The basic belief of the Gnostics was dualism. They believed that the world is ultimately divided between two cosmic forces, good and evil. In line with much Greek philosophy, they identified evil with matter. Because of this, they regarded any Creator God as wicked. Creation by a deity, they felt, was not so much impossible as it was indecent. Their own supreme being was far removed from any such tendency to “evil.”
Since the ultimate deity could have no contact with the material world, the Gnostics explained creation by a series of emanations. If we think of God as a kind of sun, these emanations would be sunbeams—extensions of his nature, yet distinct from him. These supernatural emanations (subordinate “powers”), however, were capable of producing other inferior powers until they had fashioned, as Charles Bigg, the Oxford scholar, once said, “a long chain of divine creatures, each weaker than its parent,” and came at last “to one who, while powerful enough to create, is silly enough not to see that creation is wrong.” This, according to the Gnostics, was the Creator God, the God of the Jews.