Providence, Creation, and Gnosticism According to the Gnostics
Dylan M. BurnsJournal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 55-79 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1353/earl.2016.0005
Foradditionalinformationaboutthisarticle
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/611447
Accessed 30 Oct 2017 23:40 GMT
So many aspersions have been cast upon the term “Gnosticism” that even studies about “Gnostics” prefer to avoid it. Did the Gnostics then teach no Gnosticism? The extant works (mostly from Nag Hammadi) which seem to resemble their thought prefer the language of myth to the concise, syllogistic formulations that would help modern scholars define “Gnosticism.” However, Gnostic myths are often glossed with the philosophical terminology of their day, particularly regarding the concept of divine care, or providence (πρόνοια). When set aside contemporary Platonic, Stoic, and early Christian views about providence’s activity in creation, it becomes clear that Gnostic myths express a distinctive view that presupposes a disjunction between the creator of the cosmos and the true God, who expresses Its fundamental kinship with human beings through intervention in the creation of terrestrial humanity—not the terrestrial world. Gnostic texts that emphasize instead the ubiquity of God’s will in creation seem to attempt to hedge or mitigate this perspective, rather than contradict it. From the standpoint of ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, then, we might say that there certainly was a distinctively Gnostic view about divine providence, inviting us to rehabilitate the term “Gnosticism” accordingly.
It is striking that scholars debating the definition and usefulness of the term “Gnosticism” generally agree on what body of sources these terms refer to: the “biblical demiurgical” myths resembling or belonging to the
The bulk of research presented in this study was conducted under the auspices of a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Theology, to which I express the utmost thanks. I am also in the debt of my editors and anonymous reviewers at JECS, whose suggestions and criticisms improved this article a great deal.
Journal of Early Christian Studies 24:1, 55–79 © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press
1. On “biblical demiurgical” myths, see Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: Arguments for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 265; on “Sethian Gnosticism,” see Hans-Martin Schenke, “The Phenomenon and Significance of Gnostic Sethianism,” trans. Bentley Layton, in The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism, ed. Bentley Layton, 2 vols. (Leiden, Brill, 1981), 588–616, and John D. Turner, Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition, Bibliothéque Copte de Nag Hammadi Section “Études” 6 (Québec: Les presses de l’université laval; Leuven: Peeters, 2001); on “Classic Gnosticism,” see Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 5–22, and Tuomas Rasimus, Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking: Rethinking Sethianism in Light of the Ophite Evidence, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 68 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), esp. 55; for the terms “Sethian Christian(ity)” rather than “Sethian Gnostic(ism),” see Karen L. King, “Review of David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity,” HR 52 (2013): 294–301. I agree with Rasimus in finding the terms “Ophite” and “Sethian” useful to denote particular Gnostic literary traditions, but the question is peripheral to the argument made in this study, and so I eschew them here.
2. The clarion call was sounded by Karen L. King in What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 231. Recent examples of such an approach include Karen L. King, The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), viii–x; Ismo Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle, and Society in the School of Valentinus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 1–2, 5–6; Benjamin H. Dunning, “What Sort of Thing Is This Luminous Woman? Thinking Sexual Difference in On the Origin of the World,” JECS 17 (2009): 60.
3. David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 27, 50–51; the overall argument extrapolates that of Bentley Layton, “Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Gnosticism,” in The Social World of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne (by all accounts) coherent corpus of mythology preserved largely at Nag Hammadi which has been dubbed “Sethian Gnostic,” “Classic Gnostic,” or simply “Sethian Christian.”1 Rather, the question is how to frame this more or less uncontested core of sources most productively in the service of studying ancient Mediterranean religions. Anglophone scholarship now fruitfully investigates sources formerly known as “Gnostic” without recourse to some modern construction of “Gnosticism,” but to other aspects of their ancient social and intellectual environments.2 Meanwhile, David Brakke’s recent monograph, which dubs this mythological complex a “school of thought” developed by individuals known to Irenaeus of Lyons (writing ca. 180) and Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 263) and who called themselves “Gnostics,” eschews the overarching term “Gnosticism,” since it “extracts and isolates doctrinal points or general characteristics from complex and often strikingly different mythologies” (even if his “evidence for the Gnostic School of Thought” is virtually identical to the “Classic Gnostic” corpus).3 Did the “Gnostics,” then, teach no “Gnosticism”?
While acknowledging that much has been learned by studying “Gnostic” sources without reference to some category of “Gnosticism,” the present contribution argues that some connotation of the term “Gnosticism” remains useful—even necessary—to denote the philosophical presuppositions regarding creation and salvation that underlie the body of texts that Brakke rightfully associates with the “Gnostics” (which will be provisionally referred to in this study with the adjective “Gnostic,” by virtue of this association). The character of these presuppositions and their distinctiveness in ancient religious discourse can appear obscure because the sources express themselves in the language of revealed myth rather than scholastic pronouncement.4 However, their authors often glossed these myths with the jargon of Greek philosophy—notably, the jargon used to address the problem of “providence” (πρόνοια), divine care for creation and humanity.5 Tellingly, many Gnostic anthropogonies use language about divine care to express an idea implicit in their myths: God cares for human beings, but seeing how the material world and our material bodies are full of evils, the world and our bodies must be the creation of beings who are not providential, and are thus inferior to the beings that God does care for—humanity, which is actually divine. When framed against the backdrop of ancient Platonic, Stoic, and Christian discourses about providence, it becomes clear that use of this language in “Gnostic” texts is distinctive insofar as it expresses an extreme anthropocentrism on one hand, and a disjunction between divine care for humanity and divine care for the cosmos, on the other. This distinctive Gnostic approach to
Meeks, ed. L. Michael White and Larry O. Yarbrough (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 334–50.
4. Indeed, most Gnostic works are apocalypses, designed to convince (or not) by virtue of the impact of their claim to revelatory authority; see further Dylan M. Burns, “Apocalypses amongst Gnostics and Manichaeans,” in The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, ed. John J. Collins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 358–72.
5. The dossier on providence in ancient Christianity includes Leo Scheffczyk, Schöpfung und Vorsehung, Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte 2.2a (Freiburg: Herder, 1963); Silk-Petra Bergjan, Der fürsorgende Gott, Der Begriff der ΠΡΟΝΟΙΑ Gottes in der apologetischen Literatur der alten Kirche, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 81 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002); Andrew Louth, “Pagans and Christians on Providence,” in Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority, and Change, ed. J. H. D. Scourfield (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 279–97; Jon Ewing, Clement of Alexandria’s Reinterpretation of Divine Providence: The Christianization of the Hellenistic Idea of Pronoia (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2008). None of these studies address Gnostic materials. Welcome then is the arrival of Nicola Denzey Lewis, Cosmology and Fate in Gnosticism and Greco-Roman Antiquity, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
providence is representative of a particular content and tenor of Gnostic myth with respect to the question of humanity’s place in the cosmos and its relationship to God; therefore we can say that Gnostics did, in fact, espouse something we can call “Gnosticism,” which will be discussed at the conclusion of this study.
The terms of debating providential care in ancient philosophy were fixed by Plato in various dialogues, chiefly the Timaeus and the Laws, which offer two distinct perspectives on the operation of providence.6 At stake was responsibility for creation (and the people who inhabit it), and for evil more generally. More specifically, Plato and his readers debated whether God cares for only for wholes or also for individuals (and individual beings), and whether God or inferior, semi-divine partners are responsible for the imperfections in creation and the evils that emerge from them. As we will see, these questions had deep ramifications on how philosophers regarded the relationship between human beings and the divine.
The Timaeus states that God wants the world to be as good as it could possibly be, and that it came into being through His πρόνοια. 7 However, the actual creation of the material cosmos and, in particular, humanity is not assigned to God, but the “young gods” of traditional religious cult, who are fallible beings.8 Plato specifies that God must be insulated from this creative activity in order to safeguard Him from responsibility for evil (the governing assumption being that God is also not responsible for individual lives and events, and the evils that transpire within them). Rather, the world is as good as it could possibly be, and such evils are byproducts of the imperfection which is a necessary counterpart of any creation at all. The Laws, meanwhile, concerns itself not with the creation of humanity, but God’s care for individuals; Plato here stresses God’s care for the whole and also the part, i.e., individuals (although he notes that parts are created and cared for the sake of the whole):
6. The vocabulary used by Christian and Gnostic thinkers to discuss divine care is virtually identical to that used by Plato and the Stoics—e.g., ἐπιμέλεια/ἐπιμελεῖσθαι (carum esse), ἀμέλεια/ἀμελεῖν (neglegare), τὰ πάντα/τὰ
(magna), τὰ σμικρά/ τὰ μέρη/τὰ καθ’ἑκάστα (parva)—but inclines particularly towards πρόνοια/προνοεῖν (providentia).
