Reality. Wynand De Beer. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Wynand De Beer
Издательство: Ingram
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Жанр произведения: Религия: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781532686474
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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.

      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).

      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.

      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.

      Antithesis: The Role of Necessity