The Carnivalesque

“The answer to the Mystery of Matter (why should there even be so cumbersome a thing as matter? Why did the Word have to be made Flesh? Was not the Making of Matter rather a cheap, and also difficult, trick for a Spirit to indulge in?) — the answer to this contains the answer to the question ‘How Did God Get to be God?’” — “In the Turpentine Trees” (1983)

"Snuffles" on my mind. It was a good excuse to reread the edited transcript of the LaffCon3 panel on the story. It was an excellent panel discussion. If there are weaknesses, they come from an underappreciation of the story as a Catholic parody and all that entails. The metafictional aspects were not explored much, though that wasn’t necessary—Andrew Ferguson has addressed them elsewhere. Maybe the biggest frustration is that, after so many words, there was still little clarity about the nature of violence in "Snuffles." Honestly, I think Bakhtin on Rabelais got in the way—and I say that as someone who likes Bakhtin well enough.

At some point, someone ought to examine closely how Lafferty uses Rabelais, particularly Rabelais’s stylistic tricks around violence. Concrete stuff. Consider one of my favorite Rabelais characters, the very funny Friar Jean. The following passage is from the linguistically wild 17th-century Urquhart edition (set aside Urquhart’s fidelity problems because Lafferty knew this edition):

So great was the cry of the wounded, that the prior of the abbey with all his monks came forth, who, when they saw these poor wretches so slain amongst the vines, and wounded to death, confessed some of them. But whilst the priests were busied in confessing them, the little monkies ran all to the place where Friar John was, and asked him wherein he would be pleased to require their assistance. To which he answered that they should cut the throats of those he had thrown down upon the ground. They presently, leaving their outer habits and cowls upon the rails, began to throttle and make an end of those whom he had already crushed. Can you tell with what instruments they did it? With fair gullies, which are little hulchbacked demi-knives, the iron tool whereof is two inches long, and the wooden handle one inch thick, and three inches in length, wherewith the little boys in our country cut ripe walnuts in two while they are yet in the shell, and pick out the kernel, and they found them very fit for the expediting of that weasand-slitting exploit. In the meantime Friar John, with his formidable baton of the cross, got to the breach which the enemies had made, and there stood to snatch up those that endeavoured to escape. Some of the monkitos carried the standards, banners, ensigns, guidons, and colours into their cells and chambers to make garters of them. But when those that had been shriven would have gone out at the gap of the said breach, the sturdy monk quashed and felled them down with blows, saying, These men have had confession and are penitent souls; they have got their absolution and gained the pardons; they go into paradise as straight as a sickle, or as the way is to Faye (like Crooked-Lane at Eastcheap). — Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book I, Chapter 27 (1534)

There is more than a little Lafferty here in simple prose texture, which is one important reason that Lafferty is closer to Urquhart's version of Rabelais than to Bakhtin’s version of Rabelais. For payoff, one would learn more about Lafferty by reading Rabelais closely than by reading Bakhtin. Perhaps that seems like a straw man, but it isn’t. I assure you that people are now more familiar with Bakhtin and the carnivalesque than with Rabelais himself.

There was a Shakespeare critic named C. L. Barber who wrote a very great book in the late 1950s called Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959). It came out just before Bakhtin’s work was translated into English. It makes a superficially similar point to Bakhtin’s about the carnivalesque, though it does not use the term. Barber says that festive comedy loosens social decorum to renew it. It doesn’t overturn order; it restores it. Festivity is cyclical, not revolutionary. And so forth.

Hold on, you might say. Doesn’t Bakhtin say this? It’s true—Bakhtin talks about repetition, renewal, and the temporary suspension of hierarchies. But there is another part of his theory to know if you don’t want to be at sixes and sevens over the difference between Rabelais and Bakhtin or Bakhtin and Lafferty. Bakhtin believed carnival has a liberating, utopian quality, one that is latently emancipatory. The utopian side of the carnivalesque breaks down hierarchical distance. Through it, people glimpse a freer, more equal world. It dethrones the weight of medieval moral seriousness. That’s why critics like Eagleton, as well as Stallybrass and White, argued many moons ago that Bakhtin blurs ritual renewal and political revolution in an unhelpful way.

This cashes-out for "Snuffles" because Lafferty hates utopia, and there is nothing utopian, redemptive, or emancipatory about it. As a reader or just a well-meaning person, you might really like utopian thinking. You feel that Lafferty, despite himself, comes close to it—that he’s so damn carnivalesque, he can’t help but be latently utopian. No doubt you experience something utopian in reading him. If so, I think you are the Bakhtinian, not he.

