Where Gnosticism Went Wrong

The Jewish Kabala of the 13^th century Zohar with its esoteric, astral projection style concepts of the metaphysics of the Universe and realms surrounding has a far earlier expression in the first century contemporary of Jesus from Alexandria Egypt, Philo Judaeus, who wrote a very nice metaphysical neo-Kabbalah of his own expressing ideas about mystical realms like ghost Universes of higher spiritual planes and reality. Evidently Christian disputes with Gnostics were fundamentally because Gnostics tended to believe in a dualism such that the material world is evil and was made by an evil demi-urge. While some might regard original sin in a fallen Universe of thermodynamics instead of eternal spiritual perfection as another way of saying that, the practical consequences of belief are substantial. Gnostics tended to deny Jehovah as the true God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to overcome sin. The emanationist (simplified for Christian practical purposes to’ let their be light’) theories of Gnostics are however coincident with at least some aspects of logical insight into the nature of the material Universe such as the big bang, inflaton or even a cyclical Universe expanding and flowing through a thermodynamic process. Paradoxically those that believe the Universe had no real beginning-just proximal ones such as time=0 located at a temporal hourglass very small singularity before an oppositely sequenced pre-Universe shrinking down in scale, share the idea with Christians that all things that exist are ultimately based in the eternal with temporality being expressions of phases within eternity. At this point though physical cosmology hasn’t ventured too deeply into physical reality and temporality of a multiverse within an eternal context replete with conservation of energy.

Paul as a student of Gamaliel might have been somewhat learned himself in Jewish mysticism a little. Philo of Alexandria was marginally mainstream and perhaps not unknown to Jewish theology training centers. By the time of the third century Plotinus-a famous student of Ammonius Saccus developed a beautiful, logically satisfying mystic theologically simplified cosmology that is similar in many respect to contemporary cosmological paradigms including origin from a singularity or One (En Sof-the ineffable infinite) and universal forms acceptable to Plato and quantum mechanics. It is a bit of a paradox that the mysterious, spiritual Kabbalah shares with Mohammadanism the term for spirit –Ka that the Egyptians used as well as ba or shelter. Hence one gets the spirit house or Ka-ba such as at Mecca and the Kabballah going even further in honor of a transcending spirit. The spirit house of Mecca existed long before Mohammad’s syncretistic enterprise.

The danger of simply becoming intellectually lost as an individual self-standing within the created material world is a danger that Lucifer succumbed to. Since everything exists and one may reason within the given steady-state field or any existing alternate spiritual field, there is a temptation for the ego to alienate itself from the transcendent God and the opportunity to renormalize from sin in the contingent field of being and try exist forever as a contingent being or even an nearly omnipotent contingent being without God and even a false consciousness denying His existence. That effort is in disregard to the actual facts of being-that God is all-in-all and the Son is the sole way to renormalize the estranged-by-sin relationship.

A generic emantionist paradigm for cosmological origin of quanta of any sort from a state ‘void and without form’ requires some emanation of virtual quanta or proto-particles/strings/membranes etc from an existing field containing or heteronymous with the void. Math isn’t theoretically of much help in describing the non-dimensional infinite, indivisible field that emanates with quantum uncertainty perhaps on occasion into a void. Mathematics represent some form of a coordinate system-even theoretical ones with scalable dimensions. Without coordinates or quantum it would be challenging to use math references to describe One infinite field with all possible dimensions unactualized prior to emanating into a formless void. Theological contemplation might be easier, although it’s better and simpler to recognize Jesus Christ as the only way to understand God who contains the one field engendering any potential or actual Universe.

Ultimately Plotinus’ paradigm is mostly a successful horse-shoe toss approximation of the theosophical state of the cosmos without either modern technical description or information about how to be saved from the fallen realm of materially imperfect forms that is the world. Living a couple centuries after The Lord he may have felt that wasn’t his role. The age was philosophically confused enough and just the canonized Bible such as the Muratorian fragment provided was a plain and accurate guide to eternity. Gnostics tended not to recognize the material Universe as a solid state entanglement phase (in a Higgs Field) that would be objectively changed with the second coming of Christ (everyone will recognize when he actually appears for it will be as plain as a lightning bolt across the sky). Gnostics thought they would slip out to a higher reality plain through their own awareness (they didn’t live in very cold weather much).