Humanity as the Demiurge that Creates the World

The Ancient of Days (1794), depicting Urizen. Frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy (copy D) by William Blake.

In chapter 2 of The Bride of the Lamb, Bulgakov writes that Plato’s “demiurge is, of course, not God, but man.” Bulgakov is saying that humanity is the creator of this mutable world that we inhabit. As we will see, Bulgakov means this primarily in a positive sense that is true outside of the human fall. Both from within and from outside of fallen time, humanity sits at the crossroads of all the creaturely actualizations of God’s timeless creation. As the demiurge, humanity is not, at its core, a wicked and destructive power. We are destructive of course, but our acts of deformation, fragmentation, and incompletion are not acts of creation. There is some sense in which we do seek to actualize evil things outside of the life of God (as we will see next in chapter 3 entitled “Evil”), but this is not the point here in chapter 2 on “Creaturely Freedom” where the focus remains on the proper functioning of humanity. We are only free when we are able to create a world that is in the likeness of God’s own life. In so far as we are fallen, we are not yet free.

My reflections on “Creaturely Freedom” (chapter 2 of Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb within this ongoing series) require a subscription.