Kimberly Sta. Maria Dalton

Professor Caferro

Medieval History

19 November 1999

Timaeus and the Christian God

"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." This phrase, easily recognizable as the first statement in the book Genesis, could just as naturally have come from Plato's Timæus. The Timæus, a dialog written by Plato in order to answer Sophist questioning of the possibility of reliable and objective knowledge, contains not only philosophy, but also a detailed account of his own unique perspective of creation. Plato's retelling of the creation in the Timæus, though from a clearly pagan and 5^th century perspective, managed to appeal to the Christian society of the middle ages. It was so influential, in fact, that it is now looked upon as the primary philosophical document of the period. While there exist certain similarities between Plato's Timæus and the Genesis of the Bible, several important distinctions should be noted between the two creations and their respective gods.

In order to comprehend Plato's account of creation, it is necessary to understand his philosophy of beginnings in general. Plato noted that the physical world was in constant change: things come into being and then perish. He rationalized that change always requires a cause or reason in two important respects. First, the very existence of a thing requires a cause, and secondly, the characteristics of a thing point to or suggest the idea of an ideal or form. According to Plato, all things in the sensible world are imperfect representations of these forms, which he refers to as "that which always is and never becomes" because of their perfect and unchanging nature. Plato claims that these forms reside in an invisible world quite separate from ours, though it is possible to have exact and certain knowledge about them through contemplation. Plato's Timæus also contains an implied ontology: three fundamental kinds of entities in the universe. The first kind of entity was the soul or mind. The second entities were forms which the waking world was patterned after. The third entity was a medium or physical matter which all existing things were made from.

Plato brought together all of these ideas in his proposal of a Demiourgos, a sort of divine architect or craftsman, who fashioned our world with pre-existing matter following the patterns of pre-existing forms. This pre-existing matter included earth, fire, wind and water.

In contrast, Genesis 1 chapter 2 states that in the beginning, "the earth was without form, and void; and the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Thus, the God of the Bible, did have some pre-existing matter to work with, but unlike Plato's god, he did not require a substance from which to create. God's many declarations such as "Let there be light" suggest that the only tool the Christian God needed for creation was his own voice. That Genesis makes no mention of anything present before creation except void, darkness, and water implies that there were no perfect "forms" from which its God could collect inspiration for his creations. Therefore, it is easy to assume that God used only his own divine imagination as a pattern. The singular exception to this rule was man, a creation in the image of God Himself.

The second stage of creation in the Timaeus was the formation of the sun, moon, and five planets to "define and preserve the measures of time." The God of Genesis also created a sun or "greater light" and moon or "lesser light" as well as stars to serve as signs for "seasons, and for days, and years." Interestingly, the God of Genesis, or perhaps the author of Genesis, divided His process of creation into days while the God of Timæus does not make any mention of the duration of his creation. The birth of the day and night occurred on the first day in the Book of Genesis and it was the second that actually dealt with the creation of the sun, moon and stars. There is no corresponding differentiation between night and day and the creation of the sun and moon in the Timæus.

The Timæus continues with the creation of four types of intelligent beings to populate the earth. These were "the gods in heaven, birds in the air, animals that live in water, and animals that go on dry land" (Timæus 55). The Genesis also deals with the creation of animals next. "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven," He proclaims (Genesis 1:20). God also created animals in the sea, and on the earth which he blessed and told to be fruitful and multiply.

Plato's account is unique from Genesis in that it involves the creation of lesser gods. These gods were of two types: the heavenly bodies and mythological gods. The creator addressed these newly-created divinities and informed them that they were immortal, having been fashioned by himself directly. He said that three more creatures still needed to be formed, though they could not be formed by him lest they become gods as well. He then charged the gods with creating a body for man and with weaving mortal and immortal together into one being. Timaeus clearly states that the craftsman intended to create the man's soul first because "he would never have allowed the older to be controlled by the younger." To accomplish a "less immortal soul," he divided up what was left of soul, mixed it up to make it less pure, and divided it into equal portions, one for each star in the heavens. The gods fulfilled their roles as creators, taking some of each of the four elements and combining them into a body for man. The bonding that the gods used was not "indissoluble" like themselves, "but consisted of a multitude of rivets too small to be seen, which held the part of each individual body together in a unity" (Timaeus 59).

This creation of man, like everything else in the Timaeus, is incredibly more complicated than the creation in Genesis which reads "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." In contrast to Timaeus, the Christian God created the body first: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7).

