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Out of the mist of the beginning of our era there looms a pageant of mythical figures whose vast, superhuman contours might people the walls and ceiling of another Sistine Chapel. Their countenances and gestures, the roles in which they are cast, the drama which they enact, would yield images different from the biblical ones on which the imagination of the beholder was reared, yet strangely familiar to him and disturbingly moving. The stage would be the same, the theme as transcending: the creation of the world, the destiny of man, fall and redemption, the first and the last things. But how much more numerous would be the cast, how much more bizarre the symbolism, how much more extravagant the emotions! Almost all action would be in the heights, in the divine or angelic or daimonic realm, of which the drama of man in the natural world is but a distant echo. And yet that transcendental drama before all time, depicted in the actions and passions of manlike figures, would be of intense human appeal: divinity tempted, unrest stirring among the blessed Aeons, God's erring Wisdom, the Sophia, falling prey to her own folly, wandering in the void and darkness of her own making, endlessly searching, lamenting, suffering, repenting, laboring her passion into matter, her yearning into soul; a blind and arrogant Creator believing himself the Most High and lording it over the creation, the product, like himself, of fault and ignorance; the Soul, trapped and lost in the labyrinth of the world, seeking to escape and frightened back by the gatekeepers of the cosmic prison, the terrible archons; a Savior from the Light beyond venturing into the nether world, illumining the darkness, opening a path, healing the divine breach: a tale of light and darkness, of knowledge and ignorance, of serenity and passion, of conceit and pity, on the scale not of man but of eternal beings that are not exempt from suffering and error.

The tale has found no Michelangelo to retell it, no Dante and no Milton. The sterner discipline of biblical creed weathered the storm of those days, and both the Old and the New Testament were left to inform the mind and imagination of Western man. Those teachings which, in the feverish hour of transition, challenged, tempted, tried to twist the new faith are forgotten, their written record buried in the tomes of their refuters or in the sands of ancient lands. Our art and literature and much else would be different, had the gnostic message prevailed.
-Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion
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