ak about Him so that all may understand."
The Mystic knew what this "impossibility" means. It points to the
divine drama. God is not present in what belongs merely to the senses
and understanding. In those He is only present as nature. He is under
a spell in nature. Only one who awakens the divine within himself is
able to approach Him. Thus He cannot at once be made comprehensible to
all. But even to one who approaches Him, He does not appear Himself.
The _Timaeus_ says that also. The Father made the universe out of the
body and soul of the world. He mixed together, in harmony and perfect
proportions, the elements which came into being when He, pouring
Himself out, gave up His separate existence. Thereby the body of the
world came into being, and stretched upon it, in the form of a cross,
is the soul of the world. It is what is divine in the world. It found
the death of the cross so that the world might come into existence.
Plato may therefore call nature the tomb of the divine, a grave,
however, in which nothing dead lies but the eternal, to which death
only gives the opportunity of bringing into expression the omnipotence
of life. And man sees nature in the right light when he approaches it
in order to release the crucified soul of the world. It must rise
again from its death, from its spell. Where can it come to life again?
Only in the soul of initiated man. Then wisdom finds its right
relation to the cosmos. The resurrection, the liberation of God, that
is wisdom. In the _Timaeus_ the development of the world is traced from
the imperfect to the perfect. An ascending process is represented
imaginatively. Beings are developed. God reveals Himself in their
development. Evolution is the resurrection of God from the tomb.
Within evolution, man appears. Plato shows that in man there is
something special. It is true the whole world is divine, and man is
not more divine than other beings. But in other beings God is present
in a hidden way, in man he is manifest. At the end of the _Timaeus_ we
read: "And now we might assert that our study of the universe has
attained its end, for after the world was provided and filled with
mortal and immortal living beings, it, this one and only begotten
world, has itself become a visible being embracing everything visible,
and an image of the Creator. It has become the God perceptible to the
senses, and the greatest and best world, the fairest and most perfect
which there could be." But th