THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

I have drawn upon these extensive quotations to make a number of important
points First off, Gnostic and Platonic interests coincide in all three passages.
Secondly, and just as important, the expressions used are quite similar; there is in fact
no great conceptual abyss between supposed philosophical and mythological
discourses. This passage from Basileides is in fact remarkable for its vigour and
clarity, and his concept of the “world-seed” is directly analogous to the realm of the
Platonic Forms. The last point, and one which shall be returned to in our examination
of Ammonius Saccas, is that there is no great difference between Plotinus, vehement
anti-Gnostic, and Basileides on this issue. 54
Nor is this some minor abstruse point but
is in fact at the very heart of all emanationist doctrines: how and why does a Perfect
One, residing in tranquil motionlessness, commence an emanation process which
eventually produces a lesser, distant, or inferior, realm? 55
The World-Soul of Albinus is an entity which requires awakening and
ordering 56
; this, too, is a critical act in the Basileidean theogony: “Then the Gospel
had to come to the Sphere of the Seven, so that the Ruler of the Hebdomad might also
be taught and have the Gospel brought to him”. 57
A meta-language of gnosis is also
the dynamic by which the Archgenitor of the Trimorphic Protennoia comes to realise
his essential state of Ignorance:
For behold, he himself, the Archgenitor of our birth in whom we took pride,
even he is ignorant about this Utterance” (44.27) 58
As with Plutarch, the World-Soul of Albinus pre-existed in a dormant fashion, “a sort
of trancelike sleep” 59
which is made to look upon “the objects of intellection” of the
54
However, it should be noted that, according to Hippolytus, Basileides was against
emanationism per se (describing God in such a scheme as a spider at the centre of its web),
preferring instead to detail a Memphite conception of immediate creation by the Word: “the
seed of the world, says he, came from the non-existent, the word which was spoken.
Foerster, Gnosis:A Selection of Gnostic Texts, vol. 1, 65.
55
See Jan Zandee’s important work, The Terminology of Plotinus and of Some Gnostic
Writings, Mainly the Fourth Treatise of the Jung Codex (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-
Archaeologisch Instituut in Het Nabije Oosten, 1961). Numerous textual parallels are drawn
out between the thought of Plotinus and that expressed in the Gnostic Tripartite Tractate.
Zandee’s conclusion that, “Plotinus only gradually departed from gnostic dualism and
became a more monistic thinker,”(3) is contextualised as a reaction of the older Plotinus, and
his larger conclusion that “Plotinus as well as the Gnostics draw from the common well of
Middle Platonism,” (40) is clearly the case. With respect to the core concept of
emanationism (probole), Zandee’s depiction of Plotinian and Gnostic necessity can also be
applied to Middle Platonism as a whole, as well as the Chaldean system: “Creation has not
been intended consciously. It is not based on a determined plan of the creator, nor on a
constraint put upon him from the outside; but it is founded upon an inner necessity, just as
fire must radiate warmth,”(31).
56
Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 284.
57
From Hippolytus, Refutatio VII 26.4; Foerster, A Selection of Gnostic Texts, vol. 1, 71.
58
Coptic transcription from NHS, vol. XXVIII, 420.