Dangerous Liaisons: Plutarch’s Appropriation of the Stoic Biological Model for Divine Causation

Abstract This paper examines a challenging passage in Plutarch’s Platonic Questions II against the background of contemporaneous debates about divine causation, arguing that it offers a brilliant solution to the question of how god can simultaneously be transcendent to the cosmos and act as an effective demiurgic cause. I contend that Plutarch’s strategy relies on appropriating the Stoic biological model to explain divine causation.