Faith & RitualGreek → English
Pleroma
/plɪˈroʊmə/noun
In Gnostic thought, the fullness of the divine realm, containing the whole set of emanated powers.
The Greek roots
πλήρωμα
plḗrōma
fullness, that which fills
πληροῦν
plēroûn
to fill
Literally: “the filling”
The story of the word
Ordinary Greek used it for a ship's full complement or the patch that fills a hole in a garment. Paul's letter to the Colossians says the whole πλήρωμα of the godhead dwells bodily in Christ, and second-century Valentinians took that single word and built a cosmology out of it, thirty aeons in ranked pairs, with the material world an accident that fell outside. Jung later borrowed the term for the undifferentiated state before consciousness divides anything.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
In a sentence
In this system Sophia falls out of the pleroma and the visible world is the wreckage.
The lecture traced the pleroma from Valentinus to Jung.