Christianity and the Structure of Being – 2: The Infiltration of Platonism

How Greek Metaphysics Entered Christian Thought

In its earliest centuries, Christianity encountered a world saturated with Greek philosophy. Among the many schools of thought that shaped late antiquity, none was more influential—or more seductive—than Platonism.

Plato offered a majestic metaphysical vision: a realm of eternal, unchanging Forms—the true Being of which all sensible things were mere shadows. To exist in time was to be entangled in imperfection. To change was to decay. True reality, true knowledge, and true salvation lay not in this world of bodies and becoming, but in the unchanging order beyond it.

At first glance, Christianity and Platonism seemed to share a similar longing: both spoke of something higher, more perfect, more enduring than the world of appearances. For early Christian thinkers like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and especially Origen and Augustine, Platonism seemed like a philosophical language ready to express the Christian message.

But it came at a cost.

The Dualisms Inherited

By absorbing the Platonic metaphysical structure, Christianity adopted its core dualisms:

• Eternal vs. Temporal — Only what is unchanging truly is. What changes cannot possess full Being.
• Soul vs. Body — The soul is immortal and divine; the body is perishable, corrupt, and inferior.
• Truth vs. World — Truth belongs to the eternal realm; the world is illusion, fall, or preparation at best.

Within this framework, salvation came to mean not the fulfillment of the world, but its transcendence. The soul must rise above the body, eternity must defeat time, and the world must one day disappear.

Christian doctrine, seeking to protect the transcendence of God, began to articulate its cosmology within this metaphysical template. And with it came the most consequential idea of all: creation ex nihilo—that God created the world from nothing.

Creation from Nothing — and Its Consequences

At first, creatio ex nihilo seemed to affirm the omnipotence of God. God is not limited by any pre-existing matter; He freely creates the world out of pure will. But beneath this theological affirmation lies a profound metaphysical consequence: if the world comes from nothing, it can return to nothing. If beings emerge from non-being, they can fall back into it.

Here, the Platonic suspicion of the temporal becomes something even more severe: the ontological threat of annihilation.

As Farotti writes in Gustare il destino nel cristianesimo, Christianity inherits this framework of:

“divenire da nulla e verso il nulla”— becoming

from nothing and toward nothing.

Everything that is, exists on borrowed time. Bodies, histories, relationships—even creation itself—are seen as contingent, provisional, fragile. The eternal remains stable and divine; the world is a theatre of transience.

Sin, too, is reframed in this light: not merely as a moral rupture, but as a falling deeper into temporality, into separation from the eternal. Salvation becomes not the glorification of what is, but the rescue of the soul from the perishing realm of matter and time.

Even the resurrection of the body, so central in the New Testament, begins to be interpreted through a Platonic filter: the body must be transformed into something incorruptible, glorified—in other words, abstracted from the world of becoming, severed from its temporal and material conditions.

The World Destined to Disappear

Farotti notes how, once this framework takes hold, the world is no longer seen as destined for eternal appearing, but for disappearance. The body is not an eternal presence, but a temporary container. History is not the unfolding of Being, but the stage before judgment. The Church itself becomes a provisional structure, a waiting room for a future reality that has not yet come.

This metaphysical shift transforms Christianity from a religion of fulfilled presence to one of deferred eternity. The kingdom is no longer among us—it is always not yet.

And here, the last dualism begins to take root: the eternal appears as separate from the temporal, rather than appearing in and through it.

The consequences are not merely theoretical. They shape Christian life itself:

• Love is celebrated, but feared for its vulnerability.
• The body is honored, but distrusted.
• The world is valued, but ultimately discarded.
• Faith lives in the tension between the already and the not-yet—but never fully resolves it.

An Inherited Contradiction

This is the tension Farotti, drawing from Severino, begins to uncover: Christianity did not create nihilism, but it inherited its metaphysical ground. By accepting the idea that beings come from and return to nothing, it unintentionally suspended the world over the abyss.

It affirmed the eternal—but denied it to the world. It announced salvation—but preserved the structure of loss.

And yet, as we shall see, this tension is not the end of the story. For even within this Platonic-Christian framework, something refuses to disappear. A deeper intuition persists—of a world that is not passing away, but appearing necessarily.

To reach that intuition, we must first understand how deeply this dualism shaped Christian doctrine. In the next article, we will trace how the inheritance of Platonism solidified into dogma, and how the logic of divenire da nulla e verso il nulla became the silent background of Christian metaphysics.