Quote:

Originally Posted by dog-on Quote: Originally Posted by maryhelena Yes, even back then, the move away from the evil god being the OT god, towards this god becoming the just god, seems to have caused some confusion.... You know, maryhelena, I would venture so far as to say that, if one is looking for the impetus for Christian origins, this issue may have been a primary driver once someone came up with the concept of an omnibenevolent deity. Perhaps a Platonist reading the LXX?

In the third chapter Moll turns to the question of Marcion’s dualism, rejecting Harnack’s view that the arch-heretic distinguished between a just and a good God (47–76). It is argued that Marcion’s original doctrine distinguished between a good and an evil God, which was deformed by later Marcionites into a tripartite system of good God, just God, and evil God (or evil matter).

Marcion identified the evil God with the God of the Old Testament, seen as the imperfect and flawed Creator, the God of the Jews, the Lawgiver, and the Judge. The good God is revealed by Jesus Christ and preached by Paul.

Moll suggests that Marcion conceived of the good God as seeking to destroy the evil Creator God, characterizing Christ’s stance as Trotz (spiteful, almost childish defiance) against the Creator and his law.

Thus it is the evil God who is first in Marcion’s system and the good God who is second. “The second God could not exist without the first” (67). “The good God is a pure anti-God, who merely reacts to the malice of his counterpart” (76).

RBL review of The Arch heretic Marcion, by Mark DelCogliano, 8/6/11

First Principals.
• The One (Monad): active, imposing “limit” (peras) on the formlessness (apieron) of the opposite principal. The Good. Father. First Principle.
• The Indefinite Dyad: a duality, being infinitely extensible and divisible, being simultaneously infinitely large and infinitely small.

Secondary Principals.
Ideas (from Greek) or Forms (from Latin). These are eternal, changeless, perfect. These represent order & reason. Ideas are universal abstract representations of the many types of things, and properties we feel and see around us, that can only be perceived by reason (Greek: λογική). Ideas serve as "a pattern intelligible and always the same."
• The first and most important Idea is The Good [not the same as the One, also called "The Good"]: it is the highest Form, which all other Forms seek to emulate.

The Receptacle, the "nurse of all becoming": has no properties, being "an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible and is most incomprehensible," which is unformed matter existing in space, that which is always becoming and never is, chaos. It is indestructible and eternal, like the Ideas.

The Demiurge (Craftsman) fashioned the cosmos (Universe) perceptible by the senses, from the Receptacle, using the Ideas as patterns: The cosmos "was only an imitation of the pattern, generated and visible." It is the corporeal, the temporal and becoming, which is apprehended by opinion or sense perception. The cosmos is a copy of the eternal and unchanging [Ideas], and is a living creature.
• World Soul: The soul of the universe, created when the Demiurge created the cosmos from The receptacle using the Ideas as templates. Described this process as the putting of a soul into the body of the universe, thereby putting intelligence (regularity and order) into it.
• Individual Souls: Includes souls of Gods, Daimons, and man, each inhabiting their portion of the cosmos (Gods in heavens, Daimons in the Air, and Animals/Man on earth). Immortal, subject to reincarnation as higher/lower souls.

It is generally asserted that what chiefly distinguishes the Gnostic attitude from main-line Platonism is a conviction that this world is not only imperfect (a view with which all sides would concur), but the creation of an evil entity, and that we [souls] are total aliens in it. Plainly a radically world-negating philosophy must arise from this basic position. Within the Gnostic thought-world, however, Valentinus represents a relatively non-dualistic position. For him, the creation of the world results, not from the eternal confrontation between two archetypal powers, as it does for a thinker like Mani, but rather from a Fall occurring within the framework of a previously perfect system. ...

As for the basic framework of the system, it is, if anything, reminiscent of Pythagorean metaphysics. We have initially a monadic and a dyadic figure, the latter being subordinated to the former ([although] in one variant of Valentinianism ... the original Aeon is alone in his glory, and produces Nous and Aletheia without the aid of Ennoia [page 386] (Hippolytus, Ref. VI 29, 5ff.)). The name Ennoia, denoting as it does unuttered thought, is reminiscent of such figures as Philo's Sophia (in her capacity as mother of the Logos), or the Isis of the preface to Plutarch's Isis and Osiris.

The monadic principle, the perfect, archetypal Aeon, is termed proarchê (fore-beginning), propatôr (fore-father) and bythos (abyss).

The female principle is called, besides Ennoia, also charis (grace) and sigê (silence). The [arch-typical] Aeon puts forth a seed into Ennoia, and she produces Intellect (nous) and, as his consort, Truth (alêtheia). Nous receives the titles of 'only-begotten', 'Father' and 'First Principle of all things'.

