Plutarch on Plato's Procreation of the Soul in Timaeus

Plutarch · Constitution of Man Series · 30 pages

Plutarch's essay on the passage of the Timaeus that describes the making of the world-soul, in the translation of Philips. It proceeds by setting Plato against his interpreters and then against himself: the opinions of Xenocrates and Crantor are given first, then Plato's own doctrine of the eternity of matter, the nature of the soul, and the account of a material originally a shapeless mass existing from eternity and arranged into perfect and beautiful forms by God.

The hardest section is the reconciliation of Plato with himself over the origin of evil and the claim that the soul is both created and uncreated — which Plutarch works out through geometry and the doctrine of ratios, and then again through the musical scale, the two illustrations being the standard Platonic apparatus for showing how a thing can be composed of the divisible and the indivisible, the Other and the Same. He refutes those philosophers who make the soul a compound of both, and treats the relation of spirit to matter, the four original elements of all corporeal things and how they are related, and what generation actually means. Two discordant principles are said to rule the world — Fate or Necessity, and Intelligence or Wisdom — from which follows his conclusion that the soul is not altogether the workmanship of the Deity. Further illustrations come from the planetary system and from musical science.

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