– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992)
We see how, from a seed, Gnosis grows into a tree that starts to split into branches; some branches remain virtual, some actually grow. The generative model of gnostic systems is actually a Tree, the Tree of Gnosis. From this Tree of Knowledge scholars, in their strong respect for tradition, seldom eat; but once they do, they must acknowledge to what extent human beliefs and theories are related to human games.
At this point all Western dualists without exception feel that they should settle their account with the Book of Genesis. Here the game changes. It becomes sequential, like a board game in which the character advances by rolling the die, and any square he or she lands on presents a multiple-choice case (on which a few other choices may depend). Any of the gnostic groups that produce texts seem to play the board game anew every time, and thus the results are different-they are transformations of each other.
This operation can be understood through the simple use of morphology. It does not entail morphodynamics. Yet the basic option, which is in most cases to say that the Old Testament is the Scripture of the Demiurge, can be comprehended only in morphodynamic perspective. We saw that Marcion based his rejection of the Old Testament on Paul’s distinction between two regimes of the world: sub lege and sub fide, under the Law and under Faith. Yet we also saw that the rejection was motivated by a mental operation that sought confirmation in the Bible for the qualities of omnipotence and omniscience of God but could not find it. It also appeared that the only group that would have been sufficiently close to Judaism to keep using its Scriptures, and sufficiently free to use them away from Judaic interpretive tradition, thereby triggering a rational hermeneutic of suspicion eventually directed against the biblical God, was the Christians themselves.
Pp. 242-3