gods, and religion are unprecedented. And no later thought, no later thinker, is
unaffected by Plato. This is true of Aristotle above all, whose books have had such a
fascinating influence on Western thinking in general and that of the Christian Church
in the West in particular.
The Theology of Plato’s Dialogues
Studying ancient Greek theology differs from the rest of the study of ancient Greek
religion in an important respect: despite the influence of tradition and cultural
context, rational, philosophical reflection on religion, god, and the gods is very
much bound up with the thinking of the individual Greek thinker. This applies as
much to the theology of Plato as it does to the theology of, for example, Aeschylus. In
consequence, a prerequisite to an understanding of Plato’s theology is an under-
standing of, or at least an acquaintance with, the rest of Plato’s philosophy. Obviously,
this cannot be achieved in the present context. Instead, we shall begin with a brief,
preliminary, dogmatic exposition of Plato’s theology. A literal reading of his dialogues
is likely to arrive at the following picture of the world:
There is a god who is good (Republic2,Timaeus) and who, by virtue of his
goodness, is incapable of wishing for anything other than what is good or doing
anything other than what is good. This god is faced with an expanse of stuff,
changeable and lacking all order. But because order is better than disorder, the god
sets about, as a craftsman, ade ̄miourgos, to set in order what he has found in disorder.
He does so with reference to what is eternal, unchanging, and always the same as
itself; these things he uses as models and examples,paradeigmata(Timaeus). They
belong to the realm of what can be thought,noe ̄ta, not to the realm of what can be
seen,horata(Phaedo,Republic,Timaeus). Since what is thus immutable is perceived
by the thinking mind,nous, and since whatever hasnousis better than anything that
does not, the craftsman fashionsnousinto his creation (Timaeus). But in that which
changes, i.e. in the constantly changing realm of stuff,nouscan only be present in
soul,psyche ̄(Sophist,Timaeus,Philebus). So the craftsman’s first task is to create a soul,
so that the changeable world can share in that which does not change (Timaeus).
Thus the world has soul (Timaeus,Philebus,Laws10), and all that has soul in the
world shares in that soul; highest among ensouled things are the gods created by
the craftsman, next come human beings, created in turn by the gods, and after that all
the other things that move by themselves (Timaeus). For of the two types of
‘‘moving,’’ ‘‘moving’’ caused by something else and ‘‘moving’’ moving by itself, it
is soul that moves by itself (Phaedrus,Laws10). Conversely, whatever moves by itself
has soul. But it is not fitting that these souls that move by themselves should be
dissolved. They are thus everlasting, in assimilation and approximation to what is
eternally immutable. This accounts for the regularity and immutability of the order of
the stars and planets who (sic!) move in circular motions through the ordered world,
thekosmos; they are the everlasting gods (Timaeus). Human souls, on the other hand,
have bodies of an inferior kind. When these bodies cease to function, the souls return
to where they came from. There, different fates await different souls; ultimately, what
fate one’s soul has, here and elsewhere, depends on what one does and what one
chooses to do (Gorgias,Phaedo,Republic10,Phaedrus,Laws10). That we know
386 Fritz-Gregor Herrmann