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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2022
Introduction: the ten gifts of the Demiurge
The account looks at the cosmos in two ways. In the first way, it looks at the cosmos according to the wholeness (holotês) that is in it and by virtue of which it is also similar to the All-Perfect Living Being (30c3) and has become itself an ensouled living thing, possessed of intellect and uniquely generated (30b8). But in the second way, it looks at the cosmos according to the divisions that are drawn within it. It reviews when the soul is distinguished from the body and when the order (taxis) of things that are more like form is distinguished from those things allotted a more material nature, and it examines, on the one hand, how that which is corporeal (to sômatoeides) has been established and what kind of order it possessed, and on the other, it looks at how the psychic realm (platos) has proceeded from the creation and in accord with what sort of ratios.
Since the cosmos has been exhibited to be ‘an ensouled living thing possessed of intellect’, there will be three things in it: body, soul and intellect. Now Intellect is entirely ungenerated, having been allotted both an eternal essence (ousia) and eternal activity (energeia). The world's body is entirely generated since it has been established as temporal through and through. Soul, however, has an essence of an intermediate nature. So just as it is arranged as intermedi ate between divisible and indivisible things, in this manner it is also the boundary between generated and ungenerated things, having a beginning that is generated in relation to intellect but being ungenerated in relation to corporeal nature. It also has this status by being the limit of eternal beings but the very first among the things that have been generated.
On account of these facts, therefore, Plato provides a varied generation of the body [of the universe], producing the whole thing out of what is foreign to the body itself. The Soul he produces from itself, as well as producing it from the total creation and process of enlivening (zôiogonikês).
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