The idea of the world soul is a distinctive Platonic doctrine. It is particularly significant in late Antique thought, the 12th century Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance. It is transmitted via the Cambridge Platonists, mystical pietism, Cabbala and the Spinoza revival to German Romantic period and the great age of Russian literature. Historically, it has been either loosely associated with or even identified with the Divine Sophia. This Divine Wisdom itself has a complex reception history, and constitutes a conspicuous feminine image of the Divine, and is relevant to recent discussions about the intellectual inheritance of Western Christian thought and the ecological crisis.

This chapter addresses the puzzling question of why, in his Timaeus, Plato combines two very different topics: a cosmogony and account of the universe, on the one hand, and a story about the moral actions of ancient Athens, Atlantis, and Egypt, on the other. Sattler argues that the key to understanding the relation between these two parts is recognition that, in Plato’s view, they confront us with a structurally similar problem: how we are to account for the intelligibility of processes in the phenomenal world. Sattler shows that Plato no longer chooses to solve this problem by tying intelligibility to complete uniformity, as he did in the Republic, but by tying intelligibility to a rule – to norms and laws for actions in the human cultural realm, and to ratios and descriptive rules for the motions of the heavenly bodies in the natural realm. While Plato also accounts for the concerns specific to ethics and physics, the attempt to understand processes raises similar problems for him in both realms. Recurring natural catastrophes, such as floods and fires, appear as one kind of natural regularity in this Platonic account.

Emphasis on the ‘craftsmanlike’ character of creation in the Timaeus can give the impression that the cosmos is no more an ‘animal’ than Dr Frankenstein’s monster. But Middle Platonists took more seriously the biological implications of the claim that the god is the world’s father as well as its maker, implanting a soul in matter which (as in all animals) brings the cosmos to maturity through its own creative agency. Entailments of the view are that the world soul is first and foremost the ‘nutritive’ soul of the cosmos and that the soul must be a structural feature of the cosmic body rather than a distinct substance.

This chapter examines Calcidius’ doxographical method, his view of the composition of the human soul, and the latter’s relation to the World Soul

This chapter examines how the first part of the commentary is connected to its second part.

This chapter examines the different levels of divine agency Calcidius posits, in a fluid structure of three gods; it assesses the potential influence of Numenius and Stoicism on this aspect of the commentary.

This chapter examines Calcidius' explicit treatment of Numenius, and the role of the views attributed to the latter in the commentary as a whole; it argues that Numenius is an important influence, but that Calcidius asserts his independence also from his views.