all physical things. The heavens are made of ¿ re or perhaps a ¿ ery breath,
which is the stuff of which God and the soul are made. A nonmaterialist
conception of God and the soul requires us to conceive of God and the soul
not made up of stuff, and that’s not easy to do.
Platonism offered a metaphysics which could conceive of a nonmaterial
kind of being for both God and the soul. In addition to bodily things
known by the senses (what we would now call “physical things”), there
are intelligible and unchanging things. Intelligible things are unchanging
divine Forms, essences, or truths,
including mathematics but also
the principles of virtue and ethics.
Bodily or sensible things are
formed as imperfect images or
reÀ ections of these unchanging
Forms. The Forms are literally unimaginable, because they are not sensible
but intelligible, known only by the intellect. What makes the soul different
from the body is its intellect, the capacity for an intellectual vision that sees
the Forms.
The body is not only different from the soul but inferior to it. Unlike other
ancient philosophies, Platonism conceived of the soul as nonphysical, an
entirely different kind of being from the body. The soul is not really at home
in the body, but is imprisoned there until it is freed in death; it came into
the prison of the body by falling from its heavenly vision of divine things.
Although most souls end up being reincarnated again after death, really pure
souls escape the body forever and return to heaven. Nonetheless, the visible
world itself is good, a moving image of divine, eternal beauty.
The divine is eternal, beyond passion and change. The concept of an eternity
that is not merely everlasting but unchanging and outside the world of time
change is Platonist. For Platonism, God is an eternal impersonal Mind
contemplating eternal truths within itself. As the timeless source of all being,
God does not change and therefore does not have passions or emotions.
Platonist concepts of God and the soul have been deeply inÀ uential but
also problematic in Christian theology. After some initial hesitation,
Christians gave biblical answers
to philosophical questions.