The present series has analyzed the natural world from its most basic elements to its most fantastic creatures to the operations of World Soul and Holy Spirit in it. But a question should haunt the educated reader: it it not the case, from the Christian perspective, that this world is fallen? Is it not the case that gods of sea and land and fire and wind and skies beyond are all, on the Christian reading, potentially bifurcated along dualistic lines of good and evil, and that the resultant cosmos is a creation of depreciated value? Is there not something, then, inherently gnostic to Christianity’s native apocalypticism, which ought to make Christians suspicious of the divinity of the natural world? Should we not, perhaps like the students of Sakyamuni, be seeking disenchantment from the sensible world?
The New Testament is not of one mind on this matter. The earliest texts are clearly charged with apocalyptic fervor and belief in the soon-coming dissolution of this kosmos as it presently exists and its reconstitution otherwise. Paul notes in Galatians, for example, that “thus also we”—here, Paul is employing the first-person plural rhetorically to appeal to his gentile readership—“when we were children, were enslaved beneath the elements of the kosmos” (οὕτως καὶ ἡμεῖς, ὅτε ἦμεν νήπιοι, ὑπὸ τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου ἤμεθα δεδουλωμένοι; Gal 4:3); it is this slavery that the Galatians threaten to renew: knowing and being known by God (the cognate verb here is from gnosis), “how do you turn again to the weak and poor elements, which again you want to serve” by observing months, times, and years (4:9-10). In other words, Paul’s gentile readers once served the elementary powers of the kosmos; they were freed when they came to know God in Christ, through baptism; their present behavior now threatens to enslave them afresh. This makes sense for Paul: after all, he believes that his congregants will judge angels in the age to come (1 Cor 6:3), so they should not be serving angelic powers, good or evil, in the present aeon. In the Synoptic Gospels, the heavenly powers will be humiliated at the coming of the Son of Man (Mk 13:24-25; Matt 24:29; Lk 21:25-26)—implying perhaps that they are cosmic adversaries at his descent. So, too, the world is destroyed in the Johannine Apocalypse, the heaven rolled up like a scroll (Rev 6:12-27). Elsewhere, the author of Colossians mentions the stoicheia, the “elements,” as well: he warns against the deceit of “philosophy…according to the tradition of men, according to the stoicheia of the kosmos and not according to Christ” (Col 2:8); if the readers have died with with Christ to the stoicheia of the kosmos, they should not observe merely cosmic regulations (2:20-21). 2 Peter promises that the stoicheia, “burning, will be loosed” (2 Pet 3:10) and “burning, will melt” (3:12) at the eschaton. Cosmic destruction and dissolution of the stoicheia will pave the way for the recreation of the world.1
But things are slightly more complicated when one turns to texts that have a more realized eschatology, where the cosmic catastrophe and eschatological judgment have in some sense already occurred, especially the Deutero-Pauline literature and the Gospel of John. Colossians also claims that the cosmic reconciliation has already occurred: “in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1:19-20). God already “disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in [Christ]” (2:15); the language of “triumphing” (θριαμβεύσας) here is particularly telling, since the triumphus is what happens once one has already won the battle against the adversary and is celebrating their brutal victory with parade, sacrifice, feasting, and not infrequently the ritual killing of the enemy.2 In other words, Christ’s death on the cross (the subject of the immediately precedent verse, 2:14), and perhaps his resurrection, ascension, and enthronement, have already humbled the powers whose eschatological defeat the more futurist authors of the New Testament envision. Already, the Colossians “have been raised with Christ” (3:1). This is not to say that there is no futurist eschatology in Colossians: the author does speak of Christ’s future appearance (e.g., 3:4); but the definitive victory of Christ over the powers has already taken place. So too in Ephesians: God has already “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph 1:3); “he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (1:9-10); God “raised [Christ] from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:20-23). Again, there is some eschatological remainder here, but not much: Christ is already “head over all things.” Once we followed the “prince of the power of the air” (2:2), but God “made