| I use "foundations" advisedly in the title, foundations being usually hidden below ground, or concealed beneath the stratifications of the edifice they support. Hiddenness in this study is a hermeneutic issue, one that requires an interdisciplinary orchestration of philosophy, comparative religious studies, and social-historical research in order to unearth the ancient and tenacious precepts of Egyptian emanationist thought, and to reveal them as a pre-eminent contributor to Graeco-Roman Gnosis. Behind the surfeit of aeonial detail is to be found the hidden gestalt, the synergy of the theogonic, the emanationist substructure. It is the method of this study to step back from historical process and textual particulars in order to chart the overarching theological pattern, and to define it as substantively Egyptian.;Without wishing to idealise Alexandria it is difficult to overstate the centrality of this city in these times, both for its centuries-long tradition of textual appropriation by the time the Gnostics appeared, as well as its stubborn independence in the face of Roman ideologies, both pagan and Christian. I shall demonstrate that the antinomianism, the focus on individualism, the rise of female spiritual leaders, the artistic traditions, and the heterodox and elitist predilections associated with the very broad and diverse Gnostic movement, find their philosophical, political, and geographical centre in the anarchic ferment of first and second centuries C.E. Alexandria. Alexandria, in turn, had extended its roots ever deeper into the Egyptian religious substrata through its close political and spiritual links with Memphis. A fusion occurred between an Egypto-Greek literati and the long-standing, and at this point long-suffering Egyptian priesthood, now disposed to deal with the acute problem of evil in the world. The Gnostic movement was indeed more than Alexandria and Memphis in the distinct local species of thought it produced, but the root of the eclectic Alexandrian/Memphite genius clearly pervades the genus of Gnostic expression. Equally, the Egyptian emanationist view, one handed down from the first instances of human time as a recorded phenomenon, became the great inescapable architectonic of Gnostic thought. |
