Demiurge (redirected from Demiurgus)

demiurge (dĕm`ēûrj') [Gr.,=workman, craftsman], name given by Plato in a mythological passage in the Timaeus to the creator God. In Gnosticism the Demiurge, creator of the material world, was not God but the Archon, or chief of the lowest order of spirits or aeons. According to the Gnostics, the Demiurge was able to endow man only with psyche (sensuous soul)—the pneuma (rational soul) having been added by God. The Gnostics identified the Demiurge with the Jehovah of the Hebrews. In philosophy the term is used to denote a divinity who is the builder of the universe rather than its creator.

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Demiurge

Subordinate god who shapes and arranges the physical world. In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato identified the Demiurge as the force that fashioned the world from the preexisting materials of chaos. In Gnosticism of the early Christian era, the Demiurge is regarded as an inferior deity who had created the imperfect, material world and who belonged to the forces of evil opposing the supreme God of goodness.

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Demiurge 

the term denoting, in philosophy, the creator of any source; and in theology, god, or the creator of the world. In ancient Greece its chief meaning was social: demiourgoi were the craftmen and merchants in the population, as opposed to the landowning elite (eupatridae), the farmers (geomoroi), and the people involved in free professions, such as doctors, poets, and singers.