CE), a contemporary of Saint Paul, was one of the first to reorient Jewish and early Christian thought in a more Platonic direction (James L. Christian, The Wisdom Seekers: Great Philosophers of the Western World, Vol. 1, p. 216), which eventually established the concept of immortality as the gospel truth in both cultures. Many other early Christian thinkers after Philo Judeaus were also instrumental in effecting this transition, but none was more important than Saint Augustine (354-430 CE), bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa. Augustine was a central figure in philosophical history, and is often considered the greatest shaping influence upon early Christian theology. More than any other thinker, he provided an essential bridge between the religion of the New Testament and the Platonic tradition, and through his work, Western Christianity absorbed many of Plato’s ideas (Norman Melchert, The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, p. 230).
In his youth, Augustine was attracted to Manichaeism, a radical form of Christianity originating in pre-Islamic Iran (then at the heart of the Persian empire), founded by the Gnostic prophet, Mani. Mani taught identification with Christ as the vehicle through which imprisoned souls could escape their entrapment in the body and return to God. The Manichean religion believed the body to be a haven of darkness, and required the elect of their faith to adhere to a strict regimen of asceticism and celibacy. Augustine eventually abandoned Manichaeism, which failed to answer his deeper philosophical questions about the being of God and the nature and origin of evil, but he maintained Manichean beliefs about the body’s relationship to the soul, and the desire for transcendence of the body’s mortal limitations ("Augustine," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 14, p. 397). The more mature Augustine recognized these same beliefs in the teachings of Plato.
Augustine was introduced to the thoughts of Plato through the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry, who were responsible for facilitating a revival of interest in Plato in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE. While Saint Paul admonished the early Christians, including Augustine, to "let your armor be the Lord Jesus Christ; forget about satisfying your bodies with all their cravings." (Romans 13:14), Neoplatonism reinforced the Manichaean belief that the soul must escape the body before it could return to God. Plotinus asserted that the intellect was an intermediary between soul and God, while Augustine naturally preferred Christ, but neither doubted that the soul’s true destiny was immortality and eternal reunion with the One. Both also agreed that the temporal, mortal body was a primary hindrance to fulfilling this purpose. Augustine's philosophy was an amalgam of Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and Biblical scripture, with a major leavening by Plato’s ideas. Through Augustine’s influence, the immortality of the soul, and a deliberate disidentification with the body became cornerstones of the Christian faith ("Augustine," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 14, p. 398).