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Updated: May 26, 2025
He divides the Godhead into two separate powers: the impersonal Being behind all reality, free from all activity whatsoever; the Demiurge or active governor of the universe, who again is subdivided into a transcendent and an immanent power. The teaching of Plotinus, the most famous of the later Alexandrian neo-Platonists, shows a further step in the development of religious Platonism.
Is this not the summit of wickedness that utter chaos, without quality, without form or shape, ugliness without configuration, to use their own expression, should enjoy the same prerogatives as He who is wisdom, power, and beauty itself, the Creator and the Demiurge of the universe enjoys? This is not all.
Although imperfect, and sometimes violent and capricious, Jehovah was too intelligent a demiurge to be offended about an apple or a pomegranate. One has to be a bishop or a Capuchin to support such extravagant imaginations. And the proof that the apple was what I said, is that Eve was stricken by a punishment suitable to her fault.
"When Demiurge, who is commonly called Jehovah, and by many more names, as all terms expressing quality or quantity are generally applied to him, had, I do not want to say 'created' the world for such would be an absurdity but had laid out a small corner of the universe, as a dwelling place for Adam and Eve, there were some subtle creatures in space, which Jehovah had not formed, was not capable of forming.
We may speculate whether this heat and haste and wrath of life about us is the Dark God of the Manichees, the evil spirit of the sun worshippers. But in contemporary thought there is no conviction apparent that this Demiurge is either good or evil; it is conceived of as both good and evil.
Mithra is the Mediator, who stands between "le Dieu inaccessible, et inconnaissable, qui regne dans les spheres etherees, et le genre humain qui s'agite ici-bas." "Il est le Logos emane de Dieu, et participant a sa toute puissance, qui apres avoir forme le monde comme demiurge continue a veiller sur lui."
The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully entertained in a snug Virginian stable.
For the Ainu the demiurge is the water wagtail; for the Navahos and in California, the coyote or prairie wolf; among the Lenni-Lenâpé, the wolf. Various animals as elephants, boars, turtles, snakes are supposed to bear the world on their backs. The grounds of such opinions, resting on remote social conditions, are obscure.
No longer a slave in anything he is the more a master of all, the more his will works in harmony with the one that rules the universe. “Placed between the abstract and the concrete, between the creative intelligence and the objective creation, man thus conceived, appears like the mediator par excellence, or the veritable Demiurge of the gnostics.” Yet it is not enough that he gets light from its original source, he must also be bound by endless activity to those whom he is to lead.
Hence all sorts of crudities of belief crept into the church, such as the idea of the demiurge, and the different ways of contemplating the person of Christ.
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