Timaeus next deals with the idea of reward and punishment. To "ensure fair treatment," the first incarnation for all would be as a man, the "better" of the two sexes. Those who mastered temptation and lived a good life would be sent back to their star to carry out a correspondingly happy life; those who did not live up to their expectations were reincarnated as women. If these individuals were evil during their second incarnation, they were reincarnated as animals.

While the idea that those individuals who live moral lives are rewarded by being returned to a happy life on their star somewhat corresponds to the idea of heaven, the concept of reincarnation in the Timæus conflicts greatly with Christianity. The progression from man to woman to animal for those who do not live good lives is indicative that the Platonic equivalent of the Christian "hell" was in fact being reincarnated as a woman, or in the worst case, an animal. Though it involved reincarnation, this idea of women as inferior to men must have appealed to medieval readers and may be one of the reasons why the book was so well liked by medieval philosophers and scholars. Despite popular medieval opinion, however, there is little basis for the inferiority of women in Genesis. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (Genesis 1:27-28). Thus, the God of Genesis clearly gives power to rule over the earth to the woman as well as the man and blesses them both. This is completely unlike the Timaeus which sees women as a kind of punishment or "lesser" man.

According to Plato, after men are created, they are subject to physical gain and loss, temptation, strife, pain from the onset. It is only after living a good life that they are returned to their star. The Christian account, in contrast, first presents man with a perfect garden to live in with a single temptation: the Tree of Knowledge. It was only after Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit that they were cast out of the garden of Eden, made to work and suffer, and required to show that they were worthy to achieve a reward in heaven.

In the Timaeus, after men were reincarnated into women, the lesser divinities produced sexual love. Plato provides an interesting account of this process:

If the existence of women as a punishment in the Timaeus already presents sexual relations between men and women with negative connotations, Plato's idea of "disobedient and self-willed" creatures inside men controlling lust takes it one step further. This notion that sexual love was designed because "evil" men were reincarnated as women is a definite break from Genesis. In Genesis, God created male and female in their entirety and blessed them and told them to be "fruitful" and "multiply." He looked upon procreation as a good thing and even expected it from his creations. Sexuality was so natural to Adam and Eve, that they did not even realize they should be ashamed when they were naked. There were sexual consequences to the stealing of the forbidden fruit, namely pain in childbirth and the realization of nakedness.

Plato's God is very different from the Christian God, though he too is responsible for creation and is "a living being with soul and intelligence." Plato's God required material to build his creations. While the God of Genesis did make man from dust and woman from a rib, he initially created the dust and the rib. Thus, he did not require anything that he himself did not make in order to create. According to Plato, God only created the souls of men and not their bodies. Plato's God based all of his creations on a whole even more perfect than he could create while the Christian God drew solely from the creativity of his own mind and was unlimited in his creative abilities. Plato's God indirectly created creatures such as women for the sole purpose of punishment. In contrast, the Christian god created only that which was "good." Though his beings might choose to disobey, their sin would lead them to punishment such as hell, and not reincarnation into a lesser being. Though the idea of being reincarnated as punishment might seem apalling, this plan actually points to a more lenient God because it allows anyone the chance to make it to their heavenly reward , no matter how evil they have been in the past. The Christian God offers only once chance at life, after which the soul is sent to either heaven or hell.

In Plato's Timæus, all the creations seem to add up to a larger being or perfect whole with a divine entity all its own. This whole is more important to the Platonic God than any part of the whole. In Christianity, God seems to only value the souls of the men, which were created in the likeness of God. Plato's God only created only the Earth, the sun, the stars, and five planets which. As Plato said, " our universe was and is and will continue to be his only creation" (Timæus 43). The God of Genesis did rest on the seventh day, but nowhere in Genesis does it say that the creation of Earth was his last. Indeed, the Christian God began with only one man and one woman, so it may be assumed that he is continually creating new beings in the form of children as time progresses.

Another defining incongruity between the two is the Christian God's lack of reason and the Platonic God's abundance of it. Plato's God has a reason for everything that he creates, everything he doesn't create, and for his way of creating it. For example, he does not give the earth feet or eyes or hands because they would be useless to it. The only purpose that the Christian God seems to have is to create that which is good.

The difference in complexity between the two gods can be directly related to their authors. Plato's God was a product of his own philosophical mind. Plato, like many of the philosophers of his time, sought to understand even the unexplainable. He could not accept the idea of a God or a creation without reason, so he created his own idea of God and his own rationalizations for creation. His mental creation of a perfect God became incredibly complex. Moses on the other hand, the most likely author of Genesis, seemed to write to tell what he believed was the story for creation. Though the two Gods were very different, they did both fulfill perhaps the two most important purposes of any god: both provided their believers with an explanation of creation and with a heavenly goal.