“Snuffles” is far from the precincts of Bakhtinian carnival. If we must label it, it is closer to a darkly valenced festive comedy in Barber’s sense of the term because it is so conservative and order affirming. In “Snuffles,” Lafferty uses festivity inside a Gnostic pocket cosmos to wake up modern readers and remind them that Gnosticism has been one of the most dangerous enemies of his faith—second only to Arianism—for good reason. It is potent, dangerous, interesting stuff.

The next question, then, is why bring in Bakhtinian carnival at all? We will revisit the panel for the case. However, something else must also be at play, namely what can be vacuumed out of a handbook on lit-crit terminology. The unpressured idea goes Lafferty loved Rabelais and was clearly influenced by him (true); Bakhtin wrote smart stuff about Rabelais (true); and Lafferty’s work has a carnival feel (yes but let’s pause), so maybe Bakhtin can help us understand Lafferty (false). The thinking is, here’s the carnivalesque, that well-known idea from Bakhtin, so let us use it to make sense of Lafferty—transitive property.

A problem arises. Much in Rabelais doesn’t line up with Bakhtin. Just ask a Rabelais scholar what Bakhtin misses. This is one of those position/mind-defining questions for anyone who thinks hard about Rabelais, and you will invariably get a smart answer. That alone should raise other questions: what if the parts of Rabelais that are closest to Lafferty are the parts about which Bakhtin was weakest? Then, what happens when we use Bakhtin to discuss Lafferty as if Bakhtin were either royal road or decoder key? Will it help us say anything valuable? Will it crowd out other, more generative ways of thinking and distort aspects of Lafferty, such as his extreme anti-utopianism, so at odds with Bakhtin’s project? Does it recapitulate the fog that come from reading Rabelais through Bakhtin, no matter how brilliant Bakhtin himself is? Recommended reading to get one started: The Last Laugh.

Another point to consider is that Bakhtin conceptualizes carnival as subversive of medieval order. Lafferty loved and was nostalgic for the order of the Middle Ages. Think of “Among the Hairy Earthmen.” The alien juvenile delinquents in that story play at some kind of carnival-like funny business and he condemns it. What one might need is a concept of carnival that sees the differences here. A Bakhtinian reading is likely to go wrong without being made to stand on its head like a clowning Snuffles.

Back to LaffCon3. Montejo has just said a bit about Bakhtin, and then added, "while I think the violence here in ‘Snuffles’ may have those kinds of elements as well, I think we need to see that there’s also a carnival-type violence at play." He adds:

But I tend to think that there’s also this aspect to Lafferty regarding the place of violence within the Catholic imagination. And by that, I mean that there is from earliest Christianity up through the Reformation and beyond this focus on martyrdom accounts, literary and artistic depictions of the deaths of the martyrs, which are incredibly gruesome at times. This is where we get the stories of people being ripped apart by wild lions in the arena and so forth. Some of these descriptions are lovingly detailed, but they are not done in a prurient way—because of the cheap thrills that the depiction of violence might give us—but rather because of an underlying understanding that there’s a kind of redemptive quality, a soteriological dimension to violence. Because the violence suffered by the martyrs ultimately points to the redemptive death of the Savior on the Cross. So, the idea here is that the depiction of such violence is integral to our understanding of the order of the universe, salvation history, and the place of humanity within both societal and cosmic structures.

Yes, of course. But what does this have to do with “Snuffles”? Isn’t it really a contrastive case? For Lafferty, suffering through violence can be redemptive—but only when the suffering is merited trough the treasury of Christ’s passion. In “Snuffles,” though, violence means moral negation, not redemption. We are nowhere near the soteriological imagery that Montejo points to. So my answer to the question, What does it have to do with “Snuffles”? would be this: the story world of "Snuffles" rejects redemptive suffering or at minimum sets it aside in its parodic thought experiment about Gnosticism. It is a fierce critique of modernity, targeting sf genre conventions (the metafictional) and the sf person, which is why it also includes coded attacks on evolution and open attacks on positivism.

On the other hand one might ask, what does any of this have to do with Bakhtin? Is the claim that Lafferty’s carnivalesque is somehow redemptive because it is violent, and that this violence links to the utopian potential Bakhtin sees in carnival, because Lafferty, as a Catholic, connects both merited and unmerited suffering in some way, and this way is relevant to salvation? Also, something about playacting? Is it that Catholics roleplay at martyrdom the way the girl does in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”? The logic isn’t clear.

