Proclus: Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Vol. I

That he calls all the intelligible gods eternal, and not those who exist within it, he made clear immediately by adding: "Just as, therefore, it the cosmos happens to be an eternal animal," saying this clearly regarding the intelligible paradigm. We might grasp who the intelligible gods are from a division: for they must be taken either as existing before the autozōon Self-Animal, or within the autozōon—the units, as it were, of the four ideas there—or after the autozōon. To rank them before the autozōon is ridiculous (for they would also be containing aiōn Eternity, to which he does not yet say the whole has been likened). To rank them within the autozōon is impossible: for if the whole, as he says, is not a statue of the complete animal contained by any of the species in parts, then these would not be the intelligible and eternal gods; for the ideas contained within the complete animal by species in parts are not gods. It remains, therefore, that the eternal gods are after the autozōon, all those being between the intelligible paradigm and the demiurge. For the whole resembles all of them, in so much as each of those gods contains the form of the totality of the cosmos.

This, then, has been demonstrated, and therefore some have assumed in vain that the ideas contained in the autozōon are called the eternal gods, to which he does not wish the whole to be likened. For how was he going to call the whole a statue of those to which, according to the order of the discourse, he has not yet likened the completions of the whole? For he does this later, having proceeded, when he brings forth the partial completions of the whole; so that he would not have called the whole, already having come into being, a statue of those, but if anything, "one that will be." But the cosmos is a statue of the intelligible gods when taken together with the soul, the intellect, and the divinity that has descended upon it, and a statue...