Gnosticism Series - Part 1: Introduction to Gnosticism
Summary and History: A Platonist, a Hermetic, and a Judeo-Christian walk into a bar... and share dreams of heresy
The 'kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart — not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death.'
— Friedrich Nietzsche
You can only bring order, peace and happiness through self-knowledge, and not by following a system, either economic or religious.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Do you realize the extent to which your mind has been conditioned? Society, governments, and their economic systems are illusory constructs, seemingly designed to deceive us, to herd us into a state of ignorance, to keep our collective consciousness in a prison. Yet people accept this world that they are brought up in without question, never to see past the veil.
Can you consider the possibility that, beneath the curtain of your conditioned ignorance, and under the noise of hyperactive ego, there is a silent Being at the core of yourself; that this is your true self; that this Being is divine; and that it offers an endless spring of joy, peace, and enchantment?
If you believed that a secret fire this powerful existed within you, would you not seek it out?
Gnosticism is a branch of early Christianity which sought to find it. It is the preeminent Christian Mystic tradition — where mysticism means the pursuit of experiential union with the divine. Gnosis was the name given for this mystical experience. Directly translated as Knowledge, Gnosis is not theoretical, intellectual, rational, encyclopedic knowledge. Gnosis is Wisdom, which is experiential knowledge. Of what? The hidden mysteries concerning your True Inner Being.
Gnosticism has developed a bad reputation. Not all of it is un-earned. But, reading the source text, I discovered some valuable insights, and realized that much of its reputation is in fact unfair.
The purpose of this series is two-fold: 1) to educate about Gnosticism, but also 2) to offer a different and perhaps more generous interpretation of it.
I will not claim in this series that Gnosticism is the answer. My goal is not to proselytize. I want to show you the whole picture, then extract the valuable pieces and present them to you neatly.
The series will come in three parts:
Introduction — History and high-level introduction to key tenets
Exploration — Dive into Gnostic texts and teachings, with analyses and interpretations
Modern Gnosticism — Take the valuable nuggets from the text and integrate them in the light of modern philosophy
History of Gnosticism
It’s important to understand the historical context of Gnosticism before diving in any deeper to their beliefs and teachings.
Gnostic Christianity was “founded” about a century after Orthodox Christianity; but it is inaccurate to say it was “founded”. It was not a religion. It did not have a leader. A group of writers were animated by the concept of Gnosis, and their teachings flowered in the West alongside canonical Christianity before they were forced into hiding by the Roman Catholic Church — but it was a group without a leader, and different writers said different things.
Most if not all of the Gnostic authors had roots in Platonism and Hermeticism. From Platonist roots comes the concept of a Demiurge-creator, varying levels of reality between material and spiritual realms, and the distinction between Body, Soul, and Spirit; from Hermetic roots comes the exaltation of Universal Mind, and the saving grace of Gnosis. I will explore all of these pillars of Gnosticism later in this series — but suffice it to say, for now, that Gnostics did not spring strictly from Christianity. Gnosticism was a bit of a hodge-podge between popular philosophical, theological, and metaphysical ideas of the day — but pushed through a Christian lens, with an emphasis on Gnosis as salvific.
With the advent of the Roman Catholic church, heretical writings were ordered to be burnt, and heretic writers were ordered to be punished. We don’t know how much text was destroyed. We only know what survived after being hidden away in an urn in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, never to be found until the mid-20th century. And from these writings, we can draw connections to other historical Christian movements such as Cathars, Rosicrucians, and others, implying some esoteric (i.e. hidden) teachings survived the 2nd century purge and advanced through the centuries.
Gnosticism has been interpreted so many different ways throughout the centuries that it is practically useless to even use the term anymore, because you have to constantly say “no, not that part of Gnosticism, this part.” It was a markedly diverse swath of early Christian writers. Some were “free-love” libertines who traveled in male-female pairs; others were ascetic, living in the wilderness, completely swearing off the opposite sex. Some presented themselves as Gnostikos, meaning Intellectuals, or Philosophers (Philo Sophia is Greek for “Lovers of Wisdom”, and Sophia emerges prominently in Gnostic texts); but contemporary philosopher Plotinus, on the other hand, said these aren’t philosophers at all, they merely use some philosophic ideas toward strictly religious ends. The 19th century historian Hans Jonas, who wrote the famous Gnosis und Spätaniker Geist as a study of Gnostic roots, concluded: “I am left in a terminological fog”.
