The dialogues of Plato that fascinated the Neoplatonists were Timaeus, Parmenides and Republic. The
Timaeus set out Plato's cosmogony and therefore a doctrine of the relation between the Creator and the
cosmos. The Parmenides dealt with dialectical problems about being, identity, and difference. These two
dialogues and the Neoplatonic commentaries on them were read by Christians with obvious sympathy.
The marriage of Platonism and Christianity, however, had its tiffs. The pagan Platonists were not in the
least grateful for the hand of intellectual sympathy which the Christians stretched out towards them, and
asked awkward questions about the compatibility of the notion of incarnation with divine immutability,
which Plato had argued to be necessary to the concept of perfection. From the Christian side there was
fierce criticism of the Platonic axiom of the eternity of the world, the belief that the soul possesses an
eternity and immortality independent of the Creator, and, above all, the fatalism inherent in the notion of
reincarnation.
Clement of Alexandria speaks of the Church as a river emerging from the confluence of Biblical faith
with Greek philosophy. Apocalyptic hope, passing from late Judaism into early Christian preaching, is
that element in Christianity which to a Platonist critic (Celsus) seemed most bizarre. Yet from
apocalyptic the Christians brought to the western -world the sense that the historical process is moving
to a divine event-whether near or far off they disputed. In Romans 8 Paul sees the sufferings of this life
as the birth-pangs preceding a new age.
Apocalyptic language implies a negative view of much of the world's way of going about its business.
Neoplatonic ethics also encouraged world rejection and withdrawal. 'Plotinus always seemed ashamed of
being in the body.' Before Plotinus' time Clement and Origen were articulating an ascetic ladder of the
soul's ascent from passion and pleasure to a training and discipline of the character whose final goal is
expressed in mystical terms of the vision of God granted to the pure in heart.
An accurate delineation of the distinctive features of early Christian ethics in comparison with the
philosophical ethics of antiquity is intricate, certainly not susceptible of simplistic formulas. When the
pagan Celsus dismisses Christian ethical teaching as having 'nothing new', Origen in reply is delighted to
concede; for the gospel is a gift of the Creator for the realization of those duties or goods which the
informed conscience recognizes, imprinted by the creative reason, the light that lightens every man
coming into the world. The early Christians had not read Kant (though John Chrysostom anticipates
verbatim Kant's dictum that God is discerned through the moral law within and the starry heavens
above). They did not think moral reasoning a special way of exercising rational judgment separate from
other deployments of the reason. They did not talk about the moral imperative as command coming from
an alien force outside the soul and asking for blind obedience. The doctrine of man made in God's
image, fused with Platonic language about the soul's 'affinity' with God, helped them to say that the soul
naturally recognizes how right and rational it is to be good and just. The imperatives in the conscience
are signposts to what the source of all goodness is like. But the Christians dissented deeply from the
Socratic principle that none errs knowingly or deliberately, and saw human nature as a noble ruin whose
self-inflicted misery called for a restoration transcending human powers. The stress on redemption and
grace went with an insistence on obedience and humility of which Christ is model. But the main shift in
ethical concern resulting from conversion to Christianity comes to lie in an intense interest in motive as