The following was delivered as a talk at the Norwich Centre for Christian Learning, Norwich Cathedral, 11.6.2014. As such, the style is somewhat conversational (which is a style I like to use anyway) and the content is arguably more historical than philosophical. I apologise if this comes across as vague or 'entry level,' but I was attempting to cater to a large audience.
In this talk, I am going to focusing primarily on the idea
of God we come across in Plato’s Timaeus
dialogue, a dialogue about the origin of the world. Plato’s cosmology has
similarities with the cosmologies offered by numerous pre-Socratic
philosophers, while also standing apart from them in many ways. Principally, Plato
holds that the world came into being rather than always having been, and he has
a divine creator (the Demiurge) who is distinct from the cosmos. This places
him in contrast with the majority of Presocratics, who saw the cosmos as
eternal (although several suggested it goes through periods of unity and
dissolution), and who saw the force or principle responsible for the order of
the cosmos as identifiable with the cosmos. This is particularly true of
Parmenides and Heraclitus. It is the refusal to identify the world with the
source of its own creation that makes Plato so distinct from his predecessors
(and successors, principally Aristotle), and so attractive from an Abrahamic
standpoint. However, as I hope to show over the space of this discussion, we
must be extremely hesitant when we try to too strongly identify Plato’s
Demiurge with the God of Genesis.
But first,
a few words about the cosmological ideas that preceded Plato.
Philosophical-cosmological
enquiries in Greece seemed to have begun with the Milesian philosophers. The
Milesians sought to identify the foundational substance of the cosmos, the arkhē, a word that doesn’t have a direct
parallel in English but has connotations relating to ‘origin’ and ‘first
principle.’ The notion of the ordering principle of the cosmos appears again
and again in Greek cosmological and cosmogonic thought. Thales seemingly
identified the arkhē with water,
Anaximander with an abstract substance devoid of characteristics known as the apeiron, the ‘boundless.’ Anaximander’s arkhē is of particular interest as it is
spoken of in language normally reserved for Zeus, suggesting that it has divine
characteristics. As the foundational substance of the cosmos has a divine
dimension to it, this suggests something of divinity to the world itself, that
the divine is identifiable with the cosmos (or with the facet of the cosmos
that brings the cosmos about).
The
relationship between the cosmos, its first substance, its ordering principle
and the divine becomes most interesting in relation to Heraclitus, who blurs the
lines between first substance and foundational principle, and evocatively (from
a Christian perspective) calls the principle of existence (that is, the
principle of ever-persistent change) the Logos.
That is a large gap between human perspective on these things and their
reality, though, with Heraclitus telling us that ‘[t]o God all things are
beautiful and good and just, but humans have supposed some unjust and others
just.’ [DK 22B102] Heraclitus is often described as a pantheist, and I do not
feel that this is an inaccurate description. The cosmos for Heraclitus is
defined by flux, the law of this flux is described various as ‘fire,’ Logos and God, leading to the view that
cosmos is, itself, God, bringing about its own existence eternally.
I
mention this as contrast for what we will now discuss regarding Plato.
Often, it
is said that Plato hates the world, and though he is calling on us to rise
above it, we shouldn’t take this to mean that Plato necessarily despises the world. This is a rather Neoplatonic
reading of Plato though, Plato according to the Gnostics, perhaps. The world
isn’t wicked (at least not in this dialogue); it is imperfect, but only as imperfect as raw necessity demands of it.
Indeed we are told explicitly that ‘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. 30a] It is interesting that we are
offered something that resembles a motivation for the act of creation here.
Seeing the state of chaos before him, the Demiurge sought to make it better by
bringing it as close to perfection as possible. In Platonic metaphysics, the
maker of a thing requires a model, or Form, to work by, and so does the
Demiurge (of course immediately problematising attempts to make the Demiurge
fully identifiable with the God of Genesis, who has no need of anything beyond
Himself to produce the world.) The maker must have used a perfect model, as the
maker is good and thus would want to produce a creation as close to perfection
as a thing that has come to be can. Further, the Demiurge doesn’t make the
world as much as he shapes it out of something that existed previous to the
cosmos we now inhabit.
According
to Francis Cornford, Plato ‘…believed in the divinity of the world as a whole…’
but I am not sure that that follows from the general flow of Platonic thought.
To begin, we need to realise that Plato’s created world, like us mortals,
possesses a soul. At first, it is tempting to assert that it is the soul that
is the ‘divine’ element, perhaps because of its position of authority over the
material world. However, this is not
clearly the case due to the peculiar composition of the soul. In a word, the
souls ‘divine’ credentials are suspect. The Platonic soul, both that of
individuals and of the world, partakes in both the corporeal and immaterial
realms, having both the characteristics of being eternal and unchanging and of
being ‘…unlike the Forms in that it is alive and intelligent, and life and
intelligence cannot exist without change.’ [Plato’s
Cosmology p. 63-4] Cornford here references Sophist 248e] Thus, it is
not as simple a task as declaring the soul to be the ‘divine’ component of a
human being or of the world in general- it is, rather, the part that most
strongly resembles and partakes in the divine realm, and has the potential to
become more like it. As such, if we are right that the divine is wholly and
unchangingly good and true, in the same sense that the Forms are, it simply
does not follow that, soul or not, the world can be conceived of as divine in
Plato’s view. It permits variation and changeability, it has impure elements to
it and, finally and most importantly, it became, it was not always.
