The Abiding Significance of Gnosticism
The theology of history asks the question of intelligibility about the unity and significance of man's historical record. This theology extends back beyond man to the cosmological problem itself and to God in His activity concerning man. "The point at issue," Berdyaev suggests, "is this: must man be interpreted in terms of the cosmos or the cosmos in terms of man? Is human history a subordinate part of the cosmic process or is the cosmic process a subordinate part of human history?"1 In this context, Christian writers have generally assumed more than an accidental relationship between "the fulness of time" and the Pax Romana. The condition of the First Century of the Christian era was particularly apt to facilitate the progress of the Christian message.2 And this aptness has arisen not only from the fine Roman communications system which made travel in the Empire relatively easy, nor was it only the two common languages, but also the very spiritual chaos existing at that time seemed especially responsive to the Christian teaching.3
Assuming for the moment this theological view of the beginning of the Christian era, namely that it was indeed a most fit time for God to have revealed Himself, it is then of great interest to consider the significance of the first major heresy the early Church encountered, the heresy or heresies known as Gnosticism. To propose the thesis that the first heresy was ipso facto the most dangerous one would, perhaps, be somewhat improvable. Obviously the first heresy logically might, in divine providence, have been the weakest, a heresy not requiring the developed theological arguments demanded by later deviations. In any case, the first heresy, it would appear, does represent a permanent tendency in the human mind, which the Church, in one way or another, confronts in every age.
Gnosticism was considered by the Church fathers like Irenaeus and Hippolytus to be only a Christian heresy.4 However, recent discoveries at Nag-Hammadi and elsewhere as well as the work of earlier scholars like de Faye and Bousset have shown that Gnosticism or at least its incipient forms can be found in Jewish and in Eastern religious cults. Professor van Unnik lists the following sources, which contributed to the gnostic complexus:
- Iran, the ancient Persia, whence comes, in particular, the explicit expression of dualism, the antithesis between light and darkness, the absolute of good and evil.
- Babylonia, the land of astrology. Astrology was very widespread in the ancient world, and its fatalism dominated the lives of many people....
- Western Asia, Syria with its worship of the Sun-god…
- Greece, with her philosophy; it was principally those currents of philosophy with a religious hue which strongly influenced Gnosticism, such as the popularized elaboration of Platonic concepts, stressing an opposition between matter and spirit, the Stoic with his theory that everything was motivated by the sparks of divine Reason, which includes everything within itself, and the Neo-Pythagorean ideas which revived at this time, with their asceticism and mystic doctrine of numbers.
- Judaism, with the Old Testament as its sacred book; so far as Gnosticism is concerned, its influence was largely negative, issuing in a repudiation of the God of the Old Testament as the evil Creator--but the influence is there; especially is there an affinity with various mystical sects, ostracized by official Judaism…
- Egypt, with its widespread mystery cult of Isis-Osiris…5
Thus, Gnosticism is primarily a product of syncretism, a mixture of various religious and philosophic concepts and ideas.6 Yet, this very syncretism is not wholly haphazard. A definite tendency exists within the gnostic complex, which is most significant and far-reaching.
On the surface, when looking at the theories of Basilides or Valentinianor Marcion, to mention only the most famous Gnostics, there appears only a chaos of aeons, gods, emmanations, improbable and base deities, confusing explanations of evil, man, and God. Professor Wolfson has detailed most exhaustively the complex forms found in the gnostic systems.7 In examining these theories, however, the most important elements in them are the tendencies they display rather than the specific content. All gnostic theories are founded on the hypothesis that the salvation of man is in no sense through the world, but rather through "gnosis," through a special knowledge granted to only a few of the elect.8 "The common aspiration of the first gnostics," Professor de Faye wrote, "is to possess a superior knowledge. They are haunted by the dream of a knowledge unknown by the rest of men."9 Thus the hope seems to be of finding some gnosis to save men, which does not primarily depend on a knowledge derived from the world itself.
