 Aristotle’s intellectual God seems not to be a good fit for the role of craftsman and creator which God plays in Plato’s Timaeus. Proclus (in Tim. 1.266.28–268.24) says as much: while “the Peripatetics say there is something separate [from the physical world], it is not creative (poiētikē), but final (telikon); hence they both removed the exemplars (paradeigmata) and set a non-plural intelligence over all things.” Indeed, Proclus says, Aristotle’s own principles ought to have made him admit that God was a creator. According to Simplicius, Peripatetic interpreters, including Alexander of Aphrodisias, accepted that God was a final cause of the entire world, that God’s moving the heavens made him indirectly the efficient cause of sublunar motion, and that he was also the efficient cause of the heavens’ motion, but not of their existence as a substance (in Cael. 271,13–21; in Phys. 1360,24–1363,24). Simplicius goes on to say that Ammonius devoted an entire book to arguing that, contrary to these Peripatetics, God was both final and efficient cause of both the movement and existence of the whole world, sublunar and supralunar. This interpretation, according to Simplicius, allowed Ammonius to harmonize Aristotle with Plato; it should not, therefore, be taken as a concession to Christian doctrine. Instead of criticizing Aristotle, as Proclus had done, Ammonius took five Aristotelian passages and interpreted them as indicating that Aristotle did in fact reason along the lines Proclus had indicated in his criticism. Thus, for example, Ammonius argued, according to Simplicius, that in Physics 2.3, 194b29–32, that from which comes the origin of motion (i.e., God, the unmoved mover) is itself a productive cause. Ammonius also argued that “if, according to Aristotle, the power of any finite body is itself finite, clearly whether it be a power of moving or a power that produces being, then, just as it gets its eternal motion from the unmoved cause, so it must receive its eternal being as a body from the non-bodily cause” (trs. of this and other relevant texts in Sorabji 2005, vol. 2, sect. 8(c)1). Ammonius’ harmonization of Aristotle with Plato on this point would prove essential to both Arabic Aristotelians and, eventually, to Aquinas’ ability to enlist Aristotle’s God for Christianity. Verrycken (1990, 218) interprets Ammonius’ conception of the relation of God and the world as based on the Neoplatonic ‘procession’ (God’s production of the world) and ‘reversion’ (its direction toward God as final cause), with God conceived as the divine Intellect. Verrycken (1990, 222) argues further that Ammonius and his school also conceived of Aristotle’s God as consisting of two Neoplatonic hypostases, the Good and the Intellect, and that he/it could be viewed as either one, depending on one’s point of view: in metaphysics, as we see in Asclepius’ commentary, Aristotle’s God is mostly understood as the Good, “the first origin and final cause of all reality”; in natural philosophy, as we see in Simplicius, God is primarily the demiurgic Intellect, which is itself the final cause of the world’s movement.