Plato’s Demiurge and the Jerusalem of the Spirit

by Paul Trog

According to Plato, the Demiurge is an entity that “fashions and shapes the material world” and in his "Timaeus", Plato describes this being as the organizer of the universe. He is a fashioner, an organizer, not a creator. He is not “the One”. Today, the Masons call him the "Great Architect of the Universe". He is not God. His thinking is rooted in reason and evolves, therefore, he fosters adaptive evolution.

God-YHWH, the Creator, is the source of all life. He is living thought (Dieu est la pensée vivante). His ideas, like seeds, are divinely impregnated by His Holy Spirit and His intelligent design guides their growth patterns. He creates and all beings “live on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4/3). In contrast, reason is devoid of life - it invents and fabricates. It structures an ersatz reality that fosters regression, materialism and an animalism that threatens the presence of God’s Breath of Life in all human beings. Reason clouds the fact that Christ-centered meditative thinking is an existential necessity, essential for achieving inner growth and the ultimate unfolding of God’s image in man. However, if meditative thinking as practiced by the New Age people for instance, is not Christocentric, it can definitely be dangerous. Making sure that one is properly prepared and joined to the Holy Spirit of God and Jesus Christ in prayer before meditating, is indispensable. It is through an undivided heart fully given and linked forever to the Vine, the Tree of Life, that we can listen and hear Him.

Daily access to the flow of the redemptive Blood of Christ, which is the very essence of life, makes this possible. The transformation of the nature of man proceeds in stages, till eclosion and rebirth happen. Then, all that was dead and lost, suddenly springs to life.

Many decades ago, when traveling by road from Syria to Turkey we visited an archeological site straddling the two countries. It is there that I saw Bab al Meskin, the Gate of the Poor. I'll never forgot that gate and it has become the symbol of rebirth in my mind since then: The passage into the Jerusalem of the Spirit for all the lowly and abject.

Clearly, Christ must be at our side and inside, when we cross over into His realm. Genuine reality and a new life, with sight, hearing and a restored understanding await us there.

Paul Trog
Innsbruck
March 18, 2011