Michael Prescott's Blog

My pleroma

In our last adventure, we looked at the Gnostic myth of creation as presented in The Secret Book of John, one of the ancient documents found at Nag Hammadi. As a story of God's origins and the subsequent creation of the material world, the myth is interesting but perhaps not particularly persuasive.

There is, however, another way of looking at it, which may have more relevance to most of us than the cosmological interpretation. We can view the story from a psychological angle, or perhaps more accurately, from the angle of one's personal spiritual growth.

If we were to retell the story that way, it would go something like this:

in the beginning there is pure awareness, our state of mind as a newborn infant. There is as yet no self-awareness, no separate sense of self.

At a certain point, self-awareness develops. The young child is able to distinguish between himself and the world around him – between the experiencer and what he perceives.

Along with self-awareness, a host of mental faculties gradually comes into existence, creating new mental constructs and categories in the child's mind and holding the promise of potentially unlimited development.

At this point, however, self-awareness takes a detour, evolving into the ego. The ego can be seen as a misshapen and incomplete form of self-awareness, cut off from much of the higher wisdom of the mind, isolated and arrogant.

The ego comes to see itself as the ruling power – in fact, as the most important thing there is. In effect, the ego becomes a kind of tin god, requiring subservience and banishing any thoughts or feelings that jeopardize its preeminence.

While the ego holds sway, the person's outlook is narrow, crabbed, often envious and spiteful, or greedy and acquisitive, or vengeful and malicious. The ego creates a kind of personal hell for the person in its thrall.

To escape the tyranny of the ego, what's required is the knowledge of higher spiritual realities. In other words, gnosis.

Gnosis allows the person to cast off the ego and ascend to a higher plane of psychological development and spiritual understanding. This ascent entails a reawakening of the forgotten mental faculties eclipsed by the ego. When the full range of these faculties has been restored, the person has achieved his full potential and has been, so to speak, united with the mind of God.

The parallels are pretty clear, but are even clearer if we place them side-by-side in this handy chart (click for a clearer, uncropped version) :

This way of looking at the story may make it more meaningful to some of us. How the Gnostics thought of it is an open question. Perhaps some of them saw it purely as cosmology and took it literally; they were probably the ones who felt the need for exhaustive lists of demons who could be called out in exorcisms. Perhaps others saw it both ways, as a cosmology and as a guide to one's personal life. And perhaps a few saw it exclusively as a psychological-spiritual guide, with the cosmological elements presented purely as camouflage to disguise the deeper truth from those who were not fully initiated.

Jesus is made to say (in Matthew 13:10-13) some words that may reflect a Gnostic influence, or at least the influence of esoteric doctrines in general, which conceal their highest truths from most seekers:

To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.

Pleroma is where the heart is

Over the years, I've tried reading various examples of the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, but usually without much success. The problem is that these fifteen-hundred-year-old codices, which were found buried in a large clay jar, are in poor condition, with many illegible or missing words. A typical translation might go something like this:

Then So[fia] came [down] from the Pleroma ((and)) enter[ed] ... (words missing) ... Upon which, ((she)) ascended, taking [with her] the ((divine?)) light [that] ... (two lines missing) ... from above. 

I made that up, but it gives you the idea. I've sometimes wondered why somebody doesn't try to produce a more reader-friendly translation accompanied by actually helpful notes.

Well, somebody did. The Secret Book of John: The Gnostic Gospel, translated and annotated by Stevan Davies, is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in reading these texts without undue mental strain. I'm not saying it's an easy read, but it is far more lucid than other translations of Gnostic documents I've seen, and the accompanying notes are enormously helpful.

The Secret Book of John, known technically as the Apocryphon of John, lays out many of the basic motifs of Gnosticism's complex mythology. The text, like many Gnostic works, is overcomplicated and frequently confusing. It has clearly been revised and amended many times, with marginal and interlinear notes incorporated in inconsistent ways. More than one tradition is preserved in the document, and these traditions sometimes contradict one another. The Gnostics had a tendency to indulge in elaborate cosmologies, which can confuse rather than elucidate their main points. Finally, part of the purpose of the text was to assist exorcists and healers in expelling demons from the body; accordingly, it provides long lists of the demons responsible for each individual body part, which make for extremely tedious reading.

Before proceeding, we may want to pause to consider the implications of that last detail. We like to think of the Gnostics as sophisticated thinkers, and in many respects they were. Still, it's worth remembering that these people (or at least some of them) believed that all human ills were attributable to demons, and that any given ailment could be cured by naming the appropriate demon. If a patient reported pain in the big toe of his left foot, it was critically important for the healer to call out the demon Phikna, who was responsible for the toes of the left foot, and not Miamai, who lorded over the toenails, or Boabel, whose jurisdiction covered the toes of the right foot. Naming the wrong demon was tantamount to medical malpractice.  

It was, in short, a very different world from our own, and we ought to be wary of accepting any of this ancient knowledge just because it is very old. Lots of ideas are very old, and also very wrong, and even outright silly.

