Timaeus
in the Platonic system, who has sometimes been thought to answer
to God the Father; or the world, in whom the Fathers of the
Church seemed to recognize ‘the firstborn of every creature.’ Nor
need we discuss at length how far Plato agrees in the later
Jewish idea of creation, according to which God made the world
out of nothing. For his original conception of matter as
something which has no qualities is really a negation. Moreover
in the Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world is described,
even more explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single act,
but as a work or process which occupied six days. There is a
chaos in both, and it would be untrue to say that the Greek, any
more than the Hebrew, had any definite belief in the eternal
existence of matter. The beginning of things vanished into the
distance. The real creation began, not with matter, but with
ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God took of the same
and the other, of the divided and undivided, of the finite and
infinite, and made essence, and out of the three combined created
the soul of the world. To the soul he added a body formed out of
the four elements. The general meaning of these words is that God
imparted determinations of thought, or, as we might say, gave law
and variety to the material universe. The elements are moving in
a disorderly manner before the work of creation begins; and there
is an eternal pattern of the world, which, like the ‘idea of
good,’ is not the Creator himself, but not separable from him.
The pattern too, though eternal, is a creation, a world of
thought prior to the world of sense, which may be compared to the
wisdom of God in the book of Ecclesiasticus, or to the ‘God in
the form of a globe’ of the old Eleatic philosophers. The
visible, which already exists, is fashioned in the likeness of
this eternal pattern. On the other hand, there is no truth of
which Plato is more firmly convinced than of the priority of the
soul to the body, both in the universe and in man. So
inconsistent are the forms in which he describes the works which
no tongue can utter—his language, as he himself says, partaking
of his own uncertainty about the things of which he is speaking.
We may remark in passing, that the Platonic compared with the
Jewish description of the process of creation has less of freedom
or spontaneity. The Creator in Plato is still subject to a
remnant of necessity which he cannot wholly overcome. When his
work is accomplished he remains in his own nature. Plato is more
sensible than the Hebrew prophet of the existence of evil, which
he seeks to put as far as possible out of the way of God. And he
can only suppose this to be accomplished by God retiring into
himself and committing the lesser works of creation to inferior
powers. (Compare, however, Laws for another solution of the
difficulty.)
Nor can we attach any intelligible meaning to his words when he
speaks of the visible being in the image of the invisible. For
how can that which is divided be like that which is undivided? Or
that which is changing be the copy of that which is unchanging?
All the old difficulties about the ideas come back upon us in an
altered form. We can imagine two worlds, one of which is the mere
double of the other, or one of which is an imperfect copy of the
other, or one of which is the vanishing ideal of the other; but
we cannot imagine an intellectual world which has no qualities—‘a
thing in itself’—a point which has no parts or magnitude, which
is nowhere, and nothing. This cannot be the archetype according
to which God made the world, and is in reality, whether in Plato
or in Kant, a mere negative residuum of human thought.
There is another aspect of the same difficulty which appears to
have no satisfactory solution. In what relation does the
archetype stand to the Creator himself? For the idea or pattern
of the world is not the thought of God, but a separate,
self-existent nature, of which creation is the copy. We can only
reply, (1) that to the mind of Plato subject and object were not
yet distinguished; (2) that he supposes the process of creation
to take place in accordance with his own theory of ideas; and as
we cannot give a consistent account of the one, neither can we of
the other. He means (3) to say that the creation of the world is
not a material process of working with legs and arms, but ideal
and intellectual; according to his own fine expression, ‘the
thought of God made the God that was to be.’ He means (4) to draw
an absolute distinction between the invisible or unchangeable
which is or is the place of mind or being, and the world of sense
or becoming which is visible and changing. He means (5) that the
idea of the world is prior to the world, just as the other ideas
are prior to sensible objects; and like them may be regarded as
eternal and self-existent, and also, like the IDEA of good, may
be viewed apart from the divine mind.
