Platos_theology

Plato’s Theology
Plato’s Theology
David Sedley
The Oxford Handbook of Plato (2 ed.)
Edited by Gail Fine
Print Publication Date: Nov 2019 Subject: Philosophy, Classical Philosophy

Online Publication Date: Oct 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190639730.013.6
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines Plato’s views on theology. Plato inherited Socrates’s conviction
that a proper understanding of the divine nature is essential to human virtue and happi
ness. Hence, god’s essential goodness is the thesis that runs most prominently through all
his theological arguments. Since this supreme goodness is manifested above all in the
cosmic structures created by divine intelligence, it is understandable if Plato turns out to
stick resolutely to his insistence that, for all its appearances of imperfection, from a glob
al perspective ours is the best physical world that could ever have been created, even by
a supremely powerful being. On the other hand, Plato shows less interest than Socrates
did in the idea of divine intervention in individual human lives. To that extent his work in
theology points forward to Aristotle, who would insulate god entirely from concern with
the sublunary world.
Keywords: theology, divine nature, virtue, happiness, Plato, Socrates, dialogues, philosophy
1. Educational Theology
THE term “theology”1 (theologia) makes its very first recorded appearance in book II of
Plato’s Republic (379a), although the word may at this early stage perhaps mean no more
than “telling stories (logoi) about gods.” At any rate, the context is an educational one: in
the ideal city, Socrates maintains, children must not be exposed to the traditional myths,
which misrepresent gods as capable of harm, deceit, and other bad conduct. The poets
who tell these tales must be informed as to what “outline impressions” (tupoi) about the
gods they are to convey. The starting point is that god, being essentially good, could nev
er be the cause of anything bad (379b–e). Since, however, bad things not only happen in
the world, Socrates observes (379e), but far outnumber the good things, some cause oth
er than god must be found for them. Whether Plato ever worked out what this cause of
bad things might be, and how in a god-governed world such a thing could exist, is a ques
tion to which we will return at the end of the chapter.
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Plato’s Theology
The impossibility that gods should cause harm is not merely a claim about their moral
character. It is the application of a ubiquitous Platonic metaphysical thesis about causa
tion: just as fire, being essentially hot, can only make things hot, and never cold, quite
generally too, what is essentially F can never cause anything to be or become the oppo
site of F; and god is no exception. Looking ahead to Plato’s account of the world’s divine
creation in the Timaeus, we may note that there the same premise, that god is essentially
good, will be the “supremely authoritative principle” from which the whole cosmogony
follows (29e–30a).
Despite the fact that the like-causes-like principle is a metaphysical one, its de
(p. 628)
tailed application in the Republic context is ethical, underwriting as it does Plato’s insis
tence that the gods must be paradigms of the moral standards expected of humans. Take
harming. If gods inflict punishments, for example, those must be corrective punishments
for the benefit of those punished, not for their harm (380a–b). This corresponds to Plato’s
non-retributive theory of punishment, as developed in the Gorgias. A theology of vindic
tive gods returning wrong for wrong would undermine that Socratically inspired insight,
and myths involving divinely inflicted retribution must be rewritten to avoid misleading
the young about the morality of punishment.
The concern manifested by this educational program has little to do with establishing
truths about the gods in their own right. The morally beneficial myths prescribed by
Socrates are seen by him as deliberate falsehoods, crafted for educational purposes. At
one point (378a) he even entertains the counterfactual hypothesis that some stories about
violence among the gods might be true, and insists that, if that were so, such stories
should not be told to the young, because of the harm that would be caused. So although
we meet in this part of the Republic Plato’s first sustained engagement with the idea of
gods as paradigms for human emulation,2 the focus is as much on educational expediency
as on theological truth.
2. The Shape of God

At first surprisingly, the misrepresentations of the gods that Socrates proposes to outlaw
from the Republic’s ideal city do not include anthropomorphism. If gods are to serve as
role models for the young, no doubt the fiction of their having human form is likely to do
no harm, perhaps even to help. But we should not be misled: in more directly theological
contexts Plato will make it very clear that the human form is incompatible with divine
perfection.
The text that above all others explicates this doctrine is the Timaeus,3 generally regarded
as a late dialogue, although there is little doubt that many of the ideas showcased in it
had been maturing for decades. The eponymous speaker Timaeus sets out what can safe
ly be taken to be Plato’s central theological tenets, even if interpreters have from the
start been divided about how literally these should be understood.4
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To put his theology at its simplest, god is intelligence (nous).5 The ultimate reason
(p. 629)
there is a world, universe, or cosmos (kosmos means literally “ordering”) lies in the com
bination of two initial entities: intelligence and matter. Matter is inherently disorderly,
whereas intelligence—which is inherently good, and by no means in a narrowly moral
sense of the word—loves to impose order. We must therefore posit the existence of a
supremely skillful intelligence, which, confronted with the totality of disorderly matter,
set out to impose the maximum of order on it. That pure intelligence functions as Plato’s
supreme god, but Timaeus has little to tell us about him: “To discover the maker and fa
ther of this universe is a considerable task, and to communicate that discovery to every
body impossible” (Timaeus 28c). What Timaeus seems much more confident about telling
us is how the supreme god or divine “craftsman” (dēmiourgos, English “demiurge”) fash
ioned the available matter into the entity that we now call the world. Most notably, he
made his creation intelligent (and hence also possessed of soul), unique, perfectly sym
metrical (that is, spherical), complete, self-sufficient, and everlasting, each of these attrib
utes being incomparably superior to its alternatives, and therefore the intelligent choice
for a world-maker starting from, as it were, a blank canvass.
As this series of engineering decisions is unfolded, it becomes increasingly clear to the

