PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO Like the Lord God in Genesis, the maker of the world looked at what he had made and found that it was good; and in his delight he adorned it with many beautiful things But the Demiurge diVers from the creator of Judaeo-Christian tradition in several ways First of all, he does not create the world from nothing: rather, he brings it into existence from a primordial chaos, and his creative freedom is limited by the necessary properties of the initial matter (48a) ‘God, wishing all things to be good and nothing, if he could help it, paltry, and Wnding the visible universe in a state not of peace but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, brought it from disorder into an order that he judged to be altogether better’ (30a) Secondly, while the Mosaic creator infuses life into an inert world at a certain stage of its creation, in Plato both the ordered universe and the archetype on which it was patterned are themselves living beings What is this living archetype? He does not tell us, but perhaps it is the world of Ideas which, he concluded belatedly in the Sophist, must contain life God created the soul of the world before he formed the world itself: this world-soul is poised between the world of being and the world of becoming (35a) He then fastened the world on to it The soul was woven all through from the centre to the outermost heaven, which it wrapped itself around By its own revolution upon itself it provided a divine principle of unending and rational life for all time The body of the heaven was made visible, but the soul is invisible and endowed with reason and harmony It is the best creation of the best of intelligible and eternal realities (36e–37a) In contrast to those earlier philosophers who spoke of multiple worlds, Plato is very Wrm that our universe is the only one (31b) He follows Empedocles in regarding the world as made up of the four elements, earth, air, Wre, and water, and he follows Democritus in believing that the diVerent qualities of the elements are due to the diVerent shapes of the atoms that constitute them Earth atoms are cubes, air atoms are octahedrons, Wre atoms are pyramids, and water atoms are icosahedrons Pre-existent space was the receptacle into which the maker placed the world, and in a mysterious way it underlies the transmutation of the four elements, rather as a lump of gold underlies the diVerent shapes that a jeweller may give to it (50a) In this Plato seems to anticipate the prime matter of Aristotelian hylomorphism.31 31 See Ch below 63