The aeons that make up the entirety result from the Invisible Spirit's knowledge or thought of itself. They are its thinking or its intellect, in all its complexity. They form also a spiritual realm, the equivalent of Plato's realm of ideal forms. In Plato's view, the material universe in which we live is an imperfect but very good copy of a spiritual realm of ideas or ideal forms that alone are real-that is, unchanging and eternal. Likewise for the Gnostics, only the entirety that the aeons constitute is truly real and eternal; the material world is a flawed imitation of the entirety and
...more
