The Gnostic fullness, a graded world of spiritual Beings that pre-Christian humanity knew by direct soul-kinship, before a veil fell across it around the fourth century AD.
The Pleroma in Anthroposophy is the Gnostic fullness, the supersensible world of light that Rudolf Steiner describes in Three Streams in the Evolution of Mankind, GA 225 (lecture of 15 July 1923, Dornach), as a graded realm of individualised spiritual Beings called the Aeons, sent forth in descending ranks from the Demiurgos. Within this hierarchy Jehovah holds a relatively subordinate place, and the human being he creates stands at the lowest stage of the Pleroma. Pre-Christian humanity in Greece and Asia Minor experienced direct soul-kinship with this world of light through illumination and inspiration, not through reasoning. Around the fourth century AD the Gods drew a veil across the Pleroma so that individual, rationalistic thinking could awaken in Europe. Today the same Valentinian fullness is read in the Nag Hammadi codices recovered in 1945.
The Pleroma is the Greek word for fullness, the name that early Gnostic teachers, and Rudolf Steiner after them, gave to the whole light-filled spiritual world from which graded Beings descend toward the Earth. Steiner places it above the physical world yet peopled by individualised Beings, the Aeons. He treats it as a realm humanity once knew inwardly, then lost as a veil fell across European consciousness in the fourth century.
In Steiner's Own Words
"Pleroma" was the name given to a world which transcends, although it has its basis in the phenomena of the world of sense. This conception was thoroughly intelligible to the Ancients although it was utterly beyond the grasp of a later humanity. The Pleroma was a world at a higher level than the physical world but peopled none the less by individualised Beings. And at the lowest level, at the lowest stage of the Pleroma, the human being created by Jehovah comes into existence. At this same stage, another Being appears, a Being incorporate not in the individual man nor yet in a nation, but rather in humanity taken as one whole.
What it Means Today
When Steiner lectured on the Pleroma in 1923, the primary Gnostic sources he drew on survived only as hostile summaries inside the writings of Church Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyon, whose Against Heresies preserved fragments of the Valentinian system precisely in order to refute it. That changed in December 1945, when a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman uncovered a sealed jar near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt containing thirteen leather-bound Coptic codices. Among them was the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, which speaks directly of the Pleroma as the fullness of the Father from which the Aeons proceed and into which the soul longs to return. Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton, drew on these recovered texts in The Gnostic Gospels (1979), giving a wide readership its first close view of the fullness Steiner had named from spiritual research two decades before the discovery.
Thalira synthesis: what the Nag Hammadi find restored as text, Steiner had already described as a lost faculty, a soul that once stood inside the Pleroma by direct kinship rather than reading about it from outside the veil. For a contemporary reader the two meet here: the codices give the Valentinian vocabulary of fullness, and Steiner gives the inner history of why that vocabulary stopped being lived experience and became, instead, a manuscript to be excavated.
Where to Read More
- Three Streams in the Evolution of Mankind, GA 225
- Find Steiner's Cultural Phenomena lectures at SteinerBooks
- The Pleroma: Divine Fullness in Gnostic and Pauline Thought
- The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Theseus, the Beast, and the Path to the Centre
- The Sirens: The Deadly Song and the Lure of the Unconscious