5.16 Aleksandar Kandić Plato’s Myth in The Timaeus

In many ways, Plato’s cosmological myth in the Timaeus represents a breakup with the ancient Greek religious tradition, or at least, a significant divergence. After he carried out a severe critique of anthropomorphic representations of Gods in the second and the third book of The Republic, Plato proceeded to sketch his own vi- sion of ideal state by calling upon the so-called Forms, or Ideas – the objects of true knowledge and principles of all things. However, Plato’s method achieves its final, mature form, only in The Timaeus. The treatise on the nature of righteousness and good governance turns into a creationist-cosmological myth, as we learn that being Good and Just requires not only good deeds and the knowledge of the Idea of Good, but also the knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of the Universe. We are intro- duced to an Architect (demiourgos), the one God who creates the physical world by using mathematical objects as paradigms. The Timaeus could be described as a well- balanced mixture of scientific, religious, and literary ideas, and is heavily influenced by the Pythagorean theories of number and proportion. There is no doubt that Plato’s conception of demiourgos as well as his understanding of the Good as One inspired Christian theologians in great extent, particularly through the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists. Contemporary experimental sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, are now coming to the realization that the Universe we inhabit truly is structured by number and proportion, and that some of the geometry Plato described in The Timaeus may very well correspond to the geometry of physical structures.