7. Ti. 29e–30b.
8. Ti. 40e–42e.
So let’s not treat God as less skilled than a mortal craftsman, who applies the same expertise to all the jobs in his own line whether they’re big or small, and gets more finished and perfect results the better he is at his work. We must not suppose that God, who is supremely wise, and willing and able to superintend the world, looks to major matters, but—like a fainthearted lazybones who throws up his hands at hard work—neglects the minor, which we established were in fact easier to look after.9
Nowhere does Plato imply that this care is tantamount to divine intervention in human affairs.10 Rather, as his eschatological myths make clear, the same promise of reward or retribution for all in the beyond (effective through metempsychosis corresponding to [in]appropriate behavior) is understood as care for all.11
Stoic texts seem to gravitate towards the Laws in terms of their perspective on divine care for individuals,12 although only a few agree with the dialogue in asserting it explicitly—these include Cicero’s Stoic mouthpiece “Balbus” and Seneca, who say that gods care for wholes and parts.13 A similar view is implied in Cleanthes’s Hymn to Zeus:
9. Lg. 10.902e–903a (Trevor J. Saunders, trans., Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 1559–60). The greater discussion ranges from 900d–904b. Translations of all primary sources are my own, except where noted (as here).
10. Thus Louth, “Pagans and Christians on Providence,” 280.
11. See further Myrto Dragona-Monachou, “Divine Providence in the Philosophy of the Empire,” ANRW 2.36.7 (1994): 4421, and Dorothea Frede, “Theodicy and Providential Care in Stoicism,” in Traditions of Theology: Studies in Hellenistic Theology, Its Background and Aftermath, ed. Dorothea Frede and Andre Laks, Philosophia Antiqua 89 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 93–95, both regarding Lg. 903d; see also Heinrich Dörrie, “Der Begriff Pronoia in Stoa und Platonismus,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 24 (1977): 60–87, esp. 77–78.
12. Similarly, Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils, Demiurge and Providence: Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato’s Timaeus (Turnhout: Brépols, 1999), 74, suggests influence of the Lg. and Ti. on the Stoa (Aët. Plac. 1.6; S. E. M. 9.78 = Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. Johannes von Arnim, 4 vols. [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1924—henceforth SVF], 2.1009, 2.1013, respectively); also Frede, “Theodicy and Providential Care in Stoicism,” 89–95.
13. Cic. N. D. 2.164: “Nor indeed is it the case that the care and providence of the immortal gods extends only to the human genus in its entirety, but even to individuals (etiam singulis)” (H. Rackham, ed., Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods, Academics, LCL 268 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933], 280); Sen. Ep 95.50 states that the Gods protect humanity “all the while caring for individuals” (interdum incuriosi singulorum) (Richard M. Gummere, ed., Seneca: Epistles 93–124, LCL 77 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925], 88). On the latter passage, see Robert W. Sharples, “Threefold Providence: the History and Background of a Doctrine,” in Ancient Approaches to Plato’s ‘Timaeus’, ed. Robert W. Sharples and Anne Sheppard, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 78 (London: University of London, 2003), 115.
This whole universe, spinning around the earth, truly obeys you wherever you lead, and is readily ruled by you; such a servant do you have between your unconquerable hands, the two-edged, fiery, ever-living thunderbolt. For by its stroke all works of nature <are guided> . . . Not a single deed takes place on earth without you, God, nor in the divine celestial sphere nor in the sea, except what bad people do in their folly.14
Early and later Stoics alike, such as Chrysippus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, emphasize instead that, even if providence is universally present, its care is directed at the whole.15 Even Balbus concedes that God cares for parts, but not “small matters” (parva neglegunt).16 Balbus offers a catalogue of famous men in Roman history who have benefited from divine favor, but significantly, he makes no attempt to phrase this “anthropocentrism” (in the words of Dorothea Frede) in philosophical terms.17
Our extant Stoic sources do not directly address the role of providence in the business of creation per se, but it may be inferred from them that Stoic philosophy demands the assignment of responsibility of creation, and care for it, directly to God. According to Aëtius, for instance, “the Stoics defined God as an intelligent, designing fire systematically proceeding towards the creation of the world, and encompassing all the seminal principles according to which everything comes about, in accordance with fate, and a breath (πνεῦμα) pervading the entire world . . . .”18 The Stoa did not need to postulate “young gods” to insulate God from worldly
14. Hymn l. 7–17 (Johan C. Thom, trans., Cleanthes’ ‘Hymn to Zeus’: Text, Translation, and Commentary, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 33 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005], 35–36, 40); see also Jean-Pierre Martin, Providentia deorum: recherches sur certains aspects religieux du pouvoir impérial romain (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1982), 20.
15. Chrysippus ap. D. L. 7.138–39 = SVF 2.634 = Anthony A. Long and David N. Sedley, eds. and trans., The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987—henceforth LS), 470; Epict. Diss. 1.12.24–26; M. Ant. 5.8; cf. Dragona-Monachou, “Divine Providence in the Philosophy of the Empire,” 4445, 4450.
16. N. D. 2.167. This view was also assigned to Chrysippus by Plutarch (Stoic. Rep. 1051b = SVF 2.1178), but given the conflict with other evidence (see previous note) and the Platonist’s famous hostility to Stoicism, many throw this evidence out (thus Daniel Babut, Plutarque et le stoïcisme [Paris: Université de Paris, 1969], 261–62, followed by Sharples, “Threefold Providence,” 111).
17. Frede, “Theodicy and Providential Care in Stoicism,” 108, 109–15, regarding N. D. 2.165–67; see also Dragona-Monachou, “Divine Providence in the Philosophy of the Empire,” 4430.
18. Aët. Plac. 1.7.33 = SVF 2.1027 = LS 46A, with further passages and discussion ad loc.; also Frede, “Theodicy and Providential Care in Stoicism,” 104–5. On the Stoic God as demiurge, see also Keimpe Algra, “Stoic Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 165–68, concerning D. L. 7.137, 147; Cic. N. D. 2.58.
evil, for, Plato’s Laws notwithstanding, “Stoic providence is an immanent principle in all of nature.”19 Thus, there is no such thing as worldly evil, for to say otherwise would be to identify such evil with the omnipresent, providential God. Recalling a famous Socratic proof that God must exist, given the intricacies of the human sensory organs, Balbus exclaims: “truly, what creator other than Nature, who is more cunning than all, could have achieved such shrewdness in (arranging) the senses?”20 God, rather than any “young gods,” is responsible for creation.21
If human beings—and indeed, all of reality—are the continual creation of a providential deity, how is one to respond to the appearance of worldly evil? The Stoa generally agreed that the only real evil is human, moral evil, and our evidence from Stoic ethicists address this question, significantly, in terms of providential care.22 Early Stoa famously described the universe as a great chain of necessary causes, against which individual struggle was hopeless; Roman Stoa thus maintained that the wise person, in possession of the faculty of reason, is capable of rationally apprehending the causal chain, and embracing whatever role he or she has been given to play in it.23 The Stoic flirtation with divine care for individuals might then be clarified
19. Frede, “Theodicy and Providential Care in Stoicism,” 102.
20. Cic. N. D. 2.142, regarding X. Mem. 1.4.5–7; see also Dragona-Monachou, “Divine Providence in the Philosophy of the Empire,” 4419–20, 4429–30; David Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity, Sather Classical Lectures 66 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 213.
21. Seneca, Ep. 65.4 (Richard M. Gummere, ed., Seneca: Epistles 93–124, LCL 76 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920], 446): “The Stoics are of the opinion that there is one cause—that which creates (id, quod facit).” See also Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics, 209–10.