What type of knowledge is this gnosis of the Gnostics? The early Gnostics themselves probably did not conceive this salvific knowledge after the Greek scientific manner. Professor Faggin describes gnostic knowledge in this manner: "The term 'gnosis' does not denote the discursive process of human thought as such, but a revelation of divine truth, a gratuitous intuition which brings joy to the initiate and the security of salvation."10 Professor de Faye suggests something similar:
To possess the gnosis and to live as a wise Christian is the goal. That is to be a gnostic. Knowledge becomes also the essential condition of salvation. It is not the purely doctrinal and arid knowledge such as it would become the case in the orthodoxies of the future. Asceticism was inseparable from it… It remains not less than that the salvation of the individual was basically the affair of the intellect.11
However, and this is a significant factor in the whole issue of Gnosticism, any form of gnosis--mystical, magical, scientific-- which is limited to a few who can obtain salvation only because of this gnosis reveals the very essence of Gnosticism. Indeed, in this restriction to the few we can find the perennial source of the gnostic deviation from orthodoxy. Karl Rahner, I believe, has underscored the basic reason for this consequence:
It is a knowledge, which does not stem from a personal, grace-giving self-disclosure of God but from the developing essence of man himself, ultimately a gnostic self-consciousness and not from the obedient hearing of the Word of another, of God which is faith. Whether this emancipated holy knowledge comes forth more in the form of an esoteric mysticism (outside faith-obedience) or more in a rationalist form (as in German idealism or semirationalism) is indifferent… Knowledge as such is already, through itself alone, simply redeeming…12
Here we can gain some insight into the reason why Gnosticism appears to be a major problem. For gnostic theory frees the mind from this world as an original source of knowledge and thereby it rejects a salvation through a faith, which is based on an incarnational world. 13 Moreover, since gnostic theory looks to the gnosis of the few to obtain salvation, the many are left out of consideration.
Before pursuing this line of argument further, it will be well here to assemble the basic principles common to all gnostic sects.
… behind all the variegated Gnostic sects there lay a common stock of ideas which could fasten upon, adapt themselves to and eventually transform any religious movement concerned to find an answer to the problems of existence, evil, and salvation. These ideas may now be summarized. First, all the gnostic schools were thoroughly dualistic, setting an infinite chasm between the spiritual world and the world of matter, which they regarded as intrinsically evil. Secondly, when they tried to explain how the material order came into existence, they agreed in refusing to attribute its origin to the ultimate God, the God of light and goodness. It must be the result of some primeval disorder, some conflict or fall, in the higher realm, and its fabricator must have been some inferior deity… Thirdly, the Gnostics all believed that there is a spiritual element in man, or at any rate in the elite of mankind, which is a stranger in this world and which yearns to be freed from matter and to ascend to its true home. Fourthly, they pictured a mediator or mediators descending down the successive aeons or heavens to help it to achieve this. 14
Professor Peterson points out how the gnostic sects are in the habit of using the word 'foreign' or 'strange' to describe man's stature or place in the world.15 The important thing is that man is alien, totally alien to this world. Professor Peterson's contrasts between the Greek and gnostic views are most instructive. For the Greeks, he remarks, the universe is a wonderful home for man; for the Gnostics it is a foreign place.
For the Greek the universe was a marvellous thing, for the Gnostic it was a prison. The Greek found the light in himself and in this world; the Gnostics found it in another world… To the disincarnation of man corresponds in the Gnostics a flight from the world. For the Greeks the divine was part of this world, in the Gnostics it was not only separate, but opposed to the world. This fact is expressed in the Gnostics by the distinction between a god in this world and a superior god, who is unintelligible and unknown.16
In man's own self, there is a disincarnation, a tendency in which the divine spirit tends to assume the soul's proper function. The body is simply evil. "In other words, for the Gnostics man loses not only his individuality but his personality, his person has its center in the beyond, and is the celestial form, the form of God which the Gnostic seeks to rejoin."17
M. Eliade, in his excellent book. Cosmos and History, raises the question of whether man can simply be an historical being. In order to escape the "terror of history" through which he stands absolutely alone with no further meaning for his acts than the acts themselves, he invents or finds various mythologies or religions which seek to surpass the fleetingness of the contingent and make sense of the happenings of history.18 In Gnosticism, evil and salvation are major problems. They are resolved cosmologically by positing the evilness of matter and ipso facto of history itself. Gnosticism, in this sense, makes man a complete stranger to the cosmos. The only part of man that is saved is that spark of the divine, which returns to the unknown God.
Thus for the Gnostics, "the separation between God and the world has become complete."19 But if this separation is so complete, it follows, as Professor Bultmann rightly continues, "…that this present world has ceased to be of any importance."20 The Gnostic is really without a home or a nation. The only thing he has in common with others is a negative detachment from the world. Personal redemption alone is important. "…In the last resort, the Gnostic has no real culture or community."21 The result of this theory completely changes the whole concept of redemption. No longer is the whole world saved.
As a religion dealing with the soul it laid no imperious claim on man's total life. Jesus Christ was spiritual savior, not the Lord of life; his Father was not the source of all things nor their Governor. For the church, the new people, there was substituted an association of the enlightened who could live in culture as those who sought a destiny beyond it but were not in strife with it.22
The problem of redemption is thus separated from the problem of the world.
