For Those Seeking but Not Loving the Gnostic Religion

This is linked to my podcasts on Ancient Faith, that you can listen to here, and here.

Behold, the mythical Ogdoad (the Gnostic hierarchy found in the pleroma).

The Pleroma of Valentinus’ System

The above is the peculiar system of Valentinus. Each iteration of the discrete pairs, or syzygies, takes the members of the pleroma further away from the one god. Sophia, the furthest removed, thus brings about “the fall” which is also “the creation” via thinking a thought not linked to Bythos.

The best of works on this, the standards as it were, are first Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, which is very good, but suffers from Jonas’s clear Jungian assumptions, and also that Jonas wrote before the full reality of what was contained in the Nag Hammadi texts.

Works not suffering under Jonas’ limitations are Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism; and Giovanni Filoramo’s A History of Gnosticism. Both of these are readily available and also highly readable.

Each of these books address the Gnostic systems, and while more recent authors, John Tanner writing on Sethian Gnosticism and Birger Pierson on Alexandria and Neoplatonism, they add a lot of details, which building on what Jonas, Filoramo, and especially Rudolph have already done.

Finally, as regard Prof. Elaine Pagels, the best thing to do is visit her Amazon author’s page.

For a wonderful précis of Pagels’ works, see William J. Tighe’s article in Touchstone (and I hope the link opens for you all).