reader that the emerging cosmos is itself a god. We are thus introduced to a second class
of divinities, created gods. Of these, the world itself is the foremost representative, but
others include the world’s major components: the earth, stars, sun, moon, and planets.
Much as the world itself is bounded by a sphere, namely that of the fixed stars, so too the
earth and celestial bodies are, each of them, spherical in shape, and they also share the
world’s everlastingness and intelligence. The implied reason that these divine attributes
are bound up together is that the exercise of intelligence, focused as it is on unchanging
entities, is physically embodied in the intelligent subject’s potentially perpetual rotation
on its own axis, a kind of motion natural to the sphere.
But another significance of the spherical shape lies in self-sufficiency. Although the essen
tial core of a human being is the (approximately) spherical head, our seat of intelligence
possessed of its own naturally circular motions, we humans could not have been designed
as overall spherical beings, because survival in a material world requires asymmetric ap
pendages: arms, legs, mouth, sense organs etc. The world, by contrast, is a perfect and
complete being with nothing whatsoever outside it for it to ingest, perceive, or ward off.
It therefore has no need for any such asymmetries, and remains by default a perfect
sphere—the finest of all shapes according to Timaeus (33b).
Given that gods are conceived as maximally self-sufficient beings, the sphere begins to
emerge as the natural shape of a divinity. The earth and other spherical divinities within
the cosmos must be assumed to approximate the same self-sufficiency.
For Plato, then, the scientifically true shape of divinity is the sphere, the asymmetric hu
man frame being an expedient necessitated precisely by our lack of divine self-sufficiency.
If he did not insist on that in the Republic, it was not because he had not (p. 630) yet ar
rived at his rejection of anthropomorphism, a rejection that after all had been entrenched
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in the philosophical tradition since Xenophanes (sixth century B.C.E.). Rather, to repeat, it
is because the error of envisaging gods as human in form is an educationally benign er
ror, indeed probably one that actively encourages human beings to emulate their divine
role models.
3. Other Divine Attributes

