THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

I speak of endemic scholarly constructs that tend to impede our understanding
of Gnostic thought for two main reasons. First, there has not been enough emphasis
upon understanding more deeply the philosophical essence of Gnostic thought – this
in itself might largely define the historical/social boundaries of the movement. 14
The
hermeneutic hindrances here arise out of the above-mentioned “History of Religions”
agenda with their traditional valorisation of Religion over mythology, Orthodoxy over
heresy, System over syncretism, Science over magic, and the Philosophical over the
pre-philosophical, all of which manifest implicitly occidental agenda that tend to be
more scholastic than insightful. The kernel and pith of Gnostic philosophy, its
“misprision” and “hermeneutics of suspicion” as applied to the sacred cows of the
time, has not been adequately linked to irreverent and anarchic Alexandria (at least in
the Roman view at the time), to the Eclectic Potamon, the Skeptics Arius Didymus
and Arcesilaus active there, to the ever-widening anti-religious polemical bow-wave
of Euhemerus, or to the earlier Sophistic assault on aletheia for example. There are
also a number of obvious temperamental and conceptual overlaps between Gnostic
dualism and Greek Philosophy that have yet to be considered within a socio-historical
pan-optic; in particular, an entire range of dualist, so-called “Middle Platonic”
philosophers from Empedocles to Numenius demand attention. Secondly, and for
myself this resulted from a deeper philosophical understanding of the movement
along the above lines, there has been no serious attempt to situate the movement in
Egypt; that is, not just geographically connected with Egypt, but spiritually linked
with her millennia of religious thought and expression. This is by far the most
surprising omission given the textual and historical conspicuousness of Alexandria,
and the fact that the tremendous Hellenistic ferment of the time involved an acute
Graeco-Egyptian religious/philosophical fusion just prior to and concurrent with the
rise of the Gnostic sects in Egypt. With Egypt in particular, ca. 525 B.C.E. - 300 C.E.,
we might expect that centuries of foreign subjugation and revolt had a rather profound
watershed effect upon the Egyptian psyche, in large measure explaining the rise of
dualist temperament and speculation. Far from acknowledging this manifest premise,
the field has disenfranchised the very Egyptian language through which Gnostic texts
come down to us, claiming unconvincingly that all the Nag Hammadi texts are
redactions from Greek originals for which, incidentally, not one manuscript survives.
This might be the case, but the socio-historical picture points towards bilinguality, if
not multi-linguality, not a hermetic Greek world, and the larger inference that only
Greek-speakers were involved in the rise of the Gnostic movement is a sociohistorical
thesis that is as bold as it is unsubstantiated. All those who have seriously
studied Graeco-Roman Alexandria know how problematic it is to speak of pure
“Greeks” beyond the immediate coterie of the Lagid dynasty – by Roman times this
ethnic distinction was more acutely blurred, the overcompensating pretensions of the
metropolites under Roman rule in Egypt notwithstanding. 15
To assume an ethnic-
14
An astute point made by Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, trans. Anthony
Alcock (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 144. One only wishes that he might have taken his
own advice with respect to treating Egyptian thought, even cursorily, in this otherwise
important study.
15
That an endogamous core of Greeks attempted to maintain their own cultural integrity
amongst a sea of Egyptians is hardly a surprise. However, given the evidence for
intermarriage and the fact there was at this time a very strong political motive for distancing
oneself from the status of “Egyptian”, we may surmise that the number and influence of
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