Bottom line: it is impossible to pin down one homogenous Gnostic dogma. In early Christianity, many different writers and thinkers were vying for the correct interpretation and control over this new religion that was sweeping through the world. Different men had different takes, and they worked together to try to form a cohesive doctrine. Those early Christians who focused on the concept of Gnosis were lumped together by the Church and exiled, and now in posterity they are still lumped together, no matter how different their focuses or teachings were.
And so, instead of saying “This is what Gnosticism is,” what we must do instead is identify the common thread between Gnostic writers, and then ask what if any of these threads are of practical use.
The single most prominent theme in all Gnostic writings is this: Essence of an Eternal God exists within Man; heaven is a state of rest and joy which man experiences in his mortal lifetime; one achieves this state through experience of the inner divine; this experience is called Gnosis. This is different from orthodox Christian Judaism which says God exists outside of man, indeed outside of the universe. Further, what is it that saves man, and when does he experience salvation, are two conflicting viewpoints which cannot be resolved between the Orthodox and Gnostic frameworks: Orthodox Christianity says you gain heaven after you die if you believe in Christ, do good deeds, and participate in sacraments — the Gnostics say you gain heaven while living by attaining experiential knowledge. Pick one.
Not only did Gnostic thought oppose traditional Judeo-Christian dogma, their writings were intentionally antagonistic — some* claimed the God of the Old Testament was in fact demonic, and that the act of creation was evil. Intentionally heretic to the point of being disrespectful, it is no surprise that the authors were shunned and their writings burnt.
* I say some, and emphasize it here, to stress the point: different authors said different things, yet we still lump them all together. The Demiurge myth comes in two different forms, and is mentioned in only about one quarter of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. Good or bad, literal or metaphorical, “Gnostics believe Yahweh is Satan,” because that is how history has decided to judge Gnosticism.
Some Gnostics perhaps did explicitly and literally believe this — I’ve never actually met a Gnostic in real life to confirm one way or the other, and even if I had, Gnostics are anything but homogenous.
Speaking for myself, having read the source material, I have reached different conclusions; or, at least, I’ve left my study with different insights.
That is the purpose of this three-part series: to offer a different interpretation of Gnosticism, and to pull the valuable nuggets out of the texts for your benefit. You need not consider yourself a follower of Gnosticism, or believe any Gnostic myths, to find Gnosis and attain its benefits.
Gnosticism 101
The Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you will live in suffering.
— The Gospel of Thomas
Gnosis.org, where the Nag Hammadi Library is digitally housed, has a wonderful introduction to Gnosticism written by Lance Owens, MD, a clinical physician as well as an ordained priest.
Owens’s overview describes four essential characteristics of Gnosticism. I will write them out of order only because it provides a better transition into Part 2 of this series.
First is that "direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence is accessible to human beings," and that the attainment of such knowledge is the supreme achievement of human life. Gnosis is not a rational, propositional, logical understanding, but a knowing acquired by experience.
Gnosis means Knowledge, and Knowledge implies some contents of the Intellect. But let’s be clear here: there is no amount of Intellectual exercise or secret teaching that redeems man’s soul. The key here is that experiential knowledge saves. Think of Gnosis like Wisdom, where Wisdom is the result when Knowledge meets Experience; then think of Wisdom like you’re working on a car — you can twist and tune until you get it just right, and gain experience; or you can study the instruction manual for months, and gain knowledge. The combination of the theory and the practice is what leads to true power and perfection, and optimization of the engine — you unlock the most horsepower and manifest the very best form of that engine, through Wisdom.
The fourth characteristic is the most difficult of the four to untangle, and also one of the most disturbing to subsequent orthodox theology. This is the image of God as a dyad or duality. While affirming the ultimate unity and integrity of the Divine, Gnosticism noted in its experiential encounter with the numinous, contrasting manifestations and qualities. God is imaged as a dyad of masculine and feminine elements. Several trends within Gnosticism saw in God a union of two disparate natures, a union well-imaged with sexual symbolism. Gnostics honored the feminine nature in addition to the masculine. The Gospel of Philip (which in its entirety might be read as a commentary on Gnostic ritual) relates that the Lord established five great sacraments or mysteries: "a baptism, a chrism, a eucharist, a redemption, and a bridal chamber." Whether this ultimate sacrament of the bridal chamber was a ritual enacted by a man and women, an allegorical term for a mystical experience, or a union of both, we do not know.
Note the language used in the book of Genesis in the Bible: Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”. Even in Orthodox Christianity, God is androgynous, containing both male and female characteristics.
