Page 15 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 68

late antiquity became quite complicated, but we can simplify, by simply taking
a look at Plato’s Timaeus, far and away the most potent influence on the
cosmology of late antiquity. There Plato introduces the ‘receptacle, or as it
were nurse, of all becoming’ (Tim. 49a). It is not just that in which things move,
but that in which everything becomes. What takes place in the receptacle,
which Plato will later identify with space (χώρα: 52a), is much more than the
movement of material, physical bodies, it is nothing less than the change and
becoming of everything subject to such change and becoming. To be in space
is, then, not just to be geometrically located, as it were, but to belong to the
realm of change and becoming: the ὑποδοχή is certainly a receptacle, but that
means more than a container, something to put things in, rather it means that
which receives, provides room for, everything that constitutes the cosmos—the
product of reason and necessity. Nor is the cosmos something for Plato that
can be considered in purely material terms. Before he comes to speak of the
receptacle of becoming, he describes the cosmos as a living being having soul at
the centre, with body wrapped round the outside, as it were, of soul (Plato
clearly has in mind something like an armillary sphere, often found as an
illustration in editions and translations of the Timaeus)—it is for this reason
that the cosmos and a human being can be seen as mutually reflecting one
another, human kind being, in the coinage of the Renaissance, a microcosm, a
little cosmos, μικρὸς κόσμος, an idea frequently found in the Fathers. Even a
quick glance at the Timaeus reveals that the cosmos as a living being is not some
sort of primæval being, but is already instinct with principles of reason and
proportion. Plato explains at some length how soul contains within itself
complex and beautiful mathematical structures, and as he goes on to discuss
what it is that is formed within the receptacle of becoming, we find a
discussion that embraces everything that comes into being from the four
elements of fire, earth, air and water, and how on this foundation we find the
principles of pleasure and pain, tastes, smells, sounds, colours, and beyond that
the emotional structure of the soul—its capacity for being aroused, ultimately
to anger, and for experiencing desire and longing (its incensive or spirited and
its desiring or appetitive powers). The kinds of becoming envisaged within the
receptacle of becoming go well beyond the movement of physical particles, and
include what is perceived by the senses and the very process of sensation, the
experience of pleasure and pain, and the complex reality of the soulful
experience of mortal beings (to avoid the debased meaning attached to
‘psychic’ or ‘psychological’ in English).

13