What does make sense to me is a well-plowed convention in Western literature. Both Rabelais and Lafferty laugh at violence because they are Juvenalian, not Horatian, satirists. They are rowdy, and they are mordant. If you aren’t careful, both men can look a little wicked because they are trickster satirists like Swift. The Whiggish Horace Walpole wrote, “Swift was a good writer, but had a bad heart.” The Juvenalian impulse makes the Whiggish squirm because it is far more at home in a high-church conservative sensibility than in a low-church, theologically latitudinarian one, to extend the Swift-Walpole analogy. The Christian Juvenalian doesn’t wring hands over the fact that some people are going to hell after being torn apart. It’s certainly unfortunate, but there is providence, and God uses both ministering angels and scourges. Judith beheaded Holofernes, and the guy had it coming.

In another register, Snuffles doesn’t crucify martyrs. He shreds fools. Juvenal shreds them. Rabelais shreds them. Swift shreds them. Lafferty shreds them. Snuffles is a fool but Snuffles is a scourge. In Christian art, martyrdom is a means of redemption, as the person accepts suffering through the gift of faith. In "Snuffles," the explorers’ deaths mean nothing. Phelan “died like a craven.” Margie dies softly, pathetically in the modern sense, after trying to cajole her killer. Billy Cross, ever the balladeer, dies with a quip on his lips, puffing his pipe: “I hate to go like this, Snuff, old boy.” These bloody deaths happen in a Gnostic parody world where grace doesn’t exist. The theological point seems clear: in a Gnostic cosmos, you are in trouble. The fun times might be fun, but the suffering won’t mean anything. There’s no redemption, just misery without purpose. The meaning of the bloodsmell comes from outside the frame. To put it in frame is to miss the point.

The character who prays, “O Lord . . . however it ends, don't let it have a pat ending. That I couldn't stand,” ends up as kibble—a joke about teleology. But who is he praying to? He isn’t praying. Do you think this was an accident? It’s not even an idiom in his mouth. It’s a non-cognitivist grunt, just a modern way of showing frustration. Look up how many times in his millions of words Lafferty has a character say O Lord. This is withering satire.

Let’s look closer at Snuffles. As a demiurge, Snuffles cannot create from the inside out. He isn’t like God, whose act of creation gives things purpose through the gift of essence—real ends, as Lafferty held. There is only existence. There are no entelechies, no teloi. Snuffles is a bad craftsbear, shaping things without meaning. He’s a funny scary bungler who admits his own failures: “I would be the last to deny that I miscalculated the gravity, a simple mathematical error that anyone could make . . . You may wonder why my birds have hair. I will confess it, I did not know how to make feathers.”

Put another way, in most forms of Gnosticism, the demiurge fails to create a universe that is coherent, good, or purposeful. The resulting cosmos is flawed, corrupt, and material, populated by hostile forces (the archons) that obstruct spiritual ascent. The koine kosmos in effect, backfires. If you ever meet a demiurge on the street and want to know whether it is Gnostic or Platonic, ask if it can do teleology. If it can’t—if it cannot give its creations final causes—then it’s a Gnostic demiurge. In heretical Gnosticism, the only “purpose” lies not in the cosmos itself but in what the cosmos vainly tries to contain: the spark, the pneuma, bits of the idios kosmos, exogenous traces of the originary struggling to escape a material prison. It is non-sacramental. Blood is just blood.

Bellota:

• There is no Grace.

• There is no Redemption.

• Suffering is pointless, not soteriological.

• Creation has no ultimate purpose or telos.

For these and other reasons, "Snuffles" has much more in common with C. L. Barber’s idea of festive comedy than with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. It isn't a perfect fit, but it is minimally less misleading. As a critical term, the carnivalesque imagines a liberating utopia beyond hierarchy, with revolutionary potential—but nothing in "Snuffles" is utopian or revolutionary. The story is festively violent. What we get is restorative irony, something a little mean, something a little Juvenalian, not anything emancipatory. We get a bear on a throne, a reminder of why order, purpose, and hierarchy matter. “Never does nature say one thing but wisdom another,” wrote Juvenal. “I did not know how to make feathers,” saith Snuffles. It might be tempting to read Snuffles as a Bakhtinian Lord of Misrule (as Georgina does recall from a parade float in Nola) but in the end, he is just a nasty demiurge, and she is a fool. There is little reason to think the carnival Lafferty imagines has much to do with Bakhtin’s version of it.