us alive together with Christ…raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” that is, already (2:5-6). Indeed, it is now “through the church [that] the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places” (3:10). Christ “who descended is he who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things” (4:10), that is, including in the lower heavens, the earth, and the chthonian, where the cosmic powers dwell. Sure: there is still war with the powers of the lower heavens (6:10-20); but this is secondary to the elements of realized eschatology in Ephesians, which are, frankly, most of the desired eschaton. In John, this same pattern holds: despite occasional mentions of a future parousia, nearly the entirety of the eschaton is collapsed into the person, passion, and community of Jesus himself. John is still “apocalyptic” in mode, though not in genre, and its concept of the eschatological consummation of God’s purposes is all but equated with the events of Christ’s Pascha.3
So the post-paschal universe, for these authors, is to some extent already that in which the elemental powers have been humbled and subordinated to Christ as predicted by Paul (1 Cor 15:20-28). The diversity of Early Christian takes on the mater reflects the diversity one finds in the New Testament. Origen, for example, responding to Celsus’ claim that all consumption of food and drink, even breathing of air, constitutes communion with daimones, “challenge[s] anyone to defend Celsus’ doctrine” on the matter. “Let him show how those appointed to administer all the things just mentioned are not certain divine angels of God, but are daemons, the entire race of whom is evil” (Contra Celsum 8.31).4 Indeed:
For we say that the earth bears the things which are said to be under the control of nature because of the appointment of invisible husbandmen, so to speak, and other governors who control not only the produce of the earth but also all flowing water and air. For this reason also the water in the wells and in the natural springs becomes rain and circulates, and the air is kept free from pollution, and becomes capable of giving life to those who breathe it. We certainly do not maintain that these invisible beings are daemons. (Contra Celsum 8.31)
Demonic activity is exclusively predicable of natural evils: “we would say that they are responsible for famines, barren vines and fruit-trees, and droughts, and also for the pollution of the air, causing damage to the fruits, and sometimes even the death of animals and plague among men. Of all these things daemons are the direct creators” (8.31). Origen offers a much more complex reading in De Principiis III.3.2-3.5 First, Origen mitigates the effect of demonic activity in natural evil and moral temptation: it takes place not only without divine opposition but even with divine permission (III.2.7). Next, Origen distinguishes between different kinds of spirits at work in the world: declines to suggest that “those wisdoms of the rulers of this world…are forced upon human beings by the opposing powers with the desire of ensnaring and injuring them,” preferring instead to argue that “they are offered only as a result of error, that is, not with a view to injuring human beings, but because the rulers of this world themselves think these things to be true and therefore desire to teach others things that they themselves hold to be true” (III.3.3). The “rulers” in question are “certain spiritual powers having been assigned the rule over certain nations in this world”; “besides these rulers,” Origen says, “certain special forces of this world, that is, certain spiritual powers, working certain works, which they have themselves, through the freedom of their will, chosen to effect” also exist. But while these spirits may cause disasters and tempt us, it is we who exercise free moral agency (III.4.1-4). Finally, Christ “teaches the rulers themselves the art of ruling…he had come, then, to restore the discipline…of ruling and reigning” (III.5.6): the rulers, together with the ruled, are all collectively subject to Christ and saved in the eschaton (III.5.7). The powers, even the demonic powers, are not wholly dissolute: they are ignorant, incompetent, and/or sometimes malicious, certainly, but they are still created by God and therefore good in their nature, even if some of them are for the time being corrupted in their will. Experienced dualism is the key to angelic or demonic communion, it would seem, for Origen: when we experience the life-sustaining and nourishing powers of creation, it is the angels we feast with; when we experience creation’s brutality and ferocity, it is potentially the demons. In the end, the whole corporeal order will be suffused with Spirit, Christ, and God.
