This book emerges from the author's Ph.D. thesis at Trinity College Dublin. O'B. acknowledges both his supervisor at Trinity, J. Dillon, as well as Fribourg's D.J. O'Meara. As one might expect with such a supervision team, the book does not confine itself to a narrow scope. After two introductory chapters on the very idea of a Demiurge and the earlier reception of Plato's Timaeus, O'B. considers the idea of secondary gods and divine mediators in a series of chapters on Philo, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, Numenius, the Hermetic corpus, Gnostic texts and Origen. It concludes with a chapter on Plotinus in which O'B. argues that the Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus is eclipsed by the derivationist metaphysics characteristic of Neoplatonism. There is a short conclusion, followed by bibliography, index and index locorum.
Since the range of authors surveyed is so wide the challenge for the project is to sustain a narrative structure that allows the reader to understand the variety in terms of various permutations on an underlying philosophical theme. O'B.'s generic definition of demiurgy is ‘world generation via the ordering of pre-existent matter by an entity, sometimes represented as endowed with only limited abilities, according to some sort of model, so that the activity is generally regarded as intellective’ (p. 2). Restating this slightly on p. 4, O'B. adds that the ordering of matter takes place on rational lines – typically geometric or mathematical. He concedes that not every aspect of this generic definition is replicated in each of his authors' accounts of world creation. It is, as he says at some points, a ‘motif’. But what ties together demiurgy in Philo, Maximus, Numenius and the other philosophers he considers is the historical influence of Plato's Timaeus. Their differing accounts of demiurgy result from differing ways of interpreting Plato's text or resolving philosophical problems latent there or incorporating them alongside the author's religious commitments.
Some historians of philosophy may see a methodological problem here. On the one hand, we have O'B.'s generic notion of demiurgy that is drawn very directly from Plato's dialogue. On the other hand, we have his admission that not all aspects of this generic notion of demiurgy are replicated in all the authors he considers. None the less, O'B. claims that we may take what they say to be variations on the theme of Platonic demiurgy because they were influenced by Plato's dialogue. The methodological problem is that often our evidence for the influence of Plato on the writer in question is the extent to which the author's account of world creation resembles Plato's Timaeus. (After all, it is not as if we have diary entries from Philo or Maximus noting that they spent the whole day reading Plato and found it fruitful.) Writers who use the term dêmiourgos may be alluding to Plato, but O'B. frequently discusses passages that do not refer to the creator god in this way. In any event, he concedes that the terminological ‘fingerprints’ do not necessarily imply the influence of Plato (p. 3). This problem is particularly acute in the chapter on Gnosticism. On the one hand, O'B. thinks that ‘nothing in the Timaeus text could have led to the ignorant Gnostic Demiurge’ (p. 205). Yet on the other hand, he seeks to defend the Gnostic view as an ‘extreme evolution of the concept of the Demiurge’ (p. 206). The notion that this is a radical misreading of Plato's pervasive and influential text is a hypothesis upon which the chapter is built – not a conclusion that it established. I myself would be inclined to grant the pervasive influence of the Timaeus in the first to third centuries, but a bit more methodological self-awareness might be a good thing.
What, then, are the major conclusions to emerge from O'B.'s book? O'B. himself takes the figure of the Demiurge in Plato's dialogue to have been used simply as an expository convenience – though he concedes that this is a view not shared by many modern interpreters and certainly not by the Platonists of the first to third centuries c.e. They take the Demiurge literally and their contribution to the evolution of various Platonisms consists in confronting questions that are left open by Plato's text. One of those questions is the relation between the Demiurge and the paradigm to which he looks in making the visible cosmos. The thing that O'B. finds most significant about Philo's use of Plato's notion is the way in which the Forms are now treated as God's thoughts – though O'B. does not credit Philo with originality in this regard (p. 81). In addition, Philo amplifies the motif of biological creation that is implicit in Plato's treatment of the receptacle as the ‘mother and nurse of becoming’ in his idea of God as the planter (phytourgos). Plutarch, by contrast, emphasises the role of the Demiurge as craftsman in his attack on Stoic physics. God should not be treated as an immanent principle of biological growth in the manner of the Stoic logos, so – unlike Philo – Plutarch sought to highlight the incompatibility of Platonism as he understood it with Stoicism.
Numenius forms a bridge between middle Platonism and Plotinus, but also to Hermetism and Gnosticism. Unlike Philo's logos or Plutarch's Osiris, Numenius' second god is a subordinate god that is distinct from the first principle (p. 168). Moreover, in detailing the cooperation between the first and second god, O'B. regards Numenius as reminiscent of Christian thinkers such as Origen (p. 141). Finally, Numenius' account of the matter that resists the moulding efforts of the Demiurge makes it something of an evil principle, albeit one confined to the sublunary region (p. 167).
The chapter on Hermetism is ambivalent in a way. O'B. concedes that the texts do not appropriate specific passages from Plato's Timaeus. Moreover, he thinks that it is not proper philosophy, since the operation of demiurgy in works such as Poimandres is better understood in terms of the interplay of characters in a story rather than in terms of the operation of metaphysical principles.
O'B.'s chapter on Origen is lengthy and complex, defying any simple summary. His assessment of Origen is very largely positive. He is contrasted with Plutarch and Maximus as a ‘real philosopher’. He also seeks to defend Origen's status as a Platonist from recent commentators who have sought to show how Origen's philosophy is incompatible with Platonism. Conceptually speaking, I wondered if the distinction between monotheism and henotheism might have been a helpful framework for exploring the distinction between Plotinus – the subject of the last substantive chapter – and Origen. By ‘henotheism’ I mean the view that the existence of a supreme and unitary divine origin is compatible with a multiplicity of gods. Monotheism may concede that a plurality of divine persons in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, but must deny the existence of multiple gods.
This is a learned and well-written book. From time to time it still betrays its origins in a Ph.D. thesis. It can move rather abruptly from general and synoptic exegesis into detailed contributions to existing scholarly disputes with little motivation to explain taking such a plunge. I think it is none the less a valuable contribution to scholarship on pre-Plotinian Platonisms and O'B. is to be congratulated on an impressive first book.
