The Harmoniser God: Harmony as a Comological Model in Middle Platonist Theology

It is a commonplace that the notion of cosmic harmony is key in the Platonist tradition, and indeed Middle Platonists frequently appeal to the world’s harmony in order to describe the perfect condition of the ensouled world and to state that God is the cause of this harmony . This can be regarded as a testimony to the importance of exegesis in Middle Platonist philosophy, for several Platonic passages – from the myth of Er to the divisio animae in the Timaeus – would prove good bases for claiming that the world as a whole entails harmony. Relegating the Middle Platonist doctrine of cosmic harmony to the field of mere exegesis, however, risks leading us towards an oversimplification: for this idea, if unqualified, would ultimately amount to a broad metaphor referring to the world’s order, a metaphor of no particular philosophical import in itself and simply based on the fact that sometimes Plato describes the world as harmonic. On the other hand, this does not imply that speaking of cosmic harmony without referring to Plato’s dialogues necessarily entails any intriguing philosophical doctrine: for instance, the notion of a ‘cosmic harmony’ also occurs in technical writings or Pythagorean-flavoured Hellenistic poems, such as those by Alexander of Hephesos . In this paper I aim to show not only that Middle Platonist views of cosmic harmony went beyond mere exegesis and were part of a complex philosophical reasoning, but also that the notion of cosmic harmony played different roles in Middle Platonism and was invoked in support of rival theological and cosmological models. More specifically, I will suggest that it is possible to detect two Middle Platonist models of cosmic harmony and divine harmonisation, a dynamic and artisanal one on the one hand, and a static and non-artisanal one on the other, and that each plays a key role within the theological model in which it is framed: by understanding the Middle Platonist doctrines of cosmic harmony one is in a position also to enter an intriguing debate on the sense in which God is to be regarded, according to the Middle Platonists, as the harmoniser of the world.