Creator

The inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world, but also of the pleromatic drama for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus. The encounter with the creature changes the creator.

Edinger, citing Jung, argues that the Creator’s own psychological instability is cosmologically generative and that the creator-creature relationship is dialectically transformative, providing the psychological template for the individuation process.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis

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It brings up the crucial question: Is the creator conscious of himself? The question can be broken down into two separate questions to simplify it. The first question: Is there a creator? Not everybody acknowledges that.

Edinger identifies the self-consciousness of the Creator as the pivotal question dividing religious and secular worldviews, and frames the creationist-evolutionist controversy as a contemporary concretization of that unresolved psychological tension.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996thesis

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the Creator and the production of His action are grounded in the creature, and in this sense the divine Names such as the Hidden, the First, belong to the vassal. Thus he too is the First and the Last, the Apparent and the Hidden; the divine Names are shared by the Lord and His vassal.

Corbin, reading Ibn Arabi, presents a theophanic ontology in which Creator and creature share divine Names through a mutual descent and ascent, dissolving the absolute boundary between the two poles.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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We come closer to this problem of the threshold if we proceed to the motif of the twin creators, or rather of the two creators, for they are not always twins.

Von Franz demonstrates through cross-cultural mythology that the Creator archetype is characteristically doubled, introducing conflict, incompleteness, and shadow as structural features of the creative principle itself.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995thesis

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all positive morality, as a way of regulating and thereby confirming man’s membership in the system of creation, was but a version of that Law through which the creator exercised his hold over man’s soul.

Jonas expounds Marcion’s Gnostic theology in which the demiurgic creator is identified as a law-imposing power hostile to human spiritual liberation, making rejection of the creator’s world an act of soteriological necessity.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958thesis

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he in a way forms himself. He is a kind of divine artisan who shaped the mountain and chiseled out the sky… He was supposed to have created the whole world, and even the other Gods, on his potter’s wheel.

Von Franz’s account of the Egyptian Deus faber Ptah presents the Creator as a self-forming craftsman whose creative act is simultaneously self-constitution, a pattern she reads as symbolically equivalent to the psyche’s individuation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting

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The Red God is called Naiterukop, the beginner of the earth, but he is not, the tribe says, as great as the Black God. So you see the creator is sometimes a bit less than the other, but he is still the creator.

Von Franz documents African dual-creator myths in which the active creator occupies a subordinate or ambiguous position relative to a higher principle, reflecting a widespread mythological pattern of the Creator’s incomplete sovereignty.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting

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The basic theological point was that there are two gods… a world which has so much evil in it, could not be the product of a good God. Therefore, at least according to some sects of the Cathars, the world itself was created by Satan.

Edinger traces Cathar dualism as a historical precedent for Jung’s engagement with the paradoxical God-image, showing the Gnostic splitting of Creator into good and evil deities as an earlier, less differentiated form of the same psychological problem.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting

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the worship of animals, the sense of their divinity, is a falling from God, a worship of the organic and corruptible and the mortal rather than the immortal; the creature rather than the Creator.

Hillman, citing Augustine’s reading of Paul, identifies the creature/Creator polarity as a structuring theological opposition that has historically devalued nature and animal life, a legacy that depth psychology must critically engage.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

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God is the Creator from all eternity, and He creates when He wills, in His infinite goodness, through His coessential Logos and Spirit.

The Philokalia presents the orthodox Christian position of the Creator as eternally sovereign and freely willing, through Logos and Spirit, establishing the theological baseline against which more psychologically inflected treatments of the term diverge.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting

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there were two creators. The first was called Con, and he created normal human beings, but then Pachacamac, who was also the son of the sun and whose name is creator, chased away Con.

Inca mythology provides von Franz with another instance of the dual-creator pattern in which successive creator figures displace one another, dramatizing the psyche’s movement from an initial, inadequate creative act toward a more differentiated one.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting

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nature’s discovery of human consciousness (for human consciousness is not of our own doing, rather nature and the history of our own evolution have driven us to attain this consciousness) was indeed a catastrophe.

Von Franz provocatively frames the creation of conscious humanity as potentially catastrophic, implicating the Creator in a risky and ambivalent act whose consequences remain unresolved in the drama of consciousness.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting

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we neither compare the Creator to His creatures, nor falsely speak of birth without begetting. He does not exist of Himself, Who exists through birth.

John of Damascus insists on the absolute ontological distinction between Creator and creature, deploying the Christological controversy to establish the irreducibility of that boundary within orthodox theological discourse.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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In modern dreams and fantasies as well as in schizophrenic material, the act of defecation most frequently symbolizes creation. In Symbols of Transformation Jung describes the vision of the schizophrenic patient in which God is defecating the whole world.

Von Franz marshals clinical and mythological evidence that the Creator’s productive act is symbolically associated with the body’s expulsive processes, grounding cosmogony in the psychology of primal somatic experience.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting

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The many notions of creativity are comparable to the many notions of any basic symbol (matter, nature, God, soul, instinct). The very existence of so many notions is evidence for the variety of root metaphors by means of which the psyche perceives and forms its notions.

Hillman situates creativity—and by extension the Creator as its archetypal ground—within the plurality of root metaphors through which the psyche organizes experience, advocating an imaginal rather than doctrinal approach to the concept.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside

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All things were made through Him. Thus, since nothing exists apart from Him through Whom the universe came into being, He, the Author of all things, must have an immeasurable existence. For time is a cognisable and divisible measure of extension… All things are from Him, without exception; time then itself is His creature.

John of Damascus argues for the Creator’s absolute priority by demonstrating that time itself is a creature, positioning the Creator as the unconditioned ground of all creaturely existence including temporal measure.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside

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