THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

Platonic thought in Egypt must be set. 17
It was a period of revolt, pogroms, and
bloody reprisals, the most serious revolt occurring in the Boukolia marshes in 172
C.E., which was led by an Egyptian priest. Insofar as Gnostic and Middle Platonic
thought in Egypt took place under these conditions, we can expect that the experience
of a lack of freedom – economic, intellectual, and cultural – influenced their
speculations, and this includes all Greek cities in the eastern Mediterranean where
Gnostic thought and Middle Platonism were active. 18
This undoubtedly provides one
of the key socio-political underpinnings for the phenomenon of “Hellenistic
religions”. 19
The Egyptian philosopher Ammonius (floruit. 40 C.E.), teacher of Plutarch, is
a figure of interest. In his thought we see an enhanced dualist perspective upon the
cosmos that has similarities with Xenocrates. In this view, the sublunary realm is
ruled over by an entity who is distinct from the Supreme Deity as a ruler of Hades,
thus exhibiting similarities to the Persian Ahriman. 20
Ammonius is key in
demonstrating the presence of a developed philosophical dualism in Egypt in the first
century, and it is likely that he incorporated Egyptian thought in his work. 21
Not
much is otherwise known about Ammonius, but in examining the teachings of the
major figure of Plutarch, we may presume that many elements of Plutarch’s Egyptian
sympathies came from his teacher.
Plutarch, whose floruit was around 85 C.E., is an extremely important figure,
both for his pronounced dualist thought and contemporaneous with the Gnostics, and
also for the extensive writings of his that have come down to us. For Plutarch, the
Monad, or One, is above the Indefinite Dyad, it “being the element underlying all
17
This anarchism was not confined simply to the large cities, but extended into the rural areas
where peasants were driven to flee their homes by Roman taxes and liturgies. The largescale
refusal to work was also a common feature of the times. See Lewis, ibid., 203-204.
18
Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second
Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books,
1986), 49, makes an analogous point: “In a striking scene, the Jew Philo (c.40 A.D.) tells
how a theatre audience, probably in Roman Alexandria, had cheered boisterously at a line in
a Greek play referring to ‘freedom.’ Alexandrians were perhaps exceptionally conscious of
their loss of it, but the scene can be generalized. Greek cities were aware of a great, free
past, and in relative terms, we must allow for their sense of a loss of civil and political
liberty. It underlay the culture of this period, and we can justly diagnose it, even when
contemporaries do not emphasize it.”
19
A perspective all the more remarkable for its omission in Luther H. Martin’s otherwise
useful work, Hellenistic Religions. Certainly, Martin is correct in noting that, “by late
antiquity, the centrifugal force of Hellenistic expansion extended the locus of deficiency to
the outer bounds of the cosmos itself. The necessary conclusion to this cosmic revaluation
was that the totality of the finite cosmos, together with its predominantly feminine attributes,
was considered to be deficient,” (161). What is lacking in this assessment is an appreciation
of the underlying mood of despair to be found in Egypt in particular.
20
Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 191.
21
With what we know about the complex class of Graeco-Egyptians in Egypt at this time, it is
possible that Ammonius is the Greek version of Amon.