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The Vedantists admit the existence of a "Logos," or Ishwara, the Lord of the Universe, who is, however, but a manifestation of Brahman a Great Soul, as it were, and who presides over the evolution of Universes from the Prakriti, and who plays the part of the Demiurge of the old Grecian and Gnostic philosophies.
Let us now enquire into the part played by Epinoia, the Divine Thought, in the cosmic process, reserving the part played by her in the human drama to when we come to treat of the soteriology of Simon. We have evidently here a version of the great Sophia-mythus, which plays so important a part in all Gnostic systems.
If a purely dogmatic Atheism be a rare phase of opinion critical Atheism is a very common one, and there is also a form of Atheism which is professedly sceptical or agnostic, but often in reality dogmatic or gnostic.
The pure unencumbered idea, the "Idea of ideas," is the Logos, or divine Reason, which represents the sum-total of the activities which sustain the world, and serves as a mediator between the absolutely ideal God and the absolutely non-ideal matter. Here we arrive at a Gnostic conception, which the Philonists of Alexandria were not slow to appropriate.
But this same Christian philosopher Christian? in the twenty-second chapter of his fourth Stroma tells us that for the gnostic that is to say, the intellectual knowledge, gnosis, ought to suffice, and he adds: "I will dare aver that it is not because he wishes to be saved that he, who devotes himself to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself, chooses knowledge.
He will show us how Lucifer is unmasked in an undemonstrative and gentlemanly fashion by a late Gnostic and initiate of the 33rd degree. He writes, as he frankly tells us, in a spirit of reparation and gratitude, having commerced freely with devils during a long series of unholy years.
These seals or "characters" could not only be acquired through formal rites and by the laying on of the hands of a master, but also, I am disposed to believe, by a certain mode of study I am developing the Gnôstic theory, not stating one of my own namely, that of a highly symbolic literature.
The Gnostics of the first Christian centuries attributed it to Ieu, the first man; and in one of the oldest manuscripts in existence, now in the British Museum the Coptic version of the "Faithful Wisdom," said to have been written by the great Gnostic philosopher Valentinus in the fourth century there is mention made of this venerable relic, the Saviour being said to inform the Virgin Mary that He has appointed the Spirit Kalapataraoth as guardian over it.
For thence it is that all things begin to stretch below their wondrous rays. Compare this with the teaching of Simon that the "fruit" of the Tree is placed in the Store-house and not cast into the Fire. In his aeonology, Simon, like other Gnostic teachers, begins with the Word, the Logos, which springs up from the Depths of the Unknown Invisible, Incomprehensible Silence.
How can it be thought that an Englishman, or a German, trained under and surrounded by the circumstances of the nineteenth century, should be able to thread all the mazes in the mind of a Gnostic or an Ebionite in the second?
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