Apocalypse of the Alien God. Dylan M. Burns
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title, Against Those Who Say That the Universe and Its Maker Are Evil.1 When we recall data culled from philosophical and sophistic sources about the sociopolitical environment of elite education, Porphyry’s remarks thus allow the closest look we can get at a particular group of Gnostics, and the sort of cultural seas they must have navigated in order to arrive at a circle like that of Plotinus. Yet while Porphyry’s testimony tells us a great deal about their background and the radical nature of their invocation of alien, oriental authorities in the context of Hellenism, it tells us little about the other doctrines to which these Gnostics—and their apocalypses—subscribed. Indeed, Porphyry says nothing about the content of the Sethian works other than their pseudepigraphic claims to ancient, alien authority.
Here we must turn to Plotinus and the Sethian texts themselves. It is worth pausing to review Plotinus’s polemic before proceeding to read it against the Sethian literature and other contemporary Platonic literature. The treatise—his thirty-third composition and the ninth tractate in the second partition of his collected works, arranged by Porphyry as six groups of nine (hence their title: the Enneads, Gk. “nines”)—is famously technical and difficult, and comprehensive scholarly treatments of it are specialized and uncommon. Yet it is also difficult to read in isolation, being the last segment of the so-called Großschrift, a hypothetical “long treatise” cut into four pieces by Porphyry to fit his enneadic schema of Plotinus’s corpus.2 Even beyond the Großschrift, the entire Plotinian corpus could be seen as a witness to Plotinus’s encounter with Gnosticism, and some have thus cast his thought in toto along the lines of their interpretation of this encounter.3 In the interests of practicality, this chapter will focus only on Ennead 2.9 in particular as Plotinus’s singular address to his Gnostic interlocutors, while referring when necessary to the rest of the Enneads and especially the Großschrift. Even this relatively restricted analysis, however, shows that he was not only concerned with his opponents’ constructions of cultic identity and revelatory authority but also with very specific ideas they had about cosmology, soteriology, and eschatology. In each case, he holds, their philosophy breaks up the unity of the cosmos, introducing separation and alienation where he sees only continuity, a practice culminating, appropriately, in their own alienation from their fellow humanity and the (Hellenic) traditions that inspire them.
AGAINST THE GNOSTIC COSMOS
Unfortunately, Plotinus’s discussion of Gnostic thought often seems to hide more than it reveals. He usually states a conclusion his opponents have reached and his (angry) response to it, without stating what arguments motivate both sides; the reader, hoping for a more full picture, must then sketch in various complex philosophical arguments between the lines. Nowhere is this more so than in the first ten chapters of Ennead 2.9, which plunge the reader into the middle of a series of polemics on seemingly unrelated topics: the number of divine intellects, the eternity of produced matter, the decline of the (World)-Soul, and the story of the Soul’s creation of the cosmos.4 However, each of these issues circulates around the problem of the creative activity of the undescended Soul—the entity mediating the divine Intellect and the physical cosmos, of which the individual soul, mediating a person’s intellect and physical body, is a microcosm—with respect to time and narrative, the eternity of the world, and the character of its author.
This is not easy to see, because when Plotinus talks about the problem of creation, he phrases it in his own characteristic terms as the problem of the Soul’s ability to create a good world, which for him is intrinsically bound with its character as an inhabitant of heaven along with divine Intellect. The Gnostics, he says, describe a “Soul” whose creation is bad because of a “descent” into matter, thus tainting its creative activity. Yet it is difficult to tell which characters in the Gnostic cosmogonic drama he is speaking about. Sometimes, he specifies arguments commonly made by Hellenistic thinkers to criticize the anthropomorphism of the demiurge’s portrait in Plato’s Timaeus, so he has none other in mind than the ambivalent, faulty demiurge of Gnostic myth, who crafts a deficient, even evil cosmos. Yet at other times he refers to the “decline” of the Gnostic “Soul,” apparently meaning the story of the fall of Sophia, the mother of the demiurge. As we will see, he even (quite possibly in bad faith) accuses his opponents of conflating these characters in just this confusing way.
