Beware, the following post talks about religion. (Apparently I’m just really asking for it, today.) This is a touchy subject for many, and I’m not trying to offend.
Not all of you may know this, but I was raised Catholic. I’m currently agnostic, but I went the whole gambit through Confirmation, and I even have attended Jesuit institutions of higher learning. So I’ve had a lot of religious education, and I thought I’d share an interesting bit of trivia I was thinking about recently.
It partially relates to the Adam and Eve story. You know, the apple is supposed to be a symbol of knowledge, of dividing good and evil which is only supposed to be something God can do, and that’s apparently a bad thing and everyone’s doomed to be a sinner, whatever. But isn’t that a strange moral to that story? Elsewhere in the bible they emphasize that one should come to God “child-like” in faith; essentially unquestioning. The congregation is referred to as a flock–and really, sheep are not terribly bright creatures, and they do follow extremely faithfully. This goes fairly strongly against the Jesuit tradition I was taught for having reason in faith as a unified whole, and there are very different ways you can approach these subjects intelligently while still being a faithful Christian (I’m not saying you can’t), but it still can get some people’s hackles up.
Anyway, that brings me to the trivia I was thinking about.
You know, in some Christian Gnostic (HIGHLY heretical) traditions, the thing we think of as God–that is, the God of the Old Testament–was actually only the Demiurge (a term borrowed from the Platonics).
It was a corrupt being very different from the divine true God, Sophia (which you may recognize as the Greek word for “wisdom”). Sophia (created in the unification of the “nothing”–which is the Pleroma or the Source of all potential energy–and the “something” it imagined, or in some stories Sophia fell from a higher plane of existence) created the Demiurge specifically to be separate and isolated from Sophia. The monstrous result was the Demiurge, who has no divine spark. But the Demiurge, in turn, made the material world possible as separate from the divine, where Sophia cannot intercede.
Essentially, some of these Gnostics held (and there are many different sects and stories) that the Old Testament God was a jealous, ignorant, and imperfect being who didn’t even realize Sophia had created him to be a separate entity from the divine whole. In ignorance he then created the heavens and the earth, using the power of Sophia that had created him. That meant a small spark of the divine true God, Sophia, was enclosed in the material world and could be awakened within oneself to bypass this somewhat evil Demiurge (mistaken for God), who attempts to limit humans’ knowledge as he’s jealous of our spark. Under the Christian Gnostic belief, Jesus actually came from Sophia to help awaken us (a process called “gnosis”). If you fail to find that divine spark within yourself and you don’t nurture your own knowledge and growth, but are instead seduced to worship the false Demiurge in blind ignorance, your soul is trapped for all eternity away from the true God.
In other words, awakening wisdom (Sophia) within the self is the path to salvation. And that ultimately doesn’t seem like such a terrible belief to hold.
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