It is in any case mainly in the context of cosmological science that the shape of god as
sumes such importance. From the point of view of the Platonic spectrum of values, the
world-god is a paradigm of the highest kind of happiness (eudaimonia, 34b). Unlike us, it
has no external relations with other members of its own kind, there being none (cf. 31a–
b), and therefore has neither the opportunity nor the need to exercise the equivalent of
human moral virtues. This negative attribute, far from making the world-god deficient, is
what enables it to concentrate on enjoying complete self-knowledge and self-love, identifi
able with intellectual rather than moral virtue.
That the world’s creator, a supreme intellect, should make the world as like himself as
possible (29e), reflects an approach to causality nowhere spelt out by Plato but widely as
sumed and applied in his dialogues. It comes in two parts, the first of which we have al
ready encountered in the Republic. The dual principle is clearly in operation at Timaeus
29e–30a:
(a) Like causes like. Hence the creator god, being essentially good, naturally made
his creation good. This pattern of causal transmission is specifically reflected in the
way he passed on his own supreme kind of goodness, namely intelligence, to the
world-god he created.
(b) The cause is greater than the effect. For example, as fire regularly makes other
things hot, but not as hot as itself, so too the creator god made the world good, but
not as good as himself. Rather, in Plato’s formulation he made it as good as it was
possible for him to make it.
How and why the created world-god, though good, necessarily falls short of perfection is
a major topic in Platonic theology, to which we will return in due course. At present, how
ever, the task is a narrower one: to see how that same pair of causal principles results in
there being at least two different kinds of god. Consider the quintessentially divine at
tribute, immortality. The supreme deity, being essentially immortal, must by causal princi
ple (a) transmit immortality to anything he creates. Therefore the world-god, being his
creation, is immortal. But by causal principle (b), the created world-god cannot have the
same degree of immortality as does its creator.
Whatever this means, it cannot be that the world-god will endure for a very long but nev
ertheless finite time. Rather, it is the manner of its everlasting duration that is attenuat
ed. The creator god is represented by Plato as a supreme craftsman, and one hallmark
(p. 631) of craftsmanship is likely to be the durability of the product. This reaches its ex
treme when the product is so durable that no one but its creator could destroy it (think of
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tying a knot so tight that no one weaker than you could untie it). That is the kind or man
ner of durability that the world-god enjoys. Only its creator could destroy it, and he, being
good, has no conceivable motive for doing so, now or at any future time.
Thus whereas the supreme god is essentially immortal, the world-god and its divine com
ponents such as the earth and stars are only contingently immortal. More specifically, the
created gods possess not an essential but a derivative and conferred immortality.
Why then did there need to be gods of this secondary kind? One part of Plato’s answer is
that it is gods of this kind that must be credited with the creation of mortal animals such
as ourselves. If the supreme god had directly created us, we would be derivatively immor
tal, and that would preclude the existence of an equitable life cycle in which our souls pe
riodically transmigrate up or down the scala naturae—a doctrine of reincarnation that
Plato affirms not just in the Timaeus but in many dialogues, and sees as ethically funda
mental to the existence of cosmic justice.
But that topic cannot detain us now. Instead we must focus on a second function of the
created gods, one which requires a further subdivision. At 41a Timaeus lists the created
gods as follows: “both the visibly rotating ones, and those who appear to us just to the ex
tent that they are willing.” The “visibly rotating gods” are the heavenly bodies, plus al
most certainly the earth too, even though the evidence for Plato’s thinking that the earth
rotates on its own axis (40b–c, quoted later on in this chapter) is controversial. The celes
tial divinities are living beings made mainly of fire, visibly orbiting the earth along trajec
tories that are subject to complex mathematical analysis. From the most simple to the
most complex, the observation of these rotations serves to teach the human race mathe
matics, starting no doubt with the simple counting of days and nights, and extending all
the way up to the highly problematic reduction of planetary orbits to the combined func
tions of regular motions. Orderliness is thus a feature of the divine that can best be dis
cerned and appreciated by the science of astronomy, thanks precisely to the creator’s
construction of the heavens out of these providently visible fiery gods. Taken as a whole
the celestial orbits are, in effect, the divine world-soul’s thinking made visible, thinking
that we can learn to replicate in our own heads. The orderliness of the celestial divinities
is in turn a direct reflection of divine goodness, thus making astronomy the privileged
route toward philosophical understanding, and thereby toward the highest form of human
happiness, achieved by internalizing that same orderliness in our own intellects.
4. Traditional Gods
Regarding Plato’s distinction between two kinds of created gods, “both the visibly rotat
ing ones, and those who appear to us just to the extent that they are willing” (41a), we
have so far dealt with the former class of gods. They are in effect the gods of scientific
theology: paradigms of regularity, subject to empirical study and precise mathematical
(p. 632) analysis. The latter kind are the traditional members of the divine family, not usu
ally open to inspection at all, but witnessed at most only in reported epiphanies.
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The passage just quoted is in effect Timaeus’s transition from scientific to nonscientific
theology. Having introduced the two major circles of celestial rotation and the visible di
vinities—sun, moon, fixed stars, planets, and earth—that move in accordance with them,
he remarks that without a visible mechanical model it is impossible to go further in chart
ing their conjunctions, back-circlings, occlusions, and the like; and that he is therefore
bringing to an end his account of the “nature” ( phusis) of the visible gods. To paraphrase,
here ends Timaeus’s theological physics. What immediately follows amply confirms that
this is so, as Plato’s speaker turns to the gods of legend (40d–41a):
As for the other divinities, to speak about them and to know how they came to be
is beyond our capacity. Rather, we must believe those who have spoken about
them in the past, who were, on their own say-so, offspring of gods, and no doubt
had clear knowledge of their own forebears. So it is impossible to disbelieve sons
of gods, although they speak without likely and necessary proofs; but we should
follow custom (nomos) and trust them, on the ground that the things they claim to
be reporting are their own family matters.
So concerning these gods let us, basing ourselves on them, adopt and speak of the
following genealogy. The children born to Earth (Gē) and Heaven (Ouranos) were
Oceanos and Tethys, whose children were in turn Phorcys, Cronos, Rhea and the
others of their generation. Cronos and Rhea gave birth to Zeus, Hera and all those
we know of who are said to be their siblings, and yet further offspring of these.
And the creation narrative continues with the supreme creator delivering, to an audience
consisting of both sets of gods—not only the scientific divinities, but also those of legend
—a detailed set of instructions for the creation of mortal life forms.
This is an important passage for a number of reasons. Timaeus has now moved beyond
scientific theology—the domain in which “likely and necessary proofs” are available.
“Likely” proofs are, in the Timaeus (29b–d), forms of reasoning typical of Platonic physics
as a whole, based on a well-informed reconstruction of the way a creator god would be
likely to reason when designing and constructing a world in imitation of an eternal model.
“Necessary” proofs are harder to pin down in Plato’s terminology, but in context the ex
pression must almost certainly refer to the kind of mathematical reasoning that under
pins Timaeus’s complex account of celestial motion. In other words, Timaeus is here bid
ding farewell to scientific theology, the mathematical study of spheres in motion, and
moving the spotlight to the gods of the traditional theogonies. That Zeus was born the son
of Cronos and Rhea, for example, may well be true, but no amount of scientific reasoning
can help to confirm it. Instead, Timaeus indicates with a shrug, we must simply accept
the divine family trees bequeathed by theogonic authorities. What ensues is an outline
synthesis of Hesiodic and Orphic theogony in five generations: Earth (Gē) and Heaven
(Ouranos); Okeanos and Tethys; Phorcys, Kronos, Rhea, etc.; Zeus, Hera, and the rest of
their generation; and finally the offspring of these last.
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Who are the authorities whom we are here asked to trust regarding divine geneal
(p. 633)
ogy? The attribution to them of divine parentage shows that the reference is principally to
Orpheus and Musaeus (both of them offspring of Selene and the Muses, according to Re
public 2.364e), although it is hard to think that Hesiod’s divine genealogy in his Theogony
is being altogether excluded. Nearly all modern commentators remark that the grounds
offered by Timaeus for accepting the word of these supposed authorities on divine ge
nealogy, namely their claimed divine parentage, are “ironic,” but this should be resisted.
Timaeus’s point in the quoted words is not to mock the alleged grounds for believing in
traditional gods, but simply to make it clear that on the one hand he is piously retaining
the traditional deities in his pantheon, but that on the other he has nothing to say about
their origins beyond what can be read in the theogonies,6 since such deities are not sub
ject to scientific argument. If he were indeed speaking ironically, he would be casting
doubt on the reasons for believing in divinities to whom he prayed at the start of his
speech (26b–c). There, urged by Socrates to start with the conventional appeal to gods,
Timaeus agreed, saying “it is necessary that we invoke both gods and goddesses, praying
that we may say everything above all as they would wish, and secondarily as we would.”
Worse still, according to the legislation against impiety proposed in Laws book X, mock
ery of traditional religious belief or practice, even by fundamentally good people, is so
damaging to social norms as to require stern punishment (908c–d).
Nor are we being offered a choice between two mutually exclusive modes of theology. The
ancestral couple who head the divine genealogy, namely Earth (Gē) and Heaven (Ouranos),
were previously implied by Timaeus to be the two primary deities from whom the cosmos
began (40b–c):
Earth ( gē), who is our nurse, but rotates around the axis that stretches through
the whole, he [the creator] contrived as guardian and fabricator of both night and
day, the first and most senior of all the gods who have come to be within the heav
en (ouranos).
If Earth is “most senior” of the gods within the Heaven, that is perhaps in the sense that
the Demiurge could not have created the celestial rotations of sun, moon, fixed stars, and
planets unless there had already been a central earth for them to orbit around. By the
same criterion, even if only implicitly, the enveloping Heaven at whose center the earth is
placed will itself be an even more senior deity, since a center presupposes a perimeter.
This very senior divine pair become not only the primeval cosmological deities, but also
the ultimate ancestors of the divine family now headed by Zeus.
Although Plato has, as we saw, made it clear that the latter group of deities cannot be sci
entifically studied, in the way that stars can, he does nevertheless find for them a (p. 634)
major role in the creation process, namely the design and construction of the human
body, a task explicitly said to have been shared out among the gods of both kinds (41a–d).
Although massive stars made of fire might in principle be imagined somehow contribut
ing to this task, Timaeus’s assignment of a role in it to quasi-personal gods of the
Olympian variety is not only more credible intuitively, but also respectful toward the
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Greek tradition: in a famous passage of Hesiod’s Works and Days (53-105) Pandora, the
first woman, is constructed by the craftsman god Hephaestus, assisted by an entire sup
port team of other Olympians. This may well be the creative model that Plato had in mind
for his own anthropogonic myth.
Whether Plato was altogether content with the retention of these quasi-personal divinities
is a harder question to answer. The myth in the Phaedrus, in explaining people’s differing
erotic choices, goes so far as to suggest that different Olympian deities represent differ
ent paradigms of value, and that seeking a beloved who will follow the same god as one
self comes down to some kind of moral choice (252c–253c): whereas followers of Zeus are
philosophical in character or aspire to leadership, those of Hera are “royal” and, more
worryingly, those of Ares vengeful.
In this passage Socrates’ myth is accounting for erotic diversity, and it may be doubted
whether Plato was, in his own theology, prepared to introduce this degree of variability
into divine goodness.
5. The Laws
Consider in this regard the opening of Plato’s last and longest dialogue, the Laws, a con
versation largely focused on the creation of a theocratic society, in which laws will stand
proxy for the commands of a divine intellect.7 In the dialogue’s first lines an Athenian
asks a Cretan and a Spartan about their own home cities: “God or some human individual
(theos ē tis anthrōpōn), visitors? Which is responsible for the assignment of your laws?”
The Greek indefinite pronoun tis here refers unambiguously to a human individual as leg
islator (Lycurgus at Sparta, Solon at Athens, and so on); the same pronoun’s omission
from the reference to god is no accident—especially in a Platonic dialogue’s always metic
ulously crafted opening words.8 Rather, it alludes to the scientific theology that will fol
low, especially in book X. The wording carefully leaves open the possibility that the refer
ence to god, despite being grammatically singular, as often, may (p. 635) not be to any dis
crete individual. It thus subtly foreshadows the argument for theism in book X, which will
conclude that the orderly motion of the heaven is caused by divine and ideally good “soul,
or souls” (899b5–8). What Plato’s speaker thus emphasizes is not the gods’ individuality, if
indeed they are individuals, but their possession in common of absolute goodness. Plato’s
deep theological commitment is not to monotheism, a creed with very little attestation in
pagan antiquity, but to the essential unity of the divine. At least in what I have been call
ing his scientific theology he, like Socrates and others before him,9 generally avoids the
common Greek practice of naming gods and thus representing them as fully distinct indi
viduals.
Laws book X is Plato’s final word on scientific theology, presenting a formal argument for
the existence of god, intended to be prefixed to the legislation against impiety that is en
visaged for his projected city Magnesia. In the opening pages of the book Plato shows
himself, if in passing, well aware of two existing arguments for the existence of god, both
of which remain theological classics today, and in Plato’s day were apparently already suf
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ficiently well known to be put into the mouth of a secondary speaker, the Cretan Cleinias
(886a), rather than that of the anonymous Athenian who leads the discussion:
1) The argument from design: the beneficial orderliness of the world, especially the
cycle of seasons and the celestial rotations on which it depends, attests the existence
of gods.
2) The argument from consensus: belief in gods is a cross-cultural universal.
The Athenian responds that these bare arguments are insufficient in the face of commit
ted atheists, who have enough physics to think they can explain cosmic orderliness by ap
peal to the regular behavior of matter, and enough anthropology to classify religion as a
human construct, its local variations running parallel to variations in another closely re
lated human construct, law. He therefore proceeds to construct the earliest known ex
tended argument for the existence of god. It at no point gives signs of aspiring to formal
validity, which it certainly lacks, but it not only exhibits a complex inferential structure,
but is densely enough theorized to serve as a major repository of Plato’s late theological
thought.
The following selective outline does not attempt to smooth over the considerable difficul
ties presented by this probably unrevised text.
5.1 Kinds of Motion (893b–894c)
The Athenian proposes the following curiously heterogeneous list of kinds of motion.
Motion in one place (1) rotation
Motion in many places (2) sliding or rolling
Further kinds of motion (3) Separation

