De-Aristotelianizing Plato

Between 1900 and 1960, scholars believed that Plato held to a “cosmological” view of the divine, the notion that gods are “personified forces responsible for bringing order to the sensible world.” Since then, scholars have adopted a “metaphysical” interpretation, arguing that Plato’s god is finally a metaphysical principle. So argues Gerd van Riel in Plato’s Gods (2-3).

The latter view, van Riel argues, is based on Aristotelian premises. In this outlook, “metaphysics and theology converge on the idea that the highest being (god) is the ultimate instance in which all principles of being are present in the purest way. In Aristotelian metaphysics, god is pure act, pure form, self-thinking thought (as the highest performance of the highest possible activity), and the final cause of the universe.” Thus, “god is the cornerstone of metaphysics, the principle that holds an entire universe together.”

Van Riel proposes to de-Aristotelianize Plato: “Plato was surely the first to establish firm metaphysical views, based o n his theory of forms and culminating in the inaccessible Form of the Good.” But this metaphysics remained distinct from Plato’s theology. For Plato, “gods are not metaphysical principles. They constitute a multitude of divine souls, each of whom has the specific task of looking after (part of) the sensible world.” Following Xenophanes and others, Plato aims to purify the vulgar notion, insisting on the moral excellence of the gods, such that “the order of the world is the expression of a goodness that sets itself forth in the moral conduct of gods and human beings.”

Cosmology, theology, and ethics thus converge, but are distinguished from Platonic metaphysics, which runs along different tracks.