It is worth pausing here to briefly recount a classic variant of this story, presented in a particularly famous (and Sethianized) text known as the Apocryphon of John.5 The story begins with a description of the transcendent first principle, the “Father,” or “Invisible Spirit.” Gazing into himself in the primordial water, his thought produces a divine Mother, the “Barbelo,” the second, generative, principle from which the rest of reality is born.6 With the “consent” of the Father, the Barbelo produces two quintets of aeons (Gk. “eternities”). (Here, as often in Gnostic literature, the divisions of salvation history into periods, or “aeons,” is reflected in the atemporal celestial topography, where aeons seem to be beings or places that emanate from God as the eternal paradigm of the drama that plays out on earth as its reflection.)7 Finally, the Father and Barbelo produce another principle, their Son, the Autogenes (“self-begotten”), an image of its parent. The Invisible Spirit anoints him and grants him authority. The Autogenes produces the Four Luminaries common to Sethian lore (Harmozel, Oroiael, Davithai, and Eleleth), who in turn produce twelve aeons, one of which is Sophia (“wisdom”).
Sophia desires to imitate the beings from which she has sprung—she desires to produce—but, unlike the Barbelo, does so without the “consent” of the Father. Her creation is thus the misshapen, blind god Yaldabaoth, who with his angels creates the material universe and then mankind, beginning with Adam and Eve. Poor Sophia, meanwhile, repents. In order to recover the creative power that Yaldabaoth has stolen from her, she is able with the help of the superior powers to trick her son into passing this power into Adam. This spark of divinity is passed on to Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, from whom Gnostic humanity is descended—aliens to the world of Yaldabaoth, but akin to their Father, the Invisible Spirit, itself alien to the planet they inhabit. Yet the elect have forgotten their divine identity because of Yaldabaoth’s minions, who torment them, exploiting the weakness and ignorance that accompany corporeal existence. Thankfully, a savior descends to humanity to preach the origins of man and the cosmos, expose Yaldabaoth and his powers as false gods, and thereby lend human beings knowledge of its source, the hitherto unknown, alien God. This knowledge is tantamount to salvation.
At first sight, it is then puzzling that Plotinus begins his response to this myth (and those who adhere to it) by ridiculing the doctrine of dual intellects (one unparticipatory, one participatory), one of Numenius’s odder ideas, not extant in any Gnostic text.8 His reason can only be that he wishes to emphasize the coherence of the three hypostases of his metaphysical system: One, Intellect, and Soul.9 For Plotinus, the cosmic Soul, as a direct image of the Intellect, has direct access to it and dwells with it in the heavens; in turn, the various human, animal, and vegetative souls here on earth (which together compose the hypostasis of cosmic Soul) are in direct touch with their intellects (which together compose the hypostasis of celestial Intellect). He sees the possibility of there being two or more intellects in the metaphysical world as an unnecessary introduction of intermediaries between members of this triad of hypostases, which will lead to an infinite and absurd production of intelligible entities, or worse a decline of one of the hypostases.10 Thus, the proliferation of a multitude of divine entities (familiar to even the casual reader of Gnostic texts) disturbs the hierarchy of intelligible beings and could even lead to the mistaken notion that the soul descends.
His same concern with the maintenance of the intelligible hierarchy and the undescended Soul motivates his next topic, the eternity of illuminated matter. In an especially dense passage, he argues that:
If anyone says that it will be dissolved into matter, why should he not also say that matter will be dissolved? But if he is going to say that, what necessity was there, we shall reply, for it to come into being? But if they are going to assert that it was necessary for it to come into being as a consequence of the existence of higher principles, the necessity is there now as well. But if matter is going to remain alone, the divine principles will not be everywhere but in a particular limited place; they will be, so to speak, walled