http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... alien-god/
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... -who-know/One of the great minds of Late Antiquity was the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus, the leading figure of Neoplatonism, and a younger contemporary of Origen. Around the year 263, in Rome, Plotinus engaged in a furious debate with some Gnostic thinkers. Although the two sides shared many assumptions and terminology, Plotinus condemned his enemies for what he saw as their gross misunderstanding of Platonic philosophy. Among other complaints, he warned that their radical elitism would lead them into misconduct and immorality. Effectively, he expelled these Gnostics from the mainstream philosophical world of the time, after a long period in which Platonists and Gnostics had coexisted and debated together.
That story is quite well known, but recent work has shed major light on just who these Gnostics were. I am referring to Dylan M. Burns’s excellent recent book Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). This ambitious and wide-ranging work identifies Plotinus’s Gnostic foes as Sethians.
The best evidence comes from the philosopher Porphyry, whose Life of Plotinus records that “there were in his [Plotinus’s] time many others, Christians, in particular heretics who had set out from the ancient philosophy, men belonging to the schools of Adelphius and Aculinus . . . who produced revelations of Zoroaster and Zostrianos and Nicotheus and Allogenes and Messos.” Burns notes that these “revelations,” apokalypseis, sound very much like the “Apocalypses,” we know from the Nag Hammadi library, including works we know as Zostrianos and Allogenes.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... of-wisdom/Gnostic ideas were very diverse, but fundamental was the idea that human beings are exiled in the material world. One common version of the Gnostic myth (and I stress, one of many) goes like this. We can understand the divine world as the Pleroma, the Fullness, which emanated from one absolute God. The Pleroma includes many different entities or Aeons with such names as Depth and Silence, Mind and Truth. In some systems, the Aeons appeared in balanced pairs, syzygies. Through ignorance and delusion, one of those entities created the flawed material world, and proclaimed himself its God. This is the vain, angry and judgmental deity described in the Old Testament, and he is sometimes called Ialdabaoth or Sakla. Sometimes, he is accompanied by other lesser deities called Rulers, Archons.
Sophia or Wisdom was the last Aeon to be created. She suffered a Fall into this flawed world and forgot her divine nature. Another Aeon, Christ, came to re-enlighten and redeem her, to wake her from her sleep. Through this process of fall and redemption, sparks of the divine were left scattered in the material creation. Gnostics often described human experience in terms of sleep and forgetting, through which people lost contact with their divine origins. They needed to be awoken, to overcome their amnesia.
The details of the myth scarcely matter, and they are certainly not intended as a historical narrative. It is meant to explain how human beings found themselves in this evil material world, from which they can be liberated or redeemed. They do this through knowledge, gnosis – knowledge of the nature of the universe, knowledge that they have sparks of the divine light within them, which can be restored to primal splendor. A Gnostic is one who knows, and who yearns to ascend to the divine realm. Often, that ascent is framed in mythological terms as a path through successive heavens.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... g-hammadi/Quite apart from the focus on good and evil, light and darkness, many Jewish thinkers became intensely interested in the figure of wisdom. Wisdom as an idea had been a literary theme for centuries, but from around the time of Sirach (200BC), Wisdom was not only exalted but personified, to be portrayed almost as a near-divine figure, through whom God created the world. Whether or not particular authors meant that as more than a metaphor is not clear, but readers could easily take the texts in that sense.
By the time of the Wisdom of Solomon, from the first century BC, we read that
For [Wisdom] is a breath of the power of God,
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness (7.25-26)
This sounds very much like Wisdom as a figure in contemporary Greek philosophy, an intermediary between the unchangeable transcendent Monad, the One, and the material creation. It is also densely packed with what sound like technical terms from contemporary Platonism.
Nor is the passage far from the vision of God’s creative Logos in the Gospel of John. Writing about the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, James H. Charlesworth remarks that “God’s word is seen first as the word of God, then the word from God, and finally, perhaps in only a very few circles, as ‘the Word’.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... latonists/Perhaps the greatest Platonic contribution was in the area of Dualism, as taught in his Phaedo. His system is of course quite distinct from Cosmic Dualism, the struggle of forces of Light and Darkness, but the one concept is an essential foundation for the other. Plato made a novel and revolutionary distinction between the worldly reality that we see, the world of the body, and the non-visible non-material realm of Ideas. Humans have a visible material body, and an incorporeal soul. So fundamental has that matter/spirit distinction become to us that it seems incredible that anyone could ever have invented it at a given historical moment. Linked to this Platonic approach is the theme of the soul being imprisoned in the body, from which it needs liberation.