This moderate take became normative among Early Christians in part as an explicit response to one afterlife of Jewish apocalypticism in Christian circles: namely, certain brands of gnosticism. As is now standard in scholarship on the matter, “gnosticism” was not an alternative religion in the ancient world: “gnostic” is a grab-bag term that ancients and moderns alike use to refer to a number of more closely and more loosely related teachers, schools, and communities on the margins of Christian assemblies as they were federating in the second and third centuries and eclectically inspired by a variety of Mediterranean and Near Eastern philosophies and esoteric beliefs. Simply put, some of these gnostics were heterodox to their contemporaries and later Christians—most famously, Valentinus, Basilides, and their followers—but from the perspective of the lineage that went on to become orthodoxy, others identified or identifying as “gnostic” were orthodox: the latter we typically hail as formative theologians, like St. Gregory Nyssen, or else regard as the great monastic and ascetic masters of the ancient Christian Tradition, like the Desert Fathers. In reality, the differences between the two were more subtle than heresiologists (not the most subtle thinkers then or now) frequently suggested. “Gnosticism” is a complex phenomenon, in which heterodoxy and orthodoxy must be separated like chaff and wheat, so close and similar they can often appear. The subtle distinction between these thinkers is the character of the corporeal, sensible world: whether they are moderates like Origen, who take the corporeal world to be good in itself but presently subject to a temporary futility and demonic interpolation, or radicals like Valentinus, who take the sensible creation itself to be an intrinsically bad state of being. Between Valentinus and Basilides, we have more of the former and his school than we do of the latter, so I will stick to a few of his extant words. Our earliest fragments of Valentinus himself are recorded by St. Clement of Alexandria in various portions of the Stromateis.6 These include an extended meditation on the Adam story:
And fear, so to speak, fell over the angels in the presence of the molded form when he spoke things greater than his molding (should have allowed), on account of the one who invisibly placed a seed of superior substance within him and who spoke with boldness. Thus also among the races of earthly people the works of people become frightening to those who made them, such as statues and images and all things crafted by human hands in the name of a god. For as one molded in the name of a human, Adam brought about fear of the preexistent human, since that very one stood within him, and they were terrified and immediately hid their work. (Strom. 2.36.2-4)
The important word here is “mold” and its cognates, plasis in Greek: in Greek exegesis from Philo onwards, the plasis of the Yahwistic creation account (Gen 2:4-3:24) is the inferior, sensible creation to the superior, intelligible creation (this time, poiesis) of the Priestly creation account (1:1-2:3). But where Philo would have stressed that the sensible creation is as good an image of the intelligible one as possible, Valentinus feels no such pressure. The first Adam, he says, despite his molded form, possessed an “invisible seed in him given from the nature from above” (Greek: ton aoratos en auto sperma dedokota tes anothen ousias) which caused him to be “bold” (parresiazomenon). We later learn, perhaps, the reason for the antinomy between Adam’s molded form and his bold speech, which made the angels tremble: “From the beginning you are immortal,” we learn in Stromateis 4.89.2-3, “and you are children of eternal life. You wanted to divide death within you, so that you might consume and destroy it, so that death might die in you and through you. For when you destroy the world, you yourselves are not destroyed; you rule over creation and all corruption.” The true Adam is the immortal one, the child of eternal life: he manifests “the preexistent human,” that “stands in” his mortal form. Soon after, we get something of an extended explanation for this distinction between the intelligible and the sensible:
As much as the image of a living face is inferior (to a living face), the world is inferior to the living eternity. What then is the cause (of the power) of the image? The greatness of the face provides the painter with a figure, so that the images might be honored by his name. For the form was not intended to be perfectly accurate, but the name filled what was lacking in the molded form. The invisibility of God cooperates with what has been molded (for the sake of) fidelity. (Strom. 4.89.6-90.1)
This is not quite the Valentinian Gnosticism of Christian heresiology, but it is a decidedly anticosmic perspective. Hence the anticosmism of later Valentinian texts, though I would again stress that it is not always obvious how distinct this position is from either New Testament or early patristic witnesses. Exemplorum gratia: “[Christ] walked about in this place where you reside, speaking about the law of nature—but I call it,” whether “the place where you reside” or “the law of nature,” “‘death’” (Treatise on the Resurrection 44:13-21); “The Savior swallowed death—you are not thought to be ignorant (about this)—for he set aside the world, since it is perishing” (45:14-17); “The thought of those who are saved will not be destroyed” and “The mind of those who have known him will not be destroyed,” but this implies that the body, at least the fleshly body, will be (46:22-24); it is unclear if another, higher body is in view or if pure incorporeality is: “Therefore, do not be in doubt concerning the resurrection, my son Rheginos. For when you did not exist in the flesh”—but in the spiritual corpus?—“you received flesh once you entered into this world. Why will you not receive flesh when you ascend into the eternity? That which is better than the flesh is hat which is for it a cause of life” (again, a spiritual body? It is not clearly said; 47:1-10). Nevertheless, “The world is an illusion” (48:27-28); but “the resurrection does not have this kind of nature, because truth is that which is established” (48:30-33), implying that resurrection is escape from the world.