‘Furthermore, whilst the world soul might continue existing for all time, its continued
existence is contingent on God’s will…’ [Johansen, T.K.; Plato’s Natural Philosophy; a Study of the Timaeus-Critias (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2004)]
We should
also take note of the Olympian gods and how they figure in the greater Platonic
cosmology. To begin with, Plato makes an odd move and takes a veritable
leap-of-faith regarding the traditional genealogies of the gods, calling on us
to ‘take on their word’ the genealogical
accounts of the gods offered to us by ‘descendants of gods [who] must, no
doubt, have had certain knowledge of their own ancestors.’ Though he does recognise that these
genealogies ‘speak without probable or necessary proofs’ we are asked to
‘follow established usage and accept what they say.’ This leaves us in something of a quandary,
but not an insurmountable one. The focus of this passage is on the actual form
of worldly existence the traditional gods have, so it may not be too difficult
to swallow a tacit approval of the traditional genealogies, under the recognition
that we, of course, do not know how they came to be, and that these stories
have been around for as long people have told stories about the gods. Perhaps
all Plato is saying here is that ‘None of us know where the gods came from, and
thus these tales, for as much as they do not stand at odds with reason, are
just as likely as any other myth.’ We do not have here an in-depth discussion
about the nature of the gods, or their character, merely a vague nod in the
direction of tradition. One scholar helpfully observes that in other dialogues
Plato recognises that the genealogies are ‘hard to censure because of their
antiquity’. [Plato’s Cosmology, p.
138 (footnote)]
It is worth
mentioning here that there is always a tension between traditional religion and
the kind of philosophical cosmology the Presocratics had been engaging in.
However, I emphasise that this ‘tension’ was not something necessarily
insurmountable and is often very ambiguous in nature. Although, for example,
Anaximander offers an explanation for the source of thunder and lightning in
purely naturalistic terms, a phenomenon that was traditionally associated with Zeus, this does not mean that he did
not believe in the Olympian gods, or that they weren’t worthy of worship. No
Christian’s God is entirely identical with any other Christian’s, and there is
no reason to assume it would have been otherwise for the Greeks (indeed, their
gods were indubitably protean in nature). It is only in the defiant monotheism
of Xenophanes that we see something that closely resembles rejection of the
Olympian gods and cynicism toward religion, and even then I am hesitant
describing it as an ‘outright’ rejection. It is an inevitability that people
with questioning minds would have made perhaps uncomfortable enquiries into the
nature and origins of the gods of the civic cults, but this does not mean that
they were rejecting them (not even the atomists threw the gods out!): they are
simply asking for clarification.
Regardless
of the specific details of their origins, the Timaeus account does not question the existent of the celestial
gods. The gods are placed in a privileged position in this cosmology, their lot
being to create ranks of mortal creatures. This must be done through an agent
distinct from the Demiurge, as anything made through him is indissoluble. These
inferior gods, then, must produce the other forms of life, whose lot it is to
change and vary and die. These gods,
though, are still at best perhaps only quasi-divine, for though they will never
meet death, they ‘are not immortal nor indissoluble altogether.’ Seeing as
eternity has been a characteristic associated with divinity since at least the
time of Thales, this fact is enough to qualify the gods of Olympus as they
appear in this cosmology as failing to qualify as divine, again for much the
same reason as the world itself is not divine: they came to be.
Finally,
there is the question of the Demiurge itself. As said above, this being does
not qualify for strict comparison with the Abrahamic god: it is not
all-powerful, it required things beyond itself in order to create, the material
of the world was pre-existent and it required intermediaries in order to bring
about living creatures. Is, then, the Demiurge divine? This is an extremely
difficult question to answer, not least because it is very unclear if the
Demiurge is intended to be taken literally or metaphorically. We have little reason to believe that the
Demiurge came into being. It seems far more likely that the Demiurge can be
said to either have always been, or that it stands outside of time as we
comprehend it altogether (given that the Timaeus account includes the creation
of time with the cosmos, this seems likely). As such, we can conclude that the
Demiurge is eternal and, thus, not corporeal. Further, it is through the
Demiurge that Reason comes to overcome chaotic Necessity in the formation of
the world; Reason, of course, being the characteristic that the mortal needs to
cultivate in their soul in order to grasp the eternal splendour of the Forms
and the quasi-divine element of the World-Soul itself. All of this considered,
regardless as to whether or not the Demiurge is intended to be understood as an
actually existent being or a metaphor for the effect of reason over matter, we can
perhaps cautiously suggest that the Demiurge is at least somewhat divine.
The
Demiurge, then, is an odd god. Powerful, though not all-powerful, benevolent
but somewhat impersonal. Plato’s Demiurge is more like the God of the deists
than of the theists: this is nature’s god, not Israel’s. It does not seem that
we can really have a relationship with it, and Plato does not call for us to
worship the Demiurge. Indeed, Plato in this period of his writing is not as
concerned with worship as he is with the idea that the mortal’s soul can become
godlike (though his earlier discussions of piety for the gods are for more
traditional). Indeed, Plato is not attempting to create scripture here (the
dialogue begins with a warning that it is unlikely that we’ll ever be able to
truly know how the world came to be, or who made, and even if we did discover
this, it is still doubtful that we’d be able to proclaim it to that many
people). Plato is here doing what he does best: he is speculating,
story-telling: philosophising. He is trying to grasp as close towards truth as
he can, a truth that he knows he can never be sure of.
