In ancient thinking-philosophizing, Plato was considered a theologian. Later Platonism took Plato’s thinking as theologizing. For instance, in Platonic Theology, Proclus reads and places together the Timaeus and Parmenides and gathers together scattered passages and myths in such a way that lets Plato’s thinking-philosophizing arise as theologizing, as thinking toward the god and the gods, toward the divine and divinity. In modern attempts at interpreting Plato’s thought, however, Plato is often not seen as a theologian and his philosophizing is not considered to be a theologizing, although it is agreed that, for instance, the Timaeus is where theology and philosophy come together and into each other.
Plato’s thinking of the possibility of the mortals becoming like god as much as possible brought theology closer to all philosophizing of life in the sense that becoming like god itself became that toward which all human life and philosophical inquires should be directed.
The emergence of Christianity brought theology further into philosophy, for the thinking-philosophizing of Plato was put into the service of either arguing against Christianity or struggling for its ways of thinking. The Timaeus in its thinking toward the demiurge, the god who brought disorder into order and put together the universe, seemed necessary in this arguing and struggling.
In the Timaeus, where Plato puts forth his cosmological thinking-philosophizing, he talks about the corporeal gods that were fashioned or put together by their father, the maker of the universe, the demiurge, Intelligence, or simply the god, who is thought of as good and free of jealousy. Plato says that because of this goodness, the universe came into being through the god’s ordering of the disorder that held sway prior to the god’s work. The universe, or the cosmos, is itself a god in Plato’s cosmology, containing other corporeal and visible gods, which are the sun, moon, stars, and planets.
Concerning the gods of Greek mythology, Plato takes them for granted in the Timaeus, refusing to doubt their truths by following how the ancients thought toward them or how they appeared within the most ancient thinking towards divinity.
Finally, a danger lying at the heart of any attempt at thinking together with Plato of that to which he refers as the god, the demiurge, or the father and maker of the universe, is the possibility of approaching this god through the thinking pertaining to later theology. For to approach Plato’s thinking toward divinity and the divine through the questions and possibilities of later theology is to insert foreignness into Plato’s philosophizing.
In Plato’s philosophizing, other questions and possibilities are at work, different from, for instance, salvation or omnipotence. Caring for the soul, assimilation to god, the invention of numbers, and the emergence of philosophy belong to the mortals’ engagement with and turning toward the divine and divinity in Plato’s thinking. Political, ethical, and philosophical thinking seemed to Plato to be in need of a god and gods; and existentially, happiness announces itself within us if we ourselves are turned toward the gods.
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