THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

esentment against pernicious Fate and harsh Roman rule. Above all, there is a
despairing reassessment of Ma’at in the context of Egypt as being no longer embodied
in traditional pharaonic rule over the Two Lands. There is a strong foreshadowing
from this remove of the Nietzschean revaluation of all values with its elitist focus
upon a veritable pneumatic Übermensch, if the term can be stripped of its Nazi
misappropriations. The Hellenistic Gnostic stands as the supreme literary
revolutionary who sought not to substitute one form of historical justification with
another, but rather endeavoured to overthrow the thralls of historical process entirely,
this as a result of an Entweltlichungstendenz, an estrangement from the world that is
to be historically and socially situated. 31
Within Alexandria there developed a
pluralism of religious speculation rarely seen concentrated upon the world stage in
one time and place, a hothouse of exotic incubation that owed its allegiance to an
extraordinary heterodoxy forced upon it by historical circumstance Ironically, much
of the resulting dualist mood, in particular the Gnostic temperament at the core of it,
was anti-historical.
The Romans were undoubtedly sapient from a political point of view in
attempting to vitiate Alexandria’s influence through denial of city-council status for
centuries on end. Roman rule, for dualist thought across the board in the Near East,
was synonymous with the “archontic” – Roman satrapies and prefects were the
debased and “hylic” executors of a demonic Historical Rule. It was precisely time and
place that the Gnostic temperament indicted, and the ism tagged onto Gnostic thought
is therefore a misnomer insofar as the antihistoricism of this genre of
mythopoeic/mystical thought precluded any attempt on their part to define themselves
as a historical movement, although there are some subsets of Gnostic thought at large
that exist as exceptions as we shall see. In light of this it can be said that while some
nuances of Gnostic thought were self-consciously sectarian, the overall movement can
be more effectively treated as a literary phenomena. 32
Apart from the pressing need to establish the socio-historical foundations of
Gnostic thought in Egypt, my task is also to supply the textual substructure in earlier
phases of Egyptian religious history for the rise of Gnosis in late antiquity. In the final
analysis however (as it appears in the conclusion), I am not intent upon merely
engaging in a search for various religious motifs that might be superficially matched
up; I wish to apply certain modalities of modern literary-critical theory in my
approach to the array of ancient texts before me once the historical and philosophical
analyses are concluded. The deconstruction of various orientalist assumptions which
subtend the boundaries of the Occident (Edward Said), the fictive or distorted
“author-function” that a scholarly discourse tends to inflict upon a given text (Michel
Foucault), the symbolic and metaphorical polarity in language existing here as the
equivalent of Gnostic pleromic and demiurgic ontologies (Paul de Man), the “nonphilosophy”
of the Egyptians and the Gnostics operating in an antithetical fashion as a
31
Hans Jonas sees this as the main feature of Gnostic thought. See Ioan P. Couliano, from his
interview with Jonas, in Gnosticismo e pensiero moderno: Hans Jonas (Rome: Lérma di
Bretschneider, 1985), 146.
32
A point made by Frederick Wisse, “The Use of Early Christian Literature as Evidence for
Inner Diversity and Conflict,” in Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity, ed.
Charles W. Hendrick and Robert Hodgson Jr (Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers Inc.,
1986), 188. Wisse also notes the spuriousness of orthodox and heretical divisions prior to
200 C.E..
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