“Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the stars within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle, though these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls — yet they are not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens, since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder that troubles our earth.”
Plotinus, Against the Gnostics (c. 270 CE)
The Gnostic notion of a world created by an inferior, even evil, demiurge is one that never appealed to me, for exactly the reasons outlined by Plotinus - the Universe self-evidently consists of more than just humankind, and it is only the delinquent behavior of the latter that calls for an explanation. To assert that it is only the human soul that partakes of divinity whilst everything else is corrupt seems close to an inversion of any logical conclusion.
The Gnostics took the concept of demiurge from Plato’s Timaeus, but reinterpreted it as a malevolent or simply ignorant force. Although they doubtless noticed enough human suffering in the world to require an explanation if it indeed was the creation of a good God - a dilemma which haunts many to this day - it seems unlikely that it was the struggle to explain the origin of evil that primarily motivated their cosmological speculations, and certainly it appears to be a rather wild reinterpretation of Plato. Rather, they took, I think, their cue from a desire to emanicipate their theology from the God of the Old Testament, who in addition to visiting a huge amount of misery on the Earth refused to men the knowledge of the Tree of Life - a curious, one must admit, tale otherwise.
Gnostics sought - and many believed they had attained - spiritual knowledge, something explicitly denied to them by the God of Genesis. Such a God could not be the true God and seemed to them to incarnate various degrees of malevolence towards mankind and the spiritual quest (presumably, we would say now, in order to underpin the intercessionary necessity of the priestly class). Insofar as the Christian message was revelatory, it also seemed implausible that it was given to man despite this ban on spiritual knowledge. Of course they could simply have ignored Judaism, but that would have been awkward for a religion that so clearly grew out of it. In any case, Gnostic traditions predating Christianity and separate from it, though related to Jewish religion - such as Mandaeism - already manifested the need for a solution to this problem.
So it is doubtless wrong to view Gnostic cosmology as primarily motivated by considerations of theodicy.
Nevertheless, they did believe that there was a vector by which disharmony had entered into the world, and that this perturbation of an original state of bliss could not easily be reconciled with their experience of rapture - because Gnostic religion was experiential, not philosophical. Many of us confront the same dilemma today: we know from innermost experience that the ground of all being is limitless love, yet we cannot make sense of the world we live in or even, at times, ourselves. In the Mandaean system which has survived to this day, believers even have recourse to a variety of demiurges which have placed conflicting aspirations in the heart of man. This is not exactly an elegant solution either. And even without positing a malevolent creator, adherents of Hinduism and Buddhism also seek an escape, through a form of gnosis, coupled perhaps to karma, from a world to which humanity is bound in suffering. Even in orthodox Christianity, Satan is somehow involved (it is never clear how) in explaining the unexplainable.
Yet while they may have been annoyingly imprecise on the matter, to my knowledge the Gnostic cosmology was never really cosmological - it was a disguised theory of man. As such, Plotinus’s objection misses the target.
The idea that man is responsible for his own creation of the world is to be found in a certain number of traditions, such as the character of Pangu in Chinese mythology. In most cases within the broad Judeo-Christian tradition, however, the original man is considered a perfect form, as in Paul’s notion of the Second Adam (1 Cor. 15). Even the Gnostics never seem to have suspected this figure of demiurgic activity, placing him (perhaps I should say “them”, as the figure is almost universally androgynous) in the pure Platonic realm. The notion that there is something wrong with creation, but not with man, seems particularly obtuse. After all, the Adam of Genesis really is at the origin of sin, albeit merely through being too weak to resist the still more perfidious Eve, though since she is born of his own flesh it is not obvious that this gets him off the hook.
Many cultures, of course, have a belief in a primeval Golden Age that, somewhere along the way, we fell from. If this is not a purely metaphysical abstraction, any of the demiurgic theories fails to explain anything, since the universe was indeed created perfect, and only fell from perfection much later as a result of errors committed by mankind. This notion, identified often with Rousseau, remains extraordinarily culturally productive, as witnessed to by myriad archaic revivalist projects today, from the Primal Diet to Sex at Dawn to off-grid living (it is challenged, however, in David Graeber’s magisterial final book, The Dawn of Everything, to which I will return).
From a contemporary perspective, it seems natural to attempt a psychological reinterpretation of this mythic tradition. For Jung, if I read him correctly, the status of the Archetypes remains mysterious, a pure deus ex machina, that is, an unexplained and unexplainable inbuilt feature of the human mind. Yet I think we can do better than that. If all we are really trying to do is explain the existence of evil in human relations despite a sense that, somehow, it is not primary, we obviously have a cultural candidate for that, and it is the operation of patriarchy, referenced in my previous article.
If we identify the demiurge as anthropogenic, we are tempted to take a further step and acknowledge that human beings have not only messed up their relations with each other, but are, in fact, well on the way to turning the entire planet into a graveyard. Whilst this may not have been obvious 2000 years ago, the Gnostics may have had a valid intuition in not limiting the corrupting influence of the demiurge to humanity alone.
Yet is condemning the world really helpful, if we wish to save it? Can we even save ourselves on a sort of cosmic lifeboat whilst the rest of creation dies around us? Is this ethical or responsible, or even ontologically realistic?1 And if not, do these traditions still have something to offer on the path of salvation?
I think they do. Whilst pursuing individual salvation may seem like a cop-out, even treasonous, and we certainly need to guard against such a solipsistic conception, it is not, either, simply because all change begins in the human heart. In fact, the social world really is an emanation of ideas held in the human mind and collectively in culture, and the anthropocene physical world is in many ways simply an offshoot of these mental states. Culture produces the world we live in, but on an ongoing basis, not once for all time. The human world is created by human beings. A little more wisdom and connection to the source would not go amiss. In fact, if the Gnostic vision of cosmic harmony is ever to be manifested, even faintly, in the material world, a belief in its existence and preeminence - indeed a groundedness in it - is a precondition, since we can only create that of which we can conceive. And that we can create it is a consequence of the divine wisdom in which each of us partakes.
The destructive forces which long ago entered culture and continue to hold us in their vice-like grip - the Archons as the Gnostics termed them - may be lazily thought of as exogenous and given anthropomorphic (or “angelomorphic”) form, as they are in contemporary “conspiracy” theories also. This is the nature of myth. But these forces are not primary and they are not the final word on the matter. Christian soteriology has not helped us see through this; it seems as arbitrary and capricious as anything else the God of the Old Testament has done in his questionable career. History has proven we are not saved by grace, but we are not saved by works either. If there is really something to be known, however, about our true fundamental nature - something that most of us, most of the time, are missing - then we can, perhaps, be saved by knowledge.
This fantasy, once a staple of science fiction literature, seems happily to have receded in recent decades.