22. In addition to the following, see the remarks of Cleanthes that providence is not responsible for evil deeds (Hymn l. 15–17 = SVF 1.537), as well as Chrysippus (Gel. 7.2 = SVF 2.1000 = LS 62D) and Seneca (Prov. 1.1–6, passim); further, see Dragona-Monachou, “Divine Providence in the Philosophy of the Empire,” 4430–31, 4440–43; LS 1:374–75; Algra, “Stoic Theology,” 170–73.
23. Epictetus credits to Chrysippus the classic example of a foot would be happy to get muddy, if it only knew that muddiness was part of its story in the causal chain (Diss. 2.6.9 = SVF 3.191 = LS 58J). The third-century author of the Refutation of All Heresies assigns to Zeno and Chrysippus the infamous case of a dog tied to a moving cart, who can either cheerily follow along or be dragged against its will (Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, ed. Miroslav Marcovich [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986], 1.21 = SVF 2.975 = LS 62A). Recent commentary on these passages includes Genevieve Lloyd, Providence Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 96–97; Sedley, Creationism and its Critics, 234. Suzanne Bobzien maintains the latter simile to be evidence of Roman, rather than Chrysippean Stoicism (Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 357, rejected by Sedley, Creationism and its Critics, 234), a question we may set aside in the present investigation, concerned as it is with Gnostic sources commonly dated to the Roman period.
as denoting God’s care for individuals who rationally accept, rather than resist, the providential course of events that is itself God.24 Thus Epictetus, remarking on the human superiority to animals, intones: “but you, you are a priority; you are an offshoot of God. You have a part of that one inside of yourself. Why then are you ignorant of your lineage? Why do you not know from whence you came?”25 We will return to this passage in the conclusion, but presently it suffices to observe that even if this Roman Stoic is distinctive in the warmth and intensity with which he speaks of the human relation to God, his thinking draws upon a deeply anthropocentric view of providential care emblematic of Stoicism as a whole.
Philo of Alexandria, meanwhile, strongly agreed with Plato and the Stoics that God exercises providential care over the cosmos and humanity.26 More specifically, he agrees with and recalls the language of Plato’s Laws in saying that God “exercises providence over both the whole and the parts.”27 He goes beyond even the Stoics in explicitly asserting providential intervention in Israelite salvation-history, as when God made Sarah barren so that Abraham’s children would be born due to providence, rather than any human activity.28 Yet Philo also testifies to the transcendence of the deity, and identifies God’s providential activity not with his essence but a secondary entity, the Logos,29 the human “after the image” of God
24. Similarly, Frede, “Theodicy and Providential Care in Stoicism,” 114–16; see also the literature cited in the previous note.
25. Epict. Diss. 2.8.11: σὺ
(W. A. Oldfather, ed., Epictetus: The Discourses, Books 2 and 3, LCL 131 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925], 254). On human kinship with God in Epictetus, see Anthony A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 154–62.
26. Opif. 171–72 (F. H. Colson and G. H. Whittaker, eds., Philo: On the Creation, Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis 2 and 3, LCL 226 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929], 136): “God exercises providence (προνοεῖ) on behalf of the world. For it is necessary, by virtue of the laws and ordinances of nature, for a creator to unceasingly care for (ἐπιμελεῖσθαι . .
) what has come into being.”
27. Spec. 3.189–90 (F. H. Colson, ed., Philo: On the Decalogue, On Special Laws, LCL 320 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929], 594): προνοούμενος καὶ
28. QG 3.18; similarly, Jos. 99, 236; Vit. Mos. 1.162; Peter Frick, Providence in Philo of Alexandria, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 77 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 183–85; Ewing, Reinterpretation of Divine Providence, 42n120, 46–47.
29. See also David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the ‘Timaeus’ of Plato, Philosophia Antiqua 44 (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 242, 482n45; Frick, Providence in Philo, 125–26. Philo never explicitly says this, however; Runia, Philo of Alexandria, 242 adduces Agr. 51, but Frick, Providence in Philo, 116n90 notes that there is no reference to providence here.
For this reason, then, when (Moses) philosophized about the creation of the world, saying that everything came into being through God, he specified humanity alone as having been formed with other assistants. For he says, “God says, ‘let us make humanity according to our image’ (Gen 1.26),” showing multiple actors with the phrase “let us make.” And so the Father of the wholes is conversing with his powers, those to whom he has given the mortal part of our soul to form by imitating his craft, while he formed the rational part in us, thinking it right that the ruling part in the soul be made by the ruler, and the subjected part of the soul by his subjects. And he also did as he liked with his powers not only for this reason, but because the human soul alone was meant to receive notions of evil and good, and to put into practice one set of them, if both are not possible. So he considered it necessary for the origin of evil to come from other creators, and for the origin of good to come from him alone.31
In Philo we thus meet an admixture of Platonic and Stoic views regarding the extent to which divine care is active in the creation and salvation of human beings. He appears to hold that divine providence extends unambiguously to individual beings and events (Stoic, and then some), but is exercised by the Logos, who is distinct from the transcendent deity (Platonic), but who allows humans to be in alignment with providence when they act rationally (Stoic).
The earliest Christian philosophers generally present a similar approach to providence as we find in Philo. Most are explicit about assigning responsibility for creation to the Logos (often in the same breath as Wisdom), in order to preserve divine transcendence;32 intermediaries were similarly
30. Conf. 146, 169, 171–75, 182, cit. Dragona-Monachou, “Divine Providence in the Philosophy of the Empire,” 4458; M. David Litwa, “The God ‘Human’ and Human Gods: Modes of Deification in Irenaeus and the Apocryphon of John,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 18.1 (2013): 79–80.
31. Fug. 68–70 (F. H. Colson and G. H. Whittaker, eds., Philo: On Flight and Finding, On the Change of Names, On Dreams, LCL 275 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934], 46–48). See also Opif. 69–75, 134–36; Mut. 30–32; Conf. 168–83; for discussion, see Runia, Philo of Alexandria, 242–49; Birger Pearson, “Philo and Gnosticism,” ANRW 2.21.1 (1984): 323–30.
32. Just. Dial. 61.3, 129.3; Athenag. Leg. 10.2; Thphl. Ant. Autol. 1.3 (cit. Scheffczyk, Schöpfung und Vorsehung, 36n14); Ir. Haer. 2.2.4–5; Pheme Perkins, “Ordering the Cosmos: Irenaeus and the Gnostics,” in Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early (Gen 1.27) who is responsible for creation.30 Similarly, with respect to the creation of humanity, he maintains that while God’s “helpers” (συνεργοί) created the irrational part of the soul (whence moral evils), God himself, blowing his πνεῦμα into Adam’s face (Gen 2.7), thus grants humanity the Logos (i.e., the human rational soul):
needed for its administration, as when Athenagoras states that “the order of angels was called into being by God in order to exercise Providence over the things set in order by him, so that God <would possess> complete and general Providence over the wholes (τὴν παντελικὴν καὶ γενικὴν . . . πρόνοιαν), while the angels would be arranged over the parts.”33 Minucius Felix, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, on the other hand, emphasize the singular nature of providence, despite its exercise in a multitude of contexts.34 Divine intervention in salvation-history is described in terms of providence, particularly as regards the Incarnation,35 and this is also true of our evidence about Valentianian teachers.36 Yet when we turn to Gnostic myths themselves, we also find providence intervening in the creation of humanity in very specific ways.
Perhaps the paradigmatic Gnostic anthropogony is reported by Irenaeus of Lyons in Haer. 1.30, where he tells us that, according to the “other (Gnostics)”:
On this account, Ialdabaoth, rejoicing over all those below him, swelled up with pride and exclaimed, “I am father, and God, and above me there is no one.” But his mother, upon hearing this, cried out against him, “Do not lie, Ialdabaoth: for above you is the Father of everything, the First Man; and so is Man the Son of Man.” Then, with all of them being upset at this new voice, due to the unexpected declaration, and as they were asking where they sound had come from, Ialdabaoth, in order to lead them back to himself—so they say—exclaimed, “Come, let us make humanity after our image” (Gen 1.27). The six powers, upon hearing this as their mother gave them the idea of a human being (in order that by means of him she might
Christianity, ed. Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson Jr. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1986), 221–38.
