Timaeus

Introduction

The Timaeus is Plato's late cosmological dialogue, presenting the construction of the universe by a divine craftsman — the Demiurge — who orders pre-existing chaos according to the eternal Forms. It is the only Platonic dialogue substantially read in the medieval Latin West before the Renaissance recovery of Greek, and it was for over a thousand years the single most influential ancient cosmological text in European thought.

The Timaeus is unusual in several respects: it is a near-monologue (most of the dialogue is delivered by Timaeus of Locri with only occasional interjection); its mode of presentation is explicitly mythological (Timaeus calls his account a likely story, eikos mythos, not a demonstrative argument); and its content is more cosmological and physical than ethical, departing from the typical concerns of the Platonic corpus. The work's combination of metaphysical seriousness, mythical form, and physical-cosmological content gave it a unique reception history.

Form, length, date, language

The Timaeus is formally a dialogue but functionally a monologue. After a short opening exchange between Socrates, Timaeus of Locri (a Pythagorean), Critias, and Hermocrates, the remainder of the work is Timaeus's continuous discourse on the structure of the cosmos. The work is approximately 30,000 words in Greek and was composed in Plato's late period, conventionally placed around 360 BCE. The original language is Attic Greek.

The Timaeus is the first part of an apparently planned trilogy with Critias (incomplete) and Hermocrates (never written). The Critias tells the story of Atlantis, a vast prehistoric civilization, before breaking off mid-sentence. The Atlantis material at the Timaeus's opening (20d–25d) is the source of all subsequent Western Atlantis traditions; the brevity of the original account has not prevented the legend from becoming one of the most elaborated in Western literary history.

Why it was written

The Timaeus engages a problem the earlier dialogues had largely set aside: if the visible cosmos is a derivative shadow of the eternal Forms, how exactly does the derivation work? What is the relation between the eternal, intelligible realm and the changing, sensible realm? The answer the Timaeus develops is metaphysical: a divine craftsman, looking to the Forms as patterns, orders a pre-existing material substrate (the receptacle) into the structured cosmos we experience. The Forms are the patterns; the receptacle is the material; the Demiurge is the rational agent producing the world from the combination.

The dialogue also responds to the cosmological work of the Pre-Socratics and to the contemporary Pythagorean tradition. Timaeus is identified as a Pythagorean, and the dialogue's mathematical-geometrical treatment of the cosmos (especially the construction of the four elements from regular polyhedra in 53c–57d) is recognizably Pythagorean in inspiration. The Timaeus can be read as Plato's effort to integrate Pythagorean mathematical physics with his own metaphysics of the Forms.

The broader purpose, in the context of Plato's late corpus, is the systematic working-out of the Platonic worldview. The Republic's political philosophy, the Phaedo's account of the soul, and the Timaeus's cosmology together constitute Plato's mature attempt at a complete philosophical system. The Timaeus is the cosmological half of this project.

Structure and argument

The frame (17a–27d). Socrates summarizes the previous day's conversation (a recapitulation of the Republic's political doctrines); Critias tells the Atlantis story; Timaeus is introduced as the speaker for the cosmological account.

Timaeus's opening methodological remarks (27d–29d). Timaeus distinguishes the eternal (what is always, never becoming) from the becoming (what is always changing, never simply being). The eternal is grasped by reason; the becoming by opinion. Since the cosmos is something that has come to be, our account of it can only be a likely story — plausible, not demonstrative.

The Demiurge and the construction of the cosmos (29d–47e). The Demiurge, being good, wished to make all things as good as possible. He looked to the eternal Forms as patterns and ordered the pre-existing chaos into the rational cosmos. The cosmos is therefore a single, unique, spherical living being with a soul. The structure of the cosmic soul is described in mathematical detail (the famous World Soul passage at 35a–36d). Time is created as a moving image of eternity. The visible heavenly bodies are constructed as instruments of time.

The construction of the human body and soul (42a–47e, 69c–81e). The human soul has a rational part (the gift of the Demiurge) and irrational parts (the work of lesser gods). The body is constructed to house the soul, with the various organs assigned specific functions in relation to the soul's needs.