Obviously, these Platonic themes had an enormous impact within both Christianity and Gnosticism. More generally, Greek philosophy in the last two or three centuries BC made a powerful distinction between body and soul, which presented the material world as inferior. Although these concepts are usually termed Platonic, scholars like Abraham P. Bos also stress the Dualist content of much Aristotelian thinking.
Middle Platonist philosophers explored the relationship between the good creator and the flawed material world, a discussion they drew from Plato’s Timaeus. Plato had portrayed the creation of the world through a Demiurge, demiourgos, or Craftsman, who shaped the material world – crudely, a Creator. Plato’s description of Creation makes extensive use of geometry and mathematics, and gives the origins of the planets and the elements. The Demiurge also created a world-soul, psyche tou kosmou.
The Middle Platonists understood the universe as deriving from two principles, the One, God or the Monad, and the Dyad, which is matter. Plutarch believed that the creation had transformed matter into the divine soul of the world, but that matter continues to function as a force for disorder, and even for evil. Although he did not offer anything like Cosmic Dualism, that construction could easily be reconciled with the Gnostic dichotomy between one all-powerful God, and an inferior creator of the material world.
Plutarch portrayed God as a transcendent being who ruled through subordinate creatures or intermediaries, daimons, which we know as gods or spirits. The only way to reach the highest good, the One, was through these intermediary forces. That hierarchical vision fitted well into the Jewish/Christian/Gnostic syntheses emerging in these years, and especially the hierarchy of divine Aeons formed by the highest God. Plutarch also believed in divine interventions in the material world through revelation and prophecy.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... -question/In the Gnosticism of the second and third centuries AD, we trace many Platonic themes:
-The word “Gnostic” itself derives from Platonism, although not in anything like its later religious or esoteric sense. Rather, it suggested knowledge in the sense of talent or ability. Over time, though, Christians and other groups adopted it for their own purposes.
-Also from Platonism is the idea of the Demiurge. Although Gnosticism adopted the concept, though, its substance changed radically. In the Platonic tradition, the Demiurge was a benevolent being seeking to create the best possible world. Gnostics saw the Demiurge as a flawed being responsible for a defective material creation.
-Middle Platonists postulated a division between the highest Creator and the inferior world-soul linked to matter. There was an immovable First God, Nous or Mind, the One or the Good. Derived from him is a World-Soul or Demiurge, that was in motion, and therefore inferior. This is the being that creates and governs the world. That is very reminiscent of the Gnostic world-view, in which the material universe was created by an ignorant lesser deity, sometimes called Ialdabaoth.
-Both Neoplatonists and Gnostics shared ideas of emanation, that is, the process by which lower kinds of reality emanated from the godhead. As that flow travels further from the source, so it progressively loses its divinity. This idea was attributed, dubiously, to Plato.
-Neoplatonists and Gnostics also looked to Plato’s Republic for the idea of a contemplative ascent to the divine world.
-Platonism teaches the transient and illusory quality of the visible material world. While that concept becomes fundamental to Christianity, it had special force within Gnostic systems, which so often taught the need to free oneself of illusion. That lesson was often taught in metaphors of sleep and awaking. When it accepts the material world as real, the soul is in a state of sleep, from which the Redeemer awakes it. That idea gains support from many New Testament passages in which sleep plays such an important symbolic role.
-The word hypostasis is rooted in Platonism, meaning the underlying reality or substance of something.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... os-answer/The basic problem lay in explaining the Creation, and identifying the Creator. Greek thinkers commonly presented views that to us seem like pure monotheism, imagining one transcendent deity over all things, an absolute One. Material things existed only as shadow images of ideal forms within that One. Not for a second, though, could philosophers tolerate the suggestion that this being might have created the material universe. Of its unchangeable and immovable nature, the highest One could have had nothing to do with the lower realms of change and motion. That process was the work of a lower being, which was still exalted, but which was only a Demiurge, a Craftsman. Think of the distinction between a celebrity architect designing a building and the mere building contractor getting his hands dirty.
The One, the Monad, was above all things; the Dyad, the Two, made the world. The Demiurge and the World-Soul, were divine, but not absolute, and that distinction was stark and unavoidable. Of its nature, a transcendent deity could not be a creator.
