#thegnostics — Public Fediverse posts

#摘录 #TheGnostics
……[In] Plato’s dialogue Timaeus…… a divine being called “the craftsman” (demiurge) creates the visible universe as a copy of the eternal forms. The craftsman creates lower gods, who then assist him, and the universe that he creates and in which we live is the best possible image of the perfect spiritual world.

……During the first and second centuries, intellectuals, especially admirers of Plato’s thought, became increasingly sensitive to the distance between the changing material nature of our world and the ideal of an unchanging……. If the ultimate God is utterly transcendent, unchanging, and immaterial, as the ideals of Plato suggested, then some sort of mediating divine principle(s) between that God and this created order appeared necessary.……

In comparison to these thinkers, the Gnostics appear to stand out for two reasons: their divine mediating principles are numerous and complex, and their craftsman god is ignorant and even malicious.