Providence, Creation, and Gnosticism According to the Gnostics

• Autores: Dylan M. Burns
• Localización: Journal of early Christian studies: Journal of the North American Patristic Society, ISSN 1067-6341, Nº. 1, 2016, págs. 55-79
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • According to Aëtius, for instance, "the Stoics defined God as an intelligent, designing fire systematically proceeding towards the creation of the world, and encompassing all the seminal principles according to which everything comes about, in accordance with fate, and a breath (... pervading the entire world . . GNOSTIC ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS Irenaeus complains bitterly about how the Marcosians, Valentinians, and Marcionites say that there is another maker than the Father.67 In his mind, worldly evil is the consequence of human free will;68 other "protoorthodox" contemporaries explain evil as the work of Satanic or demonic beings, or the ravages of sin, even as they maintain ultimate divine governance of the cosmos and the human creation.69 Meanwhile, the distinction between the first, high God and inferior beings responsible for creation's complications is the sine qua non of Gnostic myth, found even in Irenaeus's accounts of early exponents of such myths, like Menander.70 It is then clear that the anthropogonies from Nag Hammadi reviewed above use philosophical terms to allegorize an idea about divine care already implicit in our earliest evidence about Gnostic myths: if God cares for and intervenes on behalf of human beings (as Christians of all stripes seem to have agreed upon) but the present world and our present bodies (however construed) are full of evils, then the latter must be the creation of beings who are not providential, and are thus inferior to the beings that God does care for-humanity, which is divine, superior to the creator of the cosmos. [...]much of our Gnostic literature acknowledges this fundamental difference of perspective with their proto-orthodox contemporaries insofar as it attempts to hedge and mollify it. Translations of all primary sources are my own, except where noted (as here). [...]Louth, "Pagans and Christians on Providence," 280. Archäologie, Kunst und Religion zwischen Okzident und Orient. [...]Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism, 25-28; Heikki Räisänen, "Marcion," in A Companion to Second-Century "Heretics," ed.