Kenoma

In Gnosticism, kenoma (kenoma, κένωμα) is the concept of emptiness that corresponds to the lower world of phenomena, as opposed to the concept of pleroma, or fullness, which corresponds to the Platonic world of ideal forms. Kenoma was used by the mid-2nd century Gnostic thinker and preacher Valentinius, who was among the early Christians who attempted to align Christianity with Middle Platonism. Employing a third concept of cosmos, what is manifest, Valentinian initiates could explain scripture in light of these three aspects of correlated existence. The pleroma is the abode of the Æons . . . they are, or they comprise, the eternal ideas or archetypes of the Platonic philosophy. . . . Separated from this celestial region by Horos . . . or Boundary . . . lies the ‘kenoma’ or ‘void’—the kingdom of this world, the region of matter and material things, the land of shadow and darkness. Here is the empire of the Demiurge or Creator, who is not a celestial Æon at all, but was born in this very void over which he reigns. Here reside all those phenomenal, deceptive, transitory things, of which the eternal counterparts are found only in the pleroma. . . . All things are set off one against another in these two regions: just as The swan on still St Mary’s lake Floats double, swan and shadow. Not only have the thirty Æons their terrestrial counterparts; but their subdivisions also are represented in this lower region. The kenoma too has its ogdoad, its decad, its dodecad, like the pleroma. There is one Sophia in the supramundane region, and another in the mundane; there is one Christ who redeems the Æons in the spiritual world, and a second Christ who redeems mankind, or rather a portion of mankind, in the sensible world. There is an Æon Man and another Æon Ecclesia in the celestial kingdom, the ideal counterparts of the Human Race and the Christian Church in the terrestrial. . . . The topographical conception of the pleroma moreover is carried out in the details of the imagery.