Escaping Fate by Rising Through the Heavens

   Continuing the overview series… the Gnostic schools pretty much universally believed in the idea of fate or predestination.  Some even believed in astrology, the notion that planetary patterns reflect patterns in human lives here on Earth.  Here’s the twist, though: they were convinced that fate was evil and that part of our quest for salvation involved learning how to thwart it.

In the Gnostic mythos, fate was part of the trap the archons set for human spirit.  From the Secret Book of John:

[T]he Chief Ruler knew that [the human beings, after the Mother awakened their thinking] surpassed him in the excellence of their wisdom. He wanted to restrict their plan for he was ignorant. He did not understand [that] they were wiser than he. He made a plan with his powers.  They begot Fate and they bound the gods of heaven and angels and demons and human beings with measures and seasons and times in order to keep them all in its fetter—for it was lord over them all.

The Secret Book of John lists 12 archons, including the chief archon, Yaldabaoth; and further names seven “glories” who were appointed by Yaldabaoth to rule over the heavens, and also over the days of the week.

The seven heavens are of course the orbital spheres of the seven then-known planets.  The idea of reading one’s fate in the stars likely came to the middle east by way of Babylon, where it was brought to Egypt by the conquest of the Babylonian Empire.  Much of the Western innovation in astronomical research during the period of antiquity took place in Egypt and northern Africa.  Claudius Ptolemy, whose famous work the Almagestexpounded his famous geocentric system, published his work around the same time as the development of the Gnostic myth about fate and astrology.

With fate seen as a trap set by the archons, the Gnostics sought a way to overcome it.  The notion of becoming free of the material fetter became also a myth of cosmic ascension — of rising spiritually through the seven heavens, overcoming each archon one by one and passing on into the next realm.  Beyond the seven planetary spheres was one last obstacle, the eighth heaven with its sphere of fixed stars, which included the twelve signs of the zodiac. These too were ruled by the archons. Beyond the eighth heaven was the Empyrian Realm, a realm of light and fire, which was said to be the dwelling place of the Father.  In Ptolemy’s myth this was the realm of the Prime Mover, the one responsible for keeping the heavenly bodies in motion.

Astronomical myth played a central role in Christian doctrine from the beginning.  Recall, for example, that three kings from east (legend says from Babylon, which is the realm where the first western astrology was developed) followed a star to find the birthplace of Jesus.  Throughout his ministry Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven and his ‘heavenly Father’ (as distinct from his worldly or mundane father).  And finally, Jesus was lifted up into heaven to be with his Father.

Cosmic ascension is, therefore, a symbol for union with God that goes back to the very roots of Christian doctrine.  It is reminiscent of the ascension of Enoch.  Visions of being transported to heaven and shown around abound in Christian mystical literature, Gnostic and otherwise.  See for example the Apocalypse of Paul, which purports to describe the vision of heaven Paul was given during his conversion event on the road to Damascus.  The endurance of this tradition is demonstrated by the similar visions described by Dante Alighieri in his Paradiso.

At least one sect developed this into an extremely elaborate system of ritual magic recorded in the Books of Ieou (or IAO).  This book describes 30 heavenly aeons through which the ascendant must pass, each one governed by three archons, who must be challenged.  The ascendant uses a particular sign and grasps a numerical glyph in his or her hand while demonstrating authority over the archons.

When you come out of the body and you reach the first of the aeons, and the archons of that aeon arrive before you, seal yourselves with this seal.  Say its name Zozeze — say it one time only.  Grasp this pebble with both your hands: 1119.  … Say these protective spells also: ‘Retreat Proteth, Persomphon, Chous, archons of the first aeon, for I invoke Eaza Zeozaz Zozeoz.’  Whenever the archons … hear these names, they will be very afraid… and flee leftward to the west while you journey on up.  (Ancient Christian Magic, p. 67; translated by Richard Smith)

The Merging of Opposites in Thunder: Perfect Mind

Thunder: Perfect Mind is not like any other text in the Gnostic corpus.  It was written in the first person, and consists of a seemingly endless list of contradictory self-descriptions:

I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.

The narrator is female, but she moves beyond female-centric imagery into the abstract:

I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.