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Reception of Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque in Anglophone Academia

• 1967 – Julia Kristeva introduces Bakhtin’s ideas: Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva publishes an essay (in French) explaining Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and carnival, bringing the “carnivalesque” to the attention of Western theorists. This paves the way for Bakhtin’s reception outside the USSR.

  
  

• 1968 – First English translation of Bakhtin’s Rabelais study: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (original Russian 1965) appears in English, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (MIT Press). This publication introduces Anglophone readers to Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, the subversive, comic folk culture Bakhtin saw in Rabelais. It popularizes the term “carnivalesque” in English criticism.

  
  

• 1973 – Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky book in English: Ardis Publishers releases Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (trans. R. W. Rotsel. This brings Bakhtin’s analysis of polyphony and “carnivalization” in literature to English audiences. (Bakhtin discusses how Dostoevsky’s novels inherit the carnival spirit of inversion and free dialogue.) Though a small press edition, it marks the concept’s further entry into Anglophone literary theory.

  
  

• 1981 – Bakhtin hailed in literary theory: The Dialogic Imagination, a collection of Bakhtin’s essays (Univ. of Texas Press), is published in English. In the introduction, Michael Holquist calls Bakhtin “one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century,” signaling Bakhtin’s rising influence. Key Bakhtinian ideas, including the carnivalesque as a liberating “world upside-down” in literature, gain prominence in Anglophone criticism during this period.

  
  

• 1981 – Terry Eagleton’s Marxist critique: Literary critic Terry Eagleton questions the politics of the carnivalesque in his essay “Carnival and Comedy: Bakhtin and Brecht” (in Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism). Eagleton argues that carnival is “a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off.”  In other words, it is an authorized safety-valve rather than a true revolution. This oft-cited critique introduces a note of skepticism into the Anglophone reception, challenging Bakhtin’s more utopian view of carnival’s subversive power.

  
  

• 1980s – Scholarly debate on subversion vs. containment: Following Eagleton, other commentators and historians emphasize that authorities often sanctioned actual carnival festivals as “safety-valves.”  Research on popular culture notes that carnivals, feast of fools, etc., were permitted as temporary inversions so that social order could resume unchanged. This perspective – echoed by Bakhtin specialists and social historians – casts the carnivalesque as ambivalently subversive: a temporary “ritual rebellion” that might ultimately reinforce the status quo. This theme becomes central in carnivalesque debates.

  
  

• 1984 – Bakhtin studies flourish (translations & Todorov): The University of Minnesota Press publishes a new, authoritative English edition of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson (with intro by Wayne C. Booth). The same year, Bulgarian-French critic Tzvetan Todorov’s monograph Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984, translated to English) makes Bakhtin’s theories, including the carnivalesque, even more accessible to Western readers. These works lock in Bakhtin’s presence in Anglo-American academia and provide a fuller theoretical context for the carnivalesque concept.

  
  

• 1984 – Umberto Eco’s response: In a contribution to a 1984 symposium on carnival (published in Carnival!), novelist-semiotician Umberto Eco asserts the essential conservatism of carnival. He argues that historically, carnival was an instrument of social control (authorities “licensed” misrule to prevent real dissent) and warns that modern mass media enact a “continuous carnivalization of life” that substitutes mindless fun for genuine politics. Eco’s critique, like Eagleton’s, tempers the early enthusiasm by suggesting the carnivalesque can be easily co-opted by power structures.

  
  

• 1986 – Carnivalesque in cultural theory: Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s influential book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Cornell University Press, 1986) adopts Bakhtin’s carnivalesque as a key framework for analyzing literature and culture. They examine how carnival inversions (high–low, sacred–profane) reveal class and bodily politics, and note the ambivalence of such inversions. Stallybrass and White conclude that “it actually makes little sense to fight out the issue of whether carnivals are intrinsically radical or conservative”, since carnival can both contest and tacitly uphold social hierarchies. Their work, along with other cultural materialists, integrates Bakhtin’s ideas into Anglo scholarship while acknowledging the “double-edged” nature of carnival (both emancipatory and containment).

