Demiurge

The term Demiurge refers in some belief systems to a deity responsible for the creation of the physical universe and the physical aspect of humanity.

The word derives from the ancient Greek δημιουργός (dēmiourgós, latinized demiurgus). In Classical Greek, the word means "artisan" or "craftsman" (literally in the service of the people: δήμιος (dēmios) "official" + ἔργον (ergon) "(piece of) work"). It is used metaphorically of a creator (of the laws or the heaven) or even the Creator (of the World) in Plato.

The term occurs in a number of different religious and philosophical systems, most notably Platonism and Gnosticism. The precise nature and character of the Demiurge however varies considerably from system to system, being the benign architect of matter in some, to the personification of evil in others. Frequently, alternative titles are used for the Demiurge in these systems, including Yaldabaoth, Yao or Iao, Ialdabaoth and several other variants, such as Ptahil, used in Mandaeanism.

Platonism

Plato refers to the Demiurge frequently in the Socratic dialogue Timaeus circa 360 B.C as the entity who "fashioned and shaped" the material world. Plato describes the Demiurge as unreservedly benevolent and hence desirous of a world as good as possible. The world remains allegedly imperfect, however, because the Demiurge had to work on pre-existing chaotic matter, which was recalcitrant to his efforts to shape it.

The concept of a Demiurgic intervention between God and his creation is completely at odds with orthodox Christian theology. According to classical Christian theology, the creation is originally all-good and the work of a single benevolent creator. Consequently, it rejects outright the notion that Satan (or any equivalent being) could create the physicaluniverse. As has been noted, the Platonic concept of the Demiurge contradicts this Christian cosmogony, because it presupposes the pre-existence of passive, constituent matter (in a chaotic form), conflicting with the concept of an all-powerful creator who fashioned the universe out of nothingness, that is, "ex nihilo". The Platonic concept rejects the underlying dualism assumed in the doctrine of "creatio ex nihilo" and posits a single transcendent ineffable One which instead emanates the cosmos "ex deo".

This Christian concept might seem not only illogical, but contradicted by the New Testament of the Bible, which says, of the material universe, that "out (ek) of Him, and through Him, and for Him is the all." (Romans 11:36, Nestle-Aland Greek text. The source material for this bible version shows evidence of having been at the mercy of Alexandrian gnostics. Bear this in mind with all subsequent quotes from scripture.) "The All" in Greek is "ta panta" and means the entirety of all that is. While it would seem that the Apostle Paul is advocating that all that is was created from the very substance of God, not from "nothing" or "ex nihilo" as later Christian dogmatists maintained and still maintain, he is advocating God as the ultimate source of all creation. This is why the orthodox fathers are specific in that what comes ex nihilo comes from God as the nothingness or void is also contained within God. As much as the aperion which in Pythagorus, Plato and later Plotinus came from "ex nihilo" or "nothingness" or the void, since Ex nihilo could also be interpreted to mean "beyond understanding."

Gnosticism

A lion-faced deity found on a Gnostic gem in Bernard de Montfaucon's L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures may be a depiction of the Demiurge.

Like Plato, Gnosticism also presents a distinction between the highest, unknowable "alien God" and the demiurgic "creator" of the material. However, in contrast to Plato, several systems of Gnostic thought present the Demiurge as antagonistic to the will of the Supreme Creator: his act of creation occurs in unconscious imitation of the divine model, and thus is fundamentally flawed, or else is formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality. Thus, in such systems, the Demiurge acts as a solution to the problem of evil. In the Apocryphon of John circa 200AD (several versions of which are found in the Nag Hammadi library), the Demiurge has the name "Yaltabaoth", and proclaims himself as God:

"Now the archon who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas ("fool"), and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, 'I am God and there is no other God beside me,' for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come."

Yaldabaoth

"Yaldabaoth" literally means "Child, come here" in a Semitic language. For example, the Hebrew word for "child" is "yeled", and for "come" is "bo". Thus, most probably "yalda" and "baoth" are declensions of "child" and "go", together meaning "child, come hither" (the language's identification as Hebrew itself is doubtful).