The distinction between this perspective and that which would later be championed as “orthodox” should appear sufficiently thin at this point. By the fourth century, there were still a fair number of “orthodox” Christians advocating for a spiritual resurrection body—not in the sense of absolute incorporeality, but of a glorified bodily vehicle capable of dwelling in the Kingdom of God (which may or may not be what Valentinus has in mind); there were still “orthodox” Christians speaking of the present kosmos or aeon as fallen or beneath the rule of dark powers; and it was still the case that “orthodox” Christians read Jewish Scripture as an imperfect revelation from the secondary divine principle, the preincarnate Christ, rather than from God himself (a position also taken by Valentinus’ student Ptolemy in his Letter to Flora). Where the disagreement seems to be is simply on whether the corporeal order itself is redeemable or is in fact wholly dissolute. The mainstream position of Valentinians and other “gnostics” deemed heterodox appears to have been Yes, that the universe as it presently stands is evil because it is animated by a fallen World Soul, Sophia/Wisdom, and administered by an evil Demiurge, the Devil or Ialdabaoth, sometimes equated with fully and other times partially the deity of Jewish Scripture.7 The “orthodox” gnostics objected on these points. First, ditheism of this sort, which posited two Gods, one of the Old and the other of the New Testaments, was a hermeneutical error in the reading of Scripture (e.g., Origen, De Principiis II.4-5), leading to a metaphysical error at the level of first principles: key to Christian Faith is that there is just one God in the ultimate sense of that term, confessed as Father, Almighty, and Creator. Moreover, while Early Christians were frequently advocates for the philosophical concept of the World Soul (e.g., De Principiis II.1-3), they took the notion that the World Soul was completely fallen as, essentially, an attack on the related concept of divine providence (Greek: pronoia). If the principle of the world’s animation, movement, and harmony was fundamentally fallen, evil, or corrupted, then there would be no intermediate force in the world directing it towards the good; and beyond the doctrinal problem this would create, it would also beg the question of why the universe did not simply collapse into nonbeing to begin with, since existence is convertible with goodness in God himself. Far closer in spirit to the “orthodox” Christian vision would be, instead, the position taken by Plutarch in De Iside et Osiride: the World Soul is tensed as it were between its contemplation of the Divine Logos and the absolute indeterminacy of matter, which is the source of evil. The World Soul, with its demiurgic intellective power, constructs the sensible kosmos as the best possible image of the intelligible universe resident within the Divine Mind, as best as it can perceive.
