Analysis Of The Differences In Beliefs Between Plato And Augustine

Augustine was born around 700 years after Plato died. Plato was from Greece and Augustine, a Roman African. Their upbringings so vastly different could these two possibly share anything in common? In fact, they were both fundamental in establishing and expanding the way people thought about life and what their purpose was. So, how do these two influential people’s ideas and beliefs contradict or overlap each other? For starters, Plato was a Greek philosopher and student of Socrates. He was also later the teacher of Aristotle. The most well-known work and theory of Plato is his theory of forms. Plato had a unique approach to our existence on earth and is very interesting to then look at Augustine’s methodology. Since Augustine was born in the Anno Domini era, there is a lot more of a focus on believing in God and understanding the power of God’s grace.

Plato emphasized that the pursuit of truth was the highest human activity. It involved the person’s whole being. Through thought could this be achieved, it transformed the individual, enabling him to live by moral values. Plato’s take on obtaining truth dramatically differs from Augustine. Augustine believes that God is the source of absolute goodness and truth. Through God's communication with people, they can find the truth. With this understanding of where and how to achieve truth both again take drastically different approaches when it comes to explaining the nature of reality.

Every entity in the world is a representation of a perfect idea of that entity. A tree in a field is an incomplete version of a perfect form of a tree. What we perceive is not reality; instead, it is a world of appearances. The real world is a place of ideas, which Plato names The Realm of the Forms. According to Plato, a form is a perfect idea of something, and every object has a perfect form in the realm of the forms. For example, there are many types of pizzas: cheese pizza, pepperoni pizza, and even barbeque chicken pizza. All of these pizzas people see have, in their perception, are just reflections of the ‘perfect’ form of a pizza. No one will ever achieve or create an object that is considered to be it is own perfect form, as the forms are eternal and not of this world. Plato even said that these forms could apply to love, beauty, justice, and truth. Now, Augustine agrees with some aspects of Plato’s theory of forms and nothing being perfect in this world. He says that God is the source of all forms and that God is perfect.

In the Apology, we see in the beginning Plato talking a lot about humility and how necessary humility is. He goes around, asking individuals their opinion on areas where they have excellent skills. Because of their high skill, these individuals felt as though they were wise in other areas as well. Plato thought they were instead foolish for this reason. He believed that the source of his wisdom lies precisely in being aware of how little he knows. Thus, humility becomes a necessary precondition for attaining wisdom. Augustine takes a different approach to defining and explaining wisdom. He believed that we got our wisdom from God. Nevertheless, if we cannot gain the knowledge of God’s thoughts through our senses, and we have no means of direct access to God’s thought here on earth, how is knowledge possible? Augustine’s answer is, God himself must communicate the truths to us; He must impress certain basic notions on the human mind, and thereby enable man to discover the truth. Man, therefore, is ultimately dependent on God for all knowledge.

Plato asked for personal mystic insight, but not faith in somebody else’s revelations. Augustine demands faith, faith as such, acceptance of God’s word as reported in scripture. Augustine takes the view that there is no evil — if individuals saw God’s ultimate purpose, people would see that everything is perfect. Whereas Plato’s belief in evil is the absence of the perfection and reality that is inherent in the creature being non-God. All things in this world are necessarily infected with deficiency — with a metaphysical deficiency — because they are part of the semi-real created world.

“Augustine did not believe in the power of unaided human reason to achieve truth, goodness or happiness. He thought you needed God’s help for that. Also, Plato thought very few people had the capacity for knowledge and goodness”. Augustine believed these were more widely available to humans being through the power of God’s grace. For Plato, his concept of ultimate idea could be reached entirely through reason alone; it did not require revelation through a Holy Book written by some unknown authors. Augustine tried to prove the existence of God from eternal truths. He “argued that the human mind apprehends universal, objective, unchanging, and necessary truths that are superior to the human mind itself. Thus, an eternal God exists to explain these eternal truths”. Augustine was one of the first people to explain in detail concerning one's self, particularly how that relates to God.

Augustine was the beginning and foundation in the Christian principles of original sin, predestination, and divine grace. The theology and ideas of Augustine influenced the theological aspects of both Catholic and Protestant theology overall. “His ideas also influenced the Reformation leaders John Calvin and Martin Luther, and philosophers Immanuel Kant and Blaise Pascal”. Augustine published his psychological ideas in Confessions, one of the earliest great autobiographies. “Augustine espoused Plato's view that the soul is immaterial and immortal and that the body is material and mortal. He believed that knowledge was obtained through self-awareness and not from sensory impressions”. The mind, Augustine thought of, was something that worked in harmony with independent areas of focus like reason and memory to name a few. He showed all of the worst sides of himself to let the world know that God saved Him. Augustine wrote this way to portray his theology of depravity and grace.

Overall, the biggest reason that there is such a significant difference in beliefs between Plato and Augustine is the time range. Because Plato was born about 300 BC, this means that Jesus Christ had not come down to the Earth and made his mark on the world. The impact that Jesus Christ had on the world was revolutionary in what people thought. Therefore, Plato’s central belief was seen through his theory of forms and not needing or believing in God. He believed that a person could achieve absolute knowledge and wisdom all by themselves. However, with Augustine being born and growing up about 400 years after Jesus was on earth, there were numerous changes and developments to what people thought about wisdom and knowledge, the purpose of life, the nature of reality, and what humans strive towards. Augustine’s beliefs were more that individuals cannot achieve wisdom and have an ultimate purpose on earth without God. His groundbreaking theological aspects of needing God and God’s grace led the way to early Christian theology. Without these two philosophers' radical approaches to our purpose on earth and what comes after, the development in beliefs and understanding of ourselves could have been delayed and affected the foundation of many nations throughout history.