– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992)
Without endless hesitations as to possible solutions, which form as many building bricks of gnostic myth, we would not have the impressive array of transformations produced by the gnostic mind and characteristic of its extraordinary freedom. It is interesting to note that a historian and theorist of literature like Harold Bloom understood better than any other scholar the generative processes of Gnosticism when he perceptively defined the latter as a “theory of misprision” and its outcomes “a creative misunderstanding.” Indeed, Gnosticism is Platonic hermeneutics so suspicious of tradition that it is willing to break through the borders of tradition, any tradition, including its own. Conversely, regarded through the lens of tradition, any tradition, it appears as “misprision.”
Let us revert to our Platonist who became suspicious of the biblical god. Where will suspicion end? We may assume that a Platonic exegesis of Genesis according to the distinction of Numenius of Apamea, which would make the biblical god into the Platonic demiurge, would call little attention to itself if it were not accompanied by textual analysis. Otherwise the Bible would reject it or it would reject the Bible! Gnosticism can thus be viewed as a continual process in which suspicion tentatively extends over many significant episodes of the Old and New Testaments and would treat them many times, realizing that not one but many “true” answers are possible.
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