There is no suggestion that there is a "worst soul," a "devil" or "evil world-soul"; all that is said is that there must be one soul which is not the best, and may be more. This is Plato's way of excluding Pantheism, as incompatible with the reality of evil. The argument thus establishes at once the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. The other two heresies can now be disposed of. It is inconsistent with the goodness of the best soul to be indifferent to our conduct, and still more so to be venal. The moral government of the world is, in fact, as sured by the establishment of the single principle that every soul gravitates into the society of its likes, and consequently "does and has done to it what it befits such a soul to do and have done to it." Plato thus becomes definitely the originator of the view, that there are certain theological truths which can be strictly demonstrated by reason.
It is these demonstrable truths which are subsequently named by Varro "natural" or "philosophical" theology in contradistinc tion to the "poetical theology," the myths related by the poets, and the "civil theology," the ritual cultus instituted by politicians. From Varro the distinction of three theologies passed to St. Augus tine, and thus in the end became the foundation of the scholastic distinction between natural theology, those truths about God which can be ascertained independently of any specific revelation, and revealed theology, the further truths which are only made accessible by the Christian revelation. Since Plato's object in
demonstrating his three propositions is an ethical one, he goes on to enact that the maintenance of any of them shall be a grave crime to be visited by the State with penalties ranging from a minimum of five years' solitary confinement, and with death on a second conviction. Plato is thus the inventor, so far as European society is concerned, of the proposal to make an official creed for the State and to treat dissent from it as criminal, an innovation foreign to the spirit of the Hellenic cities, in which religion was a matter not of beliefs but of cultures. Plato's last word, then, on the problem how the sensible comes to "partake" of Form is that it does so through the agency of divine goodness and wisdom. God moulds the sensible upon the pattern of the intelligible. The obvious question, how God, who is a "soul" has nothing to do with "precession of the equinoxes," being in the wrong sense for that purpose.
not a Form, is related to "the Good" which is the supreme Form never receives discussion or solution. To answer it was to be the main business of Plotinus.