Some, including Douglas M. Parrott, one of the principal translators, have compared it to the Isis aretalogies used in Egyptian worship.  An aretalogy is a list or catalog of characteristics used to identify a deity.  For example, the most famous of the Isis aretalogies is this one, which seems to be the work of an Isis mystery cult in Thrace.  It doesn’t bear much resemblance to Thunder: Perfect Mind.  The Isis aretalogy addresses Isis in the second person, and it doesn’t have a similar rhythm at all. But the parallels may provide a clue.

Thunder: Perfect Mind does bear a bit more resemblance to the Sophia aretalogy in Proverbs 8:22-36:

Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil. (Proverbs 8:23-26)

The Sophia monologue was written during the Hellenistic period and exemplifies the Wisdom scripture of the Jewish community in Alexandria.  But even this work is very different.  It is essentially a creation story praising Wisdom, telling a coherent narrative, whereas Thunder: Perfect Mind is simply a mind-boggling array of contradictory assertions.

Merging of opposites is a prominent theme in Gnostic scripture.  Consider this famous passage from the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom” (Gospel of Thomas 22)

This in turn can be compared to the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, considered one of the foundational writings of alchemy.  Some alchemical writings appear to have been deeply crypto-Gnostic (cf. for example the work of Silberer and Jung), and the alchemical endeavor possibly provided one avenue by which Gnostic ideas were preserved in secret during the years when being in possession of Gnostic writings was a grave offense.

But what purpose could this have served?  Is it simply meant to sound profound while being, simply, nonsense?  Nanna Olsen gave a clue in her conclusion to this essay about Thunder: Perfect Mind:

The text … works to convey meaning not in an informative way, but in a performative one by perpetually deferring, defying, disrupting and destructing meaning, and forcing the reader into insoluble dilemmas, it becomes obvious how the text makes sense.

The key word there is ‘performative.’  The most obvious use of the text is as a ritual script.  Perhaps the goal was invocation, or the literal drawing of divine presence into oneself by prayer and ritual.

Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquilli, in their book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, describe an interesting theory based on taking brain images of people having religious experiences.  Ritual, they suggested, induces a state of mystical awe by stimulating both the sympathetic and the parasympathetic faculties in the nervous system.  The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for “fight or flight” by responding to potential threats; speeding the heart and and exciting the amygdala.  The parasympathetic nervous system responds to calming stimuli by slowing the heartbeat and allowing the body to enter a restful state.  Normally either one or the other is active at a time; only an unsual circumstance can trigger both to be active at the same time. Religious ritual accomplishes this, though. Ritual performance involves rhythm and repetition, which tend to calm one down; but they also present the mind with imagery or mysteries that evoke fear or surprise.  The result is that both nervous systems are triggered at the same time and the result can be a profoundly emotional experience.

Even the title of the text alone suggests this juxtaposition: “thunder” alongside “perfect mind.”  The text is intended to be performed, and gives us great insight into what it must have been like to participate in Gnostic worship.

Mercy and Judgment in Pistis Sophia

Pistis Sophia is a late Gnostic text, typically dated in the 3rd to 4th Century CE.  Largely it is known to us from a Coptic edition in the Askew Codex.  It is long and somewhat impenetrable to casual reading.

Pistis Sophia is an apocalypse telling of both the beginning and the end of the world; and as we find in most texts of that genre it spends no small amount of time describing what will happen to people’s souls after the final judgment.  Like most Gnostic texts, Pistis Sophia describes human souls as being trapped by the Archons in a cycle of reincarnation.  There are some interesting similarities to the Tibetan Buddhist text Bardo Thodol(“Liberation by Hearing in the Liminality”), and also to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

As in Bardo Thodol, right after death the human soul has a chance to be freed from the cycle of reincarnation.  If the person while alive was baptized, followed the purifications (Pistis Sophia advocated a life of abstinence), and carried out the necessary instructions upon death, they would be well-equipped to grasp that opportunity and rise up “like an arrow” beyond the obstacles of fate and fear.  Also as in Bardo Thodol, the unprepared also had a chance at liberation, but they had to be lucky enough to hear and understand liberatory prayers spoken by someone who had received the proper instruction.

