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fall

quinta-feira 25 de janeiro de 2024

  

For the manner in which life has got into its present plight there are a number of expressions, most of them describing the process as a passive one, some giving it a more active turn. “The tribe of souls14 was transported here from the house of Life” (G 24); “the treasure of Life which was fetched from there” (G 96), or “which was brought here.” More drastic is the image of falling: the soul or spirit, a part of the first Life or of the Light, fell into the world or into the body. This is one of the fundamental symbols of Gnosticism: a pre-cosmic fall of part of the divine principle underlies the genesis of the world and of human existence in the majority of gnostic systems. “The Light fell into the darkness” signifies an early phase of the same divine drama of which “the Light shone in the darkness” can be said to signify a later phase. How this fall originated and by what stages it proceeded is the subject of greatly divergent speculations. Except in Manichaeism and related Iranian types, where the whole process is initiated by the powers of darkness, there is a voluntary element in the downward movement of the divine: a guilty “inclination” of the Soul (as a mythical entity) toward the lower realms, with various motivations such as curiosity, vanity, sensual desire, is the gnostic equivalent of original sin. The fall is a pre-cosmic one, and one of its consequences is the world itself, another the condition and fate of the individual souls in the world.

The Soul once turned toward matter, she became enamored of it, and burning with the desire to experience the pleasures of the body, she no longer wanted to disengage herself from it. Thus the world was born. From that moment the Soul forgot herself. She forgot her original habitation, her true center, her eternal being.

Once separated from the divine realm and engulfed by the alien medium, the movement of the Soul continues in the downward direction in which it started and is described as “sinking”: “How long shall I sink within all the worlds?” (J 196). Frequently, however, an element of violence is added to this description of the fall, as in the metaphors relating to captivity, of which we shall see more when we study the Manichaean system. Here some Mandaean examples will suffice. “Who has carried me into captivity away from my place and my abode, from the household of my parents who brought me up?” (G 323). “Why did ye carry me away from my abode into captivity and cast me into the stinking body?” (G 388).

The term “cast” or “thrown” occurring in the last quotation requires some comment. Its use, as we have seen before, is not confined to the metaphor of captivity: it is an image in its own right and of very wide application—life has been cast (thrown) into the world and into the body. We have met the expression associated with the symbolism of the “mixture,” where it is used for the origin of the cosmos as well as for that of man: “Ptahil threw the form which the Second [Life] had formed into the world of darkness. He made creations and formed tribes outside the Life” (G 242). This passage refers to the cosmogonic activity of the demiurge: in the anthropogony the image is repeated, and it is there that it has its main significance. “Ptahil took a hidden Mana which was given to him from the house of Life, brought it hither and threw it into Adam and Eve” (ibid.). This is the constantly recurring expression for the ensouling of man by his unauthorized creator. That this is not an event planned in the scheme of Life but a violence done to it and to the divine order is evident from the remorse which the demiurge feels afterwards. “Who has stultified me, so that I was a fool and cast the soul into the body?” (G 393). Even in the Valentinian formula quoted before (see p. 45), though it belongs to a branch of Gnosticism inclined to categories more of internal motivation than of external force to expound the prehistory of the Soul, we encountered the expression “whereinto we have been thrown.” The jarring note which this concrete term introduces into the series of abstract and neutral verbs preceding it in the formula (forms of “to be” and “to become”) is certainly intended. The impact of the image has itself a symbolic value in the gnostic account of human existence. It would be of great interest to compare its use in Gnosticism with its use in a very recent philosophical analysis of existence, that of Martin Heidegger  .19 All we wish to say here is that in both cases “to have been thrown” is not merely a description of the past but an attribute qualifying the given existential situation as determined by that past. It is from the gnostic experience of the present situation of life that this dramatic image of its genesis has been projected into the past, and it is part of the mythological expression of this experience. “Who has cast me into the affliction of the worlds, who transported me into the evil darkness?” (G 457) asks the Life; and it implores, “Save us out of the darkness of this world into which we are thrown” (G 254). To the question the Great Life replies, “It is not according to the will of the Great Life that thou hast come there” (G 329): “That house in which thou dwellest, not Life has built it” (G 379): “This world was not created according to the wish of the Life” (G 247). We shall later learn what these negative answers mean in terms of a positive mythology. Gnostic myth is precisely concerned with translating the brute factuality experienced in the gnostic vision of existence, and directly expressed in those queries and their negative answers, into terms of an explanatory scheme which derives the given state from its origins and at the same time holds out the promise of overcoming it.

The Life thus “thrown” into the world expresses its condition and mood there in a group of metaphors which we shall now consider. For the most part these refer in the gnostic sources, not to “man” in the ordinary sense, but to a symbolic-mythological being, a divine figure dwelling in the world in a peculiar and tragic role as victim and savior at once. Since, however, this figure according to the meaning of the system is the prototype of man, whose destiny in its full force he suffers in his own person (frequently his name is Man, though the figure can also be female), we are justified in taking the first-person accounts of his suffering as projections of the experience of those who make him speak thus, even if such statements refer to pre-cosmic events. In the following account we shall accordingly not differentiate, and shall think of man’s existence in the world, to whatever phase or personage of the mythical drama the statement may refer. [Hans Jonas  ]