A Historical Note On the Idea of Final Causality Before Saint Thomas Aquinas (Part 4) The Demiurage, The Ideas, the Phenomenal World

The Demiurge, the Ideas and the Phenomenal World

It would seem that Professor F. M. Cornford is right in his controversy with Professor A. E. Taylor, when he refuses to recognize in the Demiurge God with a capital letter and so make of Plato a monotheist⁵² Plato believed in the „divinity” of the world as a whole, and he calls the heavenly bodies, gods. The Demiurge does not create this world in the sense of giving existence to it. The materials which he fashions are already (whether logically or ontologically prior) there. He is never called omnipotent. Quite the contrary, since there is a remnant “errant cause” left over, so to speak, after his work is done, he only fashions the cosmos as best he can. But his activity is definitely limited.⁵³ The material, in some respects, limits the power of the Demiurge. This is the „errant cause” which Plato acknowledges as present in the world. What seems to be meant here is that the very structure or the nature of things is limited and thus does not „give in” to unrestricted manipulation. For our purposes it is important to realize that the Demiurge is restricted in his activities. Not all can be indefinitely subdued by him. The material⁵⁴ „stands against”; it refuses to submit completely.

The ideas⁵⁵ as models for the activity of the Demiurge are never pictured by Plato as dependent on him in any way. Rather the Demiurge depends on them in the sense that he makes the world partake of them by ordering the chaos in conformity to the ideas which he himself must first contemplate. The ideas (Forms) are not said to proceed from the Demiurge himself. The Form is “…unchanging, indestructible, which neither receives anything else into itself from elsewhere nor itself enters into anything else anywhere, invisible and otherwise imperceptible; that in fact which thinking has for its object.”⁵⁶

There is no suggestion that the cosmos had a beginning. It is the fleeting image of the eternal Ideas. The Platonic world is not material in a strict sense. Its reality consists of the “receptacle” space, which also is everlasting ⁵⁷ and which provides a situation for all things. In space is reflected and situated the sensible reality, which constantly moves, “coming to be in a certain place and again vanishing out of it.”⁵⁸ Space is therefore the “place” and the mirror in which the copies of ideas are fleetingly present. The world as a whole is endowed with a soul, it is a living organic whole, a “blessed god” self‑sustaining in its mode of existence. There is no suggestion that it will ever have an end. The materiality of the world is identical with extension.

The Demiurge is a necessary agent in the Platonic scheme. His activity explains why order, design, purpose, reason are present in this teleologically structured world. I have already explained the role of the Idea of the Good in the finalistic explanation of the world by Plato. The idea of the Good is the ultimate cause of this world's orderly finalistic structure. The Demiurge is a personified element in the sense that he is the agent through which the Idea of the Good is present and acts in this world. The activity of the Demiurge is a way of explaining the fact that finality in this world is ultimately the effect of the idea of the Good mediated by intelligence. In other words, without the Idea of the Good an ordered world would not exist, moreover, there would not be any world at all.

The basic difficulty in the Platonic elaboration of finality in the world is the problem how order and rational design is introduced into the preexisting chaos. Words like „participation” „being present to” and similar ones remain somewhat mysterious, and although the expression “causing” and “causes” occurs in Platonic writings (Republic, Bk. VI), this happens rather rarely. It is evident from the corpus of Plato's writings that he struggled with this problem from the earliest dialogues to the latest. In the Timaeus the Demiurge and his mode of activity, pictured very vaguely on the model of a human craftsman, remains enigmatic. The presence of the Demiurge may be an indication that possibly Plato was groping toward the need for a God as a creator “ex nihilo.” He himself did not go this far.

References

¹ Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was born in the seventieth Olympiad (500-497) and died in the first year of the eighty-eighth (428). He spent 30 years in Athens and died in Lampsakus. From among his writings we have only fragments of the First Book preserved by Simplicius (sixth cent., A.D.). The fragments quoted in this paper are taken from John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy (Cleveland: Median Books, 1964).

² Sir William David Ross, Aristotle's Metaphysic, revised text with Introduction and Commentary, 3^rd ed. (Oxford, 1953), A3, 984b, 15-19 (hereafter cited as Aristotle, Metaphysics).

³ Hegel, History of Philosophy, I, 319, quoted in Frederick Charles Copleston, A History of Philosphy, 4 vols. (Garden City, N. Y.: Image Books, A Division of Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964).

⁴ Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Part I, I: 87.

⁵ Metaphysics, A4, 985a, 18-21.

⁶ Plato, Phaedo, 97b,8.

^7. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 269. The author says: “But in any case, the originality of Anaxagoras lies far more in the theory of substance than in that of Nous.”

⁸ Laws, X. This thought is presented in the first half of the book.

⁹ Phaedo, 98E.

¹⁰ Laws, X, in the greater part of the book; Phaedrus 254 c-246a; Phaedo, the whole dialogue; Philebus 30e; Timaeus, the whole dialogue.

¹¹ Francis Macdonald Cornford, Plato's Cosmology (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1957), p. 38.

¹² Paul Shorey, What Plato Said (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 329.

¹³ This division and plan are given by F. M. Cornford in his Plato's Cosmology, pp. 9-32. The quotations, unless otherwise indicated, will be Prof. Burnet's translation used also by Cornford.

¹⁴ Timaeus, 28, 28C.

¹⁵ Ibid., 28.