Demiurge

“Demiurge” sounds like the name of a monster. In Greek it was an ordinary word for a craftsman, somebody who made things for the public, like a potter or a carpenter. Plato picked that humble word for the maker of the world, and he meant it kindly. Five or six centuries later, Gnostic teachers used the same word for a blind and jealous ruler who had trapped the soul in a body. They didn’t get the idea from nowhere. They had read Plato closely, and they kept almost everything he said except his opinion of the craftsman. That one change is the most useful key I know for reading Gnostic myth, so let’s follow it through Plato’s two most famous images. ...

The ancient Gnostics told a story about a creator who built a world out of borrowed light and then announced there was nothing above him. Twenty centuries later, we build machines that generate whole worlds out of borrowed words. The old story has acquired a new reading, and it cuts in both directions. One direction points at the machines. The other points at us. The Blind Builder First, the story in brief. In the Apocryphon of John, the divine Wisdom called Sophia creates without her partner and produces a malformed offspring. He takes a portion of her light and uses it to build a cosmos: seven heavens, ranks of angels, thrones and powers. The texts give him three names, Yaldabaoth, Saklas, and Samael, the last of which means blind god. ...

If God is good and all-powerful, why is there suffering? This question has tortured thinkers for millennia. Every religion offers some answer. The most common in Western tradition: suffering is punishment for sin, or a test of faith, or a mystery beyond human understanding. We’re meant to trust that a loving God has reasons we can’t comprehend. Many find these answers unsatisfying. The ancient Gnostics offered a radically different response. They didn’t try to explain how a good God could create a world with so much pain. They said: the highest God didn’t create this world at all. ...