Concerning the procreation of the soul as discoursed in Timaeus (6-10)

But the substance of the soul, in Philebus, he called an infinite being, the privation of number and proportion; having neither period nor measure either of diminution or excess or distinction or dissimilitude. But as to that

order which he alleges in Timaeus to be the mixture of nature with the indivisible substance, but which being applied to bodies becomes liable to division,—he would not have it thought to be a bulk made up by units or points, nor longitude and breadth, which are qualities more consentaneous to bodies than to the soul, but that disorderly unlimited principle, moving both itself and other substances, that which he frequently calls necessity, and which within his treatise of laws he openly styles the disorderly, ill-acting, or harm-doing soul. For such was this soul of herself; but at length she came to partake of understanding, ratiocination, and harmony, that she might be the soul of the world. Now that all-receiving principle of matter enjoyed both magnitude, space, and distance; but beauty, form, and measure of proportion it had none. However, all these it obtained, to the end that, when it came to be thus embellished and adorned, it might assume the form of all the various bodies and organs of the earth, the sea, the heavens, the stars, and of all those infinite varieties of plants and living creatures. Now as for those who attribute to this matter, and not to the soul, that which in Timaeus is called necessity, in Philebus vast disproportion and unlimited exorbitancy of diminution and excess,—they can never maintain it to be the cause of disorder, since Plato always alleges that same matter to be without any form or figures, and altogether destitute of any quality or effectual virtue properly belonging to it; comparing it to such oils as have no scent at all, which the perfumers mix in their tinctures. For there is no likelihood that Plato would suppose that to be the cause and principle of evil which is altogether void of quality in itself, sluggish, and never to be roused on to action, and yet at the same time brand this immensity with the harsh epithets of base and mischievous, and call it necessity repugnant and contumaciously rebellious against God. For this same necessity, which renverses heaven (to use his own phrase in his Politicus) and turns it the quite contrary way from decency and symmetry, together with innate concupiscence, and that inbred confusion of ancient nature, hurly-burly’d with all manner of disorder, before they were wrought and kneaded into the graceful decorum of the world,—whence came they to be conveyed into several varieties of forms and beings, if the subject, which is the first matter, were void of all quality whatsoever and deprived of all efficient cause; more especially the Architect being so good of himself, and intending a frame the nearest approaching to his own perfections? For besides these there is no third principle. And indeed, we should stumble into the perplexed intricacies of the Stoics, should we advance evil into the world out of nonentity, without either any preceding cause or effect of generation, in regard that among those principles that have a being, it is not probable that either real good or that which is destitute of all manner of quality should afford birth or substance to evil. But Plato escaped those pitfalls into which they blundered who came after him; who, neglecting what he carefully embraced, the third principle and energetic virtue in the middle between God and the first matter, maintain the most absurd of arguments, affirming the nature of evils to have crept in spontaneously and adventitiously, I know not how nor by what strange accidents. And yet they will not allow an atom of Epicurus so much as a moment’s liberty to shift in its station, which, as they say, would infer motion out of nonentity without any impulsive cause; nevertheless themselves presuming all this while to affirm that vice and wickedness, together with a thousand other incongruities and vexations afflicting the body, of which no cause can be ascribed to any of the principles, came into being (as it were) by consequence.

Plato however does not so; who, despoiling the first matter of all manner of distinction, and separating from God, as far as it is possible, the causes of evil, has thus delivered himself concerning the world, in his Politicus. The world, saith he, received from the Illustrious Builder all things beautiful and lovely; but whatsoever happens to be noxious and irregular in heaven, it derives from its ancient habit and disposition, and conveys them into the several creatures. And a little farther in the same treatise he saith: In process of time, when oblivion had encroached upon the world, the distemper of its ancient confusion more prevailed, and the hazard is, lest being dissolved it should again be sunk and plunged into the immense abyss of its former irregularity. But there can be no dissimilitude in the first matter, as being void of quality and distinction.

Of which when Eudemus with several others was altogether ignorant, he seems deridingly to cavil with Plato, and taxes him with asserting the first matter to be the cause, the root, and principle of all evil, which he had at other times so frequently dignified with the tender appellations of mother and nurse. Whereas Plato gives to matter only the titles of the mother and nurse; but the cause of evil he makes to be the moving force residing within it, not governed by order and reason though not without a soul neither, which, in his treatise of the Laws, he calls expressly the soul repugnant and in hostility with that other propitiously and kindly acting. For though the soul be the principle of motion, yet is it the understanding and intelligence which measures that motion by order and harmony, and is the cause of both. For God could not have brought to rest mere sleepy and sluggish matter, but he brought it to rest when it had been troubled and disquieted by a senseless and stupid cause. Neither did he infuse into nature the principles of alteration and

affections; but when it was under the pressure of those unruly disorders and alterations, he discharged it of its manifold enormities and irregularities, making use of symmetry, proportion, and number. For these are the most proper instruments, not by alteration and lawless motion to distract the several beings with passions and distinctions, but rather to render them fixed and stable, and nearest in their composition to those things that in themselves continue still the same upon the equal poise of diuturnity. And this, in my judgment, is the sense and meaning of Plato.

