The Gnostic Threefold Path to Enlightenment: The Ascent of Mind and the Descent of Wisdom

Abstract

Many things in Late Antiquity come in threes: three levels of being, three periods of history, three stages of initiation into the mysteries and into the study of philosophy, three stages of the mystical ascent, even the Christian Trinity. Such triads are to be found in a number of Gnostic systems as well. Significant instances of these triads have now come to light in gnostic documents at home in the so-called Barbeloite Gnosticism of the second century A.D. Because some of these documents were read by Plotinus' circle in Rome during the third century A.D., the question of the relationship of these documents to contemporary Neoplatonism is immediately raised. Yet these systematized triads go back a long way in Western antiquity, at least as far back as Plato. Beginning with him, and perhaps a good deal before him, the systematic tripartition of the universe into stratified levels of reality and the tripartition of the process by which one comes to know this universe becomes more widespread and increasingly dogmatic in western philosophy and religion. The pattern that emerges is what one might call the three-stage path to spiritual fulfillment, a sort of tripartite structure of spiritual paidaeia by which Hellenistic man might come to know himself, his world, and his place in it. This three-fold path is, of course, found in both Greek and Jewish non-gnostic literature. Specifically, however, I suggest that when gnostic literature portrays this path as a threestage ascent of the soul to the deity, we have to do with the Platonic tradition; when it portrays this path as a three-fold descent of the deity (or some aspect thereof) to the soul in the lower world, we have to do with primarily Jewish traditions. The gnostic documents to which I wish to call attention are five treatises from the Nag Hammadi Coptic Gnostic Library,