Xenophanes and
Parmenides. The conception of a supreme spiritual ruler of the world
appears in Heraclitus and Anaxagoras (fifth century). To these and other
Greek thinkers the unity of the world and the dominance of mind or
spirit appeared to be necessary assumptions. The most definite
expression of these conceptions is found in Plato and Aristotle.
According to Plato (in the Timaeus) God, the eternal Father, created the
world (for nothing can be created without a cause), brought order out of
disorder and made the universe to be most fair and good, so that it
became a rational living soul, the one only-begotten universe, created
the gods and the sons of the gods, and framed the soul to be the ruler
of the body. Aristotle, in simpler phrase, represents the ground of the
world as self-sufficient Mind, an eternal Power ([Greek: dunamis]), from
which all action or actuality ([Greek: energeia]) proceeds.[1820]

+1001+. There are certain apparent limitations, it is true, to this
conception of unity. Both Plato and Aristotle recognize the existence of
a host of subordinate deities (created but immortal) to whom is
assigned a share, by direction of the supreme God, in the creation of
things; yet essentially these deities are nothing more than agents or
intermediaries of the divine activity, and may be compared to the
natural laws and agents of modern theism and, more exactly, to the
Hebrew angels through whom, according to the Old Testament, God governed
the world. Plato has also a somewhat vague notion of a something in the
nature of the material of the world that limits or constrains the divine
creative power--a "necessity" that forces the deity to do not the
absolutely best but the best possible. Perhaps this is a philosophical
formulation of the old "fate," perhaps Plato is merely trying to account
for certain supposed inconcinnities and inadequacies in the world. He is
not quite consistent with himself, since he represents the creation of
the universe as resulting from the fact that necessity yielded to the
persuasion of mind, which thus became supreme.[1821] In spite of this
vagueness his view is unitary, and the unitary conception is continued
by the Stoics, its best Stoic expression being found in the famous hymn
of Cleanthes to Zeus: "Nothing occurs on earth apart from thee" and "We
are thy offspring."[1822]

+1002+. In the last centuries before the beginning of our era the Jews,
partly under Persian and Greek influe