The life and essence of all things is from God. Plato's idea of God is of
the purest and highest kind. God is one, he is Spirit, he is the supreme
and only real being, he is the creator of all things, his providence is
over all events. He avoids pantheism on one side, by making God a distinct
personal intelligent will; and polytheism on the other, by making him
absolute, and therefore one. Plato's theology is pure theism.[250]

Ackermann, in "The Christian Element in Plato,"[251] says: The Platonic
theology is strikingly near that of Christianity in regard to God's being,
existence, name, and attributes. As regards the existence of God, he
argues from the movements of nature for the necessity of an original
principle of motion.[252] But the real Platonic faith in God, like that of
the Bible, rests on immediate knowledge. He gives no definition of the
essence of God, but says,[253] "To find the Maker and Father of this All
is hard, and having found him it is impossible to utter him." But the idea
of Goodness is the best expression, as is also that of Being, though
neither is adequate. The visible Sun is the image and child of the Good
Being. Just so the Scripture calls God the Father of light. Yet the idea
of God was the object and aim of his whole philosophy; therefore he calls
God the Beginning and the End;[254] and "the Measure of all things, much
more than _man_, as some people have said" (referring to Protagoras, who
taught that "man was the measure of all things"). So even Aristotle
declared that "since God is the ground of all being, the first philosophy
is theology"; and Eusebius mentions that Plato thought that no one could
understand human things who did not first look at divine things; and tells
a story of an Indian who met Socrates in Athens and asked him how he must
begin to philosophize. He replied that he must reflect on human life;
whereupon the Indian laughed and said that as long as one did not
understand divine things he could know nothing about human things.

There is no doubt that Plato was a monotheist, and believed in one God,
and when he spoke of gods in the plural, was only using the common form of
speech. That many educated heathen were monotheists has been sufficiently
proved; and even Augustine admits that the mere use of the word "gods"
proved nothing against it, since the Hebrew Bible said, "the God of gods
has spoken."

Aristotle (B.C. 384), the first philologian and naturalist of antiq