The Forgotten Books of Eden · 130 of 293

Secrets of Enoch: Chapter XXV

God relates to Enoch, how out of the very lowest darkness comes down the visible and invisible.

1. I COMMANDED in the very lowest parts, that visible things should come down from invisible, and Adoil came down very great, and I beheld him, and lo! he had a belly of great light.

Insight

Adoil is the first of the two primordial cosmic figures God draws out of the lowest darkness — Adoil, who breaks open and emits great light, and then Archas, who emerges hard and red. The names appear nowhere else in the literature; they are a unique 2 Enoch contribution. What is happening is creation ex nihilo dramatized as a cosmic theatrical scene: God commands the invisible to yield visible matter, and the invisible obeys. The closest parallel in the rabbinic tradition is the Bavli Hagigah 12a description of the world being created from a primordial substance called tohu va-vohu drawn from beneath the throne of glory. Christian readers used these Adoil and Archas figures, when they noticed them at all, as confirmation that creation involved an unfolding from unmanifest into manifest — a structure congenial to Origen and the Alexandrian theology of emanation-but-not-emanation that he tried to articulate in De Principiis II.Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 12a; Origen, De Principiis II.1

2. And I said to him: 'Become undone, Adoil, and let the visible come out of thee.'

Insight

'Become undone, Adoil, and let the visible come out of thee' — God's command is a kind of cosmic kenosis, a self-emptying of the primordial figure so that the manifest cosmos can emerge. Patristic theology eventually applies the same word — kenosis — to Christ in Philippians 2:7 ('he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant'). The structural rhyme is striking: in 2 Enoch the primordial light-bearer is 'undone' so that creation can come forth; in Philippians the divine Logos is 'emptied' so that incarnation and redemption can come forth. Whether 2 Enoch directly influenced any Christian writer on this point is unclear, but the metaphysical pattern — generation through self-undoing — is one of the recurrent shapes of late-antique Christian thinking about how anything finite arises from the infinite.Philippians 2:5-11; Origen, De Principiis II.6 on the kenosis of the Logos

3. And he came undone, and a great light came out. And I was in the midst of the great light, and as there is born light from light, there came forth a great age, and showed all creation, which I had thought to create.

4. And I saw that it was good.

5. And I placed for myself a throne, and took my seat on it, and said to the light: 'Go thou up higher and fix thyself high above the throne, and be a foundation to the highest things.'

6. And above the light there is nothing else, and then I bent up and looked up from my throne.