776 EPILOGUE
not erase.^16 While this is not usually recognized, gnostic salvation now makes
mortality not only secondary but also, as in the Judaism of the Torah, final,
with no probability of afterlife or heaven. For the Torah-based Jews, however,
reward is closeness to god and a good, virtuous, long life on earth; for the
gnostics it is a flash of disappearance of the spirit from body and earth to re-
turn to the original light source, to become that light source or god or what-
ever name one attaches to the most significant creative principle, and then to
return to earth, body and soul, consoled by the knowledge of that glimpse
and participation.
JEWISH, CHRISTIAN, AND GNOSTIC GODS
In Judaism god is the principle force, and Satan (meaning "adversary") is a
scarcely mentioned member of god's court (Job 1-2 and Zechariah 3:1-2). He
is god's enforcer among humans, and only in 1 Chronicles 21:1 is there ambi-
guity as to whether he is an adversary of god or of humans. In this one in-
stance of possible evil and opposition, he is at worst a minor digression.
Judaism is not dualistic with regard to divine powers, and apart from the
early rival Canaanite gods of the Torah, god has no rival within the ranks of
Jewish divinities. Probably through the influence of Persian (Zoroastrian)
dualism, Christianity drove Satan out of heaven into the underworld but
gave him only limited powers. Satan and his demons caused physical and
mental sicknesses and were a pervasive temptation, but wicked Satan never
tasted the omnipotence of god. His inferno was not another great firmament,
a site not of cosmic creation but of punishment. In fact Satan himself was
usually a prisoner in his own realm, in Apocalypse fire or Dante's ice, and no
match for the magnificent Almighty of Jews and Christians, whose Hebrew
Bible name, El Shaddai, "god of the mountains" or "god the bountiful," re-
sounds his grandeur.^17
In contrast to the feeble Satan of Judaism and the fearful devil of the later
Christians comes the gnostic demiurge, who is no other than the great and
- After distinguishing between spiritual leaps of the gnostic and others, we may note that
these are descriptive, not evaluative, distinctions. The lives and poems of the sixteenth-century
Spanish mystics Fray Luis de Leon and San Juan de la Cruz (Saint John of the Cross) have been
and remain a lifelong summit. - The "Almighty" of the English Bible (the term appears thirty-one times in Job alone) is an
unfortunate mistranslation of the Hebrew El Shaddai in which a strong metaphor of diverse
human qualities is replaced by a pious, conceptual adjective of disquieting omnipotent power.