Plato and Snuffles

In Western thought, the demiurge took a heel turn. Originally, it was the benevolent craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus, shaping matter in the image of ideal forms and bringing order. Not a god in the usual sense, the demiurge is perhaps better understood as a rational instrument masquerading as a rational agent. Plato introduced it to resolve a thorny metaphysical problem: how do those pesky ideal forms cross the divided line and take root in matter?

Of course, for Plato, the forms are really in charge. The demiurge works beneath them, an underlaborer by necessity, subordinate to the logic of the Good. To emphasize this hierarchy, Plato chose the Greek word demiourgos, meaning “craftsman.” One need only turn to the Laws to see how little autonomy he grants artisans: they aren’t even allowed to vote. The demiurge, then, is no ruler. It’s not a tyrant. It’s not a Snuffles.

In later Gnostic cosmologies, the demiurge becomes Snuffles. How that happened is a complicated story that divides scholars. But the overall picture is pretty clear: after the Old Academy established by Plato abandoned the idea of the forms, the demiurge vanished (who needed the demiurge in their absence?), only to reappear in the early centuries A.D. It was no longer a rational artisan but an arrogant, arrogating entrepreneur, a lesser power ruling a corrupt and imprisoning world.

As Lafferty matured as an artist, he kept returning to this theme, doing remarkable things with it. I have written about the Barnaby Sheen stories, where Valentinianism hides just below the surface, and where the phrase “The Men Who Knew Everything” is itself a joke about gnosis. Then there are many instances of the gnostic idea of Sophia in his work, which he associates with the anima. But what happened to the other demiurge, the good one, on its way to Snufflesdom?  

Part of the story is that Christian thinkers responded to the idea of the demiurge in different ways, not all of them gnostic. For instance, Justin Martyr, Origen, and Saint Basil the Great saw a way to think about the Trinity in the demiurge. It helped them imagine how a pre-incarnate Son could relate to the Father and the created world. As Christian teaching about the Trinity developed, the ecumenical councils locked the door on the demiurge. It became synonymous with heresy.

Lafferty’s “Snuffles” draws so deeply on the Gnostic tradition of the nasty demiurge that it never occurred to me to check Plato’s Timaeus for its influence. This afternoon, I reread the dialogue for the first time in years. By the time it reaches 54e–55a, the demiurge has already blended fire with earth, binding them together with air and water, and polished the cosmos-animal into a perfect sphere (31b–34b). Only then, starting at 53c and culminating in 54e–55a, does Plato derive the demiurge's micro-architecture of the four elemental bodies. What follows is the demiurge's first, and smallest, act of construction:

That’s all that needs to be said about the generation of the four substances from one another, but the next questions would be: what shape was each of them made with, and how many constituents combine to produce each of them? Let’s start with the first and smallest composite figure and its factor, which is the triangle whose hypotenuse is twice as long as its minor side. If you join two such triangles at their hypotenuses and do this three times, so that all the hypotenuses and the short sides converge at the centre, you get a single equilateral triangle made up of six triangles. If you put four of these equilateral triangles together in such a way that they form a single solid angle at the point where three plane angles meet, this solid angle is the angle that comes straight after the most obtuse possible plane angle. Four of these solid angles form the first solid figure the one which divides the whole surface of a surrounding sphere into equal and similar zones. The second figure is made up of the same triangles, but this time they form a set of eight equilateral triangles and use four plane angles to make a single solid angle. Six of these solid angles complete the second body. The third figure is made up of 120 of the elementary triangles, made into a solid, and twelve solid angles, with five equilateral triangular planes contributing to each solid angle. It has twenty faces consisting of equilateral triangles.

After reading that, one can only nod when Snuffles says,

“You thought I had forgotten that Bellota was round? If you knew how much trouble I had making it as round as it is, you’d know I could never forget it.”

epikt_map_1960_Snuffles.zip

Download ZIP • 163KB