Plato and Christian Personalism

Plato and Christian Personalism
by D.T. Sheffler

This groundbreaking study challenges a scholarly impasse that has persisted for generations. Personalist philosophers have criticized Plato for allegedly devaluing the individual person, while Platonic scholars have confined their subject to the archives of ancient history. D.T. Sheffler reveals that both traditions have missed something crucial: Plato’s philosophy offers unexpected resources for understanding personalist commitments.

Sheffler demonstrates that Plato’s revolutionary insights about the soul—its transcendence, its dignity, its capacity for self-knowledge—established philosophical foundations that resonate deeply with later Christian personalism. Far from reducing persons to abstract ideas, Plato articulated what makes each human soul irreducibly unique and infinitely valuable in ways that anticipate central personalist concerns.

Drawing on careful textual analysis and engaging particularly with Dietrich von Hildebrand’s phenomenological personalism, this book reveals surprising points of contact and mutual enrichment between ancient Athens and contemporary philosophy. Sheffler shows how Plato’s understanding of consciousness, moral agency, and human dignity addresses questions that remain central to personalist thought. 

Philosophical contemplation (theoria), as Plato, Hildebrand, and Sheffler conceive it, is not merely a way of life, but is an initiation into a divine way of life.

Mark K. Spencer

D.T. Sheffler is a professor of philosophy and academic dean at Memoria College, and an Associated Scholar at the Hildebrand Project. His research and writing focus on Christian Platonism, early Christianity, and beauty.