Atemporality and the Origins of the Sempiternal Cosmos: Debates on Timeless Simultaneity within Platonist Cosmogonies

This chapter endeavors to explore the notion of atemporality within selected works belonging to the Platonist tradition. Beyond providing an overview of various facets of atemporality and highlighting their mutual relations, this chapter aims to investigate their role in a range of accounts of the world’s origins. By focusing on the cosmogonical views elaborated by Platonists who deny that the cosmos is generated in time, such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Calcidius, and Proclus, I will dwell on a specific kind of atemporality, namely ‘timeless simultaneity,’ and shed light on its theoretical advantages in explaining the demiurgic creation of the cosmos within a sempiternalist framework. Paradoxical as it may seem, within this perspective, the assertion that the Demiurge creates the cosmos at once does not conflict but, in fact, is fully compatible with the assumption that the cosmos has no temporal beginning, causally depends on a higher cause, and is always in a process of coming to be. As a result, a multi-layered taxonomy of atemporality, and especially the notion of ‘timeless simultaneity,’ enables Platonists adopting a sempiternalist stance to argue consistently that the cosmos is both ungenerated and created all at once, and to effectively explain in what sense it is so.