Thevirginthat Became Male: Feminine Principles in Platonic And

chapter 14 The Virgin That Became Male: Feminine Principles in Platonic and Gnostic Texts John D. Turner It is indeed an honor to contribute to this anthology of studies on the subject of Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity in recognition of our esteemed col- league Antti Marjanen—to my knowledge the only Professor of Gnostic Studies in the modern academic world—who has taught us so much on the subject of gender and the role of women in antiquity and the early Christian world. Although he has dealt extensively with real women as intellectual leaders in these contexts, I would like to explore a more abstract topic, namely the ways in which wisdom (σοφία) and (spiritual) knowledge (γνῶσις) are frequently per- sonified as female entities. Of course one must bear in mind that there is a distinction between functional femininity and merely grammatical femininity in ancient Greek, Latin, and Coptic sources, in which various significant nouns and pronouns in the philosophical and mythological schemes can appear in the feminine gender, sometimes for good and substantial reasons, and sometimes for reasons that are purely grammatical and lexicographic.1 In this chapter, I survey the phenomenon of feminine principles in the metaphysics of selected Platonic and gnostic literature. The Platonic sources will include Plato’s later dialogues and oral teaching, and continue with some sub- sequent Platonist sources, including Speusippus, Philo of Alexandria, Moder- atus, Plutarch, Numenius, the Chaldaean Oracles and Plotinus. I will limit the treatment of gnostic sources to texts commonly referred to as “classic gnostic” or “Sethian.” These will include the theogony that Irenaeus in his Adver- sus Haereses 1.29–30 attributes to certain “gnostics” later identified as Ophites, Sethians and Barbeloites, and the related Nag Hammadi treatises Eugnostos the Blessed, Apocryphon of John, Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (Gospel of the Egyptians), Trimorphic Protennoia, Allogenes, Zostrianos, and Marsanes. I begin with Plato and Platonic sources. 1 On this point, see John Dillon, “Female Principles in Platonism,” Ítaca: quaderns catalans de cultura clàssica 1 (1985): 107–123. © JOHN D. TURNER, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004344938_016 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.John D. Turner - 9789004344938 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:58:40AM via free access 292 turner Plato and the Old Academy In his Timaeus, Plato first accounts for the created order as the best possible copy of a perfect transcendent model carefully reproduced by a completely intelligent male demiurge. But at the end of section 48, he makes a fresh start, stating that his account is incomplete without a consideration of a second, maternal cause of the universe in addition to Intelligence.2 Plato then goes on to characterize all earthly existents as offspring of two transcendent “parents.” All phenomena are images (εἴδωλα), the offspring or Child (ἔκγονος) of their Father the Forms, emerging and existing within the volume of their “Mother,” the “all-receiving nature” of “space,” called the “Receptacle and Nurse of becom- ing.” Indeed, the Mother is not so much a parent, as she is a Nurse, since there is no direct sexual interaction between her and the paternal Forms.3 The Forms, which alone have real being, never undergo alteration nor actually enter into anything else at any point. The receptacle is itself entirely homogeneous, without any inherent quality, and never undergoes alteration. It is a space that contains an endless flux of indistinguishable sensible qualities. Like a mirror, the Receptacle receives and reflects the images of the Forms, enabling this qual- itative flux to become defined as distinguishable things within her.4 In order to survive as offspring or Child, they must continue to exist “in” the Mother. The implication is that only the Forms and the formless Receptacle have any inde- pendent reality of their own.The images, the things that we see in the world, are only reflections or impressions of the Forms in the eternally subsisting nature of the Receptacle, apart from whom they would simply cease to be. Although the Timaeus is the only place where Plato employs the terms Father, Mother, and Child to designate ultimate metaphysical principles, the tradition of his later oral teaching seems to be much occupied with developing the ontological implications of this metaphysical triad. According to the var- 2 Timaeus 48e: “For this world came into being from a mixture and combination of necessity and intelligence … and it was by the subordination of necessity to reasonable persuasion that the universe was originally constituted as it now is.” 3 Cf. Aeschylus, Eumenides 660 etc.; the mother is not a parent but only the nurse of what the father begets in her. On Timaeus 48e–52d, see Edward N. Lee, “On the Metaphysics of the Image in Plato’s Timaeus,” The Monist (1966), 341–368. 4 The images constitute the contents of the sensible world. While the Forms are the object of intellection and the images are objects of perception, the Receptacle is neither an intelligible nor a sensible object. It only partakes of the intelligible in a most puzzling way, and can be apprehended only by a kind of spurious reasoning. John D. Turner - 9789004344938 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:58:40AM via free access the virgin that became male 293 ious reports of Plato’s oral teaching, Plato’s ultimate principles were the One, and an opposing feminine principle, the Indefinite Dyad, characterized as the Many and Few, the Great and Small, the More and Less, and the Unequal. Above or below these there seems to be envisioned also an intelligent cause or Demi- urge. In the transcendental realm, the Dyad, which plays the role of the maternal Receptacle of the Timaeus, is responsible for multiplicity, difference and change, while the One causes unity, identity and permanence; their offspring are generally conceived as the ideal numbers whose proportions constitute the forms according to which sensible objects are caused to be what they are. Apparently, these numbers and proportions come to exist in the World Soul, where they regulate the cosmic motion and change that first appear there.5 This oral teaching is basically a development of the scheme found in Plato’s Philebus, as well as in hypotheses i, ii, iii and vii of his Parmenides.6 According to the Philebus, the principle of the Unlimited interacts with the principle of Unity (τὸ ἕν) or Limit (adumbrated in hypothesis I of the Parmenides) at two levels. At the highest level, this interaction produces the Forms, which in turn interact with the Unlimited principle at the next level to produce the contents of the sensible realm. The cause of this interaction is said to be the divine Intelligence, playing much the same role as does the demiurge in the first part of the Timaeus.7 5 Plato’s doctrine of the production of ideal numbers—as well as the other forms and their sensible images—from the two primal principles of the One and the Indefinite Dyad is reported not only by Aristotle, but also by the various digests of Plato’s notorious lecture “On the Good,” and traces of this doctrine can also be found in Plato’s later published dialogues, especially the Philebus and the Parmenides. See the important monograph of K.M. Sayre, Plato’s Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 6 The Parmenides makes a distinction between two “Ones,” a One-which-is in Hypothesis ii, and in Hypothesis i (137c–142b), another absolutely pure, unique and unqualified “One,” which cannot properly be said to “be” at all (see n. 35 below). Any name or attribute such as “being” entails predication, which necessarily implies a measure of plurality or relation- ality, which if applied to the One, would destroy its unity. While the One-which-is and the Unlimited Multitude lead directly to the Old Academic principles of the One and the Dyad, one can see how, at a much later time, various gnostics and Neoplatonists might well adopt the absolutely unqualified One of hypothesis i, which has no real existence and is related to nothing else, as a sort of super-principle at the summit of their hierarchy of first principles, as that which is “beyond being” and utterly transcendent to any other imaginable entity. 7 Cf. Aristotle, Metaph. 988a7–14: Plato employed as the two fundamental causes “that of the essence and the material cause. The forms are the cause of the essence of other things, and the One is the cause of the essence of the forms, and he says that what is the underlying matter of which the forms are predicated in the case of sensible things and the One in the case of the forms is the Dyad or the Great and the Small.” John D. Turner - 9789004344938 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:58:40AM via free access 294 turner The Old Academy seems to have adopted Plato’s doctrine in a form in which the presiding Intelligence was identified with the One or Limit, thus restricting the ultimate principles to a supreme pair, the One and the Unlimited or Indefinite Dyad, whose function was identical with that of the Limit and the Unlimited or Great and Small of the Philebus. These complementary principles of Limit and the Unlimited are necessary to the existence of any ordered system. In the transcendent world, the Dyad submits perfectly to the principle of order and form and thus is merely the cause of the multiplicity necessary to any world.

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