OF PROCLUS THE SUCCESSOR

ON PLATO’S TIMAEUS

BOOK FOUR

238 Basel ed.

And as the generating Father perceived that it the universe was moved and alive, a created image of the everlasting gods, He marveled and, being delighted, devised to make it even more like its paradigm. Just as, therefore, that the paradigm happens to be an everlasting living being, so too did He attempt to complete this All the universe to the extent of its power [37 CD].

The One, creating all things at once, simultaneously generates, restores, perfects, and assimilates his creations to their paradigms, whether the generative, the restorative, the perfective, and the assimilative power is one and the same—as pleased some of the ancients—or whether they are different, as it seems to others. For the distance between the disagreement and opposition, as it were, of these men is not great, so long as those who unify do not wish for the One to be ineffable to the multitude, and those who divide do not endure saying that the number of powers is unordered and detached, but rather that they wish and declare that they are contained by their proper Monad the principle of unity and are unified and held fast by it; as it happens that some say these powers are a tetradic fourfold Monad, while others say it is a tetrad the number four again unified, or, if it pleases anyone, called "monadized."