The Platonic God

And Platonism, despite surface-semblances to the contrary, is in fact the only philosophy tailored to fit the Judaeo-Christian religious need for a unique, single, absolutely surpassing, all-disposing source of everything. For an instantial God, even if emptily said to have made Heaven and Earth and Man out of nothing and even if expressing His being in the superb blankness of ‘I am that I am,’ will always remain one among others, a particular being jealous of possible rivals, who might very well not have existed, and exhibiting a particularity in his disposition…There can indeed be nothing sacrosanct about any particular…God, in short, to deserve the self-prostration accorded for Him by the Jews, or the unreserved love demanded for Him by Jesus, would have to be, not a particular case of Justice, or Understanding, or Power or Beauty etc. by Justice itself, the Understanding itself, the infinite Might and Loveliness etc. which are necessarily unique and surpassing, in that they are of a different logical type from their parasitic instances…True religion, it may be argued, is the logical passion par excellence, and the logical pattern into which it breathes that passion tends to have a Platonic tinge (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 378-80).