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C h a p t e r 3 What Sort of Thing Is This Luminous Woman? Sexual Dimorphism in On the Origin of the World Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written, . . . can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. —Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” Whereas numerous platonizing Christian texts locate the difference of the feminine in terms of desire, lack, and derivativeness, in this chapter I turn to another kind of attempted solution to the early Christian problem of “the Platonic woman”—as seen in Tractate II, 5 from Nag Hammadi (known as On the Origin of the World). Like Clement of Alexandria and certain of the Valentinian materials we have examined, On the Origin of the World cites the Pauline typological framework and relies on its conceptual apparatus. And like these other texts, it does so in a cosmological framework largely informed by the intellectual resources of the Platonic tradition. Thus one might expect On the Origin of the World to stake similar anthropological ground to that which we have covered in the previous two chapters. Instead, On the Origin of the World significantly complicates the picture, thereby foregrounding the rich fluidity of the Platonic legacy—itself already complex and multiple—that early Christian thinkers engaged and reworked to their own ends. As such, this text raises questions that are not only relevant for the analysis of this chapter, but will also segue into the questions that drive the final section of the book. That is to say, it points toward the conclusion 76 Chapter 3 that the “true self” was not, in fact, always pre-gendered in early Christian platonizing anthropologies (or early Christian theological reflection more generally ). Nor was the dualism between mind/soul and body (and by association, male and female) always so tidy as to necessitate an erasure of sexual difference as the single mode of eschatological hope. Rather, as my analysis will show, On the Origin of the World offers an alternative conception of embodiment to those discussed thus far—and with it, by necessity, an alternative account of what sexual difference is all about. It is my contention that a text such as On the Origin of the World very much belongs in this conversation. As already noted briefly, scholars of the Nag Hammadi texts have shown that this literature should not be artificially contained to discussions of “Gnosticism” but needs to be integrated into the larger landscape of early Christian history.1 In the second, third, and even fourth centuries, the boundaries of what could count as “Christian” were under debate. Therefore, as Karen King argues, we will reconstruct a richer, more historically nuanced picture if we evaluate these texts not in terms of a supposed purity of Christian origins from which they deviate, but rather with an eye to “the variety of discourses, material and intellectual resources, processes, and practices by which people make sense of their lives in contexts of ancient pluralism.”2 Thus I propose to treat On the Origin of the World not as exterior to the discourse and practices of early Christian identity formation (equating “Gnostic” with non-Christian), but as one option in formative Christian thinking.3 This option stakes its own particular theological and anthropological ground, resisting easy categorization in terms of standard taxonomies such as “Valentinian” or “Sethian” as it narrates the origins of sexually differentiated human beings. Furthermore, as we will see, the text’s etiology of sexual difference does not map neatly onto the dominant ancient model we have been working with up to this point—a single hierarchical spectrum oriented toward the ideal male. The anthropogony of On the Origin of the World does share ground with this model in that it both appeals to a figure of primal androgyny and does not valorize the material female body. But it charts a strikingly different course from Clement or the Excerpts from Theodotus—one that needs to be understood , I maintain, as a particularly pointed riposte to the looming shadow of the Pauline anthropological problematic. While remaining in some sense dependent on the conceptual terms of Paul’s framework (and the problems for sexual difference it generates), the text responds to the specter by resisting the framework’s traditional (Pauline) form, [3.144.17.45] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

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