Pistis Sophia, like most Christian apocalyptic texts, proscribes the judgment of souls, but in describing the fate of souls its tone is much more merciful than we encounter in  mainstream Christian scripture.  The details of the fate of souls borrow heavily from Greek and Egyptian notions of the afterlife.

Upon death, the human soul is said to fall into the company of “receivers,” of whom there are several classes having varying levels of friendliness towards the soul.  Those who lead  ethical lives, regardless of their beliefs or instruction in the Gnostic mysteries, fall into the company of friendlier receivers who first “spend three days circling with it in all the creatures of the world” (ch. 103).  They then guide the soul through different regions of the underworld (Amente and Chaos, of Egyptian and Greek myth) where they are judged but do not suffer greatly.  They are made to drink from a cup of forgetfulness, and finally the soul is led back to be born into a new body, and whether they are assigned a good destiny or bad one reflects their conduct in the previous life.

Those who led less ethical lives do not fare as pleasantly.  They are taken up by “retributive” receivers who usher them through the realms of judgment, where they are punished by the Archons according to the wickedness of their actions in life.  A “wise fire” purifies them by burning away the worst parts of them.  (Baptism involving fire was not literally practiced by Gnostics – as far as we know – but they referred to the inner initiatory rituals as “fire baptism” to distinguish them from the water baptism that was open to everyone.) Finally they are brought before Barbelo, the Virgin of Light, who assigns a new fate for them based on their actions in the previous life.

Those who have been initiated in the Gnostic mysteries are said to be able to offer help to the souls of the departed.  They can recite prayers over the corpse in hopes that the spirit will hear it and follow instructions that may help them rise up beyond the spheres of fate that trap the human soul on Earth.  They can also offer prayers to the Virgin of Light on their behalf, so that she will give them a more merciful assignment in the next life.

For a few souls who led especially wicked lives on Earth – or Gnostic initiates who slide back repeatedly into immoral behavior – a particularly terrifying fate awaits.  They are taken to the Outer Darkness – the same Outer Darkness which Jesus described in the Gospels as a “place of wailing and gnashing of teeth.”  Unlike popular depictions of Hell as a place of fire and brimstone, the Outer Darkness is described, like the deepest level of Hell Dante’s Inferno, as a place of terrible, freezing cold.  There, the souls of the wicked will be frozen until the end of the world, at which time they will cease to exist.

There is no eternal suffering in this depiction of Hell.  And redemption is open to even the Archons or demons too, if they should repent.  Several of the Gnostic texts, including Pistis Sophia, Hypostasis of the Archons, and the Secret Book of John, describe a role given to a repentant Archon named Sabaoth.

I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that it is hard to reconcile ancient apocryphal texts proscribing harsh or even infinite punishment for wrongdoers with modern ideas of justice.  Pistis Sophia addresses this problem directly.  The section of the text which deals with judgment ends with Jesus assuring the disciples that the holy Mysteries will be more merciful in their judgment than any human.  Citing examples of cases where people commit many sins “deserving of death” but who are then given mercy by earthly kings or judges, he claims that even more merciful will be the Mysteries.

To illustrate his point, Jesus brings before Peter (in order to test him) a woman who had transgressed three times after repenting and being baptized. He instructs Peter to “perform the mystery which cutteth off the souls from the inheritances of the Light.”  Peter demurs:

When then the Saviour had said this, Peter said: “My Lord, let her yet this time, that we may give her the higher mysteries; and if she is fit, then hast thou let her inherit the Light-kingdom, but if she is not fit, then hast thou [to] cut her off from the Light-kingdom.”

When then Peter had said this, the Saviour knew that Peter was compassionate as he and forgiving. (Pistis Sophia, Chapter 122)

The choice of Peter in this parable is notable, because throughout the Gnostic texts, Peter is depicted as being particularly hot-tempered, misogynistic, and quick to judgment.  Even Peter can not bear to be the one who cuts this woman out of salvation, when faced with actually doing so.   The point is made: God must be even more merciful than Peter.

Guardian Angels in the Gnostic tradition

The idea of guardian spirits or angels was fairly widely known throughout the West during the period of antiquity, though these took many different forms.

