(Question) How do you explain the two riddles that the narrator gives in the passages below that:
(2) she is sinless, but that the root of sin comes from her?Here are two translations of a later passage in the poem:
Jaume de Marcos Andreu proposed this possible explanation:
I haven't been able to find where I originally got Jaume de Marcos Andreu's explanation above.
After saying "I am sinless,
and
the root of sin derives from me.
I am lust in (outward) appearance,
and interior self-control exists within me." in the same work, the narrator says:
So in both cases, sin is associated with lust or passions. Outwardly, Wisdom has the appearance of lust. But inside herself, the narrator has "interior self-control", which brings to mind how later the narrator says that sober men give up the pleasant forms in sins and in disgraceful passions and go to their resting place where they will find her (Sophia).
Two potential explanations (1 and 2) could be that "fleeting pleasures" are rooted in either
(Answer 1) the created world or in
(Answer 2) some of mankind's desires, which in turn were created at least in part by Wisdom/Sophia. Thus in a way, the root of sin
derives from Sophia. This is not same as saying that Sophia
is the root of sin. Instead, there is a degree of separation between her and the "root of sin".
It looks like your quotation from
The Hypostasis of the Archons was pretty relevant, and is a
third explanation. It is what Andreu's quotation is saying. I get that she gave birth to the Demiurge, maybe carelessly, and the Demiurge created a world that was in sin, but still, it seems rather indirect to say that this makes the root of sin derive from her, compared to Answer #4 below:
Fourth and Fifth explanations could be in the Garden of Eden story.
(Answer 4) The snake told Eve that eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil would make her and Adam like gods. That is, there was a knowledge component in the sin, so the root of sin could have come from Sophia in a way. The snake said, "'You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." The Bible writer commented in Genesis, "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and
a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate."
The term "root of sin" brings to mind the image of a tree or plant. This image also goes along with the story of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Genesis 3 says:
James 1 sees lust as the origin of sin:In the Apocryphon of John, the serpeant's act is to get Adam to eat from "wickedness of begetting, lust, destruction":
Plus
(Answer 5), if the narrator is Eve, then the root of sin could be derived from Eve, because she sinned.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Sixth and Seventh answers are that covetousness and pride are the root of all sin. I suppose that you could explain that covetousness and pride are derived in part from the Created world, like us humans who are in the created world, so that sin's root (pride or covetousness) is in turn derived from Sophia/Wisdom.
Answer 6. CovetousnessThomas Aquinas explained that covetousness can be considered a desire for fleeting good, and that all sin is at least in part rooted in a desire for fleeting good.
Thomas Aquinas wrote:
Covetousness, as Answer 6 to the question of how the root of sin derived from the narrator goes along with how the text also says that people embrace the pleasant forms in sins and passions, and that Sophia has the outward form of lust/desire. But it would also relate to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil being "a tree
desirable to make one
wise".
So maybe whereas Covetousness could be the root of sin, Covetousness could be derived from Wisdom/Sophia in the sense of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil being a tree desirable to make on wise.
Answer 7. Pride(Ecclus.10:15): "Pride is the beginning of all sin." (Note also: "An high look, and a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked, is sin." Proverbs 21:4)
Thomas Aquinas notes,
St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.) wrote, "'Pride is the commencement of all sin'6 because it was this which overthrew the devil, from whom arose the origin of sin; and afterwards, when his malice and envy pursued man, who was yet standing in his uprightness, it subverted him in the same way in which he himself fell. For the serpent, in fact, only sought for the door of pride whereby to enter when he said, 'Ye shall be as gods.'"
In
Gnostic Mysteries of Sex, Tobias Churton writes:
In other words, the Gnostic Valentinus saw pride in the "mother of heaven". Unfortunately, Churton was not more specific about where Valentinus wrote this.
So all in all,
Answers 4 and 6 above (the story Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; with Covetousness being the root of sin)
look to me to be to be the best answers. Sure, per
Answer 3, the Demiurge created a world of sin, and so the root of sin was the Demiurge's act, which was allowed because of Sophia's act of creating the Demiurge. Samael's arrogance created sin in The Hypostasis of the Archons, but The Hypostasis of the Archons' section that you quoted doesn't call Samael the Demiurge, whom the Gnostics called Yaldabaoth.
But this seems rather indirect in contrast to the Biblical ideology, where the root of sin is in covetousness, and the tree in the Garden of Eden was considered "desirable" to make people "wise", which is a direct reference to Sophia and desire/lust, which is associated with sin in the passage in Thunder of the Perfect Mind. Thunder seems to have in mind the issue of lust/desire/covetousness, since it twice associated desire/lust with sin in the passages that I quoted, which are the only times that the text refers to "sin". Right after saying that she is the root of sin, she says that she has the outer appearance of lust/desire, which looks like a pretty strong association between the root of sin and lust/desire,
which is strong evidence for Answer 6. Besides, Thunder of the Perfect Mind doesn't go into the Cosmogony of the Demiurge making the world and falling away like The Hypostasis of the Archons does, so the reader by default could be thinking about more direct associations made in the text itself, like between the "root of sin" and lust/desire.
Basically the answer to Riddle #2 is apparently that she is sinless in that she is the divine Sophia, and the root of sin derives from her because the root of sin is lust/desire and the story of the Garden of Evil explains the story of eating the fruit from the tree that was "desirable" to make people "wise."