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Gnostic Illumination: Sophia and the Demiurge
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Short Description: dence indicates that these and the Gnostic sects thrived alongside orthodox Chris- ... the predecessors of the Valentinian gnostic school (Pearson 194). ...
Content Inside: 581 Gnostic Illumination: Sophia and the Demiurge The ascent of the Blessed - Bosch (Goodwin) Original Sin, repression of the Gnos- tics and the Early Church Early Christian interpretations of the Fall differed radically, and depended largely on whether they were of the east- ern or western Church, although they ultimately all but concurred in their deliberations regarding sexuality and sin. In the eastern Church (and with them the gnostics), the myth was seen as an allegory of the evolution of man, whilst in the west, following Paul, it tended to be treated as an historical fact. The eastern view, influenced by Plato, and later Plotinus (d.270), viewed the world of matter darkly: Man and evil had evolved through the descent of the pre-existing spiritual substance, or soul, into matter. The Alexandrian school, saw the primeval Fall from the pristine in the sinful union of spirit (Adam, the male principle) and flesh (Eve, the female principle). Man's first nature was generally believed to have been spiritual and bodiless, without and incapable of sexual differentiation; he had become a physical being, and sexed, through his soul's sin, to desire the mundane (Haskins 73). About two hundred BC the rabbis had propounded the idea of the yecer ha-ra' which roughly translates as the `evil impulse'. Unlike the earlier Hebrews, who blamed themselves for their woes, the rabbis believed God had implanted in the `heart', the Hebrew place of the unconscious of each individual, at his birth or conception. The yecer was not hereditary. It was intrinsically good and the source of creative energy, but had a strong potential for evil through appetite or greed. Only strict observance of the Law could keep the strong drives it engendered under control. To the commenta- tors in the five centuries before Christ, Adam's death was due to his own sins, and not to any sin innate in the race of man (Haskins 72). In Christian hands, the yecer would become the debilitating corrupting condition known as `concupiscence', which each human being would inherit at birth, and which was transmitted through the sexual act, through the `libid' which accompanied it, and which infected his every action, and was commutable in part only through baptism. Christians were born into a sinful world, a fact which Jesus constantly reit- erated when he called for sinners to repent, but he never referred either to the Fall itself, except to say that mankind was fallen, or to original sin, and alluded only once to Adam and Eve when replying to the Pharisees' question concerning divorce (Haskins 72). The first intimation in the New Testament that Adam bequeathed sin to mankind is to
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