(4) Combination
(5) Growth
(6) Shrinkage
(7) Generation
(8) Destruction
A causal distinction (9) Motion that moves others but not

itself
(10) Motion that moves itself and
others
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With this list established, he concludes (10) self-motion to be the most powerful
(p. 636)
kind, since it is that on which the others ultimately depend. Imagine for example (895a–b)
that everything in the universe were to come to a halt: in that thought experiment, only a
motion capable of moving itself could ever get things back in motion. Thus the ranking
eventually reached is that (10) self-motion is prior to all other motion. Ranked next is (9),
motion that moves only others, since it is through this that a self-mover is able to transmit
motion beyond itself. The other eight kinds of motion, whatever order they may be ranked
in, one way or another are caused by, and depend on, the initial combination of movers.
In case all this should sound puzzlingly abstract, it is worth reflecting that Plato’s is an
immediate forerunner of Aristotle’s argument in Physics book VIII, for the existence of the
prime mover, which he elsewhere identifies as god. The difference is that Plato’s prime
mover is a self-mover, Aristotle’s an unmoved mover. For both thinkers, the chain of mo
tion envisaged starts from a primary deity (10), and proceeds (9) through the circular mo
tions of the celestial bodies (1), above all the sun. The chain then continues into the sub-
celestial world in the form of the various motions (2–8) underlying natural change.
Importantly, however, before moving to the postulation of a divine prime mover, Plato in
troduces soul as the central linking concept.
5.2 The Equation of Self-Motion with Soul (895c–896c)
(i) Self-motion, whenever it is seen in matter, indicates the presence of life.

