Focus on Creation: Plato and the Platonists

The Greeks were not so much concerned with creator and creation. Plato (and the philosophers before him) were not familiar with a God who created out of nothing. According to the Greeks, the Maker worked with eternal matter existing outside himself. Yet Plato did differ from the other Greek thinkers in the sense that he believed that the world had a beginning and had been fashioned by a divine creature. Because god was called father in Plato's Timaeus it became possible for the Christians to interpret Plato's philosophy in a Christian sense. The first book of Moses also speaks of a pre-existent primal chaos of matter characterised by the elements of water, fire, earth and air, out of which God created heaven and earth.

In Plato's vision the world is a copy made after the original world, an image of the eternal: perfection existed only in the realm of the Forms or the 'intelligible living Creature'. That which comes into being or has been made must have a first cause. For Plato, however, the maker who is responsible for what is made remains unknowable: 'The maker and father of this universe it is a hard task to find, and having found him it would be impossible to declare him to all mankind' (Timaeus). In order to get an idea how everything has come into existence Plato (the first Greek thinker to do so) introduced a creator god in the shape of the Demiurge, the worker or maker who brought order to everything that has been created. The motivation for the creation is also explained in the same myth. The creator god is good and wanted everthing he made to be good and beautiful, too. The Demiurge therefore instilled intellect in the soul and the soul in the body.

Plato's philosophical creation myth, and the Logos of the superior god, the Intellect (Nous) of the Platonists, were also an influence on Hermetic philosophy. There are clear parallels between the creation myths in the Hermetic Poimandres and Plato's Timaeus.