There are several other questions which we might ask and which
can receive no answer, or at least only an answer of the same
kind as the preceding. How can matter be conceived to exist
without form? Or, how can the essences or forms of things be
distinguished from the eternal ideas, or essence itself from the
soul? Or, how could there have been motion in the chaos when as
yet time was not? Or, how did chaos come into existence, if not
by the will of the Creator? Or, how could there have been a time
when the world was not, if time was not? Or, how could the
Creator have taken portions of an indivisible same? Or, how could
space or anything else have been eternal when time is only
created? Or, how could the surfaces of geometrical figures have
formed solids? We must reply again that we cannot follow Plato in
all his inconsistencies, but that the gaps of thought are
probably more apparent to us than to him. He would, perhaps, have
said that ‘the first things are known only to God and to him of
men whom God loves.’ How often have the gaps in Theology been
concealed from the eye of faith! And we may say that only by an
effort of metaphysical imagination can we hope to understand
Plato from his own point of view; we must not ask for
consistency. Everywhere we find traces of the Platonic theory of
knowledge expressed in an objective form, which by us has to be
translated into the subjective, before we can attach any meaning
to it. And this theory is exhibited in so many different points
of view, that we cannot with any certainty interpret one dialogue
by another; e.g. the Timaeus by the Parmenides or Phaedrus or
Philebus.
The soul of the world may also be conceived as the
personification of the numbers and figures in which the heavenly
bodies move. Imagine these as in a Pythagorean dream, stripped of
qualitative difference and reduced to mathematical abstractions.
They too conform to the principle of the same, and may be
compared with the modern conception of laws of nature. They are
in space, but not in time, and they are the makers of time. They
are represented as constantly thinking of the same; for thought
in the view of Plato is equivalent to truth or law, and need not
imply a human consciousness, a conception which is familiar
enough to us, but has no place, hardly even a name, in ancient
Greek philosophy. To this principle of the same is opposed the
principle of the other—the principle of irregularity and
disorder, of necessity and chance, which is only partially
impressed by mathematical laws and figures. (We may observe by
the way, that the principle of the other, which is the principle
of plurality and variation in the Timaeus, has nothing in common
with the ‘other’ of the Sophist, which is the principle of
determination.) The element of the same dominates to a certain
extent over the other—the fixed stars keep the ‘wanderers’ of the
inner circle in their courses, and a similar principle of
fixedness or order appears to regulate the bodily constitution of
man. But there still remains a rebellious seed of evil derived
from the original chaos, which is the source of disorder in the
world, and of vice and disease in man.
But what did Plato mean by essence, (Greek), which is the
intermediate nature compounded of the Same and the Other, and out
of which, together with these two, the soul of the world is
created? It is difficult to explain a process of thought so
strange and unaccustomed to us, in which modern distinctions run
into one another and are lost sight of. First, let us consider
once more the meaning of the Same and the Other. The Same is the
unchanging and indivisible, the heaven of the fixed stars,
partaking of the divine nature, which, having law in itself,
gives law to all besides and is the element of order and
permanence in man and on the earth. It is the rational principle,
mind regarded as a work, as creation—not as the creator. The old
tradition of Parmenides and of the Eleatic Being, the foundation
of so much in the philosophy of Greece and of the world, was
lingering in Plato’s mind. The Other is the variable or changing
element, the residuum of disorder or chaos, which cannot be
reduced to order, nor altogether banished, the source of evil,
seen in the errors of man and also in the wanderings of the
planets, a necessity which protrudes through nature. Of this too
there was a shadow in the Eleatic philosophy in the realm of
opinion, which, like a mist, seemed to darken the purity of truth
in itself.—So far the words of Plato may perhaps find an
intelligible meaning. But when he goes on to speak of the Essence
which is compounded out of both, the track becomes fainter and we
can only follow him with hesitating steps. But still we find a
trace reappearing of the teaching of Anaxagoras: ‘All was
confusion, and then mind came and arranged things.’ We have
already remarked that Plato was not acquainted with the modern
distinction of subject and object, and therefore he sometimes
confuses mind and the things of mind—(Greek) and (Greek). By
(Greek) he clearly means some conception of the intelligible and
the intelligent; it belongs to the class of (Greek). Matter,
being, the Same, the eternal,—for any of these terms, being
almost vacant of meaning, is equally suitable to express
indefinite existence,—are compared or united with the Other or
Diverse, and out of the union or comparison is elicited the idea
of intelligence, the ‘One in many,’ brighter than any Promethean
fire (Phil.), which co-existing with them and so forming a new
existence, is or becomes the intelligible world...So we may
perhaps venture to paraphrase or interpret or put into other
words the parable in which Plato has wrapped up his conception of
the creation of the world. The explanation may help to fill up
with figures of speech the void of knowledge.