The Silence and the Utterance: The Feminine Divine in Gnostic Thought
At the very top of the Valentinian map of reality, before a single world or word exists, the divine is already a pair. The account preserved by Irenaeus names them Depth and Silence, the unfathomable source and his eternal partner, and the detail deserves a slow second look. In this cosmology the deepest layer of God has a feminine half, and her name is Silence. Everything that follows descends through her. The buried texts of Gnosticism are the largest surviving body of early Christian literature in which the feminine is load-bearing at every level of divinity, from the source’s own partner down to the voice of the most shocking poem in the library. We’ll take those levels in order, from the top down. ...