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.

Comments

[Michael Prescott]

By the way, if you purchase the book, I recommend the print edition. Its format, with each page of the translated text facing a page of notes, is easy to read. The ebook edition, according to reviews, is less user-friendly.

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

Michael,
It must have been over 50 years ago that I tried to read the Nag Hammadi texts but I had the same problem that apparently you did in trying to guess what the missing parts were. I quickly gave up and have maybe looked at them one more time over those years. What I did understand is that I was wasting my time trying to figure them out.

You have wisely said that, " 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."

I think that that applies not only to very old writings but also to the not-so-old writing of today. I take everything with a grain of salt, meaning that I never accept anything on face value and I question everything any human says. The idiocy of people today provides evidence that most people are stupid and tend to promote their own beliefs either with or without evidence to back them up.

I have read a lot of things purporting to be evidence supporting a spirit world or life after death of the physical form. However some of it does seem silly to me and only makes me question more that which doesn't seem silly. I am getting to the point that the more I read of it the less I believe any of it.

I think that only personal experience will convince me of an etheric world. Let others have their belief systems, I will cultivate my own without referencing something somebody else said either in the newest e-book from Amazon or from some ancient fragile documents found in some clay jars in the desert of Arabia. - AOD

[Kathleen]

That certainly explains how God could allow evil in the world - he doesn't! He's like the preoccupied parent oblivious to the kids fighting in the other room.

I suppose this would also be compatible with NDEs, too. When one dies, they return to the "real God."

Also, I've always been in interested in these texts, so thanks for the great summary.

[Hug h]

Michael, thanks for this thought provoking essay. Might I suggest the following- “The Hermeneutics of Vision: C. G. Jung and Liber Novus, by Lance S. Owens. Late in the essay there is this-

“In the end, Jung did not proclaim a new religion. Instead, and with in- creasing focus during his last years, he turned his vision to revealing the living stream from which the myths, rituals and symbols of Christianity took source. He said we stood beside a great river. If a bridge over it was to be built, it must start from the ground where we stand. And we stood upon a great wealth and we did not see. The discarded and forgotten but still precious stone from the past would be the cornerstone of that bridge to the future. But first, humankind must return to the source, find the imaginative fire from which experience wrought the myths and images of old. In that molten basalt emerging in imaginative channels from ageless depths, our destiny would crystallize.
In an interview coinciding with the publication of Liber Novus, Dr. Sonu Shamdasani was ask to prophesy on ways the Red Book would affect Jung’s image in coming years. By way of answer, Shamdasani references the immensely important collection of Gnostic texts rediscovered in 1945 and first published in 1977 as the Nag Hammadi Library—texts widely recog- nized to be long lost primary documents of the ancient Gnosis. Looking to the future, he replied:
“The publication will be seen to mark a caesura comparable to the effect of the publication of the Nag Hammadi library on the study of Gnosticism—finally, one is in the position to study the genesis of Jung’s work and what took place in him during this critical period, on the basis of primary documents....“——

Jung’s journey described in Liber Novus brought him to this conclusion-

“God needs man in to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space an earthly tabernacle. Carl Jung, Letters, Volume 1, Page 65.

Thanks again, H