II - The Resemblance of the Cosmos to the Living-Thing-Itself: 416.6–436.3

Summary

Which Living thing is the Paradigm?

This being so, we must go on to talk about what comes next. In the likeness of what living thing has he who constructs [the universe] constructed it? (30c2–3)

General explanation: 416.9–420.19

By this Plato shows clearly the continuity between the problems [he poses] and the linking of the later ones to the earlier. The [phrases] this being so and what comes next show the continuity of what is going to be said with what has [already] been said, and that it is on account of the truth of the latter that what will follow is in turn furnished with the starting-point of the inquiry. For, since it has been shown that it was through the providence of the god that the universe was produced as a living thing, it must have been made after the likeness of an intelligible living thing. After all, where else than to the intelligible [Living Thing] did the Demiurge look when he made the cosmos a living thing? And in fact one of the things demonstrated earlier (29a2–6) was that the cos mos, since it is ‘most beautiful’, is created (gignesthai) in relation to an everlasting paradigm. So if in creating an image of this [paradigm the Demiurge] brought a living thing into being, the paradigm itself must also have been a living thing – an intelligible one. For if [the paradigm] was not a living thing, how was this [living thing], which was created (gignesthai) as a copy of it, produced as a living thing? In fact, it is precisely because it resembles [the Paradigm] that it is created a living thing. It is not sensible or particular as a result of resembling it. These [characteristics] both came to it as a consequence of its bodily nature. But it is a living thing because it resembles the Intelligible. And if it resembles it, it was from it (ekeithen) that it got the form of a living thing. And as a matter of fact copies, inasmuch as they are formed after their paradigms, get not only their form from them but their names as well. And so if [the cosmos’s] having life is due to the Paradigm, it is also called ‘a living thing’ after it – and equally ‘endowed with soul’, because the cause of all animation also pre-exists in the Intelligibles, and, by the same argument, ‘endowed with intellect’.