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Another term Plato uses to characterize space is διάστημα, interval or
distance, but again we find that this means not just measurable distance, but
any distance or extension, including moving in an argument, say, from premises
to a conclusion, or the ‘distance’ implicit in the notion of desire for something.
The notion of multitude or the manifold is implicit in the realm of becoming
and διάστημα is implicit in this. It is not so much a physical concept, as a
metaphysical one. The notion of interval applies to time as well, but again does
so in a multitude of ways. Perhaps most important is the sense of time as
bound up with cosmic movement, the movement of the heavens: the sequence
of the seasons, the passage from evening to morning. This cosmic movement is
more than physical movement, for it has significance, meaning, bound up with
the quality of time characteristic of the seasons—spring, summer, autumn,
winter (vividly expressed in medieval calendars, not least those found—
significantly—in books of hours)—and of the passage from evening, though
night, to morning and the day. The creation in six days suggests a sequence of
ages, prefigured in the successive days of creation, including the ‘ages of the
world’, variously conceived. There are also the stages of human life, often
modeled on the ages of the world: from birth to death, through the ages of
man (variously divided, sometimes four—childhood, youth, maturity, old age—
sometimes seven—as in Jaques’ infant, student, lover, soldier, judge, declining
5
into old age, and finally ‘second childishness and mere oblivion’). Furthermore,
there is the movement of the soul from its baptismal awakening by repentance,
through growth in the image of God by ascetic struggle, and a deepening
transfiguration through grace in which the life of God is manifest in the soul,
to deification. All these experiences of movement suggest mutual analogies; it
is not, as the modern mind is tempted to think, that physical space and
duration are the ‘real’ meaning of space and time, the others being merely
metaphorical. Rather all these experiences of movement in space and time are
experiences of the modalities of creaturely being, characterized by διάστημα.
Plato’s conviction of the link, or harmony, between the soul and the cosmos is
manifest in the closing paragraphs of the Timaeus, where he speaks of ‘the most
sovereign form of soul in us’, which ‘dwells in the summit of our body and lifts
us from earth towards our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in
earth, but in the heavens’, and recommends that, because ‘the motions akin to
the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe’, we

5 For Jaques’ speech, see Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7. For some sense of the richness
of the notion of the ages of man, see J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

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