For example, the Romans worshipped spirits called the lares, who were ancestor spirits who remained to guard over a family and household.  This entailed protection from harm as well as protection of the family’s hearth and bounty.  The Romans also believed in spirits called genii (sg. genius), who were associated with a particular person, place, or concept, and charged with guarding and protecting the virtue of that which they watched over.  The office of Roman emperor had a genius, as did the entire people of the Roman Empire.

Roman subjects paid a kind of spiritual tax in the requirement to regularly offer a small sacrifice, usually a small pastry or cake, to the genii of the emperor and the Roman Empire. Jews were exempted from making this sacrifice by special treaty, but that dispensation did not apply to Christians.  Refusing to make this sacrifice was the most frequent act for which Christians were condemned during the waves of persecution that sometimes swept through the Empire.

Among the various sects of Judaism, the idea of protective spirits was adopted gradually, though naturally as angels.  Daniel, when sent to the lions’ den, was protected by an angel, though it does not read as if this was an angel permanently appointed to protect him.  In the Book of Enoch are mentioned angels sent to guard over the righteous (and, according to the Epistle of Jude, to execute the Lord’s judgment).  Also, the Book of Enoch describes several archangels whose duties include promotion of justice, especially Michael.

It is this type of guardian angel who appears in Acts 12, in which an angel freed Peter from jail.  When Peter made his way to the house of Mary the mother of John, he knocked at the gate, only to have the apostles think, since it can’t be him (he’s in prison!) maybe it’s his angel.

The Holy Spirit, as a guide and protector to the body of the church, plays a role not unlike the genius of the Empire.  This is also analogous to the Kabbalistic idea of the Keneset Yisrael, the soul of the body of Israel – a spiritual bond connecting the members of the nation together as one body.

The Gnostics also spoke about guardian angels, but their understanding was somewhat different.  An excellent essay, “Joined to an Angel,” describes the role of the guardian angel in the Valentinian scripture and its importance in the Gnostic sacraments – especially the Sacrament of the Bridal Chamber, which was not a marital ceremony between man and woman, but a marriage between the aspirant and their guardian angel, spiritually analogous to the marriage of Christ and Sophia.

In the Valentinian tradition, each person has an angel who is a go-between between them and the divine presence — but the connection is even deeper than that.  The Gospel of Philip describes the union with the guardian angel by way of an analogy:

The forms of evil spirit include male ones and female ones. The males are they which unite with the souls which inhabit a female form, but the females are they which are mingled with those in a male form… And none shall be able to escape them, since they detain him if he does not receive a male power or a female power, the bridegroom and the bride. One receives them from the mirrored bridal chamber. When the wanton women see a male sitting alone, they leap down on him and play with him and defile him. So also the lecherous men, when they see a beautiful woman sitting alone, they persuade her and compel her, wishing to defile her. But if they see the man and his wife sitting beside one another, the female cannot come into the man, nor can the male come into the woman. So if the image and the angel are united with one another, neither can any venture to go into the man or the woman.

The image (eidolon) is a Gnostic term for the material body, and the implication is that the angel is almost like another half of your soul without whom you are incomplete.

This esoteric notion of the guardian angel has its roots (as do many of the Gnostic ideas) in the writings of Plato.  During the classical period, the Greek words for personal angel (daimon) and god (theou) were used somewhat interchangeably.  By the time of Plato a distinction started to appear, which was explicated in this exchange between Socrates and the priestess Diotima in the Symposium:

“What then is Love?” I asked; “Is he mortal?” “No.” “What then?” “As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two.” “What is he, Diotima?” “He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.” “And what,” I said, “is his power?” “He interprets,” she replied, “between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all, prophecy and incantation, find their way.

A similar notion of the guardian angel persists to this day, which is known in modern occultism because it was developed into a system of theurgic magic by Mathers in his Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, the central goal of which is called the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  The aspirant, after a period of ritual purification (similar to the ascetic lifestyle advocated by many of the Gnostic sects) is said to attain mastery over many things in this world.  The magical SATOR square, employed therein, was known to ancient magic practitioners, including those of ancient Alexandria.  In many ways, we see, the Western esoteric tradition has remained largely intact over the millennia.

