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| (Click here for rotating model) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| English: A lion-faced deity found on a Gnostic gem in Bernard de Montfaucon's L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The demiurge is a concept from the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of
philosophy for an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and
maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted by the Gnostics. Although a
fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily thought of as being the same as the
creator figure in the familiar monotheistic
sense, because both the demiurge itself plus the material from which the
demiurge fashions the universe are considered either uncreated and eternal, or
the product of some other being, depending on the system.
The word
"demiurge" is an English word from a Latinized form
of the Greek
δημιουργός, dēmiourgos, literally
"public worker", and which was originally a common noun meaning
"craftsman" or "artisan", but gradually it came to mean
"producer" and eventually "creator". The philosophical
usage and the proper noun derive from Plato's Timaeus, written c. 360 BC, in which
the demiurge is presented as the creator of the universe. This is accordingly
the definition of the demiurge in the Platonic (c. 310–90 BC) and Middle
Platonic (c. 90 BC – 300 AD) philosophical traditions. In the various
branches of the Neoplatonic school (third century onwards), the demiurge is the
fashioner of the real, perceptible world after the model of the Ideas, but (in most
Neoplatonic systems) is still not itself "the One". In the
arch-dualist ideology of the
various Gnostic systems, the material universe is evil, while the non-material
world is good. Accordingly, the demiurge is malevolent, as linked to the
material world.
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