Anyway, if we want to know just what the Gnostics believed about God and humanity, we can find it in The Secret Book of John, which seems to have taken pride of place among the Nag Hammadi books, being reproduced three times in three separate codices, each time as the first chapter. But to make it as clear as possible (admittedly, its inherent ambiguities mean that it can never be entirely clear), we need to strip away the complications to produce a more streamlined and accessible narrative.

My attempt to do so goes something like this:

In the beginning there was God, who was pure awareness. At some point God developed the capacity of self-awareness, which means that he (the masculine pronoun is used for convenience) was able to view himself as an object. In effect, he had split himself in two – God and the image of God. Each new mental faculty innovated by God created an additional split. Eventually a full range of mental faculties developed, each of which could be conceptualized as a separate being in its own right – not a material being, since we are dealing purely with the realm of thought and (arguably) thought-forms – but a mental operation that could be carried on with or without the cooperation of the rest of God's mind.

This complete range of God's mental capabilities is known as the pleroma, which means something like "the fullness of God's mind" or "God's mind in full." The pleroma is peopled (one might say) by a cast of characters corresponding to the various mental processes and functions of God's mind.

All was well until one of the mental faculties, Wisdom, decided to attain self-awareness for herself. (In Greek, the word for wisdom is Sophia, and so Wisdom is construed as feminine.) This was a mistake. Operating independently, without the rest of the pleroma to assist her, Wisdom was unable to create true self-awareness. Instead she gave birth to a misshapen, incomplete mental faculty, a kind of miscarriage. This abysmal creation was dubbed Yaldabaoth.

Ashamed of her error, Wisdom removed her unwanted child from the pleroma altogether, placing him in a lower sphere, cut off from God. Totally isolated, Yaldabaoth not unnaturally acquired the idea that he was the one and only God. He created a host of demons to serve him – such demons (archons) being immaterial thought-forms or objectified aspects of his own mentality – and arrogantly declared, "I am a jealous God and there is no God but me!" (As Davies points out, this is the Gnostics' subversive reworking of Exodus 20:3-5.)

Wisdom, repenting of her actions, confessed all to God. The pleroma, now acting together, took steps to undo the damage. God's mind-in-full generated a perfect thought-form of the first human being and displayed it to Yaldabaoth and his minions. Dazzled by this vision, Yaldabaoth was moved to re-create the human thought-form in his own sphere. But he could bring it to life only by breathing some (or all?) of his divine power (inherited from his mother Wisdom, who inherited it from God) into the human form he had made. Next, the pleroma bestowed insight on this newly animated human thought-form (by now named Adam), reminding him of his divine origins and encouraging him to ascend to the pleroma where he belonged. By ascending, Adam would take God's divine spark of power with him, leaving Yaldabaoth and his demons powerless, which was the pleroma's plan all along.

The plan, however, hit a snag. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Yaldabaoth began to fear that his own creation, potentially more powerful than himself, would turn against him and destroy him. He realized that if Adam abandoned him, the divine light would be gone and Yaldabaoth's sphere would be left in darkness.

To keep Adam from escaping, Yaldabaoth saw to it that he forgot his divine origins altogether. Moreover, Yaldabaoth and his demons encased the human thought-form in matter, concealing the divine spark under layers of physicality.

This is the first appearance of matter in our story. Throughout all the previous action, we have been dealing only with mental faculties and thought-forms. Now, at last, there is a material being occupying a material world.

The purpose of matter, then, is to imprison the divine spark and prevent it from rising out of the lower realm ruled by Yaldabaoth and into the pleroma, where it can attain its proper destiny as part of God's mind-in-full. Humans dimly sense their divine origin and destiny, but have forgotten it and cannot find the spark of God buried in the "tomb" of the material body.

What has happened since that day is essentially a struggle between Yaldabaoth and his demons on the one hand, seeking to keep human beings forgetful and trapped, and the pleroma of God seeking to awaken us to the true knowledge – gnosis – of our origins and set the stage for our ascent to divine status.

As I said, the full document is more complicated. Among other things, it retells various stories in Genesis, such as the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden of Eden, putting a very different spin on them. For instance, the Tree of Life in the garden is, in the Gnostic version, more like a tree of death intended to keep humanity tethered to the earth. Davies translates this poetic description of the tree:

Its root is bitter
Its branches are dead.
  Its shadow is hatred
  Its leaves are deception
The nectar of wickedness is in its blossoms.
  Its fruit is death
  Its seed is desire
It flowers in the darkness
  Those who eat from it are denizens of Hades
  Darkness is their resting place.

As we've seen, the God worshiped throughout the Hebrew Bible is recast by Gnostics as the villain of the piece, a false god, an ignorant and malicious god, who wants to keep humanity in subjection, while the true God occupies an altogether different and infinitely more exalted sphere.

Whatever else we can say about it, the Gnostic vision offers a creative solution to the problem of evil in the world. Instead of the convoluted arguments offered by orthodox theologians to explain how an omnipotent and beneficent God can permit so much wickedness and suffering, the Gnostics simply declare that we've been worshiping the wrong god all along, and that the wickedness and suffering are features of this false god's ignorance and viciousness. Naturally, this point of view did not endear them to the early Christian "heresy-hunters," who attacked them with relish and who, after attaining political power, largely exterminated them.