There is no use in attempting to define or explain the first God
in the Platonic system, who has sometimes been thought to answer
to God the Father; or the world, in whom the Fathers of the
Church seemed to recognize ‘the firstborn of every creature.’ Nor
need we discuss at length how far Plato agrees in the later
Jewish idea of creation, according to which God made the world
out of nothing. For his original conception of matter as
something which has no qualities is really a negation. Moreover
in the Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world is described,
even more explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single act,
but as a work or process which occupied six days. There is a
chaos in both, and it would be untrue to say that the Greek, any
more than the Hebrew, had any definite belief in the eternal
existence of matter. The beginning of things vanished into the
distance. The real creation began, not with matter, but with
ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God took of the same
and the other, of the divided and undivided, of the finite and
infinite, and made essence, and out of the three combined created
the soul of the world. To the soul he added a body formed out of
the four elements. The general meaning of these words is that God
imparted determinations of thought, or, as we might say, gave law
and variety to the material universe. The elements are moving in
a disorderly manner before the work of creation begins; and there
is an eternal pattern of the world, which, like the ‘idea of
good,’ is not the Creator himself, but not separable from him.
The pattern too, though eternal, is a creation, a world of
thought prior to the world of sense, which may be compared to the
wisdom of God in the book of Ecclesiasticus, or to the ‘God in
the form of a globe’ of the old Eleatic philosophers. The
visible, which already exists, is fashioned in the likeness of
this eternal pattern. On the other hand, there is no truth of
which Plato is more firmly convinced than of the priority of the
soul to the body, both in the universe and in man. So
inconsistent are the forms in which he describes the works which
no tongue can utter—his language, as he himself says, partaking
of his own uncertainty about the things of which he is speaking.