Jun 9, 2022·edited Jun 9, 2022Liked by David Armstrong
Wow! This kind of playful descensus and ascensus of the Spirit as the life of Creation, the life of the Universe, in its ebb and flow, creation and destruction, reminds me of an excellent essay by Giles Quispel, "Jewish Gnosis and Mandaean Gnosticism: Some Reflections on the Writing Bronte," (it's really, really insightful!) where Quispel reflects on the dual nature of the Mandaean Ruha and Lady Wisdom as the prototype for the divine Speaker in "Thunder, Complete Mind," which he sees as fundamentally a Hellenistic Jewish composition, antecedent to more dualistic Gnostic currents, similar to the self-praise of Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, in Sirach or the Trimorphic Protennoia. He suggests that "Thunder, Complete Mind," reflects an earlier Jewish, perhaps going back to an Israelite (Quispel is incredibly daring in his recovered atavisms), conception of Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, where in effect Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly, the Paths of Life and Death, were seen as two-sides of the same figure (cf. the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad?), a kind of Israelite goddess of fortune and fate similar to Ma'at, the Hellenistic Isis, or Ishtar, or the pre-Islamic Arabian goddess Manat, I guess what might be called Mother Nature. To be fair to Quispel, I see where's he's coming from: Yhwh could be described as a cosmically monistic God of fate and fortune in the classic Song of Hannah (10th century BCE? One of my favorite early Israelite writings), cf. Deutero-Isaiah 45:7 and Deuteronomy 32:39. In fact, Baruch Halpern even sees in this Yhwh's etymological nature, or at least a post-etymology ("YHWH the Revolutionary," pp. 203-211), if read as hiphil, which is up for debate, "He Who Brings into Being," but also "He Who Makes to Pass." I'm not sold on that, per se, but it's interesting. Anyhow, Giles Quispel sees this same conception of Wisdom-and-Folly, Fortune-and-Fate, not only in "Thunder, Complete Mind" but also in the Mandaean figure of Lady Ruha, who is the fallen mother of the world but prototype of the pious penitent who returns back to the Great Life through the angel-messenger, Knowledge of Life. This is meant to provide some distance in the Holy Spirit as both the expression of divine Wisdom and Architect of Creation but also as the Shekhinah-in-Exile, in the world, suffering with Creation, just as in the Trimorphic Protennoia or as Paul alludes in Romans 8. This attempt to resolve the problem of God's exile from God is later expressed in the Zohar, where Hokhmah is the heavenly counterpart of the Malkhut, the Kingdom, the Pleroma, who is the Holy Spirit in exile, similar to Bulgakov's Higher and Lower Sophia. But Quispel sees this same dynamic in Late Antique Judaism and Mandaism, where the descent and ascent of the singular figure of the Holy Spirit or Lady Ruha, as in the Hellenistic Jewish "Thunder, Complete Mind," later got fully bifurcated into two figures, Barbelo and Sophia, in the Apocryphon of John.
Do you have any recommendations for learning more about Pratyabhijñã? The way it deals with idealism and the world reminds me a lot of how Eriugena thought. Especially the connection with the world as images appearing in a mirror or well. I could definitely also see a connection between Pratyabhijñã's Shiva as infinite nondual consciousness and Eriugena's God as superessential nothingness whose unknowing is higher than knowing.
The traditional Christian appeal to creaturely freedom as a "solution" to the problem of evil has always operated under the assumption that human beings (and spiritual beings) have some kind of freedom that goes above that possessed by caterpillars, poodles, and grizzly bears. Of course, with humans being relatively recent arrivals in the cosmos (not to mention the crude or incomprehensible explanations that often underlie talk of "free will"), it's hardly a suitable explanation, but I'm curious about what kind of freedom or agency animals are supposed to have. Obviously animals have purposes (conscious or unconscious), and some even have powers of reasoning or language (I have read that article on elephant souls). I guess I'm just pondering what creaturely freedom can actually mean if it doesn't begin with us, which I'm convinced that it can't.