Making Paradigm Shift our Religion

One way to look at what was going on during the period of antiquity is to say that civilization was going through a major paradigm shift.  But this is the way we, with the benefit of terminology like “paradigm shift” at our disposal, are able to understand what was happening at the time, looking back at the historical and archaeological record in retrospect.  Those living through it and expressing it in their writings struggled to put into words the changes they were witnessing.

One obvious change is that notions of justice had changed over the centuries.  Much of the Law and the Prophets (what Christians call the Old Testament) conceptualize justice as a collective national concern.  When the prophets complained that the nation was failing to do “what is right in the eyes of the Lord,” they were concerned less with the conduct of individuals and more with the collective actions of the nation as a whole — but with perhaps some direct scrutiny directed at members of the ruling class.  With the identity of the nation tied in with that of the king, it was presented as just that the Lord should punish the entire nation for the misdeeds of the king or the upper class.

For example, one of the more puzzling passages (to modern readers) concerns the census ordered by King David.  The purpose of the census was likely to know how large of an army he could raise.  The passage begins with this: “Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go, count the people of Israel and Judah'” (1 Samuel 24:1).  Even over the objections of his military commander, David ordered the army to conduct a census of his kingdom.  In response, the Lord gives David a choice of three punishments:

[T]he word of the Lord came to the prophet Gad, David’s seer, saying, “Go and say to David: Thus says the Lord: Three things I offer you; choose one of them, and I will do it to you.” So Gad came to David and told him; he asked him, “Shall three years of famine come to you on your land? Or will you flee three months before your foes while they pursue you? Or shall there be three days’ pestilence in your land?  (2 Samuel 24:11-13)

David chose the pestilence, and 70,000 people died in a plague.  The sin is pretty clearly attributed to David, but it is the nation who bore the retribution, and, if we are to believe this version of events, the whole thing was a set-up by the Lord.  (The version of this story in 1 Chronicles 21 attributes the original inspiration to Satan, not the Lord, but that doesn’t blunt much the criticism we might level at the unfairness of punishing thousands of innocent people for the sin of another.)

If this sounds overly harsh and unfair to modern readers, it must be said that it sounded that way to most of the readers of antiquity as well. They dedicated a lot of energy struggling to find a way to reconcile their own ideas of fairness, and their vision of God as a just and fair Lord, with the desire to maintain fidelity with their scripture as it had been written.

By the period we call antiquity, Jewish doctrine did not much resemble the ancient set of views which had produced the older scripture.  A lot had happened over the centuries.  Conquering empires had swept over the area, from Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and finally Thrace and then Rome, and each had left their cultural mark on the region.  The influence of Hellenistic and Roman culture was particularly profound, at least in the time of antiquity, because it was the most recent.  Views had changed so much that it was a struggle at that point to maintain the principle that ancient scripture was their primary source document.  For example, most Jews of the time lived outside of Judaea and did not even speak or read Hebrew.  Just living in the Diaspora, away from the Temple, forced a lot of concessions.  A lot of legends had been adopted as beliefs which had not been recorded in ancient scripture — how were those to be treated?

The most obvious way to bridge this gap was to write commentary about scripture.  This commentary was generally welcome, and came to have almost the same level of authority as scripture itself.  But it also produced new forms of tension because not everyone accepted the newer writings as authoritative — and also, as time passed, these newer writings became just as out of touch with the times as original scripture itself, forcing even more commentary to be written.

Some of the commentary explored a new approach to interpreting scripture in a less literal way, arguing that where a literal interpretation comes up short, a metaphorical one may do.  One notable innovator in this regard was Philo of Alexandria, who offered an attempt at drawing together Jewish doctrine with Hellenistic philosophy and Egyptian mysticism.  Another innovator was Hillel.

Others held views that had shifted so much they could no longer work with even these forms of reconciliation.  They objected to the parties in power, both in the temple and in the palace.  They objected to what they had been taught about right and wrong.  They objected to the social obligations placed on them by family and employers.  And when these objections became widely-held enough to reach a critical mass, they birthed new social movements.

Apocalypticism is a form of radical theology that expresses a powerful yearning for a new social order.  It is tempting to argue that it is more political than religious, but this would neither be fair nor accurate.  The problem is that when apocalyptic scripture is read by people of later generations, we too have shifted in our thinking and would (probably) not express political ideas in the same way, so it is all too easy for the political dimension to be overlooked or glossed over.

