Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, January 22 2025
Within the framework of the seminar series on homoiosis theõ, Prof. Franco Ferrari from the University of Pavia illustrated the contents of this same doctrine in Plato’s Timaeus.
According to Arius Didymus, Plato dealt with assimilation to God in three ways: physical, in the Pythagorean manner (Timaeus); ethical (Republic); logical (Theaetetus). The discontinuity of this approach was criticized in antiquity, though in some opinions it was only apparently inconsistent, ultimately respecting the macro-areas of philosophy.
In the Republic, assimilation to God must take as its reference the ordered cosmos of ideas, in which rationality dominates, and serve as both an ethical and political parameter. From this perspective, the doctrine of assimilation concerns the philosopher, the only one capable of proposing to society, through his own life, the eidetic order.
The logical version of the doctrine, which in the Theaetetus is characterized as a “flight”, attracted the Neoplatonists.
In the Timaeus, which presents two analogical and overlapping cosmogonic schemes: the demiurgic one and that of the world generated by a father, who possesses a soul, the soul of the world. The model to which man must assimilate himself is the cosmos itself. The cosmos is a god: this aspect, for Ferrari, is the hallmark of the distinction between the Platonic and Christian visions.
If, however, the cosmos is a god, it is nonetheless a lesser god, a copy or projection of the model. We speak of a happy god, dependent on another god superior to it in ontological consistency (the Demiurge). The chora is the space, the function of this third element. From the world of ideas and chora the cosmos is generated, the only heaven, child of a single generation.
This being established, what man must do is to contemplate the movements of the stars, expression of the universe’s rationality. The movements of our soul – this seems to be the most convincing interpretation in Ferrari’s opinion – are akin to those of the world soul. It is therefore a matter of imitating the movements of our soul, which are also circular and similar to those of the stars, but disturbed at the moment of our birth, transformed from circular to rectilinear. In this framework, one must return to circularity, the expression of order.
At the end of the dialogue, the themes of assimilation are taken up again in very interesting terms.
What is generated directly by the Demiurge is eternal, not subject to dissolution: the cosmos, time, the rational souls of men. On the contrary, the realities generated by the second-degree gods are mortal: “we” humans, evidently.
Nevertheless, for Plato something divine (daimon) is rooted in our soul. Man can therefore acquire some form of immortality. This is not some addition to existence but an intensification of the stimulation of the daimon or reason that is within him.
Now immortalization, linked to the exercise of the rational soul, enters into relationship with the doctrine of assimilation to God because it realizes it, establishing in some way the object of the cosmos.
Man, in conclusion, can reach a condition of immortality “without additions to existence”, implementing, if he looks to divine things, the divine component that is within him, that is, reason.
Accepting this interpretation does not mean denying that Plato believed in the immortality of the soul, Prof. Ferrari emphasized. One must indeed keep in mind that the background of the dialogue is the existence of disorder and evil (malevolence, envy) in the face of a universe created good, free from jealousy and envy.