This sort of vision was also the ground on which pagans, not just Christians, took issue with the gnostics. Here the pagan Platonist Plotinus—younger contemporary of Origen, fellow student with him of Ammonius Saccas, and probably visited by his Christian peer at some point—is the most important interlocutor. In Ennead II.9, often titled “Against the Gnostics,” Plotinus’ argument begins from the enumeration of reality’s principles by the One or the Good, the Intellect, and Soul: since the One is simple, it must be the case that its lack of composition makes it the first principle; “we should take this as our principle,” he rights, “and next after it Intellect, that is, the primary thinker, and next after Intellect Soul, since this is the natural order” (Ennead II.9.1). “We ought not,” he admonishes, “to posit any more or any fewer principles in the intelligible world. For if anyone posits fewer, they will have to say either that Soul and Intellect are identical, or that Intellect and that which is first are identical, but it has been shown repeatedly that these are distinct from one another” (II.9.1). It is logically impossible in Plotinus’ system that there should be fewer than these, but why not more intelligible principles of reality than these? Plotinus is skeptical because of the way that more principles end up cutting off our more immediate experiences of Soul and Intellect from their transcendent principles by introducing “superfluous conceptual distinctions” (II.9.2). “[I]t is necessary,” he writes, “that all things be always in succession, and those other than that which is first are generated in the sense that they derive from others. So, the intelligibles that are said to be ‘generated’ did not come into being; rather they were and will be constantly coming into being” (II.9.3). For this reason, Plotinus is also skeptical of the gnostic theory of a heavenly fall of the world soul: “[I]f they should say that the soul of the universe produced the universe after having fallen, let them tell us the cause of this fall as well as when this fall occurred. For if it was from eternity”—that is, because the principles of intelligible reality “were and will be constantly coming into being”—”then by their own argument the soul remains always in a fallen state, and if it began to fall at some point, why did it not fall earlier?” (II.9.4). The gnostic theories about how the World Soul—read, Sophia or Wisdom—creates the world do not make sense on the basis of Plotinus’ metaphysics of creation: “[I]f it did decline” (from its exalted state in the intelligible order), “the producing is due to its having forgotten the things in the intelligible world, but if it forgot, how does it create? For what source is there for its production other than the Forms which it saw in the intelligible world?” (II.9.4) Neither the why nor the how of the World Soul’s creation of the sensible world bears any logic if the World Soul is fallen, nor does the world’s perdurance (cf. II.1); and Plotinus wonders what sort of a world an unfallen World Soul might have made from the gnostic perspective:
What other image of the intelligible world could there be that is finer than this one? For what other fire could be a better image of the intelligible Fire apart from sensible fire? And what other earth apart from sensible earth could come next after the Earth in the intelligible world? And what sphere could be more precise, more dignified, and more well-ordered in its revolution after hte one in the intelligible world that contains the intelligible cosmos? And what other sun after the intelligible Sun could be ranked ahead of this visible sun? (II.9.4)
The absurdity of the gnostic position, to Plotinus, is most evident in their arrogance: “It is outrageous that these men who have bodies such as human beings have, as well as appetites, pains, and anger, insist on their own power and claim that they can be in contact with the intelligible, but then deny that in the sun there is a power more unaffected than our own, even though it is more ordered and less subject to change, and deny that that the sun’s wisdom is superior to our own, even though we only recently came into being and there are so many deceptive obstacles preventing us from reaching the truth!” (II.9.5). Even more outrageous: “to say that our soul—even the soul of the basest human beings—is immortal and divine but that the entire universe and the stars up there, though they are composed of much better and purer elements, do not have a share in immortal soul” (II.9.5). What point is there in their longing for “‘a new earth’”—one wonders if the “gnostics” in mind do not begin to include ordinary Christians?