This post is based on the notes I made watching an identically named Arthur Holmes lecture in his excellent History of Philosophy course.
Plato’s God and the Cosmos
Plato’s concept of God and the Cosmos is essentially an application of his Theory of Forms. Plato defines three possible states of existence:
- Being: The eternal and unchanging realm of the Forms.
- Becoming: The realm of change and particulars, which constitutes our physical world.
- Non-being: The total privation of form. It is neither eternal nor particular. It is a pure, unordered kind of matter.
How Particulars Come to Be
While the Christian concept of God involves creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), Plato’s concept is nothing like that.
There is a vast collection of Forms. They are all real, part of the state of Being, and they transcend the particulars. Not only are they separate from the state of Becoming, but they are also distinct from each other. There is no complex hierarchy among them.
What, then, is the relationship between these Forms? Something has to unify them. Do they participate in a higher ideal, a Form of all Forms? To be precise, Plato did not call this unifying principle “God”, he called it “the Good”.
Plato’s God is therefore a shaper, an organizer, the Demiurge. The Good begets rational order. Because the Good is the ultimate ideal, it must be imitated. The goal of human life is to become like the Good.
Being Good means being a relentless artisan, desiring all things to be good and shaping them in accordance with the ideal Forms. This suggests a fundamentally perfectionist attitude.
Where Good exists, Evil also needs to be defined. Evil is essentially disharmony, a state of disorder and irrationality. It occurs because the primordial matter resists the Demiurge’s rational ordering.