(ii) To be alive is the same thing as to have a soul (in Greek usage, a near-truism).
(iii) This enables us to equate “soul” with “self-moving motion.”
(iv) Therefore soul is first mover of all things, past, present, and future, and of these
things’ opposites. The other kinds of motion are those of body.
(v) Therefore soul is senior and prior to body, standing to it as ruler to ruled.
(p. 637) 5.3 Soul as Cause of Both Good and Bad (896c–897b)
(i) Since soul is senior to body, things belonging to soul will be senior to bodily
things. Hence character, wish, reasoning, true opinion, concern, memory, etc. exer
cise power over bodies.
(ii) Since soul is the cause of everything, it is cause of good and bad, beautiful and
ugly, just and unjust, etc. (cf. (iv) in section 5.2).
(iii) Since soul is present in and governs all things that are moved, soul must govern
the heavens.
(iv) We are speaking here of at least two kinds of soul: (a) beneficent soul and (b) the
kind capable of doing the opposite.
(v) Soul, by its wishes, right and wrong opinions, joy and grief, confidence and fear,
hate and love, etc., governs all things in the heavens, on land and in the sea; it drives
all the secondary motions, and the qualitative changes consequent upon them. When
it uses intelligence it produces correct and happy results, when unintelligence, the
opposite results.
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5.4 The Goodness of Cosmic Soul (897b–898c)
(i) Which of the two kinds of soul governs the heavens, the earth, and the entire ce
lestial rotation?
(ii) If celestial rotation has a nature akin to intelligence, the best kind of soul gov
erns it; if it is chaotic, the bad kind.
(iii) Of the 10 motions, (1) circular motion is most akin to intelligence, since it and
intelligence share complete uniformity and regularity. And irregular motion is most
akin to unintelligence.
(iv) Therefore it is the best soul—whether that be one or many—that governs the
heavens.
5.5 Cosmic Soul Is God (898c–899c)
(i) So each heavenly body is moved by soul. We cannot see anything’s soul, but we
can grasp it by intellect. Take the example of the soul that moves the sun.
(ii) The soul moving the sun is either (I) internal to it; or (II) external to it, driving it
by some material means; or (III) external to it, driving it by some immaterial means.
(iii) On any of options (I)–(III), the soul moving the sun is properly considered a god.
(iv) Likewise all celestial beings are moved by entirely good souls, and these too, on
any of options (I)–(III), should be considered gods.
(v) In short [to quote Thales, albeit anonymously], all things are full of gods.
To re-emphasize an earlier point, this Platonic defense of theism is pointedly un

(p. 638)
concerned with counting divinities, or even with conserving their individuality. In that re
spect it contrasts strikingly with Aristotle’s argument in Metaphysics Lambda 8, where he
will set out to arrive at a precise figure for the number of divine movers needed to ac
count for all celestial phenomena. Nevertheless, in its own way the theology of the Laws
too is a mathematical science. Gods are primarily scientific postulates, halting the poten
tially infinite regress of movers and accounting for the observed mathematical perfection
of stellar rotation.
But if that is what gods are, why does it matter to Plato that all the citizens of Magnesia
should believe in them? Why does he go so far as to propose solitary confinement and ul
timately capital punishment for unrepentant atheists? And why should the gods of scien
tific theology even be associated with the gods worshipped in the traditional cults, many
of which will in some form be established in Magnesia? The key to Plato’s thinking here is
rational orderliness. Gods are perfect paradigms of this, and in the heaven they manifest
it in the complex combinations of perfect regularities to which astronomers in Plato’s day,
above all his close colleague Eudoxus, were with considerable success reducing the ap
parent irregularities of planetary motion. According to the Laws, the rational orderliness
of a good soul is essentially of this same kind. We saw at the start of the chapter how in
childhood, according to the Republic, one’s conception of the gods already serves as a
paradigm for moral emulation. In adulthood, we can now add, appreciation of god’s per
Page 11 of 19

Plato’s Theology
fect orderliness (albeit now intellectualized and non-anthropomorphic) seamlessly contin

ues that process of assimilation to the divine.
6. The Sources of Evil

In Section 1 of this chapter we encountered Plato’s concession in the Republic that there
are many bad things in the world, and that for these some cause other than god must be
found. Nowhere else does he explicitly return to this apparent gap in his theology and
supply the missing cause or causes of bad. Some candidates can nevertheless be consid
ered.10
6.1 Bad Cosmic Soul
Many scholars hold that in his late work Plato came to entertain a dualistic view of cos
mic soul, conceding that the world is not entirely governed by god or gods, who as we
have seen are essentially and inalienably good, but is also subject to the influence of a
second, bad kind of soul exercising power in the heaven. This, if established, would be a
(p. 639) truly radical solution to the problem of evil, inviting all kinds of new questions
about whether, for example, bad soul is a necessary part of a best-possible world, or a re
grettable imperfection in ours.
What then is the evidence? It all lies in one short passage of Laws 10 (896d5–e7), corre
sponding to (ii)–(iv) in section 5.3, here translated verbatim:
(ii) ATHENIAN. After this, must we agree that soul is the cause of both good and
bad, both beautiful and ugly, both just and unjust, and of all pairs of opposites, giv
en that we are going to set it down as cause of everything?
CLEINIAS. Of course.
(iii) ATHENIAN. Since soul governs and inhabits all things that are in any way
moved, we must surely say that it governs the heaven as well?
CLEINIAS. Indeed.
(iv) ATHENIAN. One soul, or more than one? More than one, I will reply on your
behalf. Let us at the very least posit not fewer than two, namely the beneficent
one and the one capable of doing the opposite.
CLEINIAS. You are quite right to say so.
Outside these lines, the notion of a second, bad, celestial, or cosmic soul occurs nowhere
in the entire Platonic corpus. There can be no disputing that the Athenian does appear to
introduce such a cosmic dualism, and to be applauded by Cleinias for doing so. However,
it seems inescapable that something has gone wrong with the text here. The whole argu
ment (in section 5.3) from which the above lines are taken is devoted to showing that,
since all the motion in the world is caused by soul, soul must be of at least two kinds,
Page 12 of 19

