The aeon named Logos sits atop the hierarchy of the Fullness |
When Logos overreached and fell into the darkness, he shattered into a confusing jumble of disconnected parts. These pieces of the shattered aeon were “sicknesses”: small, dark, ignorant, divided, and roiling with chaos. They reflected neither the glory of the originals in the Fullness, nor the ecology of the hierarchy. And, because they were no longer arranged in the pattern of the hierarchy, they forgot their functions and their names [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 77]
The shattered corpse of Logos gave rise to the imitations of the deficiency |
"Those who had come into
being did not know themselves, nor did they know the Fullness from which they
had originated, nor did they know him who had become the cause of their
existence. For since the Word was in such an unstable condition, he no longer
attempted to bring forth offspring in the form of emissions... of glory. ...Instead,
what he brought forth were feeble and small creatures, infected with the same
sicknesses with which he himself had been infected." [The Tripartite
Tractate, v. 80]
Because Logos had been reaching for the heights when he
fell, the imitation born of the fall continued to be motivated by a desire “to
reach the unreachable,” but now that upward drive was divorced from the goal of
reaching for the glory of reunification with the Father. [The Tripartite Tractate,
v. 77] With no recall of who or what came before, this upward drive was
entirely self-interested, for those of the imitation had no cooperative arrangement
amongst themselves.
What had been an upward pull to reunite the Fullnesses with the Father became an
upward push arising out of each singleton, not for the glory of the Father, but for the vainglory of the individual. “For they desired to command one another and to lord it over
them in their vain love of glory, and the glory that they acquired [from their
striving] became the cause of the structure that was to be.” [The Tripartite Tractate,
v. 79] In this manner, egoic striving for vainglory replaced glorious
longing for the Father--ambition replaced God's Will.
The “offspring of the presumptuous thought”, as they came to
be known, recognized neither Logos, the All, nor the Father as their progenitor. “They
thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning,
since they saw no one existing before them. For this reason they exhibited
disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had
brought them into existence.” [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 78]
"The Word, then, was the
cause of these things coming into being, and he became increasingly desperate.
He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection he saw deficiency; instead of unity
he saw division; instead of stability he saw disturbance; instead of rest,
upheaval." Logos “was unable to bring their love of disturbance to
an end, nor could he destroy it,” for Logos “had become powerless when his
wholeness and his perfection had abandoned him” to become the deficiency. The
deficiency took on an imitation of life on its own, becoming “the cause of the things
that do not exist on their own account from the beginning.” [The Tripartite Tractate,
v. 80]
These “irrational things” were condemned by Logos. “Because
of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to his own [in the
Fullness]. . . “The one who hastened on high [Logos] and the one who drew him
to himself [The Son] did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the
Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the
deficiency.” [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 78]
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The Simple Explanation is using its method of meta-analysis to strip out the confusing elements of the various Gnostic Gospels to form a simple, coherent, creation story. I have chosen the Tripartite Tractate as the book out of the Nag Hammadi scriptures to focus on, because I find it to be the least confusing and most complete Gnostic account of the origins of the universe, with the fewest non-essential elements. You will not find lists of names and numbers here. Only the cosmology and its rationale. The purpose of this exposition of the Simple Gnostic Gospels is to clarify and simplify so that any person who cares to may fully understand the essential Gnostic truths.
Cyd and Munchkin working on the Gnostic Gospel |
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