Pleroma
The Pleroma (Koine Greek: πλήρωμα, literally “fullness”) is a central cosmological and mystical concept originating in early Christianity and elaborated into a complex system by the Gnostic schools. It denotes the totality of divine powers — the complete, undivided spiritual realm in contrast to the emptiness (kenoma), deficiency (hysterema), or incompleteness of material existence. The term appears 17 times in the New Testament and was later adapted by Carl_Jung in his psychological and esoteric writings.
Etymology
The word derives from the verb plēróō (πληρόω, “to fill”), from plḗrēs (πλήρης, “full”). It may emphasize:
- Totality in contrast to constituent parts
- Fullness in contrast to emptiness (kenoma)
- Completeness in contrast to deficiency (hysterema)
This semantic range — from “that which fills” to “the state of being filled” — gives the term a characteristic theological ambiguity that the Gnostic schools exploited to the fullest.
In the New Testament
In its semi-technical Christian application, pleroma is applied primarily to the perfection of God — “the aggregate of the Divine attributes, virtues, energies”:
- Colossians 1:19 — The whole fullness (pan to pleroma) was pleased to dwell in Christ
- Colossians 2:9 — In Christ the whole fullness of the divine nature (theotetos) dwells bodily
- Ephesians 3:19 — That believers may be filled with “all the fullness of God”
- Ephesians 1:23 — The Church as “the fullness of him who fills all in all”
The Pauline usage establishes pleroma as the completeness with which the Son represents the Father — the fullness of life making Christ the representative, without other intermediary agencies, and ruler of the whole universe.
In Gnosticism
The Valentinian System
In the Gnostic systems — particularly that of Valentinus — the use becomes far more technical. The Gnostic writers appealed to New Testament usage, but their chief associations were with Greek philosophy. The main thought is that of a state of completeness in contrast to deficiency, or of the fullness of real existence in contrast to the empty void and unreality of mere phenomena (kenoma).
In the Valentinian system, the Pleroma consists of thirty Aeons — divine emanations proceeding from the unknowable Godhead (the Monad or Bythus, “the Deep”). These Aeons are organized in syzygies (paired male-female complements):
| Level | Symbol | Emanation |
|---|---|---|
| Point | • | Bythus (the Deep) — the unknown Father |
| Triangle | △ | Bythus + Nous (Mind) & Aletheia (Truth) |
| Square | □ | Logos (Word) & Zoē (Life), Anthrōpos (Man) & Ekklēsia (Church) |
| Pentagram | ⋆ | The Pentad — the Sons of Wisdom and their syzygies (= the Decad) |
| Hexalpha | ✡ | The Hexad and their syzygies (= the Dodecad) |
Total: 28 Aeons, plus Bythus the Root = 28 + 1 = the Contents of the Pleroma.
The circle of the Pleroma is bounded by Horus (the Boundary / Cross / Stauros), which separates the Pleroma (Completion) from the Hysterēma (Inferiority/Incompletion). Within the Hysterēma lies the Square of primordial Matter (Chaos), emanated by Sophia as the Ektrōma (Abortion). Above it is the Triangle of primordial Spirit — called the “Common Fruit of the Pleroma,” or Jesus.
“The whole Pleroma of the aeons contributes each its own excellence to the historic Jesus, and He appears on earth as the perfect beauty and star of the Pleroma.” — Irenaeus I.xi.6
The Central Drama
The central drama of Gnosticism involves a disruption of this spiritual fullness. The lowest Aeon, Gnostic_Sophia (Wisdom), falls from the Pleroma. Her descent or expulsion inadvertently results in the generation of the ignorant Demiurge, who then creates the flawed material universe as an imitation of the Pleroma. Salvation or Gnosis is viewed as the spiritual spark returning to its true home within the Pleroma.
Individual Pleromas
Each separate Aeon is also called a pleroma in contrast to its earthly imperfect counterpart — the plural pleromata designating the spiritualized fullness of particular attributes. Even individual humans have their own Pleroma or “spiritual counterpart” (as in Heracleon’s reference to “the pleroma” of the Samaritan woman).
Middle Platonism and Philosophical Origins
John M. Dillon has argued that Gnosticism imported its concept of the ideal realm (the Pleroma) from Plato’s concept of the cosmos and Demiurge in the Timaeus and from Philo of Alexandria’s Noetic cosmos — the intelligible world existing in the mind of God, in contrast to the aesthetic cosmos of sense-perception. Before Philo, there is no Jewish tradition that accepts a material world modeled on an ideal template, suggesting that the Pleroma concept is fundamentally a Gnostic adaptation of Hellenic ideas.
In Jungian Psychology
Carl_Jung famously re-appropriated the Gnostic term Pleroma, most notably in his privately circulated mystical text Seven Sermons to the Dead (part of The_Red_Book). Jung reinterpreted Pleroma not only in Gnostic terms but as a symbol of the undifferentiated totality from which all opposites arise — laying the foundation for his psychological dualities such as conscious/unconscious and animus.
For Jung, the Pleroma represented the absolute, unmanifest unified state of the universe where all opposites — light/dark, good/evil, being/non-being — cancel each other out. From the Pleroma emerges the differentiated world of consciousness and material forms. Jung used the Pleroma as a structural map to describe the deepest layers of the Collective_Unconscious, the realm where the foundational Jungian_Archetypes paradoxically rest in a state of unified nothingness until they are observed by consciousness.
Gregory Bateson: Pleroma and Creatura
In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson adopted and extended Jung’s distinction between:
- Pleroma — the non-living world that is undifferentiated by subjectivity
- Creatura — the living world, subject to perceptual difference, distinction, and information
What Bateson calls the “myth of power” is the epistemologically false application to Creatura of an element of Pleroma — treating living systems as if they were dead mechanisms. This critique parallels the esoteric insight that confusing the explicate with the implicate order produces a fatal distortion of understanding.
The Scientific Pleroma
In the context of the Unified_Esoteric_Synthesis, the Pleroma serves as the Gnostic equivalent to the quantum field or the Implicate Order — a realm of infinite potentiality before wave-function collapse forces it into explicate manifestation. The fullness of the Pleroma mirrors the superposition of all possible states; the fall of Sophia into the material world mirrors the transition from implicate potentiality to explicate manifestation.
See Also
- Gnosticism — the religious movement within which the Pleroma functions as the divine fullness
- Gnostic_Sophia — the fallen Aeon whose descent from the Pleroma precipitates material creation
- Gnostic_Demiurge — the ignorant craftsman generated by Sophia’s fall
- Gnosis — the salvific knowledge enabling the spark’s return to the Pleroma
- Carl_Jung — the psychologist who reinterpreted the Pleroma as the undifferentiated unconscious
- The_Red_Book — Jung’s mystical text containing the Seven Sermons to the Dead
- Collective_Unconscious — the Jungian transpersonal substrate paralleling the Pleroma
- Jungian_Archetypes — the autonomous forms resting within the Pleroma-like depths of the unconscious
- Anima_and_Animus — the psychic dualities arising from the differentiation of the Pleroma
- Ein_Sof — the Kabbalistic equivalent of the Pleroma as absolute unmanifest fullness
- Neoplatonism — the philosophical tradition from which the Gnostic Pleroma was adapted
- Implicate_And_Explicate_Order — Bohm’s scientific model paralleling the Pleroma/phenomenal world distinction
- Quantum_Mechanics — the quantum field as scientific analogue to the Pleroma
- Unified_Esoteric_Synthesis — the broader theoretical framework uniting these mechanisms