– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992)
In principle there could be no serious objection to a Platonist who would assert that the god of Genesis is actually the Logos of the supreme God. (Not his Sophia, however; the biblical god is manifestly male.) But a hermeneutic of suspicion like the gnostic one would not look for accommodation. In it there would be no room for the patently contradictory attempt at merging a Logos/Sophia aware of being subordinated to God and a Demiurge who brags about being unique. Once the identification of Logos with Demiurge is discarded, then Logos must be someone else. And it could as well be Sophia, for it does not have to be male. Thus we come to three principles: God, Logos/Sophia, and the Demiurge. These three principles should be linked in such a way as to explain a number of things. One is that Logos/Sophia creates the world, yet the Demiurge also creates the world, according to the Book of Genesis. Another one is that God, Logos/Sophia, and the Demiurge should be connected, yet in such a way as to leave room for the highest God’s utter inculpability for the faults of this world and the surprising fact that the Demiurge does not know about what is above him. This presupposes an obvious discontinuity (yet not a complete break), and precisely between Logos/Sophia and the Demiurge. At the same time, the Demiurge must remain the product of Logos/Sophia, for otherwise the premises of the system would be completely shattered. Since the idea the Platonic interpreters of Genesis would try to convey at this point is that of miscarriage, premature or irregular birth, abortion, and the like, their most reasonable choice would have been to take Sophia instead of Logos and to make her into the mother of an unwanted creature, the Demiurge. (Yet we saw that there are instances when Logos was chosen instead of Sophia.) The rest of gnostic myth was the easy play of imagination but also had to explain how the three things-Abyss, Darkness, and Waters-existed before the Demiurge. As good Platonists, the gnostics had no objection to the Abyss, the Platonic space (chōra), but derived Darkness and watery Matter either from Sophia herself or from the Demiurge.
Upon rigorous analysis, it appears that the sensational trademark of Gnosticism, namely, gnostic myth, is but an accessory and a figment without solidity or independence, meant to enable or convey hard philosophy and entirely determined by philosophical premises and by the necessity of making sense of the many contradictions of a precedent mythical narrative, the Book of Genesis. Again it remains a mystery why our Platonists were so keen on commenting on the Book of Genesis instead of anything else, unless they were Jewish Platonists not bound to Jewish tradition, in which case we should look for them in Jewish Christian circles from the turn of the Ist century C.E. or perhaps among Christians from the beginning of the IInd. The part played by Simon Magus in all this cannot be assessed. His doctrine featuring a female Thought of God might have worked as further catalyst toward the gnostic preference for Sophia instead of Logos. As to where Gnosticism might have begun, it is an unverifiable though not unlikely speculation to recall that the Christians of Alexandria, showing strong inclinations toward Platonism, could certainly benefit from the challenging presence of a massive and intellectually significant Jewish community. In such a setting, a Christian Platonist is compelled to measure himself or herself by the Jewish Scriptures and is likely to know more about them than other Christians elsewhere. Both Basilides and Valentinus were Alexandrians; and so were the Christian Gnostic Clement and the great Platonist Origen a century later, who was still calling the Logos Sophia, like Philo of Alexandria two centuries before. As for the existence of a “vulgar Gnosis,” let us again leave it to vulgar scholarship to prove or disprove it. All Gnosis that meets the eye, even when seriously deformed by vulgar heresiologists or, perhaps even worse, by Egyptian translators, is highly intellectual.
Pp. 134-5