/lit/ - Literature

>>18797258
The Monad, God, the Absolute, etc. is ineffable. We can only come to know it through aspects of it, Its emanations. That is, the human mind can only understand God through silvers of God, partial imperfect emanations.

"Gnostic" is as broad a term as Protestant, covering diverse sects existing over centuries. So, defining Gnostic beliefs is difficult, like trying to describe Protestantism writ large using various examples of Mormonism, Lutheranism, and Pentacostalism.

That said, a common misconception is that Gnostics were basically Neo-Platonists with Jewish or Christian spins on the Theory of Forms. In general though, Gnostics had a theory of semiotics that recalls Heraclitus and the tension of opposites, not Plato. This, the emanations of the Entirety through the Barbelo in various Gnostic myths come on balanced pairs. Yaldaboath is malformed because it is the creation of Sophia/Wisdom without her antipode. The Pleroma is in perfect balance, and it is the harmony of opposites, not the Form of the Good, that achieves this. The meditation on the various emanations itself would help form Kabblah (see Schloem's work) and Western esoterica.

So, the Monad contains elements that are bad when not in balance. It contains all things. Heat, darkness, unbearable cold, and blinding light. It's like a wavelength approaching infinite frequency. The peaks and valleys of the signal cancel each other out as frequency hits infinity. The result is silence, but a pregnant science of the infinite.

Ascribing a human-like will to the Monad is incorrect. It is pure potentiality.

Why does the Monad create in the first place? Gnostics didn't really get into this. This would wait for Boehme, and the recognition that definition, even the semiotics of opposites, relies on sublation. To be is to be not something else. Thus God most posit that which is outside Itself to know its self. Thus the whole accident of the material world, and humanity as an "other," is th process of God evolving, coming to know Itself through it's self. Humanity acts as the other and undergoes this transition on a historical scale, a point Hegel explores in the Phenomenology of Spirit.