THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

different philosophical positions, referring to those men who have inquired about
God:
The wisest among them have speculated about the truth from the ordering of the
world. And the speculation has not reached the truth. For the ordering is spoken
of in three opinions by all the philosophers, hence they do not agree. For some
of them say about the world that it was directed by itself. Others, that it is
providence, others that it is fate. But it is none of these. (NHC III, 70.8-22) 74
Parrott identifies the three positions with the Epicureans, Stoics and
Babylonian astrologers respectively and his general point about a lack of reference to
Platonism is sound, although a jaundiced view towards Fate in the Hellenistic world
was a keynote feature of the time, one derived from a number of directions and with
many nuances. 75
With respect to the first point the text indicts the “self-made” as an
“empty life” (NHC III 71.1) 76
, and yet throughout the following text there are
references to the “self-made Father” (e.g. NHC III 75.6) 77
, and I understand this to
mean that a self-made divinity within a theogonic process (that our author describes in
great detail) is the true understanding, whereas self-made in a rigid and all-inclusive
monistic sense is not: Parrott makes the point that this is in essence the ethic of
hedonism in Epicureanism. 78
With this we must agree, and in fact we have a passage
from Epicurus not cited by Parrott that is remarkably cognate with the above:
Destiny, which some introduce as sovereign over all things, he [the hedonist]
laughs to scorn, affirming rather that some things happen of necessity, others by
chance, others through our own agency. (Diogenes Laertius 10.133) 79
Eugnostos was apparently a very popular tractate among later Gnostics and
one can detect a number of themes that show up in other tractates, specifically, an
anti-philosophical stance, an apophatic description of the Primal Parent, and a strong
development of an Egyptian emanationist theogony. We shall return to the first point
at the end of this chapter. The epithets concerning the Parent are typical of a number
of Gnostic texts: immortal, unnameable, imperishable, incomprehensible,
74
Coptic transcription from NHS, vol. XXVII: Nag Hammadi Codices III, 3-4 and V,1, ed.
Douglas M. Parrott (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), 44.
75
Martin, Hellenistic Religions, 157-58: “Already by the end of the nineteenth century, in
which the Hellenistic age was first defined, it had been proposed that the gnostic teachings
of late antiquity were directed against a deterministic rule of fate, that is, the uncontested
sovereignty of astrological heimarmene. But concern with the rule of fate in the Hellenistic
world was not limited to the anticosmic protest of late antiquity, nor was the notion of fate
limited to the view of an oppressive heimarmene. The Hellenistic structure of fate itself was
in transformation along with the transitory world it articulated.”
76
Coptic transcription from NHS, vol. XXVII, 46.
77
Coptic transcription from NHS, vol. XXVII, 72.
78
Parrott, “Eugnostos and Àll the Philosophers’,” 159.
79
Loeb, vol.2, 659.