Focus on Creation: Plato and the Platonists

Plato. Timaeus. Paris, J. Badius, 1520

In Timaeus Plato (ca. 429-347 BCE) presented the world as made by the Demiurge, a creator god using matter which he himself had not created. What was structured that way, the sensible, visible world (conceived of as a living creature) and all forms of life (made by the heavenly gods: the stars, the planets, the earth), was good, as perfectly made as possible. Plato's creator god or the divine Mind imbued a living creature with soul and intelligence. Man's rational faculty is therefore divine in origin and forms a reflection of the divine nature of the cosmos as it is revealed to us.

'So, being without jealousy, he desired that all things should come as near as possible to being like himself. [ ...] Desiring, then, that all things should be good and, so far as might be, nothing imperfect, the god took over all that is visible [...] and brought it from disorder into order, since he judged that order was in every way the better.[...] There are Being, Space, Becoming - three distinct things - even before the Heaven came into being. [...] Fire, water, earth, and air possessed indeed some vestiges of their own nature, but were altogether in such a condition as we should expect for anything when deity is absent from it. Such being their nature at the time when the ordering of the universe was taken in hand, the god then began by giving them a distinct configuration by means of shapes and numbers. [...] The god framed them with the greatest possible perfection, which they had not before.'

30, 52d-e, 53b, F. Cornford