Plato’s Theology
good and bad, in order to account for all explananda, bad as well as good—a tacit applica
tion of the like-causes-like principle noted in Section 3 of this chapter. The further ques
tion which of the two kinds governs the heaven is explicitly raised and answered only in
section 5.4, where the emphatic answer is that good soul alone does so. Hence it makes
no sense for 5.3 already to be singling out celestial soul for evaluation, let alone announc
ing, without argument, that the heaven is governed partly by bad soul. The combination
of this structural incoherence and the totally un-Platonic result that would follow makes it
more prudent to assume that in 5.3 a few words are lost from the manuscripts, so that
(iii) might for example have originally read:
Since soul governs and inhabits all things that are in any way moved, we must
surely say that it governs both the heaven <and everything within the heaven>?11
Unsupported, and even directly contradicted, by the remainder of the argument in which
it occurs, the dualistic explanation of evil should be discounted.12
(p. 640) 6.2 Bad Human Soul
What has, however, emerged from the immediately preceding discussion is that some of
the harm done in the world, perhaps most of it, is caused by the morally bad and ignorant
souls of human beings. While human folly is unlikely to account for all the suffering in the
world, it is undoubtedly a major factor in Plato’s theodicy. The question we must face is
why, in Plato’s eyes, a good creator god should have made our souls such as to be capable
of vice.
Timaeus 39e–42e offers a bold answer. The world is an all-embracing animal, and is there
fore modeled on the Form of the genus animal, which contains all the animal species and
subspecies. In order to be as complete as possible a reflection of that model, the world’s
contents had likewise to include, not just the immortal fiery star-gods, but specimens of
all the mortal species that join them in constituting the genus; and souls suitable to ani
mate all of these specimens had also to be created. But lower-order animal species are
not suitable vehicles for the best kind of souls. These are rationally functional souls, natu
rally housed at the top of the upright human frame, in its approximately spherical head,
in which the circular rotations of those souls’ reasoning activities can be developed and in
some cases perfected. Quadrupeds, reptiles, and fish, by contrast, are degenerate descen
dants of the original male human archetype, reshaped so as to be occupied by corre
spondingly degenerate souls that do not properly, if at all, exercise their rationality. A sys
tem of transmigration does, in mitigation, allow souls to be promoted as well as demoted
in the scala naturae, and thus some kind of overall justice is preserved. But the key point
for present purposes is that, for the above reasons, an ideally good world is one that in
cludes degenerate human souls suitable for temporary reassignment as the animators of
lower species. The existence of human vice is a price worth paying for the world’s there
by maximized completeness.
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Plato’s Theology
But does this mean that a perfectly good god has, in creating souls, created something at
least potentially bad? That would seem to risk compromising causal principle (a), that like
causes like (see Section 3 of this chapter). Plato shows his sensitivity to such a risk when
Timaeus relates how the creator, having himself created all the individual rational souls,
delegated to the lesser gods whom he had created the task of embodying those souls, “in
order that he should not be the cause of the badness that each of them would come to
possess” (42d). This in turn implicitly relies on causal principle (b), that the cause is
greater than the effect: the created gods have a conferred rather than an intrinsic good
ness, which enables them, unlike their creator, in their own turn to create beings with the
capacity to become actually bad. Even then, it is an important point for Plato that those
who become bad are themselves, by their moral choices, the cause of their deterioration:
the lesser gods were instructed “to steer the mortal animal on the finest and best path
possible, except to the extent that it should itself become the cause of its own evils” (42e).
The adjective (aitios) translated “the cause of” here can also be translated “responsible
for.” Timaeus’s care in insulating gods from causing, or being responsible for, badness re
calls an iconic maxim from the myth in Republic X, regarding each soul’s choice of life:
“Chooser’s responsibility, not god’s” (617e; aitia helomenou: theos anaitios).
(p. 641) 6.3 Matter
So far the emphasis has been mainly on moral badness. But how about illnesses, natural
catastrophes, and the like, and our frailty in succumbing to these and other dangers?
What causes those? Since antiquity the most favored candidate among interpreters of the
Timaeus has been: matter. When creating the world the divine intelligence (nous) per
suaded “necessity” (anankē), meaning material stuffs understood as capable of only me
chanical behavior, to cooperate in its work. For example, the creator organised huge
quantities of fire to make star-gods, light, and thereby also vision. Nevertheless, the inter
pretation goes, matter has an inherent capacity to be wayward, thereby earning its nick
name “the Wandering Cause” (48a). And ultimately it is the residual intransigence of mat
ter that prevents divine intelligence from making the world altogether good.13
This interpretation raises difficulties of its own.14 Does Plato really think that matter, the
lowliest component of the universe, never hinted to be divine, ever successfully resists
god? His supreme creator god starts out working with an inherently featureless and pli
able matter (what Timaeus calls “the receptacle”), and shapes it just as he chooses, struc
turing the particles of each of the four elements as perfect geometrical solids (tetrahe
dron for fire, cube for earth, octahedron for air, icosahedron for water). If these chosen
shapes thereafter limit what he can do with matter—for example, he presumably cannot
make a river out of earth or a mountain out of fire—that will depend on his earlier deci
sions about how to shape it, not on the intransigence of matter as such.
It is therefore better to think here, not of matter that still resists divine “persuasion,” but
of Plato’s metaphysical assumption that no physical embodiment of a Form, be it that of
fire, of water, of largeness, or of beauty, can aspire to the Form’s perfection. By replicat
ing in matter some features of the paradigm, even the best craftsman must sacrifice or
Page 14 of 19

Plato’s Theology
limit other features. Timaeus’s example is the human head (75a–b), whose divine creators
had to choose whether to maximize its powers of discernment or its durability: they right
ly chose the former, as easily outweighing the latter in value. This is not the intransigence
of matter, because no kind of matter the creator had chosen or designed could have re
solved the clash of competing desiderata. What is at work here is, rather, the inevitable
need for practical engineering compromises among competing goals. It can no more be
blamed on matter than can the compromise, discussed previously, between the world’s
completeness and the goodness of its inhabitants.
However, another approach is possible. In a classic passage of the Theaetetus (176a),

Socrates associates evil with the absence of god:
But it is not possible for evils to be eliminated, Theodorus, since there must al
ways be some opposite to good, nor for them to become established among the
gods, but of necessity they frequent human nature and this region. Which is why
one should escape from here to there as soon as possible, an escape which con
sists in becoming as like god as possible.
The Theaetetus context is not one of physics, but it brings to mind Timaeus 53b,
(p. 642)
where Timaeus describes the chaotic motions of matter before the world-creator imposed
order on it: “it was entirely in the condition that anything is likely to be in when god is ab
sent.” In the light of this we may say that when matter was earlier characterized as the
non-purposive “Wandering Cause” (48a), that portrayal of it must primarily describe the
kind of contribution to which it would revert if the ordering role of god were absent.15
But is god in reality ever or anywhere absent? If this question were put to Aristotle, he
would say that divinely governed orderliness is more strongly present in the heaven than
in the region we ourselves inhabit. The nearest Timaeus comes to such a thought is when
he describes the cosmic intelligence as combatting the Wandering Cause by “bringing in
to the best state most of the things that undergo becoming” (48a). For instance, we may
take him to mean, most but not all of the world’s fire was used up in making star-gods
and light: hence there is in the world a residue of unruly fire that may on occasion burn
out of control. The question that this raises, and that Timaeus never addresses, is the fol
lowing. Is the retention of some unruly elements in the world a sign of its divine creator
having been defeated or in some other way constrained by matter, or even of his having
simply not bothered to go further in imposing order? Or was it all along part of his pre
ferred design for the world? If, as seems likely, the latter option is intended, then the
world was all along meant to retain a capacity for certain chaotic events, notably the cat
aclysms that according to Plato (Laws 3) periodically restart and morally cleanse degen
erate civilizations. Divine intelligence perhaps is absent from the unruly air from which
hurricanes emerge, the unruly water that causes floods, the unruly earth that permits
earthquakes, and so on. But if so, that is likely to reflect a decision by divine intelligence
that, all things considered, it is better that it leave certain parts or zones of the world’s
matter in a disorderly state.
Page 15 of 19

