THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

traditions prevalent in Egypt from 300 B.C.E. to 300 C.E. The use of a female firstperson
narrative is rare enough in ancient texts, the fact that this tradition existed in
Ptolemaic Alexandria three-hundred years prior to the rise of Egyptian Gnostic sects,
presents us with a strong case for historical connectedness. The text above all alludes
to the Gnostic Sophia myth, and draws out the paradoxical unity of Sophia,
manifested in her two aspects after her descent into the lower material realm. The
higher Sophia embodies the return to the Pleroma, while the lower Sophia represents
the carnal passage in life towards the reascent in Gnostic terms. In effect the paradigm
of good and evil existing in Sophia, very powerfully conveyed by the use of
oxymorons (“the master-trope of mysticism”), paradox, and parallelisms, is held up as
an existential mirror for the human condition: “I am merciful, and I am cruel” (NHC
VI 15.15-16). 47
I propose to offer the following analysis of the text based upon Kenneth
Burke’s work on meta-rhetoric. This is a complicated issue, and not one fully
explicated by Burke himself. Burke sees pure persuasion as an a priori presence in
humankind motivating all discourse, an archetype that endlessly discloses:
Apparently the farthest one can go, in matters of rhetoric, is to the
question of “pure persuasion”. But since that would bring us to the
borders of metaphysics, or perhaps better “meta-rhetoric”, we should
try as much as possible to keep particular examples in mind. 48
Meta-rhetoric, I maintain, is more properly the focus within human sentience, and is
to be differentiated from pure persuasion in that the latter is common to all life-forms,
perhaps best characterised as Schopenhauer’s Will in terms of its blind, battling,
fecundity. If rhetoric is the “art of persuasion”, then meta-rhetoric must reflexively
persuade an inner view of its own persuasiveness: in this sense it is specifically
limited to human activities. Meta-rhetoric, as the ultimate humanist rhetoric of
individualism, is a synthesis of poetic, philosophical, and psycho-analytical modes of
discourse, manifestly a “rhetoric of confession” as it must derive from individual
reflexion, a philosophy of rhetoric as it must subsume all discourse. This fusion of
poetic, philosophical, and psycho-analytical endeavours, operating within the
essentially anarchic, and antinomian realm of the radical subject, must attempt to
extend Intelligibility into the realm of the non-rational:
Pure persuasion should be much more intensively purposive... it would be a
“pure” purpose, a kind of purpose which, as judged by the rhetoric of
advantage, is no purpose at all, or which might often look like sheer frustration
of purpose. For its purpose is like that of solving a puzzle, where the puzzlesolver
deliberately takes on a burden in order to throw it off, but if he succeeds,
so far as the tests of material profit are concerned he is no further ahead than
before he began, since he has advanced not relatively, but “in the absolute ” ...
Yet, though what we mean by pure persuasion in the absolute sense exists
47
Coptic transcription from NHS, vol. XI, 240.
48
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1969), 267.