Wow! This kind of playful descensus and ascensus of the Spirit as the life of Creation, the life of the Universe, in its ebb and flow, creation and destruction, reminds me of an excellent essay by Giles Quispel, "Jewish Gnosis and Mandaean Gnosticism: Some Reflections on the Writing Bronte," (it's really, really insightful!) where Quispel reflects on the dual nature of the Mandaean Ruha and Lady Wisdom as the prototype for the divine Speaker in "Thunder, Complete Mind," which he sees as fundamentally a Hellenistic Jewish composition, antecedent to more dualistic Gnostic currents, similar to the self-praise of Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, in Sirach or the Trimorphic Protennoia. He suggests that "Thunder, Complete Mind," reflects an earlier Jewish, perhaps going back to an Israelite (Quispel is incredibly daring in his recovered atavisms), conception of Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, where in effect Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly, the Paths of Life and Death, were seen as two-sides of the same figure (cf. the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad?), a kind of Israelite goddess of fortune and fate similar to Ma'at, the Hellenistic Isis, or Ishtar, or the pre-Islamic Arabian goddess Manat, I guess what might be called Mother Nature. To be fair to Quispel, I see where's he's coming from: Yhwh could be described as a cosmically monistic God of fate and fortune in the classic Song of Hannah (10th century BCE? One of my favorite early Israelite writings), cf. Deutero-Isaiah 45:7 and Deuteronomy 32:39. In fact, Baruch Halpern even sees in this Yhwh's etymological nature, or at least a post-etymology ("YHWH the Revolutionary," pp. 203-211), if read as hiphil, which is up for debate, "He Who Brings into Being," but also "He Who Makes to Pass." I'm not sold on that, per se, but it's interesting. Anyhow, Giles Quispel sees this same conception of Wisdom-and-Folly, Fortune-and-Fate, not only in "Thunder, Complete Mind" but also in the Mandaean figure of Lady Ruha, who is the fallen mother of the world but prototype of the pious penitent who returns back to the Great Life through the angel-messenger, Knowledge of Life. This is meant to provide some distance in the Holy Spirit as both the expression of divine Wisdom and Architect of Creation but also as the Shekhinah-in-Exile, in the world, suffering with Creation, just as in the Trimorphic Protennoia or as Paul alludes in Romans 8. This attempt to resolve the problem of God's exile from God is later expressed in the Zohar, where Hokhmah is the heavenly counterpart of the Malkhut, the Kingdom, the Pleroma, who is the Holy Spirit in exile, similar to Bulgakov's Higher and Lower Sophia. But Quispel sees this same dynamic in Late Antique Judaism and Mandaism, where the descent and ascent of the singular figure of the Holy Spirit or Lady Ruha, as in the Hellenistic Jewish "Thunder, Complete Mind," later got fully bifurcated into two figures, Barbelo and Sophia, in the Apocryphon of John.
Do you have any recommendations for learning more about Pratyabhijñã? The way it deals with idealism and the world reminds me a lot of how Eriugena thought. Especially the connection with the world as images appearing in a mirror or well. I could definitely also see a connection between Pratyabhijñã's Shiva as infinite nondual consciousness and Eriugena's God as superessential nothingness whose unknowing is higher than knowing.
The traditional Christian appeal to creaturely freedom as a "solution" to the problem of evil has always operated under the assumption that human beings (and spiritual beings) have some kind of freedom that goes above that possessed by caterpillars, poodles, and grizzly bears. Of course, with humans being relatively recent arrivals in the cosmos (not to mention the crude or incomprehensible explanations that often underlie talk of "free will"), it's hardly a suitable explanation, but I'm curious about what kind of freedom or agency animals are supposed to have. Obviously animals have purposes (conscious or unconscious), and some even have powers of reasoning or language (I have read that article on elephant souls). I guess I'm just pondering what creaturely freedom can actually mean if it doesn't begin with us, which I'm convinced that it can't.
I'm reminded of what Simone Weil terms "de-creation" as the spiritual return when she muses on Shiva.