LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM 309In his commentary, which moves through the pages toward more purely
Valentinian speculation, Herakleon speaks of the three levels of people: the
material (or hylic, earthly), the psychical (with soul, psyche), and the spiritual
(or pneumatic, with spirit, pneuma) and their special apprehension of reality.
The material people worship the demiurge, who made the earth and flesh; the
psychical people also worship the demiurge and god as Jesus in the flesh. They
all miss what the spiritual people apprehend, which is the higher father of
truth, or whatever of the many names the transcendent gnostic deity is given.
In disputing the nature of reality that the other Christians perceive, Herakleon
is not suggesting that Jesus did not exist or that the events recounted in the
gospels were false. They did take place, yet their meaning is not the apparent
historical meaning but an image of the inner meaning, of a higher reality.
Through knowledge, the spiritual one comes upon and participates in that
higher reality, which is the gnostic deity. Sometimes the elect are unaware of
their spiritual, pneumatic level and can falter: the gnostics tended to ascribe
such ignorance to error rather than moral sin. The true gnostics understand
the symbolic meaning of the images in the world, and turn inward to look for
the indescribable and secret forces of the divine.
COMMENTARY ON JOHN
4
(1) John 1:3
Through the word everything came to be,
and without the word nothing came to be.
Everything is the world and what is in the world, but the aeon and what is in
the aeon was not born through the word. Nothing is what is in the world and
the creation. Who provided the cause of the generation of the world to the
demiurge was the word, who is not the one from or by whom but through
whom the world was generated. The word did not create as if he were given
energy by another, but while he was providing energy, another, the demiurge,
created. In that sense the world was generated through the word.- Herakleon's Commentary on John; translated from the Greek by Willis Barnstone.