Yearning for the Pleroma

Ten years ago, back in July 22nd of 2015, I wrote one of my first articles about Gnosticism on my Simple Explanation blog, and I'm going to read from that for you today. This was very soon after I began to realize that the Orthodox Christianity that I had been strongly embracing for all of my life could be enhanced by this knowledge of Gnosticism.

I had been trained up to believe that Gnosticism was a heresy, and it takes many years for a very strong believer in Christianity to even be willing to consider Gnosticism as another sect of Christianity. So while not being willing to give up my belief in the Christ as our salvation, and not being willing to demote my relationship with Jesus, because I can't deny that since I personally know it to be true, I was at last able to begin reading the Nag Hammadi texts. I was particularly taken by the text called the Tripartite Tractate, which is the one that I share with you mostly on this Gnostic Insights podcast.

So let me share with you now this first article that I wrote in 2015 called Yearning for the Pleroma, which is still posted on my long-running Simple Explanation blog. This was originally broadcasted as an episode in August of 2021, which was before I started posting episodes to Substack, so my Substack readers have never seen or heard this episode. Also, for those of you who have been following Gnostic Insights from the beginning, you haven’t ever had a chance to read the transcript, so here it is. As I said, this article is ten years old. I hadn’t yet developed the illustrations that have become so familiar by now, which you can see throughout the Gnostic Insights transcripts and in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book from 2019. This episode features my first attempt at diagramming the gnostic cosmology. The concepts still hold up, although the artwork is more colorful and polished today.

This is called Yearning for the Pleroma.

Other words for the Gnostic word "pleroma" include the "Fullness," the "All," the "Totalities," and "the circle of divine attributes," which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism. Wikipedia cites 17 uses of the Greek word kenoma that is usually translated as “fullness,” with only one usage of pleroma as we Gnostics would define it.Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma--a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as "the fullness.""For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Col. 2:9).The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ... This contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).While I do agree with the opening premise that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of ... beings," there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.First, the idea that the fullness can't be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, "In contrast," since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let's imagine how that would work.

Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I've represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son's cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid to the right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son's will into hierarchies of traits and powers.

We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One wh