Christianity and Gnosticism were apocalyptic movements, and it is not possible to fully make sense of their teachings without considering their political underpinnings.  To go even further, I would argue that these doctrines do not even make much sense taken in the absence of their political underpinnings.

So to say, as many do, that Gnostics equated “the Jewish God” with the chief archon is an oversimplification that misses the goal.  Gnostic doctrine was an expression of a paradigm shift that occurred within the milieu of Hellenistic Judaism.  And the idea, basically, was this: that the God we worship is not the Lord described by the Law and the Prophets.  They expressed their objections within the cultural milieu that was their heritage.  Many of them combined this with the doctrine of antinomianism, the rejection of the Law as divine.

The Christians, for their part, developed a theory of “supersessionism” which taught that Jesus ushered in a new, superior covenant that replaced the old one.  The idea is an attempt to have it both ways — they wanted to maintain the authority of the Law and the Prophets while at the same time claiming that they no longer held.  So, they claimed that the requirements of the Law had all been “fulfilled,” thus making way for a new covenant.

What makes this a difficult topic is that later generations of Gnostics and Christians came to faith within a Christian cultural milieu instead of a Jewish one.  They were no longer dissenters within their own faith tradition, they were critics of a different tradition.  Because of this and the long history of anti-Semitic oppression and violence which followed, it is impossible now to discuss Christian or Gnostic theology without acknowledging that these doctrines have long outlived their usefulness.  And today, they are symptoms of the very problem that the Christians and Gnostics were seeking to solve: they reflect an outdated way of thinking, but we are stuck with them because of the level of authority with which we embue doctrine and scripture.

In a way, doctrine and scripture themselves are our demiurge.  They provide for us a simulacrum of an ideal for which we can strive, one just correct enough for us to start to understand what the ideal would look like, but which is itself merely a worldly artifact, brought into being by human hands and based on a reflection of spirit of which we have seen fleeting glances.

God Within Us

The communities and schools of thought that were all lumped together as ‘Gnostic’ have a wide range of different ideas and teachings. Some were misogynistic and preached complete abstinence from all pleasure; others were libertine and gender-egalitarian. But there are a few points of commonality. The most important of those is the teaching that within each of us there is a piece of the divine presence.

In many versions of the myth, our spirits are pieces of a goddess – usually named Sophia – who has been kidnapped by the archons (the rulers of this world) or otherwise fallen under an enchantment and forgotten who she is. The Secret Book of John and the Hypostasis of the Archons are two Gnostic texts with classic renditions of this myth. The tale begins with the archons making a clay statue modeled after the perfect spirits (the aions) of whom they had gotten a glimpse. They can build the clay model but they can’t make it move; the only thing which brings the clay figure to life is when the spirit of Sophia or The Mother is breathed into it. But then, since the clay body now possesses spirit which they themselves don’t have, making it superior even to them, the archons become jealous and seek to trap the spirit by creating the illusion that it lives in a beautiful garden.

This is the tomb of the molded body with which they clothed the human, the fetter of the flesh. He is the primal one who came down and the primal partition. But it is the Thought of the primal light who dwells in him who awakens his thinking. …

The Chief Ruler took him and placed him in paradise, of which he said, ‘It is a delight for him’ but really so that he might deceive him. For their delight is bitter and their beauty is licentious. Their delight is a deception and their tree is iniquity. Their fruit is an incurable poison and their promise is death to him.

This belief, that human beings possess a divine spirit temporarily deceived into forgetting its nature, distinguished the Gnostics from most other Christians of their time, and certainly from all of them since Augustine. It is not compatible with the idea of original sin, or the later idea of total depravity. If there is a part of you that is divine, it is not God that does the work of reconciling you to the divine presence, it is you — and that reconciliation is not the crossing of a great gulf, but merely the cultivating of awareness of that which part of you already knows. If there is a part of you that is divine, then you are not fundamentally broken, but fundamentally okay.

It’s interesting though how different schools of Gnosticism took this idea down different paths of reasoning when it came to morality. One path led in the direction of deep ascetic worldly denial; another led in the path of heady amorality; and a third group took a middle way.