33. Leg. 10.5 (William R. Schoedel, ed. and trans., Athenagoras: Legatio and De Resurrectione [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972], 23, modified); see also 8.7–8, 24.3. For discussion, see Bernard Pouderon, Athénagore d’Athènes: Philosophe chrétien, Théologie historique 82 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989), 142–48.
34. Oct. ch. 18; Or. Cels. 4.99; Or. Princ. 1.3.1; Clem. Str. 1.11.52.3, 1.17.85.5.
35. On Christian belief that God cares for individual beings, see Just. Dial. 1.4 (on which, see Dylan M. Burns, “Care or Prayer? Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho 1.4 Revisited,” VC 68 [2014]: 178–91). For the Incarnation as act of providence, see Just. Dial. 118.3; Or. Cels. 1.9.
36. For Valentinus, see Clem. Str. 2.20.114. = frg. H (Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, 245). For Valentinians, see Iren. Haer. 1.2.5; for Theodotus, see Clem. Exc. Thdot 74.2 (Sagnard).
empty them of their original power), together formed a man of immense size, in regard to breadth and length alike. However, as he could merely writhe along the ground, they carried him to their father. Sophia was doing all this so that she might empty him of the sprinkling of light in him and so that he would no longer stand against those who were above him, having been deprived of his power. So, when that one breathed the spirit of life into the man—so they say—he was secretly emptied of his power, while humanity came to possess thenceforth intellect and thought, and—they say—these are the faculties which enjoy salvation.37
A corollary of this myth is that while God cares for human beings, insofar as he bestows saving “intellect and thought” upon them, God does nothing to redeem the cosmos or the human body. What is interesting is that several accounts of this same anthropogony—On the Origin of the World (NHC II,5) and the Apocryphon of John (BG 8501,2; NHC II,1; III,1; IV,1)—phrase this divorce between care for humanity and care for the cosmos in terms of the reach of divine providence, as does our evidence concerning second-century Valentinians, such as Ptolemy.
Orig. World describes how providence determined that the archons, attempting to create slaves for themselves, wind up creating a divine being patterned after the “Adam of Light,” an image of God. As in Valentinian theology, the text distinguishes between two Sophia-figures, the celestial Pistis Sophia (“Faith-Wisdom”) and her lower counterpart, an Eve-figure by name of Sophia Zoe (“Wisdom-Life”).38 Accordingly, there are also a higher and a lower “Providence” (ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ), although the text does not explicitly distinguish between them.39 The “lower Providence” is associated with the timespan of the week, and is the consort (and female name) of the demiurge, Yaldabaoth, the “Prime Begetter” (ⲁⲣⲭⲓⲅⲉⲛⲉⲧⲱⲣ).40 She plays the lead role in a sub-narrative of the work which seeks to show that sexuality was introduced by divine plan.41 In a scene that recalls the famous
37. Ir. Haer. 1.30.6 (Adelin Rousseau and Louis Doutreleau, eds., Irénée de Lyon: Contre les hérésies, SC 264 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1979], 370–72).
38. Pheme Perkins suggests that they are something of a parody on the receptacle of Pl. Ti. 49a, 51a in “On the Origin of the World (CG II,5): A Gnostic Physics,” VC 34 (1980): 40.
39. I capitalize “Providence” in the following cases where πρόνοια refers to a hypostasized character, like God’s “Wisdom” (σοφία).
40. NHC II,5.101.26–27 (Louis Painchaud, ed., L’écrit sans titre: Traité sur l’origine du monde [NH II, 5 et XIII, 2 et Brit. Lob. Or. 4926{1}], Bibliothéque Copte de Nag Hammadi Section “Textes” 21 [Québec: Les presses de l’université Laval; Louvain/Paris: Peeters, 1995], 156; see also Louis Painchaud, “Commentaire: L’écrit sans titre. Traité sur l’origine du monde,” in L’écrit sans titre, 276.
41. NHC II,5.111.15–20, 111.31–33; see further Michael A. Williams, “Higher Providence, Lower Providences and Fate in Gnosticism and Middle Platonism,” in
“seduction of the archons” known from Manichaean myth, she falls in love with but is rejected by the primordial Human Being, the “Adam of Light”:
When this light manifested, a human image appeared within it, being most splendorous, and nobody saw it, except for the Prime Begetter alone and Providence, who was with him. . . . Then, once Providence saw this emissary (ⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲟⲥ—i.e., this image of the divine Adam), she fell in love with him; but he despised her, because she was on darkness. Now, she wanted to embrace him, but she was not able to.42
Meanwhile, the archons, too, catch a glimpse of the Adam of Light, which leads them to condemn the Prime Begetter, since he had claimed, “It is I who am God. No one exists besides me”:
When they approached him, saying, “Is this the god who has destroyed our work?” he answered, “Aye. If you wish that he not be able to ruin our work, let us go, then, and create a human being from the earth, according to the image of our body and according to the likeness of that one (i.e., the luminous Adam—ⲕⲁⲧⲁ
ⲡⲉ`ⲓ´ⲛⲉ ⲙ̄ⲡⲏ), that he might serve us; moreover, that when he sees his likeness (ⲉⲓⲛⲉ), he might fall in love with it. No longer shall he ruin our work; rather, as for those who shall be begotten from the light, we shall turn them into our slaves for the entire duration of this age.” But all this came to pass through the Providence of Pistis (ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲧⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ ⲛ̄ⲧⲡⲓⲥⲧⲓⲥ), so that humanity might appear in his (i.e., the divine Adam’s) likeness (ⲉⲓⲛⲉ), and come to condemn them (i.e., the authorities) through their modeled form (of it).43
It can only be on behalf of the higher Providence that Pistis(-Sophia) acts here,44 which should not surprise us, given the association of God’s Providence and Wisdom in Hellenistic Jewish literature.45 The passage offers
Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, ed. Richard T. Wallis and Jay Bregman, Studies in Neoplatonism 6 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 498, followed by Denzey Lewis, Cosmology and Fate, 42; cf. Perkins, “Gnostic Physics,” 39.
42. NHC II,5.108.7–18 (Painchaud, 170, 172); cf. Painchaud, “Commentaire: L’écrit sans titre,” 344–45. The seduction of the archons features strongly in Manichaean mythology; see for instance Werner Sundermann, “Der lebendige Geist als Verführer der Dämonen,” in Manichaica Selecta: Studies presented to Professor Julien Ries on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Alois van Tongerloo and Søren Giversen, Manichaean Studies 1 (Louvain: International Association of Manichaean Studies, 1991), 339–42.
43. NHC II,5.112.29–113.9 (Painchaud, 180, 182).
44. Perkins, “Gnostic Physics,” 40, followed by Takashi Onuki, “Die dreifache Pronoia. Zur Beziehung zwischen Gnosis, Stoa und Mittelplatonismus,” in Takashi Onuki, Heil und Erlösung, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum neuen Testament 165 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 252.
45. Indeed, much of the rest of the text is occupied with the “lower” Sophia, Zoe, and her effort to instruct humanity by creating a “beast”—the Serpent who bears salvific knowledge (NHC II,5.113.10–120.6).
