We can perhaps illustrate what Gnosticism was by giving a rough composite summary of the teaching current in one of the most important schools, that of Valentinus who taught at Alexandria and later at Rome in the middle decades of the second century. According to this, above and beyond the universe dwells the supreme Father, Bythos, the unbegotten Monad and perfect Aeon, and by his side Sige (Silence), who is His Ennoia (Thought). From these proceed, by successive emanations, three pairs of aeons, Nous (or Mongenes) and Alethia (Truth), Logos and Zoe (Life), Anthropos (Man) and Ecclesia (Church), thus completing the Ogdoad. From Logos and Zoe proceed five (the Decad), and from Anthropos and Ecclesia six (the Dodecad), further pairs of aeons. These thirty form the Pleroma, or fulness of the Godhead, but the only-begotten Nous alone possesses the possibility of knowing and revealing the Father. The lowest of the thirty aeons, however, Sophia (Wisdom), yielded to an ungovernable desire to apprehend His nature. She travailed with the guilty yearning she had conceived (Enthymesis), and would have been dissolved into the All had not Horos (Limit: also called Stauros, or Cross), appointed as guardian of the Pleroma, convinced her that the Father is incomprehensible. So Sophia cast away her passion and was allowed to remain within the Pleroma. Nous and Alethia meanwhile, at the Father's behest, produce a new pair of aeons, Christ and the Holy Spirit, to instruct the aeons in their true relation to Him. Order having been thus restored, they sing the praises of the Father and produce the Savior Jesus as the perfect fruit of the Pleroma.
But what of Sophia's monstrous birth, Enthymesis, exiled form the Pleroma and now known as a lower Sophia, or Achamoth? As she wanders about the still lifeless void, her anguish brings matter to birth, while out of her yearning for Christ she produces the 'psychic' or soul-element. Then Christ has pity on her and , descending by the Cross (Horos), impresses form on her formlessness, As a result of this she gives birth to spiritual, or 'pneumatic', substance. Out of these three elements - matter, psyche, and pneuma - the world then came into being. First, Sophia formed a Creator, or Demiurge, out of psychic substance as an image of the supreme Father. The Demiurge, who is in fact the God of the Old Testament, then created heaven and earth and the creatures inhabiting it, When he made man, he first made 'the earthy man', and then breathed his own psychic substance into him; but without his knowledge Achamoth planted 'pneuma', or spirit, born from herself, in the souls of certain men. This spiritual element yearns for God, and salvation consists in its liberation from the lower elements with which it is united. This is the task which the Savior Jesus accomplishes. According to their constitution, there are three classes of men - the carnal or material, the psychic and the pneumatic. Those who are carnal cannot in any case be saved, while in order to attain redemption the pneumatic only need to apprehend the teaching of Jesus. The psychic class can be saved, though with difficulty, through the knowldge and imitation of Jesus.
This amalgam of speculation and mythology, interspersed with scriptural reminiscences, was typical of developed Gnosticism.
JND Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines pgs 23-24. |