The receptacle and the elements (48a–61c). The discussion shifts to the material substrate — the receptacle (chora) that receives the impressions of the Forms. The four elements (fire, air, water, earth) are constructed from the regular polyhedra (tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, cube). This is one of the most influential single passages of ancient cosmology, anticipating the later atomic and mathematical traditions in physics.

The body, disease, and the soul (61c–92c). An extended treatment of human physiology, the causes of disease, and the relation between bodily condition and psychological wellbeing. The dialogue closes with the famous image of the cosmos as a single, complete, eternal living being.

Key passages

• 27d–28a — the distinction between the eternal and the becoming.
• 29c–29d — the likely story (eikos mythos) methodological reservation.
• 30a–30c — the Demiurge's motive (he was good and wished to make all things good).
• 35a–36d — the construction of the World Soul.
• 37d — time as the moving image of eternity.
• 48e–52d — the receptacle (chora).
• 53c–57d — the construction of the four elements from regular polyhedra.
• 92c — the closing description of the cosmos as a single visible god.

Reception history

The Timaeus has had a reception history out of all proportion to its philosophical centrality within Plato's corpus. Among Plato's dialogues, it is not the deepest or the most argued; among Plato's texts in transmission, it is the most consequential. The reasons are largely historical accident.

In the medieval Latin West, almost all of Plato was lost. The exception was Calcidius's fourth-century Latin translation and commentary on the Timaeus (covering 17a–53c), which remained available throughout the Middle Ages. Plato was therefore known in the Latin West essentially as the author of the Timaeus until the fifteenth century. The Timaeus-shaped Platonism that resulted — a cosmological Platonism focused on the rational structure of the universe, the World Soul, and the divine craftsman — was the form Plato took in medieval thought.

The consequences were enormous. The Chartres school of the twelfth century (Bernard of Chartres, Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches) produced extensive commentary on the Timaeus and used it as the basis for an attempt to integrate Platonic cosmology with Christian doctrine. The Timaeus shaped Christian theological cosmology through Augustine (who knew it well), Boethius, and the broader Latin tradition. The Timaeus's Demiurge was identified with the Christian Creator in various theologically careful ways; the World Soul was identified with the Holy Spirit by some, more cautiously by others.

The Timaeus was also the central Platonic text for the Neoplatonist tradition. Plotinus engaged it constantly; Proclus wrote a major commentary on it (large portions survive); the Islamic Neoplatonist tradition (especially Al-Farabi and Avicenna) inherited it through the Arabic translation.

The Renaissance recovery of Greek and the broader Platonic corpus did not displace the Timaeus's importance; if anything, Ficino's complete translation and commentary made it more accessible. The Timaeus's mathematical cosmology shaped Renaissance natural philosophy (Kepler especially read it carefully). Galileo's mathematization of physics has Pythagorean-Timaean roots even where it broke with the Timaeus's specific claims.

The modern philosophical reception has been less central than the medieval, but the Timaeus remains a key text for the history of cosmology, philosophy of religion, and the metaphysics of creation. Heidegger engaged the receptacle passage seriously in his late work; Whitehead's process philosophy is recognizably Timaean.

Contemporary engagement

The standard scholarly editions include the Loeb (R.G. Bury), the Cornford translation and commentary (Plato's Cosmology, 1937, still the most thorough English commentary), the Hackett edition by Donald Zeyl, and the recent Cambridge edition. Major recent scholarly monographs include Thomas K. Johansen's Plato's Natural Philosophy (2004), the essays collected in Mohr and Sattler's One Book, the Whole Universe (2010), and Sarah Broadie's Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus (2012). Active scholarly disputes concern the literal versus metaphorical reading of the cosmic creation (did Plato hold that the cosmos has a temporal beginning, or is the creation account a way of presenting eternal structural relations?), the status of the receptacle (matter, space, or some third thing?), and the integration of the Timaeus with the rest of Plato's late corpus.

Further reading

• Plato — the author
• Platonism — the tradition
• Neoplatonism — the tradition that most extensively developed the cosmology
• Christian Theology — the tradition that absorbed the Timaeus through Calcidius and Augustine
• Logos — the rational structure the Demiurge instantiates
• Republic — the companion work the Timaeus opens by recapitulating

The most influential ancient cosmological text in Western thought. The single Platonic dialogue substantially read in the medieval Latin West.