THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

sin in sinlessness”. This is made clearer in the peroration of the text wherein the
speaker awaits those who go through so-called “libertinisms and condemned
passions” (21.23-24) 64
. The “delightful forms which exist in numerous sins” (21.21-
22) 65
, deconstructs the whole notion of “sin”. The qualities of antinomianism, which I
have posited as existing in meta-rhetoric, are also evident in the “negative” side of a
number of oxymorons used to illustrate the paradoxical nature of the speaker; for
example, “shameless, “anarchy”, “godless”, “foreigner”, “unrestraint”, “sin”, and
“lust” are proclaimed by her as being part of her disposition. It might be said here that
there is an ethical realm of sexuality, but that there is also a higher amoral equivalent.
This work clearly demonstrates its concern with paradox and language. It is
also evident that the work self-consciously strives to transcend all dichotomy, and this
is accomplished not by looking at dichotomy as an external reality, but in viewing it
as existing within the duplicities of language, and therefore within the speaker herself
who presents herself, in effect, as Rhetoric incarnate. The relentless insertion of
paradoxical statements is obviously designed to make something “unexpected”
happen in the reader. 66
This something might be said to be the elicitation of an
uncanny identification with the speaker who is “the word of many aspects”. Behind
the ironic awareness of her own persuasiveness, behind the blandishments of
rhetorical seduction with its wilfully alembicated welter of paradoxical terms, lies the
enigma of a rhetorical personality 67
– this alone vaults Intelligibility onto the metarhetorical
level; as such, the purpose underlying the antimonies of these verbal
posturings uses the archetype of pure persuasion as a means, not as an end or
obsession in itself – an ethical tautness in this confession saves it from such a fall. In
the Burkean sense the work is not theological, but logological, in its focus:
64
Ibid., 252.
65
Ibid., 252.
66
A number of oxymoronic pairs of qualities can be listed. These are used in the text following
“I am...”:
first/last whore/holy one
Gnosis/Ignorance reticence/loquaciousness
shameless/modest assurance/fear
war/peace poverty/wealth
merciful/cruel foolish/wise
hated/loved Life/Death
Law/Anarchy scattered/collected
godless/god (“fearing”) praised/despised
foreigner/citizen substance/without substance
restraint/unrestraint harmony/dissolution
sin/sinless lust/abstinence
the one who cries out/the one who listens
67
Patricia Cox Miller, “In Praise of Nonsense,” in Classic Mediterranean Spirituality, ed.,
A.H. Armstrong (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1986), 482: “Like Plotinus, Perfect
Mind knows that her thundering riddles are the echoes of her reality in words, and it is those
words that give her mystery a place in which to dwell in human consciousness... She
identifies herself not only with the paradoxical images of language but with language itself.
Perhaps the ultimate revelation is that this goddess is the very process of speaking that she
uses to characterise herself.