a striking parody of the account of Plato’s Timaeus, where, as we have seen, it is the demiurge who sows the immortal part of human souls, even though the body is built by the faulty “young gods” (or, for Philo, “powers”).46 Like Irenaeus’s others, Orig. World goes beyond Plato (or Philo) in explicitly assigning the transmission of a divine, immortal element into the created human (God’s “likeness”— ⲉⲓⲛⲉ) to the work of divine providence, ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ, and divorcing that work from that of the archons (“the image [ϩⲓⲕⲱⲛ] of our body”), the material Adam.47 As is well-known, its association of a separate, “lower” ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ with the work of the archons is probably modeled off of contemporary Middle Platonic tripartitions of divine administration (to which we will return, below).48
Providential intervention in the creation of humanity is also central to the anthropogony of one of the most famous Gnostic texts, the Apocryphon of John. This tractate is preserved across four manuscripts in two recensions, differentiated in part by their use of language about ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ (more frequent in the long version). The relationship between the Graeco-Coptic word ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ, the Coptic phrases with which it is used interchangeably (ϣⲟⲣ︤ⲡ︥ ⲙ̄ⲙⲉⲉⲩⲉ, ⲧⲉϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ
), and the metaphysical and salvific entity known as the “Barbelo,” is too complex to discuss presently.49 What is clear, however, is that the anthropogony as reported by Irenaeus is to be found here, too, but with a slight modification:
And a voice came (down) from the exalted aeonic heaven (saying): “Man exists, and the Son of Man (exists).” And the first archon, Yaltabaoth, heard it, thinking that the voice had come from his Mother. And he did not know from where it had come. And He, the holy and perfect MotherFather—He, the perfect providence, He, the image (ϩⲓⲕⲱⲛ) of the Invisible one, (the image of) the father of the universe, through whom the universe came into being—He, the First Man, taught them; for he revealed his likeness (ⲉⲓⲛⲉ) in masculine form (ⲧⲩⲡⲟⲥ ⲛ̄ⲁⲛⲇⲣⲉⲁⲥ). . . . And when all the authorities and the first archon looked, they saw the lower part (of the abyss) illuminated; and thanks to the light (shining down), they beheld in
46. Ti. 41c, 41e, 42d; Reydams-Schils, Demiurge and Providence, 71; esp. Zlatko Pleše, “Fate, Providence, and Astrology in Gnosticism (1): The Apocryphon of John,” MHNH: International Journal of Research on Ancient Magic and Astrology 7 (2007): 237–68.
47. On Orig. World ’s interpretation of the terminology of “image” and “likeness” (regarding Gen 1.26–27), and its description of the created Adam as fundamentally material, see Dunning, “Sexual Difference,” 66–74, 77–78.
48. Perkins, “Gnostic Physics,” 40–43, followed by Painchaud, “Commentaire: L’écrit sans titre,” 384.
49. On one occasion, SR uses ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ ⲛ̄ⲉⲛⲛⲟⲓⲁ where LR has ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ (NHC II, 1.7.22 = BG 32.11–12; NHC III,1.11.9–10); survey of all the terminology involved can be found in Onuki, “Dreifache Pronoia.” See also n.52 below.
the water the form of the image (of the Spirit). And he (Yaltabaoth) said to (the) authorities before him, “come; let us make man after the image of God (ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲑⲓⲕⲱⲛ ⲙ̄ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ), and after our own likeness (ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲡ︤ⲛ︥ⲉⲓⲛⲉ), so that his image might become a light for us.”50
In Ap. John, Yaldabaoth and his archons are inspired to create a “psychic” human body by looking at the image of the “First Man”—the celestial Adam—identified in the theogony of both recensions as the Barbelo, the “image” of the first principle, the “Great Invisible Spirit.”51 She is referred to throughout the long recension of the text as ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ; in the long recension, then, the creation of humanity, in stark contrast to the cosmos, is explicitly inspired by and even modeled upon Providence.52 Yet the archons hold power over Adam’s psychic body; heaven responds by sending a rational faculty, Consciousness (ⲉⲡⲓⲛⲟⲓⲁ), to enter him and liberate him from their clutches, and thus rectify the deficiencies of Sophia.53 Adam’s acquisition of conscious reason is understood to be providential in both recensions of the text, but in different ways: in the LR, Consciousness is sent by the “Mother-Father,” an appellation for Barbelo (i.e., Providence), while in the SR, the rectification of Sophia’s deficiencies is glossed as occurring thanks to divine providence.54
Are these Gnostic anthropogonies from Nag Hammadi, which feature the intervention of providence, as ancient as the second-century anthro-
50. Ap. John NHC II,1.14.13–15.14 (Michael Waldstein and Frederick Wisse, eds., The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 33 [Leiden: Brill, 1995], 85, 87).
51. On the First Man as Barbelo, see NHC II,1.6.2–8 = BG 29.8–14; Litwa, “The God ‘Human,’” 73–74; cf. King, Secret Revelation, 120. Interestingly, Ap. John prefers to express the manifesting divine similitude with the term “image” rather than “likeness,” which it uses for the similitude of the archons, unlike the interpretation of the terminology of Gen 1.26 found in Orig. World above, as well as Philo (Karen King, “A Distinctive Intertextuality: Genesis and Platonizing Philosophy in the ‘Secret Revelation of John,’” in Gnosticism, Platonism, and the Late Ancient World: Essays in Honour of John D. Turner, ed. Kevin Corrigan et al., Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 82 [Leiden: Brill, 2013], 3–22, 13–14; Litwa, “The God ‘Human,’” 61–62). For the creation of the human psychic body as the result of the appearance of the heavenly First Man, see NHC II,1.15.15–29.
52. Cf. Pleše, “Fate, Providence, and Astrology,” 262n52. For Barbelo as ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ or “first thought” (Grk. πρωτέννοια), used virtually identically in the text in Ap. John, see NHC II,1.4.32 = BG 27.10–11; NHC II,1.5.4 (ϣⲟⲣⲡ ⲙ̄ⲙⲉⲉⲩⲉ) = BG 27.18 (ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ ⲛ̄ⲉⲛⲛⲟⲓⲁ); BG 28.4; NHC II,1.5.16 = BG 28.10; NHC II,1.6.5; [NHC II,1.6.22] = BG 30.14; NHC II,1.6.30 = BG 31.4; NHC II,1.14.20.
53. NHC II,1.20.13–31.
54. BG 47.6–7 = NHC III,1.21.10–11; Takashi Onuki, Gnosis und Stoa: Eine Untersuchung zum Apokryphon des Johannes, Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus 9 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 114.
Similarly, Painchaud suggests that Orig. World’s emphasis on the activity of ⲡⲣⲟⲛⲟⲓⲁ in the creation of humanity is the mark of a Valentinian redactor.57 Yet we know that other sources fixed in the second century comment on the Gnostic myth of the creation with reference to God’s πρόνοια in a similar way. A certain Justin (not the apologist, “Martyr”), probably writing in the later second century, specifies that the first principle is “provident over the wholes” (προγνώστης τῶν ὅλων), while the male and female creator-deities “are bereft of forethought (ἀπρόγνωστος).”58 According to the Valentinians:
And as for the offspring of the mother, Achamoth, which she brought forth in accordance with her contemplation of the angels surrounding the Savior, being of a similar, spiritual substance, subject to the mother—they say that the demiurge himself was ignorant of it, and that it was secretly deposited in him, without his knowing, so that it might be, through him, sown into the soul that comes from him, and into this material body, and so that, having been carried by them as in a womb and grown, it might come to
55. Waldstein and Wisse, Synopsis, 1; similarly, Alastair P. Logan, Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: A Study in the History of Gnosticism (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 16–17; cf. Rasimus, Rethinking Sethianism, 279; Bernard Barc and Louis Painchaud, “La réécriture de l’Apocryphon de Jean à la lumière de l’Hymne final de la version longue,” Le muséon 112 (1999): 317; Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, 24 (albeit cautiously).
56. “La réécriture,” esp. 322–33, followed by Onuki, “Dreifache Pronoia,” 247.
57. Painchaud, “Commentaire: L’écrit sans titre,” 389.
58. Hipp. Haer. 10.15; see also Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism, 18–19. pogony reported by Irenaeus, in which providence does not figure at all? In Haer. 1.29, Irenaeus preserves an epitome of the theogony of Ap. John, and so many scholars date the Greek Vorlagen of our Coptic versions of this work to the mid-second century c.e., but, as Michael Waldstein and Frederick Wisse rightly point out, Irenaeus’s evidence merely indicates his access to a source common with one of those used by the author(s) of Ap. John, a text with a complex redaction-history.55 Louis Painchaud and Bernard Barc have famously demonstrated that the redactor(s) of the long recension of the text added language about providence to it (as observed above), to accompany their insertion of a “Pronoia Hymn”—a poem about the interventions of Providence herself on the part of elect humanity—into its conclusion.56 Significantly, they do not say why someone would have wanted to do this; we shall return to this point, but in any case it is conceivable that the myth as related by Irenaeus in Haer. 1.30 is prior to the version recapitulated in our extant copies of Ap. John, where providence plays a crucial role.
be for the reception of the perfect Word. And so, as they say, the spiritual Human Being, thanks to ineffable power and providence (ἀρρήτῳ δυνάμει καὶ προνοίᾳ), escaped the attention of the demiurge, having been sown into his breath by Wisdom. For just as the demiurge failed to recognize his mother, so it was with her seed, which—they say—constitutes the church, being a reflection of the celestial Church.59
Just as in Orig. World and Ap. John, the demiurge has been produced and has created the cosmos outside of the scope of providence, but has been manipulated by divine agency so that humanity can be said to have been granted its divine (i.e., rational) element thanks to God’s care.