—if it is simply “the paradigm of a cosmos that they despise?” (II.9.5). Their extraneous hypostases are made-up language (II.9.6), a bastardization of Plato and “innovations introduced to establish their own brand of philosophy” (II.9.6). Their primary mistake is “reducing the Demiurge to being identical to Soul, and granting Soul the identical affections that belong to particular souls,” that is, subjection to the passions (II.9.6). What the gnostics have right—”that our soul’s association with the body is not the preferred [mode of existence] for the soul” (II.9.7)—is not original to them, and even so misunderstands the relationship of body and soul: body is in soul, not the other way around, and so the sensible cosmos is within the World Soul, meaning that it is unconditioned by the bodily cosmos. Why the sensible cosmos at all? The gnostics are dissatisfied with it? “If another cosmos better than this one actually exists, what is it? But if a cosmos is necessary” (it simply is what Soul does with the Forms it perceives in the Intellect) “and there is no other cosmos, then our cosmos is the one that preserves the imitation of the intelligible one” (II.9.8). Moreover, the gnostics misjudge the character of their own cosmically ensconced souls: “[I]f our souls arrived here because they were compelled by the soul of the universe, how could souls subject to compulsion be superior? For among souls the one that is in control is the greater one. And if,” on the other hand, “they descend willingly, why do you blame the cosmos that you willingly entered and that allows anyone who is not satisfied to escape from it?” (II.9.8; cf. I.4.7; I.9). In Plotinus’ view, attention to diversity and inequality of life station (and perhaps of embodiment?) is irrelevant because virtue frees us from such concerns, since the immortal part of the person is unthreatened by such things. This is possibly the most objectionable part of Plotinus’ argument against the gnostics, dependent on how it is to be read. No experience in this life suffices as a blow to cosmodicy for Plotinus: “Even if you are murdered, you got what you wanted” (II.9.9); but the question is whether the rhetorical “you” refers generally to any such victim, or particularly to the gnostics, who desire escape from the sensible cosmos. Gnosticism is a “crude view” that must be overcome “by respecting the hierarchy,” thereby being able to “ascend by going as far as our nature allows us to go, and one ought to believe that there is a place beside god for the others, too, and not rank himself alone next after god—as if by some flight of fancy!—thereby depriving oneslef of becoming a god even to the extent that this is possible for the human soul” (II.9.9). “Foolish people are sold on accounts such as these,” of self-deification, “as soon as they hear ‘You will be superior not only to all human beings but even to the gods!’” (II.9.9)—here, indeed, Plotinus may well also have Christians in view insofar as this is the traditionally Pauline concept of deification (1 Cor 6:3). “Even the man,” he writes, “who was previously a humble and moderate private citizen is sold if he hears: ‘You are the son of god, but other men whom you used to admire are not sons of god and neither are the beings that they worship in accordance with the tradition of their fathers; you, however, are even greater than heaven without even having struggled to be so’” (II.9.9). “[W]hy should god,” wonders Plotinus, “pay this providential favor to all of you while neglecting the entire cosmos in which you yourselves reside?” God either watches over the whole cosmos or none of it; and in turn, “one should not be focused on one’s heart’s desires but on the whole universe” (II.9.9). “The person,” by contrast, “who complains about the nature of the cosmos does not know what he is doing, nor does he realize where this insolence of his is leading” (II.9.13). And “again to have disdain for the cosmos, the cosmic gods, and its other beautiful parts is not to become good” (II.9.16).
Of course, Plotinus’ philosophy and metaphysics became the dominant paradigm from which Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers worked ever afterwards. But it is interesting that while late third and early fourth century Greek theology largely takes Plotinus’ metaphysical points against the gnostics, Plotinus’ cosmology and theodicy—specifically, the idea that this is the best possible physical world—is explicitly not taken by these authors. To the contrary, argues Nyssen in true Origenist fashion in his De Opificio Hominis: the true creation is in fact God’s poiesis, in which the true Human Being, the collective of all humans with Christ as their head, fill the true creation; it is from this beginning, also our true end, that we have declined into this plastic world with its present forms of materiality, temporality, and spatiality. This world is still good, as far as it goes, but it is inherently providential, from beginning to end: hence also, later, Maximos the Confessor will say that “Adam fell from the first moment of his coming to be” (Questions to Thalassios 61.2). This is every bit as “gnostic” as the Valentinians, with the sole difference that corporeality qua corporeality and the kosmos qua kosmos are not here objected to as evil in themselves, nor the introduction of an evil creator. To the contrary: they are in their very existence expressions of providence, even when evil takes place within them. The World Soul may well be tensed by the dualism of good and evil, but this dualism, too, is subsumed into its ultimate identity, per the still later (by far) perspective of Sergius Bulgakov, as the Creaturely Sophia, whose quest is to unite with and manifest the Divine Sophia that is her archetype, thus far realized completely in the hypostatic union of the two in Christ and the total deification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who may be said, in some sense, to hypostatize the Creaturely Sophia in her deification just as Christ hypostatizes the Divine Sophia in his humanization.
