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Essay: Exploring the Roots of Suffering for Orthodox and Gnostic Christians: Platonism Explained

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  • Published: 1 April 2019*
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Deeply rooted in the origins of Orthodox Christianity is a very complex, existential issue.  An issue that constantly plagued them with worries and doubts.  How do you explain all the pain, suffering and torment the Christians are going through… when they have a God who they know loves them?  Early Christians struggled with finding the reason that suffering came to be, and there was a sort of splintering effect throughout the group as people came to rationalize their own reasons.  Orthodox Christians had one way, Gnostic Christians had another… but both ways still left questions unanswered.   Platonism helped both the Orthodox and Gnostic Christians justify this burning debate within Christianity.  

Orthodox Christians first began to rationalize the rampant amount of suffering in the world with the book of Genesis, specifically the story of Adam and Eve and the fall.  We all know the story of Adam and Eve… God says you can have anything in my garden besides the fruit on this tree, the Forbidden tree.  A snake (presumably Satan) comes and tempts Eve to eat the fruit, who then tempts Adam to do so as well.  God finds out because Adam and Eve realize they are naked and care now, even though they never had before, and then God condemned them to suffer separate punishments on earth and cast them out of the Garden of Eden.  

“The Lord God said, “Since the man has become like one of us, knowing

good and evil, he must not reach out, take from the tree of life, eat, and live forever.”  So, the Lord God sent him away from the garden of Eden to

  work the ground from which he was taken.”  (Genesis 3:22-23 CSB)

This idea makes a lot of sense, since God actually DID sentence them to suffer.   Adam and Eve disobeyed and all of mankind has to pay for that.  Simple enough, right?  But there were still some unanswered questions like “Why is the tree there if the humans are not meant to eat from it,” and possibly the most confounding of all, “Why would a just God allow suffering?”  These questions plagued the Orthodox Christians.  They tried to make sense of it themselves but with the explanation not quite complete, they began to turn to new age philosophers to help them fill the gap.  

Now the Gnostic Christians had a completely different rationalization.  The Gnostics believed that the world was actually made by an inferior God, Demiurge Yaldabaoth, and not the God that we know as God.  They believed that this inferior God was evil, and that he is the root of all of the suffering that the Christians were going through at that time and for all of time as well. They make their argument with the same passage that the Orthodox do, the story of Adam and Eve, though in this new version of Adam and Eve the serpent does not tempt Eve, instead he tempts the both of them to sin and a “divine light” makes Adam eat from the tree of Gnosis.  Gnostic Christians draw this belief primarily from the Apocryphon of John, also known as the secret book of John.  In this secret book, evidence in the text shows that there is a God who has evil, and is worried about there being another God, despite no proof actually being shown of that yet.  

“When he gazed upon his creation surrounding him, He said to his host of demons… The ones who had come forth out of him: “I am a jealous God and there is no God but me!”  [But by doing this he admitted to his demons that there is indeed another God. For, if there were no other God, whom would he possibly be jealous of?]” (Secret book of John, gnosis.org)

This text excerpt shows the jealous nature of the inferior God, and shows where they got the belief that the first, inferior God had evil intentions and helped to cause the suffering.  

Platonism helped to answer these questions for the Gnostic Christians by giving them something to weave into their separate beliefs of how the world came to be and how suffering arose.   Plato believed that the world was always here.  It’s a chaotic ‘ever-existing’ universe and God came and simply brought order to it.  For the Gnostic Christians, this was a way to justify the belief that the world was not created by the one known as God, but by the inferior God they believe came along and then left.  The Gnostic beliefs are deeply rooted in Platonism, it’s as if they took Orthodox Christianity, combined it with Platonism, and made a new, baby religion out of the byproduct of that experiment.  Platonism is also deeply rooted in the Allegory of the Cave, which plays heavily into the beliefs of the Gnostics.  This Allegory is about a hypothetical situation, you are chained in a dark cave and behind you there is fire, you can see the shadows cast by the fire… but are not allowed to turn around and see the fire.  With the power of reason, you could break free from your chains and break free into the “true light of the sun,” but you realize that the outside world is true reality, not the cave that you had grown to accept was your bitter reality.  Plato believed that with the body you were only allowed to see worldly things, and with the soul and the psyche you had the ability to reason. Gnostics deeply rejected the body, the body is one of the sources of suffering, because with it you cannot fully function on your spiritual consciousness and “higher self.”  This is shown in their version of the story of Adam and Eve where,

“Adam was the dramatic embodiment of psyche, or soul, while Eve stood for the pneuma, or spirit. Soul, to the Gnostics, meant the embodiment of the emotional and thinking functions of the personality, while spirit represented the human capacity for spiritual consciousness.” (gnostic.org)

Gnosticism delicately intertwined the beliefs of Orthodox Christians and Platonism to create a new, world-rejecting religion.   

As Platonism developed a new philosopher, Justin Martyr, introduces the idea of free will.  This is the way that Orthodox Christians justified the burning questions they had.  Martyr claimed that God gave humans free will, and they freely choose to sin.  This realization helped clarify the suffering problem for humans because God does love humans immeasurably, but they have free will to go against him… as shown in the story of Adam and Eve.  With the introduction of the idea of free will, Orthodox Christians had a solid foundation to stop doubting why a God who supposedly loved them would cause them so much pain and suffering.  They also share the belief that God is a transcendent being, he is eternal and perfect.  The Christians take this idea of a perfect, transcendent God and combine it with Genesis and free will, rejecting the Platonism idea of the world always existing, in favor of the Genesis narrative that they had all come to believe.  Plato’s thoughts about the nature of God combined with Martyr’s new idea of free will gave all the closure they needed on this specific debate within the religion.   The doctrine was deeply affected by the introduction of free will into Christianity, because while the Gnostics believed in predestination, the Orthodox now had a new frame for not only how suffering and the world came to be, but also how they would be able to enter the kingdom of heaven.  The previous theory, predestination, was the divine foreordaining of all that will happen, especially with regard to the salvation of some and not others.  This meant that your fate is already decided for you by God, and that nothing you can do on earth can change this.  This theory does not make as much sense as free will to the Orthodox Christians and Martyr, who thought that since God gave you the choice to sin against him, those who chose to follow his path and seek forgiveness for those sins but also actively make choices to not go against God would have a higher chance of getting to spend an eternity in heaven.  This thought is something that is still widely prevalent today, meaning that the Orthodox Christian doctrine was inherently effected by the teachings of Platonism.   

Both the foundations of Orthodox Christianity and Gnostic Christianity were shaped by the teachings of Plato and later Martyr.  These teachings gave new life and meaning to both religions, for the Orthodox it gave not only some much-needed closure to the Origin of the world and the question of suffering, but also some insight onto how exactly they could reach the kingdom of heaven they were all striving for.  As for the Gnostics, they had a religion that was dualistic and basically the Orthodox beliefs other than the story of genesis, rewritten in the language of Plato.  The emergence of Platonism helped to strengthen Christianity in the Second Century and helped to bring even more followers to it, since with both of the branches of Christianity Platonism helped to reconcile some of the burning questions they both had with their faiths, and give some philosophical insight to both as well.  

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