Demiurge Quotes
Too long,” said my father, "have we lived under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge. Too long has the perfection of his handiwork paralysed our own creativity. We do not wish to compete with him. We have no ambition to rival him. We wish merely to be creators in our own, lower sphere. We crave creativity for ourselves. We crave the joy of creation. In a word, we crave Demiurgy.
Bruno Schulz
Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards. These rewards are of exactly the same character as those of the artist. To see a difficult uncompromising material take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion, whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic. To see meaning and understanding come where there has been no meaning and no understanding is to share the work of a demiurge. No amount of technical correctness and no amount of labour can replace this creative moment, whether in the life of a mathematician or of a painter or musician. Bound up with it is a judgement of values, quite parallel to the judgement of values that belongs to the painter or the musician. Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognise this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician.
Norbert Wiener
Your disciples will expect something even grander from you. They'll want you to become a deity.”
She snickered and said, "I'm not ruling out that possibility.”
"What sort of deity? A hamadryad? Plato's demiurge? The Creator God of Judeo-Christian revelation?”
"That job's already taken,” she said.
"But you could do it better,” I said.
"When it comes to the physics, no, but in other areas-you're right.
James K. Morrow
But what matter that men should be no longer submissive to Ialdabaoth if the spirit of Ialdabaoth is still in them; if they, like him, are jealous, violent, quarrelsome, and greedy, and the foes of the arts and of beauty? What matter that they have rejected the ferocious Demiurge, if they do not hearken to the friendly demons who teach all truths; to Dionysus, Apollo, and the Muses? As to ourselves, celestial spirits, sublime demons, we have destroyed Ialdabaoth, our Tyrant, if in ourselves we have destroyed Ignorance and Fear."
Anatole France
In a traditional reading eating the apple was the original sin; but, as Gnostics understood the story, the two primordial humans were right to eat the apple. The God that commanded them not to do so was not the true God but only a demiurge, a tyrannical underling exulting in its power, while the serpent came to free them from slavery. True, when they ate the apple Adam and Eve fell from grace. This was indeed the Fall of Man – a fall into the dim world of everyday consciousness. But the Fall need not be final. Having eaten its fill from the Tree of Knowledge, humankind can then rise into a state of conscious innocence. When this happens, Herr C. declares, it will be ‘the final chapter in the history of the world.
John N. Gray
