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 (earth). Interestingly, the Demiurge himself makes only the heavenly gods, while the remaining three classes of living beings were made by these gods. Plato’s delegation of the rest of the creative work to the celestial gods may reflect a notion that the heavenly bodies, especially the Sun, actively generates life on Earth.117 We also read in the Politeia that the Sun is the cause of coming to be, growth, and nourishment of things in the visible world, without itself coming to be (Book VI, 509b).
Aristotle likewise recognized the influence of the Sun in the generation of living beings, as we read in the Physics: “Man is begotten by man and by the sun as well” (II.194). He suggests elsewhere that the efficient cause of things coming to be and passing away is the movement of the Sun towards and away from the earth: “Thus we see that coming-to-be occurs as the sun approaches and decay as it retreats; and we see that the two processes occupy equal times” (De Gen et Corr, II.336b). In other words, for Aristotle the generation and destruction of substance is caused by the annual movement of the Sun in the ecliptic or zodiac cycle.118
Antithesis: The Role of Necessity
Unlike the Judaic and Christian doctrine on God as creator, the Platonic Intellect is not viewed as omnipotent (or all-powerful) in fashioning the physical world. The reason for this limitation is that Intellect is constrained by an opposing force, which is necessity (Greek, anangkē; also translated as force or restraint).119 This view was already stated in mythical language by Parmenides, writing that Necessity is a goddess who governs all things. This includes the celestial bodies, which are led and shackled by necessity.120 Plato describes the role of necessity in the establishment of the cosmos as follows: “For this ordered world was of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailed over necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be towards what is best, and the result of this subjugation of necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of the universe” (Tim, 48a).
In the Platonic understanding, necessity is associated with disorder and random chance. Necessity means the indeterminate, the inconstant, the anomalous; it is a force that is irregular and unintelligible. In his informative commentary on the Timaeus, Francis