Plato’s Theology
7. Conspectus
Plato inherited Socrates’ conviction that a proper understanding of the divine nature is
essential to human virtue and happiness. Hence god’s essential goodness is the motif that
runs most prominently through all Plato’s theological arguments. Since this supreme
goodness is manifested above all in the cosmic structures created by divine intelligence,
it is understandable if Plato turns out to stick resolutely to his insistence that, for all its
(p. 643) appearances of imperfection, from a global perspective ours is the best physical
world that could ever have been created, even by a supremely powerful being.
On the other hand, Plato shows less interest than Socrates did in the idea of divine inter
vention in individual human lives. To that extent his work in theology points forward to
Aristotle, who would insulate god entirely from concern with the sublunary world.
Finally, as we have seen, it is not particularly helpful to label Plato either as a polytheist
or as a monotheist. On the one hand, when he speaks interchangeably of “the gods” and
“(the) god,” he is following a regular Greek linguistic practice that was never felt to imply
that the gods might be in reality a singular being. And in what I have called his scientific
theology he does clearly enumerate distinct cosmological divinities, such as the earth and
the sun, as well as differentiating between the supreme creator god and the tier of lesser
gods that he created.
On the other hand in the Laws, which includes Plato’s final venture into theology, he hints
from the outset, and makes clear in book X, that the option of simply postulating the exis
tence of undifferentiated divine soul, and equating this with god, would be explanatorily
sufficient. His reason for keeping such an option open seems to lie in his profound convic
tion, in the face of the mainstream religious tradition, that whatever divine powers there
may be are defined by their shared essential goodness and unity of purpose.
Bibliography
Annas, J. 1999. “Becoming Like God, Ethics, Human Nature, and the Divine,” in Platonic
Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, NY), 52–71.
Bordt, M. 2006. Platons Theologie (Munich).
Broadie, S. 2011. Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge).
Burnyeat, M. 1997. “First Words: A Valedictory Lecture,” Proceedings of the Cambridge

Philological Society 43, 1–20, reprinted in his Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philos
ophy 2 (Cambridge 2012), 305–25.
Burnyeat, M. 2004. “The Impiety of Socrates.” Ancient Philosophy 17, 1–12; repr. in T.
Brickhouse and N. Smith (eds.), The Trial and Execution of Socrates (Oxford 2002), 133–
45, in R. Kamtekar (ed.), Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito: Critical Essays (Lanham,
Page 16 of 19

Plato’s Theology
MD 2004), 210–28, and in M. Burnyeat, Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy 2

(Cambridge 2012), 224–37.
Carone, G. 2005. Plato’s Cosmology and Its Ethical Dimensions (Cambridge).
Cherniss, H. 1954. “The Sources of Evil according to Plato,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 98, 23–30; repr. in G. Vlastos (ed.), Plato vol. 2 (Garden City, NY
1971), 244–58.
Jirsa, J. 2008. “Plato on Characteristics of God: Laws X, 887c5–899d3,” Rhizai 5, 265–85.
Johansen, T. 2004. Plato’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge).
Karfík, F. 2004. Die Beseelung des Kosmos: Untersuchungen zur Kosmologie, Seelenlehre
und Theologie in Platons Phaidon und Timaios (Munich).
Lavecchia, S., 2006. Una via che conduce al divino. La “homoiosis theo” nella filosofia di
Platone (Milan).
Lennox, J. 1985. “Plato’s Unnatural Teleology,” in D. O’Meara (ed.) Platonic Inves

(p. 644)
tigations (Washington, DC), 195–218. (Reprinted in Lennox, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biol

ogy (Cambridge, 2001, 280–302).
Mason, A. S. 2010. Plato (Durham, UK).
Mayhew, R. 2008. Plato, Laws 10. (Oxford).
Mayhew, R. 2010. “The theology of the Laws”, in C. Bobonich (ed.), Plato’s Laws: a Criti
cal Guide (Cambridge 2010), 197–216.
Menn, S. 1995. Plato on God as Nous (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL).
Sedley, D. 2007. Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley, CA).
Sedley, D. 2017. “Becoming Godlike,” in C. Bobonich (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to

Ancient Ethics (Cambridge), 319–37.
Van Riel, G. 2013. Plato’s Gods (Farnham, UK).
Notes:
My thanks to Gail Fine for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
(1) Especially significant studies of Plato’s theology include F. Karfík, Die Beseelung des
Kosmos: Untersuchungen zur Kosmologie, Seelenlehre und Theologie in Platons Phaidon
und Timaios (Munich 2004); M. Bordt, Platons Theologie (Munich 2006).
(2) “Becoming like god” as a human aspiration in Plato is not discussed in the present
chapter, but see J. Annas, chapter 22 of this volume, 278–79; “Becoming Like God, Ethics,
Human Nature, and the Divine,” in her Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, NY 1999),
Page 17 of 19

