The Egyptian Foundations of Gnostic Thought
Download the thesis (PDF) — same edition as the file used to prepare this excerpt.
Opening of Part I, Chapter One — Introduction and Hermeneutic Prospectus
The following reproduces the epigraphs and the opening paragraphs of the chapter from the thesis PDF (pagination omitted).
These are the myths that Basileides tells from his schooling in Egyptian wisdom, and having learnt such wisdom from them he bears this sort of fruit.
He thinks he is in Alexandria on the Panium, an artificial mountain coiled round by a staircase, rising in the centre of the town.
In front of him stretches Lake Mareotis, to the right the sea, to the left open country — and just beneath his eyes a confusion of flat roofs, cut through from north to south and from east to west by two intersecting roads which display down their entire length a series of porticoes rich in Corinthian capitals. The houses overhanging this double colonnade have coloured glass in their windows. A few of them are fitted externally with enormous cages of wood where the outside air rushes in.
Monuments quite various in their architecture crowd close together. Egyptian pylons loom above Greek temples. Obelisks emerge like lances between red brick battlements. In the middle of squares appear the pointed ears of a Hermes or a dog-headed Anubis.
Antony can see mosaics in the courtyards, and carpets hanging from beams in the ceilings.
I then decided to study under good old Didymus. Blind though he was, no one could master his knowledge of the Scriptures. When the lesson was over he would request my arm to lean on. I would walk him to where, from the Panium, one can see the Pharos and the high sea. We would come back by way of the harbour, elbowing men of every race, from Cimmerians wrapped in bearskins to Gymnosophists of the Ganges rubbed over with cow-dung. But there was always a fight going on in the streets, on account of Jews refusing to pay tax, or of seditious parties who wanted to expel the Romans. The town is in fact full of heretics, the followers of Mani, of Valentine, of Basilides, of Arius — all of them accosting you to argue and convince.
Their talk now and again crosses my mind. Try as one will to pay no attention, it’s unnerving.
The “orientalising” glosses and historical liberties in Flaubert’s description of Egypt and the denizens of Alexandria during this time period are obvious; yet apart from the excesses, perhaps, of surrealism and lyricism which enliven this work, there is something quite fresh and authentic about the scene that he describes. Both in the strokes with which he effects the temptations of Anthony, and in the honest expressions of his own inner ambiguity, Flaubert’s “savage sensuality” is well read, obsessed with history, and therefore mythopoeically entitled. Lacking even a fraction of the resources possessed by modern Gnostic Studies, Flaubert approaches the “heretical” Sitz with a keener sense of Egypt and the Orient, one uncompromised by modern rhetorics of inclusion which would ameliorate these figures, bringing them into the fold as overly imaginative early Church theologians, serving them up as opaque objects of study beneath the rubric of “influences”. For Flaubert these voices tantalise because they have been given back their time and place; they are historically enabled persons not at all lacking in either flair or mundanity, or dedication to strange — dare we say, Oriental — causes and systems of thought. Flaubert persuades us that with genuine socio-historical apperception a certain romantic excess and lack of accuracy can be easily forgiven; no amount of accurate detail, however, can mask an insufficiency of connection or “feel” for the historical period in question.
One of the main effects of this study is to dilate the notion of “Hellenistic syncretism” in order to show that Gnostic emanationist mythologies, expressly dualist, drew much of their essence from ancient Egyptian emanationist theologies, themselves implicitly dualistic in nature. Although traditional Egyptian cosmologies were much mitigated by exposure to diverse influences in the Hellenistic and Roman era, a basic insight about theogony obtained great systematic clarity, as well as fantastic obscurity, in a broad array of sects, many of which survived until the conquest of Egypt by Islam.