The original meaning shown by other uses.
Again the teaching of the Valentinian schools supplies other uses which serve to illustrate its meaning. Not only does the supramundane kingdom as a whole bear this name, but each separate Æon, of which that kingdom is the aggregation, is likewise called a pleroma[[570]]. This designation is given to an Æon, because it is the fulness, the perfection, of which its mundane counterpart is only a shadowy and defective copy. Nor does the narrowing of the term stop here. There likewise dwells in this higher region a pleroma, or eternal archetype, not only of every comprehensive mundane power, but of each individual man; and to wed himself with this heavenly partner, this Divine ideal of himself, must be the study of his life. |Interpretation of John iv. 17, 18.|The profound moral significance, which underlies the exaggerated Platonism and perverse exegesis of this conception, will be at once apparent. But the manner in which the theory was carried out is curiously illustrated by the commentary of the Valentinian Heracleon on our Lord’s discourse with the Samaritan woman[[571]]. This woman, such is his explanation, belongs to the spiritual portion of mankind. But she had had six[[572]] husbands, or in other words she had entangled herself with the material world, had defiled herself with sensuous things. The husband however, whom she now has, is not her husband; herein she has spoken rightly: the Saviour in fact means ‘her partner from the pleroma’. Hence she is bidden to go and call him; that is, she must find ‘her pleroma, that coming to the Saviour with him (or it), she may be able to obtain from Him the power and the union and the combination with her pleroma’ (τὴν δύναμιν καὶ τὴν ἕνωσιν καὶ τὴν ἀνάκρασιν τὴν πρὸς τὸ πλήρωμα αὐτῆς). ‘For’, adds Heracleon, ‘He did not speak of a mundane (κοσμικοῦ) husband when He told her to call him, since He was not ignorant that she had no lawful husband’.
Valentinians accept St Paul and St John,
Impossible as it seems to us to reconcile the Valentinian system with the teaching of the Apostles, the Valentinians themselves felt no such difficulty. They intended their philosophy not to supersede or contradict the Apostolic doctrine, but to supplement it and to explain it on philosophical principles. Hence the Canon of the Valentinians comprehended the Canon of Catholic Christianity in all its essential parts, though some Valentinian schools at all events supplemented it with Apocryphal writings. More particularly the Gospel of St John and the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians were regarded with especial favour; and those passages which speak of the pleroma are quoted more than once in their writings to illustrate their teaching. |and quote them in support of their views.|By isolating a few words from the context and interpreting them wholly without reference to their setting, they had no difficulty in finding a confirmation of their views, where we see only an incongruity or even a contradiction. For instance, their second Christ—the redeemer of the spiritual element in the mundane world—was, as we saw, compacted of gifts contributed by all the Æons of the pleroma. Hence he was called ‘the common fruit of the pleroma’, ‘the fruit of all the pleroma’[[573]], ‘the most perfect beauty and constellation of the pleroma’[[574]]; hence also he was designated ‘All’ (πᾶν) and ‘All things’ (πάντα)[[575]]. Accordingly, to this second Christ, not to the first, they applied these texts; Col. iii. 11 ‘And He is all things’, Rom. xi. 36 ‘All things are unto Him and from Him are all things’, Col. ii. 9 ‘In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead’, Ephes. i. 10 ‘To gather together in one all things in Christ through God’[[576]]. So too they styled him )Ευδόκητος, with a reference to Col. i. 19, because ‘all the pleroma was pleased through Him to glorify the Father’[[577]]. And inasmuch as this second Christ was according to the Valentinian theory instrumental in the creation of the mundane powers, they quoted, or rather misquoted, as referring to this participation in the work of the Demiurge, the passage Col. i. 16 ‘In Him were created all things, visible and invisible, thrones, deities, dominions’[[578]]. Indeed it seems clear that these adaptations were not always afterthoughts, but that in several instances at least their nomenclature was originally chosen for the sake of fitting the theory to isolated phrases and expressions in the Apostolic writings, however much it might conflict with the Apostolic doctrine in its main lines[[579]].
Use of the term by the Docetæ
The heretics called Docetæ by Hippolytus have no connexion with docetism, as it is generally understood, i.e. the tenet that Christ’s body was not real flesh and blood, but merely a phantom body. Their views on this point, as represented by this father, are wholly different[[580]]. Of their system generally nothing need be said here, except that it is largely saturated with Valentinian ideas and phrases. From the Valentinians they evidently borrowed their conception of the pleroma, by which they understood the aggregate, or (as localized) the abode, of the Æons. With them, as with the Valentinians, the Saviour is the common product of all the Æons[[581]]; and in speaking of him they echo a common Valentinian phrase ‘the pleroma of the entire Æons’[[582]].
and by two Ophite sects.
The Ophite heresy, Proteus-like, assumes so many various forms, that the skill of critics has been taxed to the utmost to bind it with cords and extract its story from it. It appears however from the notices of Hippolytus, that the term pleroma was used in a definite theological sense by at least two branches of the sect, whom he calls Naassenes and Peratæ.
(i) Naassenes.
Of the Naassenes Hippolytus tells us that among other images borrowed from the Christian and Jewish Scriptures, as well as from heathen poetry, they described the region of true knowledge—their kingdom of heaven, which was entered by initiation into their mysteries—as the land flowing with milk and honey, ‘which when the perfect (the true Gnostics, the fully initiated) have tasted, they are freed from subjection to kings (ἀβασιλεύτους) and partake of the pleroma.’ Here is a plain allusion to Joh. i. 16. ‘This’, the anonymous Naassene writer goes on to say, ‘is the pleroma, through which all created things coming into being are produced and fulfilled (πεπλήρωται) from the Uncreated’[[583]]. Here again, as in the Valentinian system, the conception of the pleroma is strongly tinged with Platonism. The pleroma is the region of ideas, of archetypes, which intervenes between the author of creation and the material world, and communicates their specific forms to the phenomenal existences of the latter.