The Thomas Christians compared the physical body to a garment which the soul wears.

Jesus said, “When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then [you] will see the son of the living one and you will not be afraid.” (Gospel of Thomas 37)

The Hymn of the Pearl is another writing preserved by the Thomas Christians, a parable of a prince sent to Earth to retrieve a pearl. But the prince falls under an enchantment. He forgets his royal heritage and lives as a slave to the world’s ruler, wearing only rags. It is only when he is reminded who he is that he is finally able to discard the rags in which he was clothed and complete his task of retrieving the pearl.

Many of the Gnostics took these beliefs to mean that denial of worldly pleasure was the holiest course. They developed a morality of restriction, in which the life of ascetic denial is holy, which leads in predictable directions, such as the hostile misogyny found in later Gnostic writings such as the Exegesis on the Soul.

This text is essentially a commentary on scripture, developing the idea of the reincarnating soul comparing it to a wandering prostitute who couples with many bodies. The tone is misogynistic, which is not surprisingly coupled with a strong moralizing tone and promotion of an ascetic way of life. The text is a little unusual in that draws from the Prophets as well as the New Testament and Homer, but this underscores the syncretic nature of Gnosticism.

As long as she was alone with the father, she was virgin and in form androgynous. But when she fell down into a body and came to this life, then she fell into the hands of many robbers. And the wanton creatures passed her from one to another and […] her. Some made use of her by force, while others did so by seducing her with a gift. In short, they defiled her, and she […] her virginity.

Other Gnostics, such as the libertine Carpocratians, believed that morality of restriction was another way of letting the flesh rule you. None of their writings have survived, but we have a (somewhat polemically described) summary of their beliefs recorded by Bishop Irenaeus:

[T]hey maintain that things are evil or good, simply in virtue of human opinion. They deem it necessary, therefore, that by means of transmigration from body to body, souls should have experience of every kind of life as well as every kind of action (unless, indeed, by a single incarnation, one may be able to prevent any need for others, by once for all, and with equal completeness, doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts, nor think credible, if any such thing is mooted among those persons who are our fellow-citizens), in order that, as their writings express it, their souls, having made trial of every kind of life, may, at their departure, not be wanting in any particular.

The Valentinian school eschewed both extremes, following the argument of Aristotle that every virtue is a rational mean between two vices, which are extremes:

it is possible to fail in many ways … while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult- to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue;

For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect…

For the Valentinians, the archontic prison was much more devious than simply “enclosing spirit in a prison of flesh” — the mind was the starting point and the ending point for their investigations. The mind is the source of error, following fear and and hate and falsehood down pathways of erroneous logic — but is also the source of the solution, capable of following truth and wisdom and applying correct logic. Salvation then depends on learning how to discern error from truth, which is not a kind of wisdom that can be encapsulated in a myth or a set of pithy principles. Any idea or concept can be misused or misapplied or taken to an extreme. One must raise one’s mind above (metanoia) the traps of logic and error.

Because there is only one way to be right and many ways to be wrong, it follows that there is ultimately only one wisdom, and we can see clues of this in many faith traditions. Also, this truth should in every way match what we find in natural observation of the universe. When we investigate nature we should not find patterns there which reflect a different order from the things we believe – or else our beliefs must be mistaken, since truth and nature are reflections of the same cosmic ordering principle — the same Logos.

The difficulty of belonging to a faith tradition was illustrated in the Letter of Ptolemy to Flora, an epistle from one student of Valentinus to another, which namely is this: that in any doctrine, the truth is intertwined with falsehood, and we must contemplate each teaching to ascertain whether it is truly the teaching of Logos or merely that which was written by a man in pursuit of a particular goal.

For if the Law was not ordained by the perfect God himself … nor by the devil…, the legislator must be some one other than these two. In fact, he is the demiurge and maker of this universe and everything in it; and because he is essentially different from these two and is between them, he is rightly given the name, intermediate.

And if the perfect God is good by nature … and if the one who is the opposite nature is evil and wicked, characterized by injustice; then the one situated between the two is neither good nor evil or unjust, but can properly be called just, since he is the arbitrator of the justice which is his.

http://www.theserpentswisdom.com/2014/07/escaping-fate-rising-heavens/

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