kosmos (scil. aisthetos): ornament, order, the physical, visible universe (see kosmos noetos)
1. There is a tradition (Aetius II, 1, 1 and D.L. VIII, 48) that the first one to describe the universe as a kosmos was Pythagoras; but the notion of the universe as an order turns up in the fragments of his predecessors (Anaximander, Diels, fr. 12A10; Anaximenes, Diels, fr. 13B2), and in any event it is difficult to trace its exact evolution through the stages: order, order of this universe, the universe as order. It had certainly reached this final connotation by the time of Empedocles (fr. 134), while the related notion of man as the microcosm of the universe appears with Democritus (fr. 34). Whatever the origins of the original insight, the Pythagoreans did have a theory of kosmos; the universe was a kosmos because it could be reduced to mathematical proportions (harmonia), since the arche of all things was number (arithmos) (Aristotle, Meta. 985b), with its ethical corollary of attempting to restore this cosmic harmony in the soul (see katharsis). The same basic idea had been expressed by the Milesians, not in the mathematically oriented formulae of Pythagoras, but in a series of figures borrowed from the ethical sphere (see Anaximander, Diels, fr. 12A9, b1, and dike; Empedocles, fr. 30) to explain cosmic process, replacing the sexual metaphors of earlier myths.
2. Heraclitus is the first we know of to take the further step and identify this cosmic order with “law” (nomos) (fr. 114), thereby setting in motion a train of thought leading to the notion of Natural Law (see no?nos). Heraclitus called the law that ensured this order “divine” (theios), but this is only one of several strands leading to a belief in the divinity of the kosmos; the others are the vitalism of the Milesians (see zoe, pyr) and a belief in the divinity of the heavenly bodies (see ouranioi). There is some late evidence (D.L. VIII, 25) that the Pythagoreans held the divinity of the kosmos, as may have Xenophanes as well (Diels, fr. 21A36; Aristotle, Meta. 986b). Plato calls the kosmos a “visible God” (horatos theos) in Tim. 92c, not on vitalist grounds but because of the ethical role it plays in his harmonia-katharsis theory (see ouranos). His mimetic point of view led him to posit another kosmos not apprehensible by the senses, as ours is, but only by the intelligence (see kosmos noetos).
3. In his early De philosophia, fr. 18, Aristotle reaffirms the divinity of the kosmos, echoing the Platonic formula “visible God”; but by the time of the later treatises most of the Platonic theology has disappeared in the wake of a revised theory of physis (q.v.). In the fully developed Aristotelian system there are only two divinities (see theos) and one of them, the First Mover, is outside the kosmos (De coelo I, 279a—b). The other is the outer sphere of the kosmos, the sphere of the fixed stars and the domain of aither (q.V.); this is divine because of its eternal circular motion (ibid. II, 286a).
4. Stoic pantheism restores the divinity of the kosmos (SVF II, 1027) and, following upon the theories of fire (see pyr) and pneuma, considered it a living, ensouled, and intelligent being (D.L. VII, 138-139). The Sceptics denied both of these positions (Cicero, De nat. deor. in, 9, 22-24). The organic nature of the kosmos was defended by Poseidonius and was the point of departure for his theory of sympatheia (q.v.). As against the Gnostics, who viewed it as the product of evil and ignorance (see Irenaeus, Adv. haer. I, 4, 1—2; 1, 5, 3), both Philo and Plotinus defended the sensible universe, both calling it a “son of God” (Quod Deus, 6, 31; Enn. V, 8, 12) in its function as an image (eikon) of its ultimate transcendent source (see Enn. II, 3, 18). (TFG)