thing generated by power subsists
together with the cause containing this power: and hence production of
this kind cannot be destroyed unless the producing cause is deprived of
power. The divine intellect therefore that produced the sensible universe
caused it to be coexistent with himself.

This world thus depending on its divine artificer, who is himself an
intelligible world replete with the archetypal ideas of all things,
considered according to its corporeal nature, is perpetually flowing, and
perpetually advancing to being (en to gignesthai), and compared with its
paradigm, has no stability or reality of being. However, considered as
animated by a divine soul, and as receiving the illuminations of all the
supermundane gods, and being itself the receptacle of divinities from
whom bodies are suspended, it is said by Plato in the Timaeus to be a
blessed god. The great body of this world too, which subsists in a
perpetual dispersion of temporal extension, may be properly called a
whole with a total subsistence, on account of the perpetuity of its
duration, though this is nothing more than a flowing eternity. And hence
Plato calls it a whole of wholes; by the other wholes which are
comprehended in its meaning, the celestial spheres, the sphere of fire,
the whole of air considered as one great orb; the whole earth, and the
whole sea. These spheres, which are called by Platonic writers parts with
a total subsistence, are considered by Plato as aggoregately perpetual.
For if the body of this world is perpetual, this also must be the case
with its larger parts, on account of their exquisite alliance to it, and
in order that wholes with a partial subsistence, such as all individuals,
may rank in the last gradation of things.

As the world too, considered as one great comprehending whole, is called
by Plato a divine animal, so likewise every whole which it contains is a
world, possessing in the first place, a self-perfect unity; proceeding
from the ineffable, by which it becomes a god; in the second place, a
divine intellect; in the third place, a divine soul; and in the last
place, a deified body. Hence each of these wholes is the producing cause
of all the multitude which it contains, and on this account is said to be
a whole prior to parts; because, considered as possessing an eternal form
which holds all its parts together, and gives to the whole perpetuity of
subsistence, it is not indigent of such parts to the perfecti