Gnostic myth recounts that Sophia (Greek, literally meaning "wisdom"), the Demiurge's mother and a partial aspect of the divine Pleroma or "Fullness", desired to create something apart from the divine totality, and without the receipt of divine assent. In this abortive act of separate creation, she gave birth to the monstrous Demiurge and, being ashamed of her deed, she wrapped him in a cloud and created a throne for him within it. The Demiurge, isolated, did not behold his mother, nor anyone else, and thus concluded that only he himself existed, being ignorant of the superior levels of reality that were his birth-place.

The Gnostic myths describing these events are full of intricate nuances portraying the declination of aspects of the divine into human form; this process occurs through the agency of the Demiurge who, having stolen a portion of power from his mother, sets about a work of creation in unconscious imitation of the superior Pleromatic realm. Thus Sophia's power becomes enclosed within the material forms of humanity, themselves entrapped within the material universe: the goal of Gnostic movements was typically the awakening of this spark, which permitted a return by the subject to the superior, non-material realities which were its primal source. (See Sethian Gnosticism.)

Under the name of Nebro, Yaldabaoth is called an angel in the apocryphal Gospel of Judas. He is first mentioned "The Cosmos, Chaos, and the Underworld" as one of the twelve angels to come "into being [to] rule over chaos and the [underworld]." He comes from heaven, his "face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood." Nebro's name means rebel. Nebro creates six angels in addition to the angel Saklas to be his assistants. These six in turn create another twelve angels "with each one receiving a portion in the heavens."

Samael

"Samael" literally means "Blind God" or "God of the Blind" in Aramaic (Syriac sæmʕa-ʔel). But the being is considered not only blind, or ignorant of its own origins, but may in addition be evil; its name is also found in Judaicas the Angel of Death and in Christian demonology. This leads to a further comparison with Satan.

Another alternative title for the Demiurge, "Saklas", is Aramaic for "fool" (Syriac sækla "the foolish one").

Yahweh

Some Gnostic philosophers (notably Marcion of Sinope) identify the Demiurge with Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, in opposition and contrast to the God of the New Testament. Still others equated the being with Satan. Catharism apparently inherited their idea of Satan as the creator of the evil world directly or indirectly from Gnosticism. Or, they may well have gotten the idea directly from the New Testament, which refers to Satan as "The God ['ho theos'] of this age" in Second Corinthians 4:4. Also, the New Testament asserts that the "whole world lies in the power of the evil one" in 1 John 5:19. Though nowhere in the New Testament is the creator of the world or the universe identified as Satan, although Yahweh declares in Isaiah 45:7 that He "makes good and creates evil [Hebrew "ra"]. Nor in the old or New Testament is nature or earth created by the creator referred to as evil, unlike the so-called Gnostic "sectarians." (Unless one sees the attribute of Creatorship as inherent in the concept of "God," and therefore the title "The God of this Age" applied to Satan becomes a powerful indicator that Satan is indeed the creator. Other modern-day Cathars see a further indication of this in the epithet "Kosmokrator" [Koine Greek, kosmokratoras, which literally means cosmos-sovereign, or even cosmos-might] which is applied to Satan in Ephesian 6:12, as a further indication of the creatorship of Satan and his identity with the Demiurge)

Criticism

The Gnostic conception of the Demiurge was apparently criticised by the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus. The nine tractate of the second of the Enneads - the works of Plotinus compiled and edited by Porphyry, his successor - is titled "Against Those that Affirm the Creator of the Kosmos and the Kosmos Itself to Be Evil" (generally quoted as "Against the Gnostics"). Therein, Plotinus criticises his opponents for their appropriation of ideas from Plato:

From Plato come their punishments, their rivers of the underworld and the changing from body to body; as for the plurality they assert in the Intellectual Realm- the Authentic Existent, the Intellectual-Principle, the Second Creator and the Soul - all this is taken over from the Timaeus. (Ennead 2.9.vi; emphasis added)

Of note here is the remark concerning the second Creator and Soul. Plotinus criticises his opponents for "all the novelties through which they seek to establish a philosophy of their own" which, he declares, "have been picked up outside of the truth"; they attempt to conceal rather than admit their indebtedness to ancient philosophy, the which they have corrupted by their extraneous and misguided embellishments. Thus their understanding of the Demiurge is similarly flawed in comparison to Plato's original intentions.

The majority view tends to understand Plotinus' opponents as being a Gnostic sect — certainly, several such groups were present in Alexandria and elsewhere about the Mediterranean during Plotinus' lifetime, and several of his criticisms bear distinct similarity to Gnostic doctrine (the doctrine of Sophia and her emission of the Demiurge is most notable amongst these similarities). Scholars of note who have held this view include A.H. Armstrong, who published a highly influential translation of the Enneads in 1966, through the Harvard University Press.

