The Demiurge

In Plato's Timaeus the Demiurge — the word means 'craftsman' or 'artisan' — is the divine maker who brings order out of disorder by looking to the eternal Forms as his model and shaping the receptacle of matter after their pattern. He is good, and being without envy he wishes all things to be as like himself as possible, and so makes the world as fair as a thing of becoming can be.

A maker, not a creator from nothing

Crucially, the Demiurge does not create out of nothing. He orders a pre-existing disorder, persuading 'necessity' — the brute resistance of the material — as far as it can be persuaded. He fashions the World Soul, sets the planets and stars in their courses, and then delegates the making of mortal creatures to the lesser gods, so as not to be the direct author of what must perish.

The interpreters' debates

Later thinkers argued fiercely over his identity and over whether the making was an event in time or an eternal dependence. Plutarch read it literally; Numenius and other Middle Platonists distinguished a supreme transcendent god from a demiurgic second god; and the Neoplatonists tended to locate the Demiurge within Intellect, reading the craftsman myth as an image of the timeless procession of the cosmos from its principles rather than a story of a beginning.

The craftsman of the cosmos

In the Timaeus the Demiurge is a divine craftsman, not a creator from nothing: looking to the eternal Forms as his pattern, he shapes the disorderly receptacle into an ordered, living cosmos because, being good, he is free of envy and wishes all things to resemble him. Later Platonists disputed whether this making was a literal event or an eternal dependence, and where to place the Demiurge among the divine principles.