Pleroma

The Pleroma — from the Greek πλήρωμα, ‘fullness’ — occupies a singular position in the depth-psychological corpus as the conceptual horizon against which individuation is defined and measured. Jung appropriated the term directly from Valentinian Gnosticism, where it designates the totality of divine aeons, the fully explicated plenum of divine being. In the depth-psychological reworking, most consequentially staged in the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (1916), the Pleroma becomes the primordial undifferentiated All — simultaneously nothing and everything, the cancellation point of all opposites — whose principal danger is dissolution of the individual creature. Hoeller’s commentary clarifies that the Pleroma’s qualities are precisely the pairs of opposites, which within it annihilate one another; only in the created, differentiated world do they become operative. Jung’s decisive move, transmitted through both the Red Book annotations and Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche, is to link the imperative of distinctiveness — the principium individuationis — to resistance against Pleromatic regression. To fall back into the Pleroma is to die as a creature. Jonas’s scholarship on Valentinian cosmology anchors the mythological substrate, showing how Sophia’s fatal plunge beyond the Limit enacts precisely the catastrophe of undifferentiated absorption. The tension between Pleromatic totality and creatureliness structures the entire Jungian account of psychological development.

In the library 11 passages

In the Pleroma there is nothing and everything: it is not profitable to think about the Pleroma, for to do that would mean one’s dissolution. The CREATED WORLD is not in the Pleroma, but in itself.

This passage from the First Sermon establishes the Pleroma as the paradoxical all-and-nothing whose contemplation threatens the creature with dissolution, setting the foundational ontological distinction between Pleroma and created world.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The pairs of opposites are the qualities of the Pleroma: they are also in reality non-existent because they cancel each other out. Since we ourselves are the Pleroma, we also have these qualities present within us.

The passage articulates the core Jungian doctrine that the Pleroma’s constitutive pairs of opposites, though self-cancelling within it, become active and dangerous within the differentiated creature who also participates in the Pleroma.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

If we do not distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We fall into indistinctiveness, which is the other quality of the pleroma… Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness… This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS.

Jung’s own text in Memories directly equates failure to differentiate with Pleromatic regression and names the principium individuationis as the creature’s fundamental counter-force to Pleromatic dissolution.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in the nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish.

Edinger transmits and amplifies the Jungian Pleroma doctrine, emphasizing that the loss of discriminating consciousness constitutes a literal death of the individual creature through Pleromatic absorption.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Gnostics… expressed it as Pleroma, a state of fullness where the pairs of opposites, yea and nay, day and night, are together, then when they ‘become,’ it is either day or night.

This editorial note in Liber Novus documents Jung’s own retrospective gloss on the Pleroma as a pre-differential state of potentiality, explicitly linking it to the Valentinian tradition and to his later concept of the Bardo.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Differentiation is creation. It is differentiated. Differentiation is its essence, and therefore it differentiates. Therefore man differentiates, since his essence is differentiation. Therefore he also differentiates the qualities of the Pleroma that do not exist.

The Philemon voice in Liber Novus argues that creation is constitutively differentiation, and that human consciousness necessarily projects distinctions onto Pleromatic qualities which, strictly speaking, have no existence within the Pleroma itself.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

God is a quality of the Pleroma… God also is himself the Pleroma, even as every smallest point within the created world, as well as within the uncreated realm, is itself the Pleroma.

The Second Sermon extends the Pleroma concept to encompass even God and Devil as its first differentiated emanations, collapsing the distinction between divine being and the primordial undifferentiated whole.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the ‘Ενθύμησις reflection of the Sophia who dwells above, compelled by necessity, departed with suffering from the Pleroma into the darkness and empty spaces of the void. Separated from the light of the Pleroma, she was without form or figure.

In the context of alchemical symbolism, Jung invokes Irenaeus’s account of Sophia-Achamoth’s departure from the Pleroma to establish the mythological precedent for psychic fragmentation and its relationship to formlessness.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

within the Pleroma to restore true serenity; and, as a condition thereof, to take care of the residual formlessness and impart form to it.

Jonas details the Valentinian soteriological apparatus by which Christos and Holy Spirit are emanated to repair the rupture caused by Sophia’s fall, restoring Pleromatic harmony while addressing the formless residue expelled beyond its boundary.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

she would in the end have been swallowed up by its sweetness and dissolved in the general being, had she not come up against the power that consolidates the All and keeps it off the ineffable Greatness. This power is called Limit (horos).

Jonas’s account of Sophia’s near-dissolution into the Abyss and her rescue by the Limit (horos) provides the mythological template for the Jungian understanding of Pleromatic regression and the structural necessity of boundary and differentiation.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It was their thinking in paradoxes that drew Jung to the Gnostics… he identifies himself here with the Gnostic writer Basilides (early second century A.D.) and even takes over some of his terminology.

This editorial commentary situates Jung’s adoption of Gnostic terminology, including the Pleroma, within his broader attraction to paradoxical thinking and his deliberate identification with the Basilidean tradition.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms