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The GnOStIC ClarissaMargaret Anne Doody Such a Sun in a family, where there are none but faint twinklers, how could they bear it! ... The distance between you and them is immense. Their eyes ake to look up at you. What shades does your full day of merit cast upon them! (Anna to Clarissa, 9 March) Do they not act in character?—And to whom? To an Alien. You are not one of them. (Anna to Clarissa, 25 March) Once upon a time there was a Virgin Maid who lived in bliss surrounded by the light in which she participated. In her happy home some say she was placed just below her Mother, in freedom and felicity. But in making a false and deadly contact with an inimical element, whether out of inadvertence, curiosity, or desire, this Virgin Maid lost her happy place. She was deceived andbeguiled; she confusedthe low with the high, the false simulacrum or reflected light with the reality. The arrogant and destructive deceiver who beguiled her brought about her fall. The Lady of Light was nearly quenched by his arrogant power. But she, seeing the truth at last, turned back, and repenting her error returned, slowly and not without trials, through the unhappy chaos back to her place of light. Simply put, this summary gives us what we will, I think, recognize as a possible plot summary of Richardson's Clarissa—although we will all immediately protest against it, saying that Clarissa's place in her "original family" the Harlowes is far from truly happy. The plot summary I have just given is a justifiable, if greatly shortened, version of the Gnostic story of Sophia or Heavenly Wisdom. For centuries, the main source of information about the chief Gnostic versions of cosmic events was St EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 1, October 1998 50 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Irenaeus of Lyons, who, in an all-out treatise Against Heresies, left the most accessible versions of the beliefs he attempted to refute; his work was widely known to learned Christian divines of various persuasions in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Texts more recently translated, such as Pistis Sophia (which was not translated into English from Coptic until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), have added greatly to our own knowledge ofthese cosmologies and theologies, even before the discovery in this century of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.1 Various forms of Gnostic beliefs can be traced in the thinking of some Renaissance groups such as the Family of Love which flourished in the environment of Renaissance print culture.2 It would not be especially surprising if Richardson had come upon versions and variants of Gnostic thought fairly often, even in hostile citations in sermons and in antagonistic tracts. Richardson's age was full ofreligious controversy.3 The atmosphere of the 1720s and 1730s was conducive to attacks upon "heresy," which means, of course, that heresies had to get some kind of airing. The endeavour on some sides to turn Christian theology into deistic moralizing—a tendency so visible in the eighteenth century—may actually have stimulated a kind of oppositional interest in inner-light doctrines of various kinds, as the rise of Methodism would seem to indicate. 1 St Irenaeus of Lyons writing Against Heresies about 180 AD left valuable information about the sects he was trying to combat, particularly the followers of Valentinus who began to flourish about the middle of the second century AD. Irenaeus summarizes what he takes to be the beliefs of various Gnostic groups, and is still the chief source of information about Gnostic thought in the early Christian era. Pistis Sophia was discovered, if not edited, in the eighteenth century; it was in the possession of Dr Anthony Askew, a divine at Cambridge. The discovery in the midtwentieth century ofthe Nag Hammadi library ofGnostic texts buried in Egypt has greatly amplified our knowledge of Gnosticism. 2 Christopher W. Marsh, in a recent study, The Family of Love in English Society 1550-1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), notes as others have done that the Family ofLove on the Continent flourished chiefly among the Antwerp humanists and had a special connection to the printing house...

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