Page "Gnosis" Paragraph 16

According to Hegemonius ( 4th C .) Mani ( 3rd C .) vilified the creator God of the pagan philosophers ( Plato's demiurge ) and the creator God of Judeo-Christianity ( creator ).

Gnosticism presents a distinction between the highest, unknowable God and the demiurgic “ creator ” of the material.

Several systems of Gnostic thought present the Demiurge as antagonistic to the will of the Supreme Being: his act of creation occurs in unconscious semblance of the divine model, and thus is fundamentally flawed, or else is formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality.

Thus, in such systems, the Demiurge acts as a solution to the problem of evil.

According to Samuel Angus ( 1925 ) the gnostic sectarians also sought to reconcile the individual to their own personal deification ( henosis ), making each individual God.

As such the gnostic sects made a duality out of the difference between the activities of the spirit ( nous ), called noesis ( insight ), and those of faith.