Plato’s Theology
52–71; S. Lavecchia, Una via che conduce al divino. La “homoiosis theo” nella filosofia di
Platone (Milan 2006>); and D. Sedley, “Becoming Godlike,” in C. Bobonich (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics (Cambridge 2017), 319–37.
(3) Not all aspects of Timaean theology can be addressed here. See further S. Broadie,
Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge 2011); also T. Johansen (this volume),
and id. Plato’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge 2004); D. Sedley, Creationism and Its Crit
ics in Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2007) ch. 4.
(4) See T. Johansen, chapter 12 of this volume, esp. 466–70.
(5) For discussions of what this identification amounts to see S. Menn, Plato on God as
Nous (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1995); G. Van Riel, Plato’s Gods (Farnham, UK,
2013), 68–97.
(6) The same point is made at Republic 365e by Adeimantus, who a little earlier (364e)
has identified the divinely born theogonic poets as Orpheus and Musaeus.
(7) Valuable contributions on the theology of the Laws include R. Mayhew, Plato, Laws 10
(Oxford 2008; (translation and commentary), and “The Theology of the Laws,” in C.
Bobonich (ed.), Plato’s Laws: a Critical Guide (Cambridge 2010), 197–216; J. Jirsa, 2008,
“Plato on Characteristics of God: Laws X, 887c5–899d3,” Rhizai 5 (2008), 265–85; and G.
Carone, Plato’s Cosmology and its Ethical Dimensions (Cambridge 2005), ch. 8.
(8) Cf. M. F. Burnyeat, “First Words: A Valedictory Lecture,” Proceedings of the Cam
bridge Philological Society 43 (1977), 1–20, reprinted in his Explorations in Ancient and
Modern Philosophy 2 (Cambridge 2012), 305–25.
(9) Cf. M. F. Burnyeat, “The Impiety of Socrates,” Ancient Philosophy 17, 1–12; repr. in T.
Brickhouse and N. Smith (eds.), The Trial and Execution of Socrates (Oxford 2002), 133–
45, in R. Kamtekar (ed.), Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito: Critical Essays (Lanham,
MD 2004), and in Burnyeat, Explorations 224–37.
(10) There is still-valuable material on this controversy in H. Cherniss, “The Sources of

Evil according to Plato,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98 (1954),
23–30; repr. in G. Vlastos (ed.), Plato, vol. 2 (1971), 244–58.
(11) Perhaps read καὶ τὸν οὐρανὸν <καὶ πᾶν τὸ ἐντὸς οὐρανοῦ>, 896e1.
(12) I am here to a large extent agreeing with Cherniss 1954, n. 29. See also the extended
discussion of the issue in Carone ch. 8. As far as I am aware the need to emend has not
previously been acknowledged.
(13) Such is the prevalent reading of Timaeus 46c–e, 47e–48a, 75a–b; e.g., Mason 2010,
174–76.
(14) Lennox 1985; Sedley 2007, 113–27).
Page 18 of 19

Plato’s Theology
(15) Cf. the Statesman myth. 269d–e: the world alternates between phases controlled by
god and other phases where he is absent; “it is only to the most divine things that it be
longs to stay always the same, and the nature of body does not belong to that order,” so
the world cannot remain altogether changeless. 273b–d: when god lets go, the precosmic
disorder that is natural to body reasserts itself and causes evils. The Statesman myth is a
fantasy, not a literal cosmology, but may convey genuine Platonic principles.
David Sedley
David Sedley (born 1947; BA Trinity College Oxford, 1969; PhD University College
London, 1974) taught 1975 to 2014 at the University of Cambridge, where he was
Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy from 2000 and remains a Fellow of Christ’s
College. He has edited The Classical Quarterly (1986–1992) and Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy (1998–2007). His books include Plato’s Cratylus (Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 2003), The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato’s Theaete
tus (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Uni
versity of California Press, 2007).
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Plato’s Theology

Print Publication Date: Nov 2019 Subject: Philosophy, Classical Philosophy

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

2. The Shape of God

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As this series of engineering decisions is unfolded, it becomes increasingly clear to the

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

3. Other Divine Attributes

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

5.1 Kinds of Motion (893b–894c)

Motion in one place (1) rotation

Motion in many places (2) sliding or rolling

Further kinds of motion (3) Separation

A causal distinction (9) Motion that moves others but not

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

5.2 The Equation of Self-Motion with Soul (895c–896c)

(i) Self-motion, whenever it is seen in matter, indicates the presence of life.

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

5.4 The Goodness of Cosmic Soul (897b–898c)

5.5 Cosmic Soul Is God (898c–899c)

To re-emphasize an earlier point, this Platonic defense of theism is pointedly un­

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

fect orderliness (albeit now intellectualized and non-anthropomorphic) seamlessly contin­

6. The Sources of Evil

6.1 Bad Cosmic Soul

CLEINIAS. You are quite right to say so.

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

(p. 640) 6.2 Bad Human Soul

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

(p. 641) 6.3 Matter

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

However, another approach is possible. In a classic passage of the Theaetetus (176a),

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

Bordt, M. 2006. Platons Theologie (Munich).

Broadie, S. 2011. Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge).

Burnyeat, M. 1997. “First Words: A Valedictory Lecture,” Proceedings of the Cambridge

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

MD 2004), 210–28, and in M. Burnyeat, Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy 2

Carone, G. 2005. Plato’s Cosmology and Its Ethical Dimensions (Cambridge).

Jirsa, J. 2008. “Plato on Characteristics of God: Laws X, 887c5–899d3,” Rhizai 5, 265–85.

Johansen, T. 2004. Plato’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge).

Lennox, J. 1985. “Plato’s Unnatural Teleology,” in D. O’Meara (ed.) Platonic Inves­

tigations (Washington, DC), 195–218. (Reprinted in Lennox, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biol­

Mason, A. S. 2010. Plato (Durham, UK).

Mayhew, R. 2008. Plato, Laws 10. (Oxford).

Menn, S. 1995. Plato on God as Nous (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL).

Sedley, D. 2007. Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley, CA).

Sedley, D. 2017. “Becoming Godlike,” in C. Bobonich (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to

Van Riel, G. 2013. Plato’s Gods (Farnham, UK).

My thanks to Gail Fine for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 11 January 2022

(4) See T. Johansen, chapter 12 of this volume, esp. 466–70.

(10) There is still-valuable material on this controversy in H. Cherniss, “The Sources of

(14) Lennox 1985; Sedley 2007, 113–27).

To re-emphasize an earlier point, this Platonic defense of theism is pointedly un

fect orderliness (albeit now intellectualized and non-anthropomorphic) seamlessly contin

Lennox, J. 1985. “Plato’s Unnatural Teleology,” in D. O’Meara (ed.) Platonic Inves

tigations (Washington, DC), 195–218. (Reprinted in Lennox, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biol