An example of these two opposite tendencies in ancient times is furnished by the Greek philosophy on the one side, and the Hebrew theology on the other. Plato, the most religious of Greek philo sophers, and the one most fully possessed by the thought of the real identity of philosophy and the ology, nevertheless, in his search after an absolute first principle of existence and truth, finds himself carried up to the assumption of an ideal good, which is not only beyond personality, but beyond definite existence itself.* In a subsequent discus sion, which forms a sequel to the former, we find an attempt made to exhibit this Supreme Being in relation to the world of definite and derived existences ; and the apparent discrepancy between the language of this dialogue, the Timm's, and that previously employed in the Republic, has given rise to much forced interpretation, and, through that, to some wholly untenable theories concerning the character of the Platonic theology, and its re lation to the doctrines of Christianity.
The Platonic cosmogony, as it is exhibited in the Timxus, appears to recognise three original and eternal existences : first, the Deity, the Creator, or rather the artificer or demiurge of the visible world; secondly, the ideal world or archetype, after the pattern of which the visible world was framed ; and thirdly, the primitive matter out of which the world was framed ; itself unformed and invisible, but susceptible of every variety of visible form ; the substratum and recipient of those modes which constitute the material elements of the universe. The Deity, in framing the world out of the primi tive matter, is said to act from reason and desz:gn (be X6-you eat Stapolas); by intellect (5,a mail) ; and his action is spoken of as an exercise of reason (Xoi fur u6s) ; but there is not the slightest evidence that this divine reason was represented by Plato as having a distinct personality, or as being anything more than an attribute of the divine mind. Indeed his whole language seems to necessitate the oppo site interpretation. The author of the world, he says, being good, and desiring that all things should be like himself, framed the visible world after the ideal pattern ; and because that which has intelli gence is better than that which has it not, therefore he created the world as an intelligent being, having a soul as well as a body. Of the world as thus made, he says, that the father who made it admired it, and was rejoiced ; and subsequently, after de scribing the creation of time, of the planets, the mea sures of time, and of the fixed stars, which are living beings divine and everlasting, he proceeds to tell us how the supreme Deity, having formed the souls of men, committed to these inferior deities the task of joining them to corruptible bodies. If this lan guage is understood literally, it is difficult to recon cile the personality and intelligent action here ascribed to the Deity with the terms previously used in the Republic in relation to the supreme Good ; and when we consider the evidently mythi cal character of many of its details, we shall per haps be justified in regarding the cosmogony of the Tinions as a popular rather than a philosophical exposition, expressing the personal belief of the author, rather than the logical result of his system ; and as intended to express, under a symbolical form, a theory designed to fill up, or rather to leap over, the chasm which separates the ideal principle of being from the material ground of the phenomenal world, by means of the intermediate conception of a soul of the universe.*
But the later Platonists of the Alexandrian school adopted a different interpretation. They evaded the difficulty by assuming, without any warrant from the text of the dialogue,t the exist ence of an impersonal supreme principle as un derstood, in addition to the principles expressly mentioned by Plato. To this principle, the ideal good, they assigned the highest place in the scale of existence, placing the intelligent author of the world, whom Plato calls the ever-existent God (av act Oebs), in the second rank, as having a depen dent existence derived from the first principle, and adding to these, as a third principle, the soul of the universe, the product of the divine intelli gence.:t These three constitute the celebrated Pla tonic or rather Neoplatonic triad of rillmebv, PODS, and which some of the Christian Fathers regard as an approximation to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity,§ and which has been employed in the same point of view for two opposite purposes in modern times, by Cudworth in support of Chris tianity, and by Gibbon in depreciation of it.II But in truth this triad, though attributed to their mas ter by Plotinus and others of the Neoplatonic schoo1,11" cannot without extreme violence be ex torted from the text of Plato himself, nor fairly traced, in its complete form, to any teaching earlier than the Christian era.** The most plausible evi dance in favour of an earlier date rests on two passages in the so-called Platonic Epistles, which, however, are too obscure to warrant any reliable inference, and which are now generally regarded as spurious, and are thought by some to bear traces of a Jewish, if not of a Christian origin.* Nor can any greater weight be attached to another argu ment, also employed by some of the Fathers in sup port of a Platonic anticipation of Christianity, from the use by Plato and other philosophers of the term X6yor to denote the divine intelligence ;t a term which, whether intended literally or figuratively, will be naturally used in relation to the divine mind, as it is in relation to the human, and which, in its earlier use, bears no trace of the theological sig nification afterwards assigned to But in this respect again a distinction must be made between the language of Plato himself and that of his later followers, particularly of the Jewish Platonist Philo, whose speculations will require a separate exami nation.