Imprimatur
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World

Key terms
What it is like
Man and the heavens
Where it came from
One world or many

A living creature

Is the world a thing, or a being with a life of its own? To call it a living creature is to say that the whole universe has a soul and acts as one. These readings ask what follows if everything belongs to a single life.

3 readings

In the Timaeus the Pythagorean Timaeus gives a “likely account” of the making of the world, and here he tells how God, finding the visible sphere in “disorderly” motion, “brought order” out of disorder. He speaks of “intelligence” put in “soul” and “soul in body”, and of the world as “a living creature” endowed with “providence”. The dialogue was the best known of Plato’s writings in the later ancient and medieval world, and the passage is placed here as its account of the world’s making.

Book IV, section 33 of the Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the older English translation, is a note he set down for himself in the Stoic manner. He speaks of the world as “one living substance” with “one soul”, of “one general motion” and of a “connection and concatenation” of all things. The passage is placed here as a Stoic statement of the unity of the world.

Treatise IV.4 of the Enneads, the third of the “Questions About the Soul”, in section 11 compares the administration of the world with that of a living being. Plotinus sets the art of the physician against “nature” and speaks of “the principle” and of the universe as “an immense tree”. It is placed here for that comparison.