Hi Hoghead –
I wanted to revisit our discussion in an attempt to clarify a couple of points.
The first I think if we’re talking about the 2nd century, we need to define ‘mystic’. It did not carry the implications it does today. The word comes from the Greek, from the root verb ‘to seal the lips’ and it refers to an initiate – who was sworn to secrecy. This initiation was into ‘the Mysteries’. In the case of the Gnostic Schools, it’s an initiation into the rites and rituals of the school. In the case of the Christian, it’s an initiation (baptism) into the Christian Mysteries – the Liturgies, the Agape Meal and the Eucharist.
So I would say that both are ‘mystery schools’ in the ancient sense of the term, but the Mysteries in question diverge radically. I think a useful key to discerning the difference between Gnosticism and Christianity is in emanationism.
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According to Philo, God cannot act on the world immediately, but only through powers or forces (pneuma) which are not identical with Him, but proceed from Him. The primitive Divine force is the Logos. Whether the Logos is a substance or only an attribute, remains obscure. From the Logos the Spirit (pneuma) proceeds. It is the vivifying principle of the world and of the psyche, the individual soul.
The first clear and systematic expression of emanationism is found in Neo-Platonism. According to Plotinus, the first principle of all things is the One. Absolute unity and simplicity (one-ness) is the best expression by which God can be designated. As the One is pure formless essence, no attribute or determination (form) can be predicated of the One without introducing a limitation and/or multiplicity/complexity. Even ‘intelligence' and ‘will' cannot belong to this Primal Reality, for they imply the duality of subject and object, and duality necessarily presupposes a higher unity.
The One can be described as the Absolute, the Infinite, the Boundless, the First, the Good, the Light, the Universal Cause. From the One all things proceed; not by creation, which would be an act of the will, and therefore incompatible with unity; nor by a spreading of the Divine substance as pantheism teaches, since this would do away with the essential oneness. The One is not all things, but before all things. Emanation is the process by which all things are derived from the One. The infinite goodness and perfection is said to "overflow", and, while remaining within itself and losing nothing of its own perfection, it generates other beings, sending them forth from its own superabundance. Or again, as brightness is produced by the rays of the sun so everything is a radiation (perilampsis) from the Infinite Light. (The ancients were not aware that suns and stars are effectively finite and burning themselves out.)
The ‘Fall’ in emanationism and Gnosticism holds that the individual soul is eternal, and existed in a timeless ‘beatific vision’ of God. For some reason that is never adequately explained, the soul becomes ‘satiated’ and in its fulness turns away from the Divine, and this turning away precipitates its fall. Matter was then created as the necessary and expedient means of catching the falling soul and thus preventing its fall becoming infinite and eternal.
Early Gnostic systems regarded the world of matter as a necessary product brought about by the first evil, which was the turning away from God, and that the world is a place of perdition and punishment from which the soul must try to flee the world and escape back to the Divine. Thus these world views were negative with regard to creation, and nihilistic with regard to human possibility.
Later systems, and Origen was a friend of these, regarded the world as pedagogic rather than punitive. Again the creation is an unfortunate and ill-fated necessity, but here is the place where the soul learns and by learning can return to its source.
In all emanationist systems, the emanations form a series of successive steps, each the product and image of its predecessor, though inferior to it. The first reality that emanates from the One is the Nous, a pure intelligence, an immanent and changeless thought, putting forth no activity outside of itself, it simply is what it is.
The Nous is an image of the One, and, coming to recognize itself as an image, introduces the first duality, that of subject and object. The Nous includes in itself the intellectual world, or world of ideas, the kosmos nontos of Plato.
From Nous emanates the World Soul pneuma, the transition between the world of ideas and the world of the senses. It is intelligent and, in this respect, similar to the ideal world. Pneuma realizes the ideas in the material world, and in so doing Pneuma generates individual souls, psyche, which are the "forms" of all things.
Finally, the soul and its particular forces beget matter, which is of itself indetermined and becomes determined by its union with the form.
With variations in detail, the same essential doctrine of emanation is taught by Iamblichus and Proclus. With Plotinus, Iamblichus identifies the One with the Good, but assumes an absolutely first One, anterior to the One, and utterly ineffable. From it emanates the One; from the One, the intelligible world (ideas); and from the intelligible world, the intellectual world (thinking beings). According to Proclus, from the One come the unities (enades), which alone are related to the world. From the unities emanate the triads of the intelligible essences (being), the intelligible-intellectual essences (life), and the intellectual essences (thought). These again are further differentiated. Matter comes directly from one of the intelligible triads.
Gnostics teach that from God, the Father, emanated numberless Divine, supra-mundane Æons, each one less and less perfect than the one before (as many as thirty plus emanations in some systems), which taken together, constitute the fullness (pleroma) of Divine life. Wisdom, the last of these, produced an inferior wisdom named Achamoth, and also the psychical and material worlds. To denote the mode according to which an inferior is derived from a superior degree, Basilides uses the term aporroia ("flowing from", "efflux"), and Valentinus, the term probole (throwing forth, projection).
Thus the ascent, for the Gnostic, is to make one’s way back through the levels, the emanations, the Aeons, each one accessed from the one below only to those who have the ‘keys of knowledge’ to unlock the path, as it were.
The Kabbala the doctrine of the Sephiroth is essentially a doctrine of emanations. It was developed and systematized especially in the thirteenth century. The Sephiroth are the necessary intermediaries between God and the universe, between the intellectual and the material world. They are divided into three groups, the first group of three forming the world of thought, the second group, also of three, the world of soul, and the last group, of four, the world of matter.
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Pseudo-Dionysius for example, frequently borrowed from Plotinus and Proclus, adapting the language to the teachings of Christianity. God is primarily goodness (e.g.: Psalm 53:8, Matthew 19:17, Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19, 3 John 1:11) and love (1 John 4:8). The difference then In Christianity there is no emanationism.
The Fathers and early Christian writers, working a doctrine from the words of Christ in Scripture, recast the triune of the One, the Logos and Pneuma not as an hierarchical emanation, but as Trinity – the One is Three and the Three are One. One, Logos and Pneuma are all God, without distinction, the same substance, the same essence, the same in every sense, not three Gods but one God.
The term used was Perichoresis to describe this process, in that, for example, the Wisdom of God is not another God, nor less than God, but is God. So God and His wisdom is really one and the same thing. In the same way, God is God. The Logos of God is God, the Spirit of God is God. God can be said to ‘beget’ His Logos as Father begets Son, but really – as the dispute with the Arians made clear – there was never a time when God was not Father, Son and Holy Spirit — monotheism did not become bitheism and then tritheism – there is just One God in Three Persons.
Perichoresis describes the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as an indwelling (Heb, shekinah). This process also extends to the community of the faithful: "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us" (John 17:21).
This, in a sense, is the foundational statement of Christian mysticism.
It is not an emanationist doctrine. Thus the relationship of dependence between the gnostic master and disciple, again one of emanation from higher to lower, from pneumatic to psychic, does not reflect the relation of the presbyter to the congregation in the Christian community. In that community, the presbyter is chosen from among the community to lead the Mysteries, and in the traditional form the presbyter faced the altar and the tabernacle before and with the people, not as intermediary but as one of the community. And in the Agape Meal God is present at the feast, not in the presbyter and through the presbyter to the people, but at the feat and immanently present in the people, one to another.
An ancient saying of the Fathers was: 'Love God and love thy neighbour, because where thy neighbour is, there is God’.
The same is held of the Eucharist. God is present in the Eucharist, not in the presbyter, and priest and people participate and receive the Eucharist.
