PROCLUS ON THE TIMAEUS IV [Tim. 37 CD]

but by receiving the emanations flowing from there, which, being secondary orders with which it is commensurate, are adorned as they are born from them. That he calls the intelligible gods "eternal" and not those who are in the world, he made clear by immediately adding: "As therefore it itself happens to be an eternal living being" original: "καθάπερ οὖν αὐτὸ τυγχάνει ζῷον ἀίδιον", saying this, it is clear, of the intelligible. We might discern who the intelligible gods are from a division: either we must take them as existing before the autozoon the self-living-being/the Form of the Living Being, or within the autozoon—as the monads of the four ideas there—or after the autozoon. To rank them before the autozoon is ridiculous (for they would be encompassing aion eternity, to which he says the whole has not yet been likened). To rank them within the autozoon is impossible; for if, as he says, the whole is not a statue of anything contained within the part-form of the panteles zoon all-perfect living being, then these intelligible and eternal gods would not exist; for the ideas contained within the part-form by the all-perfect living being are not gods. It remains, therefore, that the eternal gods are after the autozoon, all of them being those between the intelligible paradigm and the Creator; for the whole is like all of them, in that each of them contains the form of the totality of the world. This, therefore, has been demonstrated, and it is in vain that some have supposed the ideas contained within the autozoon to be called eternal gods, to which the whole does not wish to be likened. For how would he intend to call the whole a statue of those to which he has not yet, according to the order of the discourse, likened the fulfillments of the whole? For he does this later, having proceeded forward, when he produces the partial fulfillments of the whole; so that he would not have said the whole is already a statue of those, but if anything, "it will be." The world, therefore, is a statue of the intelligible gods, taken together with the soul and the intellect and the divinity that has come upon it; but a statue...