THE CITY
This awareness is vital, for there were many in Augustine’s day—as there are still many today—who too quickly blame Plato for the he‐ retical teachings of the Gnostics. Augustine sets the record straight on this misconception. In Book VIII, he makes it clear that the true heirs of Plato are to be found among the Neo‐Platonists, in particular, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Apuleius. Later, in Book XIII, he highlights a specific area in which Plato and the Gnostics part com‐ pany. According to the Gnostics, the soul “will be perfect only when it returns to God simple, solitary, and naked, as it were, stripped of every shred of its body.” This teaching, which stands in stark opposi‐ tion to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, lies at the root of Gnosticism’s dismissal of matter and the body. It is a teaching, Augustine writes, which Plato did not share. Indeed, not only did Plato not view the body in wholly negative terms; in the Timaeus he provides a pre‐Christian, extra‐biblical glimpse of the Resurrection Body. In one of the most memorable pas‐ sages of Timaeus, God tells the lesser gods that he is able to hold body and soul together in an indissoluble link and promises them that they may remain forever in the same body if they do not become corrupt. Surely Plato would not have included such a divine promise if the body were inherently evil! No, concludes Augustine, those Gnostics and so‐called Neo‐Platonists who claim that the body can only be a prison and a chain, “forget that their very founder and master, Plato, has taught that the supreme God had granted to the lesser gods, whom he had made, the favor of never dying, in the sense of never being separated from the bodies which he had united to them.” Still, though true Platonists “are not so senseless as to despise earthly bodies as though their nature derived from an evil principle” (XIV.5), they do not rest content in a mere earthly existence. Plato knew something that many Christians, in Augustine’s day as well as our own, often forget: that there is no happiness apart from God. Platonists, writes Augustine, are deservedly considered the outstanding philosophers, first, because they could see that not even the soul of man, immortal and rational (or intellectual) as it is, can attain happiness apart from the Light of that God by whom both itself and the world were made, and, second, because they hold that the blessed life which all men seek can be found only by him who, in the purity of a chaste love, embraces that one Supreme Good which is the unchangeable God. 16