The Evil Demiurge

A study of the Demiurge figure by pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran. There is no way to reconcile the idea of an honorable god with the obvious omnipresence of evil. In the beginning, something unspeakable must have happened, vitiating existence forever. We cannot accept that the good god, the "Father", was involved in the scandal of creation. Goodness doesn't create, it lacks imagination, and it takes imagination to make a world, however slapdash it may be. The truth is that we have come from the hands of a cursed god, to whom we cling with our miseries and our tares: nothing flatters us so much as to be able to place the source of our indignity in the actions of a perverse creator. We mimic his deplorable inability to remain in himself, we perpetuate his work, because to procreate is to be complicit in an original crime. All begetting is suspect; angels, fortunately, are unsuited to it, the propagation of life being reserved for the fallen. The Evil Demiurge is not, however, an essentially dark book. In any case, it ends on a serene note: "We are at the bottom of a hell in which every moment is a miracle".