We may note here a deliberate piece of oneupmanship on the part of the Gnostics.

Their secondary, derived principle, Nous, is given the titles of the Platonic supreme god, 'Father' and 'first principle', while their own supreme principle is 'Forefather' and 'pre-first principle'.

This is a motif apparent also in Chaldaean theology, and, as we saw in the last chapter, something of it rubbed off onto Numenius. At any rate, Nous is the only product of the Forefather that is granted knowledge of him, and in virtue of that knowledge he produces a further pair of principles, Logos and Zoe ('life'). In Logos we have another philosophic concept, familiar to us in particular (in this book) from Philo, but not much is made of it in the Valentinian system, except as a source of further aeons. ...

Passing over for our present purpose the further elaborations which make up the Pleroma, we come to the lastborn of the Aeons, the female principle Sophia. About her Fall something has been said just previously. It is a most interesting concept, representing as it does the striving of the religio-philosophic mind to account, not only for the imperfection of the physical world, but for its creation at all in any form.

Plato himself was sufficiently dualistic to postulate a cause of imperfection, albeit a rather passive, negative one, external to God, on which God works as best he can. There is no question of imperfection or of a fall within the divine realm.

Only in the case of the individual soul is there question (in the myth of the Phaedrus) of some fall from a previous perfection. But the postulation of the Indefinite Dyad introduces a cause of disequilibrium at the highest level, and it is the workings of this principle that are used to explain not only all that is imperfect, but all multiplicity and even existence.

Speusippus, as we have seen, refused to characterize the Dyad as evil, which is a more logical attitude to take. For Valentinus, similarly, there is nothing evil about Ennoia. She is simply the condition for the generation of everything [page 387] after the Forefather. Evil only arises at a much lower level, with the most junior of the aeons [Sophia].

Sophia sins through her desire to know her origin, to comprehend the nature of the Forefather. She plunges recklessly into the abyss where he dwells, causing a disequilibrium in the Pleroma, and is only brought up short by the intervention of an entity previously not heard of, termed Horos ('boundary'—a variant, perhaps, of the Pythagorean peras, 'limit'). This entity seems to be an aspect of the Forefather generated by the imbalance within the Pleroma. It may be seen, in more philosophic terms, as the Logos in its regulating aspect, or, in Philo's system, the 'regal power' of God [which is Philo's sole principal].

Sophia is restored to her place, but the result of her disruption remains, objectified as a 'formless entity', and causes pain to the other aeons. They cause a further aeon, Christos, to be produced, in order to deal with this formlessness. Christos, like Horos, is a logos-figure. He separates off the formless entity, and expels it from the Pleroma. It becomes the 'lower' Sophia, or Achamoth, a projection of the higher Sophia outside the intelligible world. It corresponds to the irrational World Soul of Middle Platonic metaphysics, an irrational entity which yet yearns for what is above it, and grieves because of its separation from the higher world. Its emotions, grief, fear, bewilderment and ignorance, all become hypostatized, and give rise to the four elements of the material world, while a fifth quality of Achamoth, its 'turning back' (epistrophê) to what is above it, produces Soul.

Out of this soul-substance, Achamoth produces a son, the Demiurge, and it is at this stage that we find in Valentinianism an explicit parody of the Timaeus, and through it of Platonic metaphysics in general, as well as an attack on Jehovah as portrayed in the Old Testament.

The Valentinian Demiurge is not so much evil (as he is in certain other Gnostic traditions), as simply ignorant. He does not know the true nature of things; he cannot see the Forms, yet he thinks that he is the unique and supreme God. He organizes the material universe into seven heavens, over which, in the eighth sphere, he presides.

This notion that our world is in the power of an evil, or at best ignorant, being is one that is characteristically Gnostic, but of which we have seen dim suggestions both in Philo and in Plutarch's teacher Ammonius, and even perhaps in Xenocrates' connexion of the sublunar realm with 'Titanic' deities and a 'lower Zeus'. It is plainly one explanation of the world's imperfection with which men like to torment themselves, and is after all only a personified development of Plato's [page 388] notion of Necessity (Ananke) as irreducibly present in the material world.

The Demiurge tries to imitate the structure of the higher world in his creation of the material world, but fails systematically through ignorance. The parody of the Timaeus attains its sharpest manifestation, perhaps, in the description of the Demiurge's attempt to imitate Eternity (Aiôn) with the creation of Time (cf. Tim. 37Cff.): ...

[John Dillon, The Middle Platonists (1977), pgs 385-388]