Timaeus

Plato’s late cosmological dialogue, in which the Pythagorean Timaeus of Locri delivers a “likely account” (eikōs logos) of the generation of the cosmos. The Demiurge, looking to the eternal forms-eidos, fashions the world as a single living being possessed of soul and intelligence — the world-soul (psychē tou kosmou). The human soul is a microcosmic recapitulation: reason placed in the head, thumos in the chest, appetite below the diaphragm — each part placed in the body to reflect its relation to the body of the world (Cornford 1937, on Timaeus 69d–72d).

The dialogue’s method is distinctive. It presents itself as a mythos eikos, a “likely story,” rather than a strict demonstration: the Demiurge is a mythic figure, and “Cosmos has always existed. It had no beginning in time and therefore no maker. The image of the craftsman is employed” (Cornford 1997). What the Timaeus offers is not a literal creation history but a mythological articulation of the manner of cosmic rationality. Beyond the world-soul, two further concepts are load-bearing: the khora or receptacle as the “third kind” — neither Form nor copy but the medium in which Becoming occurs — and the quaternity of elements as the minimal structure of physical reality.

The Timaeus is the Platonic text the later tradition most thoroughly adopted. Cornford notes that “the highest form of Eros, the passion for divine wisdom and immortality,” has its seat in the brain “at the head of the column” — the rational soul as the divine fragment in the human (Cornford 1937, on Timaeus 90a). Aristotle takes up this teaching as a program of ascent: man should “achieve immortality and do what man may to live according to the highest thing that is in him” (Nicomachean Ethics X.7).

Through the Timaeus, Plato bequeathed to the Lineage the structural claim that the cosmos itself is ensouled. plotinus elaborates this in the Enneads through his third hypostasis; the Hermeticists make it the doctrine of spiritus mundi; the alchemists receive the receptacle as prima materia and locate the anima-mundi in matter itself; carl-jung recovers it as the unus mundus and reads the four-elements passage as the root of the quaternity; james-hillman makes it foundational: soul is not in us; we are in soul. The dialogue is also the source of the doctrine of the body as mirror of the cosmos — a structural ancestor of every later somatic-symbolic anthropology in the tradition.

Concepts introduced or developed

• world-soul
• demiurge
• tripartite-soul
• anima-mundi
• khora
• quaternity
• reason-and-necessity
• time-as-moving-image-of-eternity

Cited by

• plotinus
• carl-jung
• james-hillman
• f-m-cornford
• plato
• henry-corbin