Il giardino dialettico. Il Fedro nell'Epistola a Flora

The "Epistle to Flora" by Ptolemy, Gnostic thinker and martyr – a masterpiece of second century Gnostic literature and Gnostic reflection – is to be interpreted in structural connection with the 'Great Notice' on Ptolemy that opens Irenaeus’s "Adversus haereses". Certainly to be placed in Rome in the middle of the second century, addressed to a recipient with a symbolic name, perhaps to be identified with the Roman church itself within which the community of Ptolemy’s Valentinian disciples was present, it must be deciphered in its systematic reference to the pleromatic myth attested to us by Irenaeus. Referable to the genre of διαιρετικὴ εἰσαγωγή, it is characterized by precise dialectical structures dependent on Plato's "Phaedrus", albeit reinterpreted on the basis of the apocalyptic dualism specific to Valentinian Gnosticism. The same allegorical plot that characterizes the letter transforms the "Epistle to Flora" in an exoteric 'garden of Adonis' which refers to the living esoteric Logos, to be identified with the pleroma of Christ, the Fruit that only the spiritual seed of Sophia/Earth is able to recognize.