A number of scholars have long noted but struggled to elegantly formulate the relationship between the distinctive Gnostic mythos of creation and contemporary philosophical and religious thought about providence. Leo Scheffczyk claims that canonical Scripture, in contrast to Gnosticism, denies an “Abtrennung der Schöpfungs- von der Erlösungswirklichkeit.” 60 Jaap Mansfeld opines that from the premise that the world is not good, the Gnostics concluded that there is a bad demiurge—a completely novel position in terms of Greek philosophy.61 Ioan Couliano characterizes Gnostic thought as a rejection of the “anthropic principle,” asserting a fundamental disjunction between the human being (good) and the cosmos we inhabit (bad).62 Pheme Perkins and Pierre Létourneau both suggest that an integral characteristic of Gnosticism is its elevation of humanity above the creator-god.63 All these statements are true, but not precise, in part thanks to the opacity of the Gnostic myths themselves. However, when these myths were glossed in terms of the philosophical jargon of the day for articulating such matters—as is the case with the term “providence”—we were given a foothold that allows us to extrapolate, in terms of ancient philosophy, what viewpoint these myths express, and what might be distinct about it.
59. Ir. Haer. 1.5.6.
60. Schöpfung und Vorsehung, 19.
61. Jaap Mansfeld, “Bad World and Demiurge: A Gnostic Motif from Parmenides and Empedocles to Lucretius and Philo,” in Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions: Studies Presented to Gilles Quispel on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Roelof van den Broek and Maarten J. Vermaseren (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 313.
62. Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism, trans. H. S. Wiesner (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 108–11.
63. Pheme Perkins, The Gnostic Dialogue: The Early Church and the Crisis of Gnosticism (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 173; Pierre Létourneau, “Creation in Gnostic Christian Texts, or: What Happens to the Cosmos When Its Maker Is Not the Highest God?” in Theologies of Creation in Early Judaism and Ancient Christianity: In Honour of Hans Klein, ed. Tobias Nicklas, Korinna Zamfir, and Heike Braun, Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies 6 (New York: de Gruyter, 2010), 432.
Now, if Frede was right to dub Balbus’s Stoicizing flirtations with divine intervention anthropocentric, Philonic and early Christian conceptions of providence could be so characterized, too, given their relative ease in accepting God’s direct creation of humanity and interventionist care. In this context, the Gnostic anthropogonies we have reviewed here should be considered the apex of second-century Christian anthropocentrism. When Orig. World, Ap. John, and others explain how divine providence was completely active in the creation of even the first human being and its acquisition of the rational faculty—the first divine intervention in Gnostic salvation-history!—their expositions of Gnostic anthropocentrism take on a Stoic valence, for it is Stoic thinkers who maintained that the rational human being operates under the direct care of divine providence, while Platonists delegated the creation and administration of human beings to fallible entities.
It is easy to miss the Stoicizing side of Gnostic descriptions of providential activity in creation, since Gnostic anthropogony also parodies Plato’s Timaeus as a way of addressing theodicy. It is a departure from Plato and Philo (given its more negative evaluation of the person of the demiurge), but it addresses the same philosophical problem by foisting responsibility for human evil upon secondary entities (i.e., “young gods,” “powers,” “archons”), rather than denying the existence of all evil but human evil (as do the Stoics). A famous Gnostic appropriation of the Timaeus in this regard is again found in Ap. John, where God’s πρόνοια is the Barbelo, whose theophany inspired the anthropogony; a separate “providence” is employed by the archons in the creation of Adam’s psychic body; finally, evil fate (εἱμαρμένη), to whom man’s physical body is bound, governs events on earth.64 Ultimately derivative of Plato’s distinction in the Timaeus between the providential care of the demiurge and the fallible activity of the “young gods,” such distinctions between God’s providence (which does not govern the world and the evils that transpire in it) and a “lower” providence and/or fate became a hallmark of later Platonic reflection on divine care,65
64. For the “secondary providence” of the archons, see NHC II,1.12.17 = BG 43.12; NHC II,1.15.15 = BG 49.16; for Fate as the fetter of humanity, see NHC II,1.28.11–32 = BG 72.2–12; generally, see Pleše, “Fate, Providence, and Astrology,” 253, n. 34.
65. For threefold providence, see Apul. Dogm. Plat. 1.12, Ps.-Plut. Fat. 9 572f–573b, Nemes. Nat. Hom. 788b, 789a–792a; Dillon, Middle Platonists, 320–26; DragonaMonachou, “Divine Providence in the Philosophy of the Empire,” 4462–64, 4467–69; Sharples, “Threefold Providence”; and, recently, Jan Opsomer, “The Middle Platonic Doctrine of Conditional Fate,” in Fate, Providence, and Moral Responsibility in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought: Studies in Honor of Carlos Steel, ed. Pieter d’Hoine and Gerd van Riel, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy 1 (Leuven:
and, as noted above, one finds a comparable distinction between higher and lower providence in Orig. World. 66 By assigning the creation of the world and the (psychic-)material human body to lower demiurgic beings, Gnostic thought abandons Stoicism entirely in its attempt to insulate the transcendent God from activity (evil and salvific both), acknowledge the evils that transpire in the cosmos, and provide a mechanism for salvation. Indeed, it identifies the true human not as a “body” at all, but a purely spiritual being—a view that could hardly be more antithetical to Stoicism.
Irenaeus complains bitterly about how the Marcosians, Valentinians, and Marcionites say that there is another maker than the Father.67 In his mind, worldly evil is the consequence of human free will;68 other “protoorthodox” contemporaries explain evil as the work of Satanic or demonic beings, or the ravages of sin, even as they maintain ultimate divine governance of the cosmos and the human creation.69 Meanwhile, the distinction between the first, high God and inferior beings responsible for creation’s complications is the sine qua non of Gnostic myth, found even in Irenaeus’s accounts of early exponents of such myths, like Menander.70 It is then clear that the anthropogonies from Nag Hammadi reviewed above use philosophical terms to allegorize an idea about divine care already
Leuven University Press, 2014), 137–67. The doctrine derives from the Timaeus’s distinction between the creation of the Demiurge (41c) and of the secondary gods (42e), while tertiary providence (42e) is the arrangement of human affairs.
66. Denzey Lewis shrewdly observes that Ap. John, in a sense, here agrees with Athenagoras that angels exercise control over the (fallible) parts, while a providential God governs the (entirely good) wholes (Leg. 24.3; Denzey Lewis, Cosmology and Fate, 35). Williams rightly doubts that Ap. John originated in the “School of Gaius” (associated with Apuleius et al.) in “Higher Providence.”
67. Haer. 1.20.3, 4.18.4, 4.27.4, respectively, cit. M. C. Steenberg, Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic Christ and the Saga of Redemption, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 91 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 67; see also Ir. Epid. 4.99.
68. For a brisk discussion, see Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 232–37.
69. Recent studies of these topics include Dale B. Martin, “When did Angels become Demons?” JBL 129 (2010): 657–77; Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
70. For a sensitive, recent analysis of Irenaeus’s remarks concerning the teachings of Satorninos and Menander (Haer. 1.23.5–24.1), see Volker Henning Drecoll, “Martin Hengel and the Origins of Gnosticism,” in Corrigan et al., Gnosticism, Platonism, and the Late Ancient World, 152–61.
implicit in our earliest evidence about Gnostic myths: if God cares for and intervenes on behalf of human beings (as Christians of all stripes seem to have agreed upon) but the present world and our present bodies (however construed) are full of evils, then the latter must be the creation of beings who are not providential, and are thus inferior to the beings that God does care for—humanity, which is divine, superior to the creator of the cosmos. Moreover, much of our Gnostic literature acknowledges this fundamental difference of perspective with their proto-orthodox contemporaries insofar as it attempts to hedge and mollify it.
