Traces of Gnostic Influence in the Transcendental Epistemology

of the Anonymous Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides

Zeke Mazur

Université Laval

ajmazur@uchicago.edu

The extended passage of the Anonymous Turin Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides (p. 2, fol. 91^v, lines 14–31) describing the ultimate apprehension of the transcendent First One (or “God”)–– and in particular the exhortation to “stand upon an unutterable preconception of him that ‘images’ him through silence, without recognizing that it is silent nor conscious that it is ‘imaging’ him nor knowing absolutely anything at all, but being an ‘image’ of the unutterable alone, unutterably being the unutterable, but not as knowing (στῆναι ἐπὶ τὴν αὐτοῦ ἄρρητον προ{σ}έννοιαν τὴν ἐνεικονιζομένην αὐτὸν διὰ σιγῆς οὐδὲ ὅτι σιγᾷ γιγνώσκουσαν) et seq.–– is completely suffused with Gnostic concepts and technical terms used to describe a similar approach to and / or visionary apprehension of the supreme, unknowable deity. These concepts and terms include, inter alia, [a] the need for transcendental stasis; [b] variants of the neologism pro<t>ennoia which simultaneously denote the primordial hypernoetic emanation of the transcendent principle and the extraordinary human faculty capable of apprehending that principle, and that are [c] commonly said to subsist in close relation to “silence”; [d] the (related) paradoxical apprehension of the Unknowable through a mystical “un–knowing”; and, finally, perhaps most importantly, [e] the contemplative assimilation to the First principle by means of the creation or discovery of an inherent or intrapsychic eikôn of that principle: an “image” that is simultaneously identical to and different from its archetype, and that somehow replicates the intermediate phase of the primordial deployment of the Second principle through the reflexive self–apprehension of the First. Now this passage has a few terminological parallels in the extant works of Porphyry, to whom Pierre Hadot famously attributed the Commentary. Yet there is no reason to think this is a Porphyrian innovation, since one can also find more substantial parallels in Plotinus, not only in middle–period treatises responding to the Gnostic tractates read and critiqued in his circle–– such as, for example, in the patently anti–Gnostic context of the Großschrift, at III.8[30].9 and V.8[31].11–– but also in the early treatises I.6[1] and VI.9[9]. However, a close examination of the Commentary passage alongside its Gnostic analogues demonstrates that the Gnostic parallels are closer still, both conceptually and terminologically. What is most interesting is that many of these parallels––which, moreover, are not limited to the much–discussed Noetic Triad–– may be found not only in the extant Coptic versions of the Platonizing Sethian tractates Allogenes (NHC XI,3) and Zostrianos (NHC VIII,1) which were known to Plotinus and his entourage but whose chronology relative to Plotinus and his immediate successors remains controversial, but also in a wide variety of Gnostic sources that are more or less securely pre–Plotinian, such as, for example, the account of the supposedly Simonian Apophasis Megalê provided by Hippolytus (Refutatio omnium haeresium VI.12–18), the Trimorphic Protennoia (NHC XIII,1), the Gospel of the Egyptians / Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (NHC III,2 and IV,2), and the Apocryphon of John (NHC II,1, II, 1, IV,1 and BG 8502,2), where analogous schemata reflect specifically Gnostic conceptions that probably derive at least in part from Jewish mysticism. This suggests that this transcendental epistemology–– and thus the Anonymous Commentary in its entirety–– emerged not from a strictly Academic environment but rather from a Platonizing Gnostic (or crypto–Gnostic) milieu that was as familiar with the topoi of classic Gnosticism as with the dialogues of Plato and their contemporaneous Pythagorean exegeses. This observation is consistent with the pre–Plotinian origin of the Anonymous Commentary proposed by Corrigan, Bechtle, Turner, and Rasimus, and more generally provides support for the hypothesis that a substantial amount of the apparent ‘innovation’ in academic Platonism during and after Plotinus owes far more to the tacit influence of Gnostic intellectual creativity than has hitherto been suspected.