  
  

• 1989 – Extension to film and media: Film scholar Robert Stam publishes Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (1989), which applies Bakhtinian concepts – including the grotesque and carnivalesque – to cinema and popular media. This is “the first extended application” of Bakhtin’s carnival theory beyond literature into mass-media criticism. Stam’s work signifies the broadening of the carnivalesque’s influence into new disciplines (film studies, cultural studies). By the end of the 1980s, Bakhtin’s carnival had become a cross-disciplinary theoretical tool in the English-speaking academy.

  
  

• 1990s – Assimilation into theory and new applications: By the mid-1990s, Bakhtin’s carnivalesque is firmly embedded in Anglophone academic discourse, appearing in critical theory handbooks and inspiring diverse scholarly applications. Feminist theorists engage with the concept: e.g. Mary Russo’s “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory” (essay, 1986) and her book The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (1994) draw on Bakhtin’s grotesque-carnival to analyze the female body and subversive laughter. Postmodern and postcolonial writers are often read through a carnivalesque lens – for instance, Salman Rushdie’s and Angela Carter’s novels are noted for carnivalesque elements, blending magical realism with social satire. Scholar David K. Danow’s book The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque (1995) explicitly links Bakhtin’s carnivalesque to Latin American magical realism and the grotesque in modern fiction. Such works show the concept’s evolution: from a historical-literary idea about Rabelais, it expands to describe contemporary narrative strategies, gender politics, and cultural resistance in Anglophone scholarship.

  
  

• 2000s – Continued influence and critical re-evaluation: In the 21st century, the carnivalesque continues to spur academic inquiry. Scholars apply it to new contexts – from organizational communication to digital culture – seeing, for example, online forums and social media as “carnival” spaces of dissent and play. At the same time, theorists persist in questioning how genuinely subversive these carnival-like phenomena are. The earlier critiques by Eagleton and others are revisited in light of modern mass culture: does the “carnival” in consumer society liberate people or merely entertain them? This period sees a balance of enthusiasm and skepticism, with the carnivalesque acknowledged as a powerful analytic concept but one whose “emancipatory” limits must be understood in context.

  
  

• 2022 – Ongoing relevance in contemporary thought: Decades after its introduction, Bakhtin’s carnivalesque remains a reference point in cultural theory. For instance, writer Ed Simon in “Who Still Needs the Carnivalesque?” (The Baffler, 2022) reflects on the concept’s modern pertinence and calls for reviving carnival’s radical, populist spirit in current politics.

The Demiurge in Western Thought

(4th c. BCE → 19th c.)

c. 360 BCE — Plato introduces the Demiurge as benevolent craftsman.

In Timaeus 28a–29b, the dêmiourgos (“craftsman”) models the cosmos on eternal Forms, imposing mathematical order on recalcitrant pre-cosmic “chaos.” The maker is purposive and good; the account is offered as an eikôs muthos/logos (a likely story/reason). Key features: exemplarism, teleology, and a strict distinction between intelligible model and generated world. Primary conduit for all later receptions.

1st c. BCE–1st c. CE — Hellenistic/early imperial receptions (Philo; proto–Middle Platonism).

Philo of Alexandria reworks Platonic cosmogony into biblical monotheism: God creates through his Logos—functionally occupying demiurgic roles but as divine Word/Wisdom rather than a subordinate artisan. This both appropriates and displaces the Platonic craftsman within a Jewish framework.

1st–2nd c. CE — Middle Platonists systematize: Alcinous, Plutarch, Numenius.

Handbooks/commentaries (e.g., Alcinous’ Didaskalikos) and essays by Plutarch and fragments of Numenius elaborate the hierarchy: the Good/First God, a second divine Intellect (often identified with the Demiurge), and the World-Soul as mediator. Numenius tends to split the demiurgic intellect in its encounter with matter. This period hardens the triadic metaphysics picked up by later Platonism and Christian thinkers.

2nd century — Christian “Gnostic” transformations: the hostile/ignorant Demiurge.

Sethian and related materials (e.g., Apocryphon of John) polemically invert Plato: the world-maker (Yaldabaoth/Saklas/Samael) is an ignorant or arrogant ruler who falsely claims ultimate divinity; the material cosmos is a prison. This reframes the Craftsman as a cosmic obstacle to salvation. (Survives in multiple Coptic witnesses at Nag Hammadi.)

Late 2nd–early 3rd c. — Patristic responses and heresiologies (Irenaeus, Tertullian).

Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses) catalogues and refutes demiurgic myths, explicitly reporting the Gnostic claim that the Demiurge “imagined he created” unaided; Tertullian (Adversus Marcionem) defends the OT Creator as the true good God, even while adopting “demiurge” as a neutral label for the biblical maker. These sources fix much of our historical knowledge of such groups and mark the theological pushback.

*3rd century — Origen’s Christian Platonism: subordinating demiurgy to creatio.

Origen’s On First Principles integrates Platonic cosmology into Christian doctrine: creation flows from the one God (not an inferior craftsman) via the Logos; the Platonic schema is re-interpreted within Trinitarian metaphysics. Later Christian tradition will harden the shift from “craft” to creation ex nihilo.

3rd century — Plotinus’ Neoplatonism rejects the Gnostic demotion of the maker.

In Ennead II.9 (Against the Gnostics), Plotinus defends the goodness of the sensible cosmos and repudiates the idea of an ignorant/evil demiurge. In his own system, the “demiurgic” role belongs to Nous (Intellect) as the living Forms; creation is emanation, not temporal manufacture. The demiurgic metaphor becomes increasingly attenuated.

4th–5th centuries — Late Neoplatonism ritualizes and hierarchizes demiurgy (Iamblichus, Proclus).

Theurgic currents (Iamblichus) and systematic exegesis (Proclus’ Commentary on the Timaeus) interpret “Demiurge” within an elaborate cascade from the One through Intellect/Soul, often correlating the Demiurge with Zeus and assigning “demiurgic” causality to divine Intellect. Proclus becomes the medieval West’s most influential philosophical reader of Timaeus.

4th–5th centuries — Latin West: Chalcidius and the Timaeus go medieval.

Chalcidius’ partial Latin translation and extended commentary on Timaeus (to 53c) becomes the central Platonic conduit for the Latin Middle Ages, blending Middle/Neoplatonic elements and stabilizing the demiurgic vocabulary for scholastic readers.

4th–6th centuries — Doctrinal consolidation of creation ex nihilo.

While Christian Platonists retain purpose and exemplarism, the Church’s doctrinal center of gravity moves to creatio ex nihilo, sharply distinguishing biblical creation from Platonic “crafting.” This culminates in medieval theology (e.g., Aquinas, ST I, q.45) where God creates without pre-existent matter, displacing “demiurge” as a technical term.

12th–13th centuries — Dualist heresies and a demiurgic “evil creator” motif in the Latin Middle Ages.

Bogomil and Cathar movements are portrayed (largely via hostile sources) as teaching a sinister world-maker (sometimes identified with Satan/Satanael), echoing late-antique dualisms. Scholarship debates degrees of continuity with ancient Gnosis, but the demiurge-as-oppressor trope persists culturally.

15th century — Renaissance Platonism and Ficino’s Timaeus revival.

Ficino’s translations/commentaries re-center Timaeus in humanist curricula and Christianize Platonic cosmology: the world-maker becomes the providential Christian God working teleologically through an ensouled cosmos. This rekindles interest in demiurgic teleology for natural philosophy, astrology, and medicine.

Late 16th century — Hermetic/Neoplatonic cosmologies (Bruno and allies).

Renaissance Hermetism (which Ficino had popularized) sometimes invokes a demiurgic intellect mediating divine power; Bruno radicalizes the animated, infinite cosmos while drawing on Ficinian Platonism/Hermetism. The demiurge figures within broader debates about cosmic animation and providence.

17th century — Cambridge Platonists (Cudworth) and “plastic nature.”Seeking a tertium quid between occasionalism and mechanism, Cudworth posits a “Plastick Nature,” an unconscious, lawlike, purposive agency executing divine ideas—conceptually akin to a de-anthropomorphized demiurge within nature. His True Intellectual System re-thematizes teleological craftsmanship without positing a sub-deity.

17th–18th centuries — Early modern teleology reframes demiurgy metaphorically.

Leibniz’s architect/engineer God and (more programmatically) Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Part II) relocate “craftsman” language into regulative teleology: nature must be judged “as if” purposively organized, but no literal cosmic artisan is affirmed by theoretical reason. The demiurge becomes a heuristic rather than a metaphysical agent.

19th century — German Idealism/Naturphilosophie sublate the artisan into immanent process.

In Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and related works, productivity/nature itself is living, self-articulating power; “demiurgy” diffuses into the identity of nature and spirit. Hegel treats ancient Gnosticism within the history of religion, but the system’s absolute idealism leaves no room for a subordinate world-maker. The demiurge’s conceptual work is completed by the logic of immanent development.