Lenka Karfíková
SUMMARY
The Iconic Structure of Reality in the Platonic Tradition and Its Christian Reinterpretation
The myth in Plato’s Timaeus narrates the process of organising the chaotic traces of ideas, mirrored in the medium of the chora, into cosmic order, the beautiful corporeal world as a divine image. In his exegesis of the Timaeus, Plotinus enlarges the iconic structure, applying it to the whole of reality, including the Intellect as an image of the One, the soul as an image of the Intellect and the cosmos as an image of the soul. The early Christian authors, inheritors of this tradition and interpreters of the Bible, present not only human beings as an image of God (Gen 1:26f.) or Christ but, at the same time, Christ as the privileged Image of God (Col 1:15).