Gnostics were enamored with this concept. They identified two Opposites (either in the macrocosm, or within man’s Psyche) which, joined in union, comprised the Whole One. It could be interpreted as dualist, to say that the One contains both light and dark properties, but that the concept of Wholeness as a Union-of-Opposites is a common thread throughout all ancient religions, Christianity included.
Further, some Gnostics claim, like some Tantrics or Alchemists, that sex magic can transmutate inner sexual energy, and that this experience helps the practitioner achieve enlightenment. The passions of the flesh lead man’s soul astray, so, they claim that by learning to tame them in the act of sex, or by channeling the subtle energies while retaining vital seminal essence, the soul gains power. As Owens said, it is unclear if these texts are recommending a true ritual, or if the stories are purely allegorical.
In either case, Gnosticism has earned a reputation for Christian Dualism: God has both Male and Female properties; each man has a True Inner Self, and it’s distinct from the Body/Flesh. It is a fair reputation: the writers do a poor job demonstrating an understanding of the connection between bodily hormones and psychic equilibrium.
Second is that one simply cannot cipher up Gnosticism into syllogistic dogmatic affirmations. Gnosis is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the self, and [this] knowledge leads to freedom.... Primary among all the revelatory perceptions a Gnostic might reach was the profound awakening that came with knowledge that something within him was uncreated. The Gnostics called this "uncreated self" the divine seed, the pearl, the spark of knowing: consciousness, [awareness], light. And this seed of intellect was the self-same substance of God. It was man's authentic reality, the glory of humankind and divinity alike. If woman or man truly came to gnosis of this spark, she understood that she was truly free: Not contingent, not a conception of sin, not a flawed crust of flesh, but the stuff of God, and the conduit of God's immanent realization.
The eternal Source, uncreated but permanently being, exists within us as the Intelligence within a Seed, the Architect of the Cosmos. They call him “the Pre-Existent One”, “Him-who-is”, and emphasize that this is the source from whom sons come.
Connected to the concept of the “divine seed” and the “eternal self” as the true self within, is the concept of a mortal, exterior self, created by an evil demigod:
The creator god, the one who claimed in evolving orthodox dogma to have made man, and to own him, the god who would have man contingent upon him, born ex nihilo by his will, was a lying demon and not God at all. Gnostics called him by many deprecatory names: "Saklas", the fool; "Yaldabaoth", the blind god; and "Demiurge", the architect or lesser creative force.
Here is where Gnosticism loses so many. The act of the creation of the world of man was an evil act; the material world was created by an arch-Demon — these are both fundamentally pessimistic claims. Like any theological creation myth, it’s a little fantastical, but this myth is a little more out there than normal ones. But Owens follows this up immediately with clarification:
This brings us to the third prominent element in our brief summary of Gnosticism: its reverence for texts and scriptures unaccepted by the orthodox fold. Gnostic experience was mythopoetic: in story and metaphor, and perhaps also in ritual enactments, Gnosticism sought expression of subtle, visionary insights inexpressible by rational proposition or dogmatic affirmation. For the Gnostics, revelation was the nature of Gnosis. Irritated by their profusion of "inspired texts" and myths, Ireneaus complains in his classic second century refutation of Gnosticism, that “…every one of them generates something new, day by day, according to his ability; for no one is deemed perfect, who does not develop...some mighty fiction.”
So, Gnostics attempted to create ‘mythopoetry’, in story and metaphor, to express the inexpressible. Revelation was the nature of Gnosis, words must necessarily fall short. “They all write something new, something different, something fictional,” presumably for the same reason that we write insightful tweets — we want our understanding and expression of truth to go viral.
Gnostic Gospels do not in any way touch on the story of the historical Jesus’s life, like the synoptic gospels did. Instead they focused only on teachings of Jesus (or other spiritual beings), and there is debate as to whether the teachings are real, partially due to the dating, partially due to the heretical nature, and partially due to the dream-vision-like nature of the encounters. It’s possible the Gnostics were writing mystical, hermetic, or platonic fan-fiction. Different authors wrote a lot of different things, sometimes directly contradictory with each other. What this very likely means is that there were a group of people creating stories together based on their shared experience, all with the goal of creating a new coherent myth of a Mystical Christ. Now, two thousand years later, we lump them all together and say “this is what the Gnostics believed”. But what we should really be asking is, “what were they trying to get at, and are the points they were trying to make valid?”
I will answer these questions in Part 2 — providing summaries and interpretations of text from Gnostic authors.