The Platonic world of Forms was shattered by God, bursting down through the clouds to enter into the womb of a young Jewish girl !
By Regis Martin
Crisis Magazine
March 23, 2026
Picture yourself sitting alongside Plato at a local Greek restaurant, a couple of gyros between the two of you. What do you say ? Is there anything you know that could possibly add to the sum of all that he already knows ? I mean, it isn't every day that one dines with the foremost philosopher of the ancient world, concerning whom pretty much everything we've ever thought or said since has been a series of footnotes. So, what do you talk about ? The food?
The good news, of course, is that he's offered to pick up the tab, so it won't matter what's in your wallet. But he will certainly want to pick your brain, and perhaps flay you alive while doing so, like the legendary executioner so expert at cutting off the heads of his victims that they scarcely realized they'd lost their own until they needed to sneeze and found that they had no head. In other words, make sure you've got something under the hood about which you can instruct him. Something so original, so totally over-the-top that the poor man will have thought he'd lost his own head.
Like the Christian Story, for example, which hadn't yet been told while Plato lived some five centuries before the coming of Christ. How wonderfully provoking that will prove the moment you've begun telling the tale of the birth of God among men ! Of course, the impact of the strike will be like a warhead launched from another world, blowing apart the structures of his own world, leaving everything in ruins, at once causing him to flee the restaurant, leaving you with the check and his half-eaten gyro.
But why the upset ? Why should stout Plato have been left so shaken by the story that he could not even finish his lunch ? Because, you see, Plato was an Idealist of the Old School-indeed, he practically built the place-for whom everything in the universe, the whole shooting match, including the entire created order of being, along with all truth, goodness, and beauty, can only be adjudged real to the extent everything remains untouched, undefiled, by contact with the world of the senses, the human world we see and smell, hear, taste and touch.
Have you got that ? For old Plato, you see, reality is not material at all. Existing solely in the realm of ideas, which places it totally and blessedly beyond change and decay, it can never permit the purity of its perfection to be interfered with by the least contact with material being. Only ideas are really real, leaving everything else-matter, the sensate world, all that yucky stuff we mortals traffic in everyday-a distant and inferior reflection (at best!). In short, an imitation so pallid and thin, so wanting in the stuff of real being, that no serious mind would wish to engage it at all.
For men of Plato's persuasion, and their number is legion, looming ever larger with each passing day spent in cyberspace, the actual face of one's own wife, the sweetness of one's children, the tenderness of an old grandmother-qualities which so endear them to us that we want to hug and squeeze them at once-are, in fact, far less real to Plato than the idea of a lovely wife, or cuddly child, or a wise and tender old grandmother.
What a cheap date Plato must have been ! Imagine inviting someone like that home for the holidays. Rather than heaping high his plate with ham and potatoes and plenty of apple pie, you just hand him a sheet of paper on which you'd written down x number of ideas of culinary perfection. How that will bring delight to his mental palate!
But mightn't there be something in the Christian Story of which Plato and his minions would approve ? Some idea universal and ethereal enough to whet the Idealist's appetite ? What about a line or two from the Fourth Gospel ? Shall we put it to the test by quoting the Prologue, then watch and see what happens ? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Will that give the poor man heartburn ? Surely not. Nor, I will wager, the following assertion: "He was in the beginning with God; and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made."
Nothing to object to so far, right ? I mean, all you've done is evoke the impersonal principle of Logos, of Mind or Nous, which is Plato-Speak for that governing idea which presides over the entire universe. Hardly anything here to inconvenience your average Idealist, is there?
And the fact that by the light of this Word, this light which "shines in the darkness," evincing an intensity of equal and eternal duration, "the darkness has not overcome it," should just as easily comport with the Platonist scheme of things. And so, despite 25 centuries between us, we have rather a lot in common, haven't we ? Enough, certainly, to allow him to finish his gyro.
Ah, but then there is the rub, the bone of contention keeping the two of you at sword's point. Possibly forever, too. And the quarrel will not have been over this or that idea hovering above the flux of a corrupt and changing world. No, the disagreement here is not over ideas at all, which, given sufficient spirited conversation, can become the basis for a happy and productive consensus between us.
The thing that will at once engender the deepest division of all will be a certain pesky little event we call Incarnation, an event so irreducibly specific that it can only have happened once in the great sea of history. "And the Word was made flesh," the apostle John tells us, "and dwelt among us."
That will be the bridge too far, the warhead whose impact will cause Plato to go completely ballistic. "The ineradicable positivity," Joseph Ratzinger has called it, "of the Christian religion." The perfect showstopper. That Plato's all-comprehensive, all-comprehending idea, the very Logos of God Himself, should deign to enter the human estate, becoming one of us.
For men like Plato, who subsist on a diet of purest abstraction, nothing could be more absurd than God pitching His tent in the midst of men. It amounts to no less than a full, frontal assault upon the entire architecture of Idealism, leaving not a single blueprint in the wake of so dramatic an enfleshment of eternity in time. "God's infinity dwindled to infancy," exclaims the poet Hopkins, "Welcome in womb and breast / Birth, milk, and all the rest."
As for Plato, only if the Eternal Word were to remain conveniently sequestered amid the ethereal realms, thus enabling ultra-fastidious folk like himself to commune with its sheer otherness, would he have bade it welcome. Behold the Achilles Heel of all Idealism on full display. The crippling incapacity to allow the infinite all possible mediation by the finite. Meaning/Matter, Word/Flesh, Heaven/History, God/Man—each consigned to its tiny little box, hermetically sealed, like a coffin, forever.
Well, God has unsealed that coffin once and for all, having burst through the clouds to become Himself a creature on the very day a young Jewish girl consented to bear the Eternal Word in her virginial womb. The world God made has thus been remade by the mere fact of His coming into it. I expect Plato now knows that.