To return once more to the Iranian conception, the idea of two original and opposite entities leads to the metaphor of “mixture” for the origin and composition of this world. The mixture is, however, an uneven one, and the term essentially denotes the tragedy of the portions of the Light separated from its main body and immersed in the foreign element.

I am I, the son of the mild ones [i.e., the beings of Light], Mingled am I, and lamentation I see. Lead me out of the embracement of death.

(Turfan fragment M 7)

They brought living water and poured it into the turbid water;9 they brought shining light and cast it into the dense darkness. They brought the refreshing wind and cast it into the scorching wind. They brought the living fire and cast it into the devouring fire. They brought the soul, the pure Mana, and cast it into the worthless body.

(J 56)

The mixing is here expressed in terms of the five basic elements of the Manichaean scheme, which obviously underlies this Mandaean text.

Thou hast taken the treasure of Life and cast it onto the worthless earth. Thou hast taken the word of Life and cast it into the word of mortality.

(G 362)

As it entered the turbid water, the living water lamented and wept. . . . As he mingled the living water with the turbid, darkness entered the light.

(J 216)

Even the messenger is subject to the fate of mixture:

Then the living fire in him became changed. . . . His splendor was impaired and dulled. . . . See how the splendor of the alien man is diminished!

(G 98 f.)

In Manichaeism the doctrine of mixing, with its counterpart of unmixing, forms the basis of the whole cosmological and soteriological system, as will be shown in a later chapter.

Closely connected with the idea of “mixing” is that of “dispersal.” If portions of the Light or the first Life have been separated from it and mixed in with the darkness, then an original unity has been split up and given over to plurality: the splinters are the sparks dispersed throughout the creation. “Who took the song of praise, broke it asunder and cast it hither and thither?” (J 13). The very creation of Eve and the scheme of reproduction initiated by it subserve the indefinite further dispersion of the particles of light which the powers of darkness have succeeded in engulfing and by this means endeavor to retain the more securely. Consequently, salvation involves a process of gathering in, of re-collection of what has been so dispersed, and salvation aims at the restoration of the original unity.

I am thou and thou art I, and where thou art I am, and in all things am I dispersed. And from wherever thou willst thou gatherest me; but in gathering me thou gatherest thyself.

This self-gathering is regarded as proceeding pari passu with the progress of “knowledge,” and its completion as a condition for the ultimate release from the world:

He who attains to this gnosis and gathers himself from the cosmos . . . is no longer detained here but rises above the Archons;

and by proclaiming this very feat the ascending soul answers the challenge of the celestial gatekeepers:

I have come to know myself and have gathered myself from everywhere. . . .

It is easy to see from these quotations that the concept of unity and unification, like that of plurality, diversity, and dispersal, has an inward as well as metaphysical aspect, i.e., applies to the individual self as it does to universal being. It is a mark of the higher, or more philosophical, forms of Gnosis that these two aspects, complementary from the beginning, come to ever more complete coincidence; and that the increasing realization of the internal aspect purifies the metaphysical one of the cruder mythological meanings it had to begin with. To the Valentinians, whose spiritualized symbolism marks an important step on the road of de-mythologizing, “unification” is the very definition of what the “knowledge of the Father” is to achieve for “each one”:

It is by means of Unity that each one shall receive himself back again. Through knowledge he shall purify himself of diversity with a view to Unity, by engulfing (devouring) the Matter within himself like a flame, Darkness by Light and Death by Life.

(GT 25:10–19)

It must be noted that in the Valentinian system the same achievement is ascribed to gnosis on the plane of universal being where the “restoring of Unity” and the “engulfing of Matter” mean no less than the actual dissolution of the whole lower world, i.e., sensible nature as such—not by an act of external force but solely by an inner event of mind: “knowledge” on a transcendental scale. We shall see later (Ch. 8) by what speculative principle the Valentinians established this objective and ontological efficacy of what at first sight seems to be a merely private and subjective act; and how their doctrine justified the equating of individual unification with the reuniting of the universe with God.

Both the universal (metaphysical) and the individual (mystical) aspects of the idea of unity and its opposites became abiding themes of succeeding speculation as it moved even farther away from mythology. Origen  , whose proximity to gnostic thought is obvious in his system (duly anathematized by the Church), viewed the whole movement of reality in the categories of the loss and recovery of metaphysical Unity.13 But it was Plotinus   who in his speculation drew the full mystical conclusions from the metaphysics of “Unity versus Plurality.” Dispersal and gathering, ontological categories of total reality, are at the same time action-patterns of each soul’s potential experience, and unification within is union with the One. Thus emerges the Neoplatonic scheme of the inner ascent from the Many to the One that is ethical on the first rungs of the ladder, then theoretical, and at the culminating stage mystical.

Endeavor to ascend into thyself, gathering in from the body all thy members which have been dispersed and scattered into multiplicity from that unity which once abounded in the greatness of its power. Bring together and unify the inborn ideas and try to articulate those that are confused and to draw into light those that are obscured.

(Porphyr. Ad Marcell. x)

It was probably through the writings of Porphyry   that this Neoplatonic conception of unification as a principle of personal life came to Augustine  , in whose intensely subjective manner the emphasis at last shifts from the metaphysical aspect entirely to the moral one.

Since through the iniquity of godlessness we have seceded and dissented and fallen away from the one true and highest God and dissipated ourselves into the many, split up by the many and cleaving to the many: it was necessary that . . . the many should have joined in clamor for the coming of One (Christ) . . . and that we, disencumbered from the many, should come to One . . . and, justified in the justice of One, be made One.

(Trin. IV. 11)

By continence we are collected into the One from which we have declined to the many.

(Confess. X. 14; cf. Ord. I. 3)

The “dispersal” has finally received what we should nowadays call an existentialist meaning: that of the soul’s “distraction” by the manifold concerns and lures of the world acting through the senses of the body; that is, it has been turned into a psychological and ethical concept within the scheme of individual salvation. [Hans Jonas  ]