For instance, the Hypostasis of the Archons insists that, like in Ap. John and Orig. World, divine “Immortality” (ⲧⲙ︤ⲛ︦ⲧ︥ⲁⲧⲧⲁⲕⲟ) appeared in the terrestrial waters and inspires the creation of humanity “so that, by the will of the father (ϩ︤ⲙ︥ ⲡⲟⲩⲱϣ ⲙ̄ⲡⲉⲓⲱⲧ`), it should join the universe with the light.”71 Orig. World, too, states “all this came to pass by the providence of Pistis.”72 The Paraphrase of Shem repeats ad nauseum that even seemingly bizarre cosmogonic events transpire “by the will of the Majesty,” or the like.73 A recent analysis of several Sethian treatises suggests that the “Seed of Seth” was regarded as an agent of divine providence, caring for creation through the mediation of the elect.74
We witness a similar ambivalence specifically regarding condemnations of the demiurge and his rule—and, by implication, the superiority of the
71. NHC II,4.87.22–23 (Bentley Layton, ed., “The Hypostasis of the Archons: Critical Edition and Translation,” in Nag Hammadi Codex II, 2–7. Vol. 1, ed. Bentley Layton, Nag Hammadi Studies 20 [Leiden: Brill, 1989], 234–59; italics mine); cf. 88.10–11, 88.34–39.1, 96.11–12. This early Coptic idiom relating the active agency of divine care came, in later Coptic epitaphs, to be expressed in terms of providence (see Jacques van der Vliet, “‘What is Man?’: The Nubian Tradition of Coptic Funerary Inscriptions,” in Nubian Voices: Studies in Christian Nubian Culture, ed. Adam Łajtar, Jacques van der Vliet, and Giovanni Ruffini, Journal of Juristic Papyrology Supplement 15 [Warsaw: Journal of Juristic Papyrology, 2011], 215–20); I thank Alexander Tsakos (Bergen) for the reference. However, see also the use of a nearly identical phrase referring to providence in Orig. World (see following note).
72. Orig. World 113.5–9. Perkins and Denzey Lewis have suggested that the text here could rearticulate, using the philosophical term “providence,” the text from Hyp. Arch. on which (they surmise) Orig. World is dependent in Perkins “Gnostic Physics,” 41, and Denzey Lewis, Cosmology and Fate, 40.
73. NHC VII,1.2.29, 4.15, 6.30–31, 8.15–16, 9.3–4, 10.16, 11.7, 12.15–16, 13.33–34, 18.2, 21.21, 25.4–6, 29.20–21 (Michel Roberge, ed., La Paraphrase de Sem (NH VII, 1), Bibliothéque Copte de Nag Hammadi Section “Textes” 25 [Leuven: Éditions Peeters, 2000], 122, 124, 128, 132, 134, 136, 140, 142, 152, 158, 166, 174).
74. Lance Jenott, “Emissaries of Truth and Justice: The Seed of Seth as Agents of Divine Providence,” in Corrigan et al., Gnosticism, Platonism, and the Late Ancient World, 43–62, regarding Ap. John, Apoc. Adam, and Gos. Eg.
elect to the creator. A famous example of such a condemnation can be found in the polemical homily entitled the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, where Jesus declares:
But, thanks to my Father, I am the one who the world did not recognize. And for this reason, it rose up against me and my brethren. But we are innocent as regards it; we did not sin. For the Archon was a joke, since he said, “I am God, and there is none greater than me,” “I alone am the Father, the Lord,” and “there is none other besides me,” “I am a jealous God, bringing the sins of the fathers upon the(ir) children for three and four generations,” as though he had become stronger than me and my brethren. But we, we are innocent regarding him, for we did not sin.75
Some thinkers who distinguish the demiurge from the high God are less comfortable with such excoriations of the creator, his rule, and his inferiority to the saved. Ptolemy, for instance, refuses to identify the creator of the cosmos with “the devil,” nor to deny him the attribute of providence;76 even though the world is not perfect:
The apostle says that the creation of the world is <the Savior’s>, and that everything came into being through him, and that without him nothing came into being—thus pulling out the rug from under the baseless wisdom of the liars—not of some destructive God, but of a righteous God who hates iniquity. Rather, <this> is the view of idiots who do not ascribe providence to the creator (τῆς προνοίας
λαμβανομένων), and who have been deprived not only the eyes of the soul, but of the body as well.77
The Valentinians, too, assert that the demiurge has repented of his ignorance, and “will accomplish the administration of the world (τὴν κατὰ τὸν κόσμον οἰκονομίαν) until the given time.”78 Demiurges also repent in Hyp
75. NHC VII,2.64.12–29 (ed., Gregory Riley, “The Second Treatise of the Great Seth: Text, Translation, and Notes,” in Nag Hammadi Codex VII, ed. Birger Pearson, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 30 [Leiden: Brill, 1996], 184, 186).
76. Epiph. Pan. 33.3.1–2 (GCS NF 10.1:450–51); see further Christoph Markschies, “New Research on Ptolemaeus Gnosticus,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 4:2 (2000): 239–46.
77. Epiph. Pan. 33.3.6 (GCS NF 10.1:451).
78. Iren. Haer. 1.7.4 (SC 264:109–10), an exegesis of the story of the “Centurion” (Matt 8.5–13 = Luke 7.1–10); see also Tert. Val. 28. One also recalls the Refutatio’s portrait of the thought of Basilides, where the “enlightened” Great Archon administers providence up but not beyond the sublunary realm, like Aristotle’s God (Haer. 7.24.3; Bergjan, Der fürsorgende Gott, 140n85; Abraham P. Bos, “Basilides as an Aristotelianizing Gnostic,” VC 54 [2000]: 53).
Arch. and Orig World, narrative twists likely responding to this same discomfort with outright dismissal of the author of the cosmos.79
Diverse authors who exalt the first God above and beyond the demiurge also believed that the world must have been created with the capacity for evil, in order that human beings also be capable of good—exactly the thought of Plato on the matter, and of Irenaeus himself(!), writing about why humans are created with the ability to be evil.80 Like Ptolemy, they must have been wary of being pegged as denying providence, given the insistence of some Gnostic myths, like Ap. John, that the cosmos came about without the consent of the true God:
She (i.e., Wisdom) desired to manifest a likeness out of herself, without [the will] of the Spirit—He did not consent—and [without] her consort, and without his consideration. So, despite the person of her maleness not having consented, and without her having found her partner, she fell deep into thought—without the will of the Spirit, and the knowledge of her partner— and she brought something forth.81
Not only did such a claim invite tarring with the brush of Epicureanism or of Aristotelianism (the other ancient schools of thought to deny providential care for the cosmos),82 but it also opened one up to the charge of inconsistency, should one then affirm—as Ap. John and some other Gnostic texts do—providential care for the elect. Indeed, this is precisely what Plotinus, writing against his Christian interlocutors in the mid-third century c.e.—in a treatise his disciple, Porphyry, entitled Against the Gnostics—fulminated against: “Moreover, how is it pious for providence to fail to extend to anything here—indeed, to anything at all? And how are they at all consistent in holding this view? For they say that God does care for them, and them alone
79. Hyp. Arch. NHC II,4.95.13–96.2; Orig. World NHC II,5.103.32–106.18.
80. Haer. 3.22.4; Epid. 12.
81. Ap. John NHC II,1.9.28–35 (Waldstein and Wisse, 59, 61, italics mine); cf. Zlatko Pleše, “Evil and its Sources in Gnostic Traditions,” in Die Wurzel allen Übels. Vorstellungen über die Herkunft des Bösen und Schlechten in der Philosophie und Religion des 1.–4. Jahrhunderts, ed. Fabienne Jourdan and Rainer Hirsch-Luipold, Ratio Religionis Studien 3/Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 91 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 108–12, identifying responsibility for the causal break in the very unknowability of the first principle itself, rather than a lower principle’s desire to create without its consent (as here).
82. Thus e.g., Attic. frg. 3 = Eus. p.e. 15.1.1–14.
83. Plot. 2.9.16.15–17 (Arthur Hilary Armstrong, ed., Plotinus: Enneads II.1–9, LCL 441 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966], 286).
