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