Divine World

to the divine realm of light, self-contained and remote, the cosmos is opposed as the realm of darkness. The world is the work of lowly powers which though they may mediately be descended from Him do not know the true God

Jonas identifies the Gnostic Divine World as an absolutely transmundane realm of light antithetically opposed to the cosmos, governed by ignorant Archons — the foundational dualist thesis of Gnostic cosmology.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958thesis

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His eternal ideas can be seen as a rational version of the mythical divine world, of which mundane things are the merest shadow. He did not discuss the nature of God but confined himself to the divine world of the forms.

Armstrong argues that Plato’s eternal Forms constitute a philosophical rationalization of the mythic Divine World — static, changeless, and the only fully real domain — of which material phenomena are mere imitations.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993thesis

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To admit this is to affirm, in a sense, the fundamentally divine character of the world, based upon this identity of the principle of divine Wisdom in God and in the creature. Wisdom in creation is ontologically identical with its prototype.

Bulgakov’s sophiology grounds the Divine World’s relationship to creation not in opposition but in ontological identity: creaturely Sophia shares its essential principle with divine Sophia, making the world fundamentally — if not fully — divine.

Bulgakov, Sergei, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 1937thesis

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the central point from which sophiology proceeds is that of the relation between God and the world… we are faced with the question of the meaning and significance of Divine-humanity — not only insofar as it concerns the God-human… but precisely insofar as it applies to the theandric union between God and the whole of the creaturely world.

Bulgakov frames the entire sophiological project as a resolution of the tension between a separating dualism and a collapsing monism, seeking a Divine World that genuinely interpenetrates the creaturely through Divine-humanity.

Bulgakov, Sergei, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 1937thesis

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through a lapse in wisdom, Sophia, some of the brilliance of the divine realm is lost. The child of Sophia, the creator or demiurge… fashions a world of mortality that snares human beings.

Meyer’s Gnostic Gospel material presents the Divine World as a Pleroma whose luminosity is catastrophically diminished by Sophia’s fall, producing a demiurgic counter-world that traps the divine spark in matter.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005thesis

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The Active Imagination is essentially the organ of theophanies, because it is the organ of Creation and because Creation is essentially theophany. The Divine Being is a Creator because He wished to know Himself in beings who know Him.

Corbin, reading Ibn ‘Arabi, locates the disclosure of the Divine World not beyond creation but within the theophanic imagination: creation itself is the form through which the Divine Being reveals itself to itself.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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The Active Imagination is essentially the organ of theophanies, because it is the organ of Creation and because Creation is essentially theophany.

Corbin affirms that the Divine World becomes accessible through the Active Imagination, which mediates between the sensory and intellectual planes in the intermediate world of real Images.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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The recollection of his own alienness, the recognition of his place of exile for what it is, is the first step back; the awakened homesickness is the beginning of the return.

Jonas frames the soul’s existential condition as exile from the Divine World, with gnostic awakening consisting precisely in the recovery of that sense of alienness — the beginning of re-ascent to the realm of origin.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958supporting

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the divine seeds of being in the soil of non-being, the actualization of divine prototypes, of the divine Sophia in the creaturely… The world is created in all its fullness, and God ‘rested from his works’ after creation.

Bulgakov describes world-history as the gradual actualization of divine prototypes already present in creaturely Sophia, such that the Divine World is the eschatological telos immanent within the developmental process.

Bulgakov, Sergei, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 1937supporting

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that Being which has sunk to the level of this world from the other world of divinity, which separates itself, with the death of man, once more

Rohde’s account of Aristotle identifies the Divine World as a prior realm of divinity from which Mind descends into matter and to which it returns at death — yet, lacking imaginative content, this doctrine has no living power for human conduct.

Rohde, Erwin, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting

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should not those who have attained ‘knowledge’ [gnosis] pursue the Good already here… for the very reason that they claim to have sprung from the divine essence? For it is of the nature of this essence to regard what is noble.

Plotinus’s critique of the Gnostics, as relayed by Jonas, insists that genuine kinship with the Divine World entails ethical engagement with this world — not its contemptuous rejection.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958supporting

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Divine-humanity is the unity and complete concord of the divine and the created Wisdom, of God and his creation, in the person of the Word.

In Christ, Bulgakov argues, the Divine World and the creaturely world achieve their fullest union — the Incarnation being the ontological proof that the two orders are not irreconcilably opposed.

Bulgakov, Sergei, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 1937supporting

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there are two poises of our soul-existence, a lower, troubled and subjected, a higher, supreme, untroubled and sovereign, one vibrant in Mind, the other tranquil in Spirit.

Aurobindo posits the Divine World as an inner supramental poise accessible to the evolved soul, distinguishing it from ordinary mental existence and treating it not as an otherworldly escape but as a higher status within total being.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting

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what is other than the Divine Being is not absolutely other (a no without a yes), but is the very form of the theophany (mazhar), the reflection or shadow of the being who is revealed in it.

Corbin insists that the created world is not ontologically alien to the Divine World but is its theophanic form — a shadow that, rightly read through ta’wil, discloses its divine source.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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the specifically gnostic feature of the process is that it is one of progressive deterioration (alienation) in which the Epinoia, the bearer of the creative powers separated from their source, loses control over her own creations.

Jonas traces the Gnostic narrative of the Divine World’s self-alienation: the creative power emanated from the Father progressively deteriorates as it moves away from its source, generating the fallen cosmos.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958supporting

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the Shekinah becomes the female aspect of God… identified the Shekinah with the Gnostic figure of Sophia, the last of the divine emanations which had fallen from the Pleroma and now wandered, lost and alienated from the Godhead.

Armstrong notes how Kabbalistic thought maps the Divine World through the sefirotic system, identifying the Shekinah — like Gnostic Sophia — as the divine emanation most proximate to the created world and most subject to alienation.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993aside

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The world itself, like the heavenly gods and man, is divine because it contains the divine element, reason… There is, then, in the soul and body of the universe a divine Reason analogous to man’s.

Plato’s Timaeus, as glossed here, presents the Divine World not as wholly separate but as immanent within the cosmic structure through the World-Soul’s divine Reason — a position that complicates any simple otherworldly dualism.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside

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She is the intelligence within nature, the animating energy of the cosmos; rooted in tree, vine, earth, and water and active in the habitations of humanity. She is the principle of justice that inspires all human laws.

Harvey and Baring present the Divine Feminine Wisdom as the mode through which the Divine World actively inhabits the natural and social orders — the hidden ordering intelligence underlying cosmic and human life.

Harvey, Andrew; Baring, Anne, The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996aside

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