What was a Jewish intellectual to do? The Bible made it easy to identify the Jewish God as the One who reigned above all, and Jews had no hesitation in claiming that identification. But that same Bible also left no doubt that that same God was directly involved in creation, and interfered in that worldly process, directly and repeatedly.
From a Greek perspective, this was not merely absurd, but actively scandalous. Worse, this same deity was so far from being impassible and unchangeable that he actually felt emotions. This was the behavior of a primitive tribal god. It was rather like treating the Greek fables of Zeus or Hera as serious theology.
In popular history, many Christians imagine the early church trying to take their exalted view of the one God to ignorant polytheists, and trying to rid them of their silly superstitions. For the educated Greek world, though, the conventional construction of the Jewish/Christian deity was so self-evidently primitive as to be embarrassing.
Jews could of course ignore Platonism and the other Greek philosophies, but if they did, they were abandoning any claim to a place in civilized society. Somehow, Jewish thinkers had to find ways of reconciling competing views of the divine. As I will discuss in my next post, scholars like Philo made heroic efforts to do this, postulating aspects of the deity that could serve as creator and as intermediary. The difficulty was in constructing such a figure, the Logos, without it acquiring divine qualities in its own right, and contaminating the monotheist vision.
The simpler solution was to accept the philosophical logic, and to admit freely that the transcendent God was not identical with the creator of the world. This is not true cosmic Dualism, which implies two equal divinities, but rather imagines one true God and a flawed imitator. Such a distinction was fundamental to Gnostic systems, which evolved many myths and stories to suggest how such an inferior deity might have arisen. In some cases, that two-God solution might have owed something to anti-Judaism, a deliberate rejection of the Old Testament deity. As the Jesus movement arose and became a separate faith, it was natural and logical for some believers to identify the two deities with the old and new dispensations, the gods of the Old and New Testament.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... -gnostics/Having excluded God from the world, though, Philo used a Stoic concept to bring him back (and he often ran into serious contradictions in the process). God was transcendent, but also thoroughly immanent, a constant creative force in all things. As a would-be Platonist, Philo explained creation as the work not of a God separated from the world, but of divine powers or attributes.
The most important of these powers that lay between perfect Form and imperfect matter was the Logos, Reason, God’s “first-born,” which is equivalent to Plato’s creative Demiurge. The Logos concept also stemmed from Stoic thought, but it was current in other Greek schools. Again trying to integrate ideas from multiple traditions, Philo is quite confused about how his Logos relates to the divine Wisdom, and deciding which emanates from which.
Philo understands the Logos as “the image of God” as mentioned in the Septuagint translation of Gen. 1.27, almost as the shadow of God’s perfection. He also identifies the Logos with the “Angel of the Lord,” mentioned periodically throughout the Bible. Philo presents the Logos as at once the archetype of things, including the human mind, and the creator of all. In a much-quoted passage, he wrote that “the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousben ... hristians/Through rhetorical necessity, Gnostics had to present their religious systems as at least as authoritative as those of the mainstream churches, rather than as later innovations. They therefore claimed links with the apostles or their immediate successors, usually via some secret tradition. For similar reasons, early dates are also favored by modern writers who are sympathetic to the Gnostics, or anxious to advocate the historical value of alternative scriptures. Yet in fact, it is not easy to find much evidence of Gnosticism before about 100 AD. (I am summarizing a complex scholarly debate here!)
The blog posts about Philo, Porphyry, Plutarch, etc. were most interesting to me.The well-informed Irenaeus gives a doubly surprising picture of the geography of Gnostic origins, and one we would not imagine if we lacked his account. His first two heretical leaders, Simon and Menander, both derive from Samaria. Also, he places the movement’s early rise in the Syrian city of Antioch, with an expansion into Egypt only around 110 or so.
I'm not so sure about the argument in the last two posts. With the purely chronological argument, it seems to assume, as Stephan Huller points out, some kind of "cosmic background radiation" (my term) of orthodox catholic Christians, with the sighting of gnostics as the rare exceptions, bright stars studding the night sky of orthodoxy. But it's not enough to say it's hard to find firm evidence of Gnosticism before about AD 100, when it's hard to find firm evidence of a lot of things in relation to Christianity before about AD 100. In any case, I tend to understand the New Testament somewhat differently than Philip Jenkins.