Of which the easy reconciliation of his seeming incongruities and contradiction of himself may serve for the first proof. For indeed no men of judgment would have objected to the most Bacchanalian sophister, more especially to Plato, the guilt of so much inconvenience and impudent rashness in a discourse by him so elaborately studied, as to affirm the same nature in one place never to have been created, in another to have been the effects of generation;—in Phaedrus to assert the soul eternal, in Timaeus to subject it to procreation. The words in Phaedrus need no repetition, as being familiar to nearly every one, wherein he proves the soul to be incorruptible in regard it never had a beginning, and to have never had a beginning because it moves itself. But in Timaeus, God, saith he, did not make the soul a junior to the body, as now we labor to prove it to have been subsequent to the body. For he would never have suffered the more ancient, because linked and coupled with the younger, to have been governed by it; only we, guided I know not how by chance and inconsiderate rashness, frame odd kind of notions to ourselves. But God most certainly composed the soul excelling the body both in seniority of origin and in power, to be mistress and governess of her inferior servant. [*]

And then again he adds, how that the soul, being turned upon herself, began the divine beginning of an eternal and prudent life. Now, saith he, the body of heaven became visible; but the soul being invisible, nevertheless participating of ratiocination and harmony, by the best of intelligible and eternal beings she was made the best of things created. [*] Here then he determines God to be the best of sempiternal beings, the soul to be the most excellent of temporal existences. By which apparent distinction and antithesis he denies that the soul is eternal, and that it never had a beginning.

And now what other or better reconciliation of these seeming contrarieties than his own explanation, to those that are willing to apprehend it? For he declares to have been without beginning the never procreated soul, that moved all things confusedly and in an irregular manner before the creation of the world. But as for that which God composed out of this and that other permanent and choicest substance, making it both prudent and orderly, and adding of his own, as if it were for form and beauty’s sake, intellect to sense, and order to motion, and which he constituted prince and chieftain of the whole,—that he acknowledges to have had a beginning and to have proceeded from generation. Thus he likewise pronounces the body of the world in one respect to be eternal and without beginning, in another sense to be the work of creation. To which purpose, where he says that the visible structure, never in repose at first but restless in a confused and tempestuous motion, was at length by the hand of God disposed and ranged into majestic order,—where he says that the four elements, fire and water, earth and air, before the stately pile was by them embellished and adorned, caused a prodigious fever and shivering ague in the whole mass of matter, that labored under the combats of their unequal

mixtures,—by his urging these things, he gives those bodies room in the vast abyss before the fabric of the universe.

Again, when he says that the body was younger than the soul, and that the world was created, as being of a corporeal substance that may be seen and felt,—which sort of substances must necessarily have a beginning and be created,—it is evidently demonstrable from thence that he ascribes original creation to the nature of bodies. But he is far from being repugnant or contradictory to himself in these sublimest mysteries. For he does not contend, that the same body was created by God or after the same manner, and yet that it was before it had a being,—which would have been to act the part of a juggler; but he instructs us what we ought to understand by generations and creation. Therefore, says he, at first all these things were void of measure and proportion; but when God first began to beautify the whole, the fire and water, earth and air, having perhaps some prints and footsteps of their forms, lay in a huddle jumbled all together,—as probable it is that all things are, where God is absent,—which then he reduced to a comely perfection varied by number and order. Moreover, having told us before that it was a work not of one but of a twofold proportion to bind and fasten the bulky immensity of the whole, which was both solid and of a prodigious profundity, he then comes to declare how God, after he had placed the water and the earth in the midst between the fire and the air, incontinently closed up the heavens into a circular form. Out of these materials, saith he, being four in number, was the body of the world created, agreeing in proportion, and so amicably corresponding together, that being thus embodied and confined within their proper bounds, it is impossible that any dissolution should happen from their own contending force, unless he that riveted the whole frame should go about

again to rend it in pieces;—most apparently teaching us, that God was not the parent and architect of the corporeal substance only, or of the bulk and matter, but of the beauty and symmetry and similitude that adorned and graced the whole. The same we are to believe, he thought, concerning the soul; that there is one which neither was created by God nor is the soul of the world, but a certain self-moving and restless efficacy of a giddy and disorderly agitation and impetuosity, irrational and subject to opinion; while the other is that which God himself, having accoutred and adorned it with suitable numbers and proportions, has made queen regent of the created world, herself the product of creation also.

Now that Plato had this belief concerning these things, and did not for contemplation’s sake lay down these suppositions concerning the creation of the world and the soul,—this, among many others, seems to be an evident signification that, as to the soul, he avers it to be both created and not created, but as to the world, he always maintains that it had a beginning and was created, never that it was uncreated and eternal. What necessity therefore of bringing any testimonies out of Timaeus? For the whole treatise, from the beginning to the end, discourses of nothing else but of the creation of the world. As for the rest, we find that Timaeus, in his Atlantic, addressing himself in prayer to the Deity, calls God that being which of old existed in his works, but now was apparent to reason. In his Politicus, his Parmenidean guest acknowledges that the world, which was the handiwork of God, is replenished with several good things, and that, if there be any thing in it which is vicious and offensive, it comes by mixture of its former incongruous and irrational habit. But Socrates, in the Politics, beginning to discourse of number, which some call by the name of wedlock, says: The created Divinity has a circular period, which is, as it were, enchased and

involved in a certain perfect number; meaning in that place by created Divinity no other than the world itself.