THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

the Didaskalikos (Guide to the Doctrines of Plato), begins with the definition that
Philosophy is “a striving after wisdom or a release and a redirecting of the soul from
the body” 50
, this based upon the intelligible world. Elsewhere, a distinction of a type
of knowledge independent of sense-perception is developed.
Another Middle Platonic development held in common with Gnostic thought
is a focus upon the need for theogony in the peerless and motionless One. One sees
this contradictory depiction in the thought of Albinus:
Since Mind is better than Soul, and Mind in activity intelligising all things
simultaneously and eternally, is better than mind in potentiality, and nobler than
this is the cause of this and whatever might exist superior to these, this would be
the Primal God, which is the cause of the eternal activity of the mind of the
whole heaven (i.e. of the cosmos). The former, being motionless itself, directs
its activity towards the latter, even as the sun towards vision, when someone
looks at it, and as an object of desire sets desire in motion, while remaining
itself motionless; even thus will this Mind move the mind of the whole
heaven. 51
This can be profitably compared with the Gnostic Basileides of Alexandria, a
contemporary of Albinus who, according to Hippolytus, targets the same issue:
Since therefore there was nothing, no matter, no substance, nothing
insubstantial, nothing simple, nothing composite, nothing non-composite,
nothing imperceptible (non subjective), no man, no angel, no god, nothing at all
that can be named or can be apprehended by sense perception, nothing of the
mental things and thus (also nothing of all that which) can be simply described
in even more subtle ways, the non-existent god... without intelligence, without
perception, without will, without resolve, without impulse, without desire,
wished to make a world. I say ‘he wished’, he says, for want of a word, wish,
intelligence, and perception being excluded. By ‘world’ (I mean) not the flat,
divisible world which later divided itself, but a world-seed. 52
As does Plotinus a few centuries later, evidenced in this description of his thought:
Nous proceeded from the One (and Soul from Nous) without in any way
affecting its Source There is no activity on the part of the One, still less any
willing or planning or choice... There is simply a giving-out which leaves the
Source unchanged and undiminished. But though this giving-out is necessary, in
the sense that it cannot be conceived as not happening or as happening
otherwise, it is also entirely spontaneous: there is no room for any sort of
binding or constraint, internal or external, in Plotinus’ thought about the One. 53
50
Jeremiah Reedy, trans., The Platonic Doctrines of Albinus (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press,
1991), 21.
51
Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 282.
52
Hippolytus, Refutatio VII 21.1. Foerster, Gnosis:A Selection of Gnostic texts, vol 1, 64.
53
A.H. Armstrong, Plotinus: A Volume of Selections (London: Unwin & Allen, 1953), 33.