Soul, thereby becoming the foundation of all beings.
The creation of the cosmos is described in considerable detail by Plato in his late dialogue Timaeus, where Intellect is personified and called the Father, or more often the Demiurge (ho demiourgos, which has the meaning of a divine Craftsman). As Porphyry explains, with reference to Plotinus’ teaching that the essence of the Godhead extends over three hypostases: “The highest god is the Good [i.e., the One], and after him and second there is the Demiurge, and third is the Soul of the Universe; for the divine realm proceeds as far as Soul” (History of Philosophy, Book 4). This reasoning confirms that Plato’s Demiurge is a personification of the divine Intellect.
The concept of a creative Demiurge was not limited to Hellenism. The Greek Christian theologian Basil of Caesarea, although highly critical of Hellenic natural philosophy, referred to “the Creator and Demiurge of the universe” (Hex I.5). It has also been remarked that Plato’s Demiurge is comparable to the Egyptian god Ptah, the divine intermediary between the creative idea and the physical product, and to Jesus Christ as the Logos through whom all things are created (as taught in Christian theology).109
Thesis: The Creation of the World by Intellect
Plato commences his account of cosmic creation by arguing that something which is visible and tangible, like our universe, had to have an origin instead of having always existed. The Athenian philosopher adds that to find the maker and father of this universe (Greek, to pan, literally ‘the whole’; Latin, omnis, ‘every or all’)110 is hard enough, and to declare him to everyone is impossible. At any rate, this world of ours was fashioned after an eternal model and is grasped by a rational account, i.e., by wisdom (Tim, 28b–29a). Interestingly, Plato’s apophatic theology (of which more in a later chapter) was admired by the Greek Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, who described Plato as a sincere friend of the truth, for recognizing that the mystery of the divine being cannot be expressed in words.111
In the Platonic understanding, goodness is an essential attribute of the divinity. The goodness of the Demiurge is moreover stated as the motive for creation: “He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible. The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over all that was visible—not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion—and brought it from a state of disorder to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder” (Tim, 29e-30a). Motivated by his goodness, the divine Intellect transforms the pre-cosmic disorder into cosmic order.
To the question as to why God created all things, Patristic theology gave the same answer as Plato: out of the abundance of his goodness. As John of Damascus writes, “Because the good and transcendently good God was not content to contemplate himself, but by a superabundance of goodness saw fit that there should be some things to benefit by and to participate in his goodness, he brings all things from nothing into being and created them.”112 However, in this passage we notice a divergence from the Platonic cosmology, namely that God creates the world from nothing, as opposed to forming it from primordial matter.
Plato continues his account as follows: “The god reasoned and concluded that in the realm of things naturally visible no unintelligent thing could as a whole be better than anything which does possess intelligence as a whole, and he further concluded that it is impossible for anything to come to possess intelligence apart from soul. Guided by this reasoning, he [the Demiurge] put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, and so he constructed the universe. This, then, in keeping with our likely account, is how we must say divine providence brought our world into being as a truly living thing, endowed with soul and intelligence” (Tim, 30b–c).
An identical causal schema to the foregoing is depicted in the ancient Hermetic writings, according to which the soul makes copies in the physical world of the things which Mind (nous) makes in the soul itself. In its turn, Mind makes copies in the soul of the things which the First Cause of all makes in Mind. Consequently, all the shapes and images which we can see with our bodily eyes in the sensible world of becoming are only semblances and copies of the eternal forms in the intelligible world of real being.113
In his Platonic Theology, the great Neoplatonist thinker Proclus credits Plato for advancing our understanding of theology beyond some earlier views, such as the identification of ‘gods’ with first principles in nature, or with the faculties of soul. “Only the divinely-inspired philosophy of Plato,” writes Proclus, “asserts, as has been said, that Intellect is the father and causal principle of both bodies and souls, and that everything that exercises its life in conditions of progression and unfolding possesses its being and its actualization in dependence on Intellect. But, then, it advances to another first principle, completely transcending Intellect, yet more incorporeal and ineffable than it, from which all . . . must derive their existence” (Book I.3). This transcendent Principle is, of course, the One.
Since the physical world must have bodily form, Plato continues, it must be visible and tangible (Tim, 31b). The components of the world therefore must include fire and earth, and since these elements are solids, the Demiurge also created air and water as intermediates to combine them. Each of these four elements are composed of different geometrical solids.114 The Demiurge made the sensible world from these four elements, bound together as a ‘symphony of proportion’ (Tim, 32b–c).
It should be noted that initially the four kinds (genē) of fire, air, water, and earth are without proportion and measure. They are ‘thoroughly god-forsaken’ in their natural condition, and therefore the Demiurge must give these kinds their distinctive shapes, by means of forms (eidesi) and numbers (arithmois) (Tim, 53a–b). The Demiurge employs specific geometrical figures known as regular solids: the tetrahedron for fire, the octahedron for air, the icosahedron for water, and the cube for earth (Tim, 55e–56a). These ‘shapes and numbers’ used by the Demiurge to produce the cosmos out of chaos are the basic intelligible features of the world.115
Plato adds that the world was created spherical in shape: “He [the Demiurge] gave it a shape appropriate to the kind of thing it was. The appropriate shape for the living being that is to contain within itself all the living beings would be the one which embraces within itself all the shapes there are. Hence, he gave it a round shape, the form of a sphere, with its center equidistant from the extremes in all directions. This of all shapes is the most complete and like itself, which he gave to it because he believed that likeness is incalculably more excellent than unlikeness” (Tim, 33b). As a matter of fact, the sphere is the most uniform of all solid figures and the only one which can move without change of place, through rotating on its axis. For Plato, the rotation of the world with all its contents shows the penetration and rule of intelligence over the entire universe.116
As a further step in the creative process, the Demiurge sets soul in the center of the cosmos, so that soul is given priority to rule over the physical universe: “And he [the Demiurge] placed soul into the midst of it, and stretched it through the whole of it, and enveloped its body with it from without” (Tim, 34b). The visible world is therefore a living creature, having soul (psychē) in its body and mind (nous) in its soul.
Four kinds of living beings were made by the Demiurge, corresponding to the four primary elements (Tim, 39e–40a). These are: (i) the heavenly gods, in which the element of fire is dominant; (ii) the flying creatures (air); (iii) the aquatic creatures (water); and (iv) the terrestrial creatures
