The One Dialogue the Latin West Kept

For most of the Middle Ages, Latin readers who knew Plato knew this text and little else. A partial translation with commentary was available where the rest of the dialogues were not, and the consequence was that a cosmological work stood in for the whole philosophy. Medieval Platonism is shaped by that accident: a school of thought known through its account of the making of the world reads differently from one known through its ethics or its epistemology.

The demiurge had a further career outside orthodoxy. Gnostic writings take the idea of a craftsman who shapes the world from a model and put it to a use Plato does not, making the maker of the material world a lesser and sometimes hostile power, and Hermetic and Neoplatonic literature works the figure over in its own ways. Reading any of those traditions without this dialogue behind them leaves the vocabulary unexplained. Its influence on esoteric thought runs mainly through that vocabulary. The world as a living creature with a soul, the correspondence between the order of the heavens and the order in a person, and the notion that number is what the cosmos is made of are all Timaean, and they arrive in later occult literature already several removes from the argument that produced them.