The present reading of the evidence permits us to say why the redactor(s) of the long versions of Ap. John added language about providence, and particularly the Pronoia-Hymn, to the text: for some of their interlocutors, Gnostic anthropocentrism must have implied denial of providential care for the “present evil age” (Gal 1.4)—and these redactors wished to show otherwise, insofar as Pronoia herself has descended into Hades three times, on the behalf of humanity.84
Some writers of Gnostic literature therefore chose to emphasize the universal power and extension of πρόνοια to the world and human beings. The problem of providence thus furnishes a rare glimpse into how the authors of Gnostic texts grappled with the implications of Gnostic myth for negotiating their greater identity and worldview amongst Christians and Hellenes. As Denzey Lewis has shown, the rhetoric of cosmic enslavement is employed in Gnostic literature to construct “a discourse of alterity, distinguishing one group from another,” and this usage is indeed not substantially different from that of other “non-Gnostic” Christians about fate.85 Yet we do glimpse a clear tension between “Gnostic” and “nonGnostic” sources on the problem of care for the cosmos versus humanity, most of all in texts like Hyp. Arch., Orig. World, or Paraph. Shem, whose myths elaborate Gnostic anthropocentrism but add that nothing happens except by divine will. The fact that authors felt such asides were necessary in the first place proves that such tensions were present.
As scholars it is our right to create second-order terms to denote phenomena which we find interesting; those of us who study early Christian discourse about superhuman beings and ritual life in the ancient Mediterranean world do this already, when we talk about “early Christianity,” or ancient “religion” more generally.86 The contention of this study is that we need some such second-order term to denote these tensions in ancient “Gnostic” literature about the involvement of divine care in the creation of human beings and the cosmos. It is hard to imagine the authors dis-
84. Ap. John NHC II,30.11–31.28.
85. Denzey Lewis, Cosmology and Fate, 8.
86. See recently Brent Nongbri, Before Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 153; Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms in the Study of Religion, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281–82.
cussed here agreeing with the Sentences of Sextus that, “just as the ruler (τὸ ἄρχον) welcomes the ruled, God welcomes the wise man. Just as the ruler is inseparable from the ruled, so God cares for and attends to (προνοεῖ καὶ κήδεται) the wise.”87 Even the author of NHC II,4, insisting that everything transpires “by the will of the father,” prefers a different analogy for divine care in the treatise entitled
. Conversely, it is difficult to imagine this same author empathizing with Epictetus’s remark that God “has no need of a fussy spectator” who has been granted to witness the festival that is the present life.88 Having digested the many critiques of the term and continuing to invite research that proceeds without it, scholarship might then rehabilitate “Gnosticism” fruitfully to describe the view of this author and his ilk—that responsibility for the creation of the world falls to a being inferior to God, to whom human beings are kin—a view promulgated, defended, and hedged, in diverse permutations, in the various extant works associated with ancient individuals known as “Gnostics.”89 Why “Gnosticism”? Let us briefly look at two alternatives that are currently in use. First, there is “biblical demiurgical(ism)” and other formulations focusing on the dualism of God and creator, as generally favored
87. Sent. Sext. 422–23 (Henry Chadwick, ed., The Sentences of Sextus: A Contribution to the History of Early Christian Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959], 60, italics mine).
88. Diss. 4.1.108 (W. A. Oldfather, ed., Epictetus: The Discourses, Books 3 and 4, Fragments, The Encheiridion, LCL 218 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928], 280); see also Long, Stoic and Socratic Guide, 168–72.
89. This approach closely resembles the simple “twofold typology” of Gnosticism devised by Antti Marjanen, “Gnosticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 210–11. David Brakke criticizes this typology for setting the origin of the cosmos and the divine quality of the soul at the center of the teaching of ancient Gnostics, who probably identified themselves rather as proponents of the message of salvation offered by Jesus Christ in The Gnostics, 26–27; it is, however, also necessary to address the content of their message of Christian salvation, which, if the writings that fall under the rubric of the “evidence for the Gnostic school of thought” and their like tell us anything, had something to do with distinguishing God from the creator and human beings from the inferior, present creation and its maker. These two themes are also central to the treatment of Zlatko Pleše, “Gnostic Literature,” in Religiöse Philosophie und philosophische Religion der frühen Kaiserzeit. Literaturgeschichtliche Perspektiven, ed. Rainer Hirsch-Luipold et al., Ratio Religionis Studien 1/Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 51 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 177–82, 189–96, and figure strongly in other, at times considerably more complex, typologies, such as that of Christoph Markschies, Gnosis, trans. John Bowden (London: T & T Clark, 2003), 15–17.
90. See Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism, 265; cf. Pleše, “Evil and its Sources,” 101, 107–8.
91. Most recently and forcefully, see Roelof van den Broek, Gnostic Religion in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2–3. See also Giovanni Filoramo, “Gnosis/Gnostizismus, I. Religionswissenschaftlich,” RGG4 3 (2000): 1043–44; Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Gnosticism,” in The Brill Dictionary of Religion, ed. Kocku von Stuckrad, (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 790–93; out of this trajectory see now April DeConick, “Crafting Gnosis: Gnostic Spirituality in the Ancient New Age,” in Corrigan et al., Gnosticism, Platonism, and the Late Ancient World, 300–301.
92. Van den Broek, Gnostic Religion, 4–5, 11; DeConick, “Crafting Gnosis,” 293; cf. Christoph Markschies, “Von Afrika bis China—Varietäten von Gnosis,” in Zugänge zur Gnosis: Akten zur Tagung der Patristischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft vom 02.–05.01.2011 in Berlin-Spandau, ed. Christoph Markschies and Johannes van Oort, Patristic Studies 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 1–4. A particularly thoughtful evaluation of whether Manichaism is “Gnostic” (the answer: not exactly) is offered by Peter Nagel, “Über das Verhältnis von Gnosis und Manichäismus, oder: Wie gnostisch ist die Gnosis des Mani?,” in Vom “Troglodytenland” ins Reich der Scheherazade. Archäologie, Kunst und Religion zwischen Okzident und Orient. Festschrift für Piotr O. Scholz zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Magdalena Drugosz (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2014), 121–39.
93. Thus also Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism, 25–28; Heikki Räisänen, “Marcion,” in A Companion to Second-Century “Heretics,” ed. Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 76 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 107; Marjanen, “Gnosticism,” 211. in North American scholarship;90 second, there is “Gnosis” with a capital “G,” a wider category, favored by European scholarship, concerned with salvation via knowledge of one’s divine origins.91 Consequently, many of these scholars regard the “Gnostic” (or “Sethian,” or “biblical Demiurgical,” if you will) myths and their authors as only one instance of a religious current, Gnosis, which also encompasses Manichaeism, the Hermetic literature, and even the Gospel of Thomas. 92 Both approaches ring true in some way, but also leave something to be desired, since they lead us far afield from the “Gnostics” known to Irenaeus and Porphyry and the extant works which resemble their thought: a definition of a “Gnostic” as simply an exponent of the dualism of God and creator leads us, for instance, to regard Marcion as a “Gnostic.”93 Meanwhile, Epictetus’s query to his reader, “you are an offshoot of God. . . . Why do you not know from whence you came?” would ostensibly qualify as emblematic indeed of “Gnosis.” Should we then speak of “Gnosticizing” tendencies in Stoic thought? Rather, the focus of this study on the problem of divine care clarifies that both questions—the dualism of God and creator, and the divine nature of humanity—are intertwined of necessity and chief of priority when it comes to the myths associated with ancient “Gnostics.”
Regardless of what one makes of the vicissitudes of “Gnosticism,” Gnostic documents offer a perspective on divine providence distinctive not just to Christian but philosophical circles as well, and so one should therefore speak, in terms of the history of ancient philosophy, of a particularly “Gnostic” approach to providence, for the myth of a second, faulty creator-god implies that the world was created absent providential activity, but that God cared (προνοεῖν) when it came to the creation of human beings—and several Gnostic texts explicitly use the language of providence to relate this story. Others recognized the difference between this view and those of their contemporaries and tried to bridge it, by qualifying their myths with comforting reminders that nothing transpires without the divine will. Another name to describe this distinctive perspective on divine care is required. “Sethian” or simply “Christian” does not suffice.
Dylan M. Burns is a Research Associate at the Free University of Berlin