However, other scholars such as Christos Evangeliou have contended that Plotinus' opponents might be better described as simply "Christian Gnostics", for the reason that several of Plotinus' criticisms are as applicable to orthodox Christian doctrine as they are to Gnosticism. Even though Plotinus himself never applied them to or acknowledge Christianity. Also, considering the evidence from the time, Evangeliou felt the definition of the term "Gnostics" was unclear. Thus, though the former understanding certainly enjoys the greatest popularity, the identification of Plotinus' opponents as Gnostic is not without contention. Though in the case of Christos Evangeliou it is yet to be seen if he still holds this view, since A. H. Armstrong identified the "Gnostics" that Plotinus was attacking as Jewish and Pagan. Armstrong did this by using Michelle Puerch's study of the Sethian library found at Nag Hammadi as the basis that all Gnostic groups shared a "common" core or library of text from which they drew common or core beliefs.

Comparisons

Cerinthus

According to the heresy of Cerinthus (who shows Ebionite influence), the ancient Hebrew term Elohim (the "uni-plural name", often used for God througout Genesis 1, can be interpreted as indicating that a hierarchy of ancient spirits ("angels or gods") were co-creators with a Supreme Being, and were partially responsible for creation within the context of a "master plan" exemplified theologically by the Greek word Logos. Psalm 82.1 describes a plurality of gods (ʔelōhim), which an older version in the Septuagint calls the "assembly of the gods"; however, it does not indicate that these gods were co-actors in creation. (Unless one translates Genesis 1:1 literally as "in the beginning the gods [elohim] created the heaven and the earth.") Also according to this theory, an abstract similarity can be found between the Logos (as applied to Jesus in the Gospel according to St John) and Plato's Demiurge. However, in John 1:1, which reads: "in the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God and the Word was God," the Logos is clearly one single being, not an assembly or group. Further, typical Christian theology identifies Jesus as the second person in the holy and undivided Trinity, thus rejecting the notion that the world was created by an ignorant or even malevolent demiurge ("uni-plural" or not) in co-action with a separate, higher and unknowable god.

Iamblicus

The figure of the Demiurge also emerges in the theoretic of Iamblichus (a Neoplatonist), in which it acts as a conjunction between the transcendent, incommunicable "One" that resides at the summit of his system, and the material realm.

The initial dyad that Iamblicus describes consists of the One, a monad whose first principle is intellect ("nous"); between this monad and "the many" that follow it, Iamblicus posited a second, superexistent "One" that is the producer of intellect or soul ("psyche"), completing the dyad mentioned above. The former and superior "One" is further distinguished by Iamblicus into the spheres of the intelligible and the intellective; the latter sphere is the domain of thought, while the former comprises the objects of thought. Thus, a triad is formed of the intelligible nous, the intellective nous, and the psyche.

Of this intellectual triad Iamblicus assigned the third rank to the Demiurge. The figure is thus identified with the perfected nous, the intellectual triad being increased to a hebdomad. As in the theoretic of Plotinus, nous produces nature by the mediation of the intellect, so here the intelligible gods are followed by a triad of psychic gods.

Non-Western traditions

Vedic

Within the Hindu Vedic tradition, Brahma, a member of the Trimurti, is a secondary creator of the universe. According to Puranas he is "self-born" (without mother) in the lotus which grows from the navel of Vishnu at the beginning of the universe. He is surrounded by darkness and tries unsuccessfully to find out about the origin of the lotus. Then he hears the syllables ta-pa and starts to perform asceticism and becomes empowered by Vishnu for creation.

Siberian Shamanism

In the shamanic religion of the ancient Turks and other Siberian nomads, Bai-Ulgan was the force behind creation. Inasmuch as Siberian shamanism may be said to parallel Gnostic cosmological beliefs, Bai-Ulgan has been compared to the Demiurge.

References

• The Nag Hammadi Library (see Nag Hammadi)

See also

• Archon
• Brahma
• Bythos
• Christian anarchism
• Conceptions of God
• Gnosticism
• Johannite
• Mandaean
• Neoplatonism
• Platonism
• Sethianism
• Svantovit
• YHWH
• Timaeus
• Urizen
• Yaw