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If that be Pessimism, make the most of it. That there is a Divine Plan I do not doubt; but I believe it to be broader, deeper, more worthy of the great Demiurgus than that which pictures him telling a priest how to carve his pantaloons or sacrifice a pair of pigeons, than standing idly by with his hands under his coat-tails, while some drunken duffer beats the head of his better half with a bootjack, or a bronze brute rips the scalp from a smiling babe.
To evade this difficulty, the Gnostics postulated a series of emanations from God, becoming successively less and less spiritual and more and more material, until at the lowest end of the scale was reached the Demiurgus or Jehovah of the Old Testament, who created the world and appeared, clothed in material form, to the patriarchs.
It is the Sovereign Pontiff who thus stands forth throughout the history of Europe, as the great Demiurgus of universal civilisation.
He saw plainly the profound differences, but for the moment he was struck by the resemblances, and they carried him away. What delighted him, first of all, is the beauty of the world, constructed after His own likeness by the Demiurgus. God is Beauty; the world is fair as He who made it. This metaphysical vision entranced Augustin; his whole heart leaped towards this ineffably beautiful Divinity.
He too looks up to God with prayers for the guidance of his reason. He too enters into speculation concerning God in His absoluteness, and in His connection with the universe. "The Primary God," he says, "must be free from works and a King; but the Demiurgus must exercise government, going through the heavens.
In summing up the present results of Carlyle's labor, foolish men of the world and small critics have not failed to ask what it all amounts to, what the great Demiurgus is aiming at in his weary battle of life; and the question is significant enough, one more proof of that Egyptian darkness of vision which he is here to dispel.
And as in each part of the universe and in nature itself, the demiurgus of all which the world contains established resemblances of the unknown essence of the gods, that all things might be converted to divinity through their alliance with it, in like manner I am of opinion, that the divine intellect of Plato weaves conceptions about the gods with all its progeny, and leaves nothing deprived of the mention of divinity, that from the whole of its offspring a reminiscence of total natures may be obtained, and imparted to the genuine lovers of divine concerns.
From the child-like simplicity, where man saw and adored the Deity in all his works, heard his laughter in the ripple of the stream, his voice in the thunder-storm and saw his anger in the writhen bolt, to the present age of skepticism, where he can see his Creator nowhere; and, blinder than his barbarian ancestors knowing more of processes but less of principles protests that Force is the only Demiurgus, dead matter the only Immortal.
The Church was about to establish his miraculous sainthood, when, in the official process of collecting the necessary information, it was discovered that the supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, a Catharus, a believer in the wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan, the defeat of the spiritual God, and the uselessness of the coming of Christ.
It remains therefore, that the demiurgus produced the universe by power alone; but every thing generated by power subsists together with the cause containing this power: and hence production of this kind cannot be destroyed unless the producing cause is deprived of power. The divine intellect therefore that produced the sensible universe caused it to be coexistent with himself.
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