And so the elements, and the elemental gods, are not and cannot be wholly corrupted: their nature as creatures of God outlives all their evil, for the Creator will neither revoke the word of creation by which he has granted being to anything, nor can the inherent goodness of his own being ever be overwhelmed by any exercise of volition, as true freedom is only ever expressed in adherence to the proper activity of one’s own nature, which can only be good. (This is the heart, for Origen, Nyssen, Maximos, Eriugena, and Bulgakov, of universalism.) The question then becomes whether it is necessary to take a gnostic line of thinking, however orthodox or heterodox, at all: why not simply embrace Plotinus’ cosmology, in which the gods, their heavens, and the daimones are all generally good and trustworthy, and evil is often misidentified and illusory, at least with respect to the body? In a sense, the true advantage of the Christian position over the unchurched Plotinus’ may well be the seriousness with which it takes both personal suffering and evil. Both Plotinus and, say, Nyssen or Augustine could dismiss evil as ultimately nothing, metaphysically groundless in a reality that proceeds wholly and only from the One God who is himself the Good; but all the more reason, so thought the latter two, to feed the poor and clothe the naked. It is not that Plotinus himself did not believe in or practice benefaction; it is that Christian belief in a partially fallen kosmos generated for Early Christians an urgency about human dignity sometimes absent from even late antique Platonism, for all of its beauty. Plotinian comfort with the status quo and the cosmic hierarchy are difficult to stomach in a world where humans invent and die for social hierarchies and oppression of the weak by the strong is the usual way of things here below—especially if one happens to have the raw end of the deal on either side. And today, we see that some of Plotinus’ confidence in the universe’s perdurance and perfection above the Moon was quite misplaced. There really are conflagrations, whether supernovae, crunches, or bangs (big ones) are in view; stars and the gods indwelling them really can err; there really is war in heaven. We may do better to take up with Advaitins and Buddhists than with Plotinus in thinking that at least some devas are subject to avidya and dukkha, and that their finitude makes them naturally mutable: only God is perfect and purely actualized, and therefore epektasis is the best possible eschatology of sky and every creature, god, human, or bullfrog. Most importantly, Christ, in his descent, ascent, in-filling all things, and enthronement above all things, at God’s right hand, has begun to restore the discipline of ruling to the rulers, as Origen says—but partly through the exempla of the Christian assemblies, as the author of Ephesians says. Plotinus found this objectionable, but for Christians, it is an unimpeachable element of what makes Christ’s accession to the universal throne a gospel: humans, formerly subject to the elements and the gods overseeing them, victim to their whims, partial wisdoms, and wiles, have now been gifted a path of cosmic liberation, taking which they in fact participate in the messianic healing of the world. If I may be so bold as to say, with Adam’s tongue but that gospel, it is a spectacle triumphant enough to make angels tremble.
See Edward Adams, The Stars Will Fall From Heaven: Cosmic Catastrophe in the New Testament and Its World (London: T&T Clark, 2007).
See Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009).
See Benjamin E. Reynolds, Apocalyptic Revelation in the Gospel of John: Revealed Cosmology, the Vision of God, and Visionary Showing,” 109-129 in The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought, ed. Benjamin E. Reynolds and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017); Reynolds, John Among the Apocalypses: Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the “Apocalyptic” Gospel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
The translation is Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 474-475.
The translation is Origen, On First Principles, ed. and trans. John Behr, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
The translations that follow are from Geoffrey S. Smith, Valentinian Christianity: Texts and Translations (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).
See M. David Litwa, The Evil Creator: The Origins of an Early Christian Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Really excellent article. That the “orthodox” Christian perspective on the phenomenal cosmos constitutes something of a via media between the “Gnostics” and the Platonists (perhaps, excepting Plutarch) is a regular talking point of mine, and I’m happy to finally have an article to recommend!
I’m curious if you have encountered Jason BeDuhn’s argument (shared by Shelly Matthews) that Paul believes that the material cosmos was created by angelic mediators akin to the mediated law. The data to make any firm adjudication is probably lacking, but it’s an intriguing possibility.
I've enjoyed the Damick/De Young podcast The Lord of Spirits, but one point on which they haven't convinced me is that the spiritual world lacks all moral ambiguity; for them, it seems, the ever-present spiritual powers not properly and perfectly angelic are necessarily demonic and damned. Yet if we are to assert with Bulgakov and many before him that the appearances of the "natural" world are founded on a personal or angelic substructure, it seems to me we must allow that the moral ambiguity we see in the phenomenal world reflects deeper ambiguities in the realm of the spiritual. Your Substack, I think, has dredged up ample scriptural evidence for this.