Professor Wolfson defines Gnosticism as "the verbal christianizing of paganism."23 In the last century, Harnack had called it "the acute hellenization of Christianity."24 However, Gnosticism is probably better described not so much by its origins as by its status as a world religion by itself, as Professor Quispel does.25 Harnack himself, it seems, described the aim of Gnosticism quite correctly: "It aimed at the winning of a world-religion, in which men should be rated, not on the basis of citizenship, but according to the standard of their intellectual and moral aptitude."26 This is an incisive observation. For it suggests the key concept of our present consideration. We have seen that Gnosticism deliberately separated man from the cosmos. Having accepted this initial position, Gnosticism was forced to posit that neither knowledge nor salvation came through the world. If we reflect that for Aristotle and St. Thomas, knowledge of the First Being had to come through the sensible world to which man's intellect was related, we can see that in Gnosticism, the structure of the Absolute world had to rest solely on man's construction. The gnosis, be it poetic, magical, theological, or scientific, had to construct the higher world from man's own internal resources since the gnostic view of the world prevented it from obtaining intelligibility there.
This act of freeing the mind from dependence on the cosmos serves to affirm the brilliant correctness of Professor Quispel's analysis of Gnosticism: "Wir behaupten also nichts neuer, geben vielmehr den sensus communis der moderner Forschung wieder, wenn wir behaupten: Gnosis ist die mythische Projektion der Selbsterfahrung."27 In other words, the heresy of Gnosticism is, in a major sense, the heresy since it frees man from the existential content of the world--which for the Gnostic is wholly evil--and allows man to seek his own salvation. The only source of this salvation is himself, his mythical reconstruction of the world, a world, which in reality, is the world of the Gnostic's mind.
The consequences of the gnostic spirit are far-reaching. But the key for locating the influences of the gnostic mentality must be kept clearly in mind. This key is precisely the attempt to locate the cause of order in an intellectual vision of the world centered in man and the categories of his thought. Correlative to this, there is always the attempt to reshape the world according to this vision. Professor Quispel himself suggests as an example of this tendency Jung's "archetypes of the unconscious" which he believes to be gnostic in origin since they ground their intelligibility in a mental state which draws its meaning from itself and not from the cosmos.28 Hans Jonas further suggests that "in modern times) a modified Marcionite dichotomy has become tempting to theology--by enabling it to concede to natural science the complete autonomy of the physical realm and to retain a God dealing merely with the soul and no longer charged with the role of cosmic providence."29 Such a theory would no longer accept the original gnostic idea that the world is evil, but it would retain the same consequence, namely that there is no point of contact between God and man through the cosmos known by science.
The most significant and effective analysis of the meaning of Gnosticism throughout the history of thought is that of Professor Eric Voegelin. For Voegelin the "essence of modernity (is) the growth of Gnosticism."30 By this he means that movements from the early Protestant visionaries who sought to set up the Kingdom of God on earth to rationalism, liberalism, communism, and fascism are basically gnostic in the sense that they attempt to set up a final order, a salvation order on earth which is based on humanity as its source.
Gnostic speculation overcame the uncertainty of faith by receding from transcendence and endowing man and his intramundane range of action with the meaning of eschatological fulfillment. In the measure in which this immanentization progressed experimentally, civilizational activity became a mystical work of self-salvation. The spiritual strength of the soul which in Christianity was devoted to the sanctification of life could not be diverted into the more appealing, more tangible, and, above all, so much easier creation of the terrestrial paradise.31
All of these gnostic movements see themselves as absolutes, all qualified and commissioned to impose their vision of life on other men. The result of this is that modern wars have tended more and more to become absolute wars. "The real danger of contemporary wars does not lie in the technologically determined global extent of the theatre of war; their true fatality stems from their characteristic as Gnostic wars, that is, of wars between worlds that are bent on mutual self-destruction."32
The tenor of modern social science which denies to a large extent the possibility of deriving order from the universe, as the Gnostics did also, must seek to reconstruct society through specialized scientific gnosis according to their own theories of what society should be like. But if a scientist is freed from the necessity of discovering an intelligibility from the world, he must end, like the Gnostics, in projecting a world-view upon reality based upon his own idea of what reality is like. In this sense, Basilides, Valentinian, and Marcion belong to the same spirit as many contemporary social scientists.
In evaluating the significance of Gnosticism in relation to the Christian faith, it is well to recall Paul Henry's idea that heresies are always conservative and reactionary in spirit, merely echoing the predominant trends of the intellectual thought of the times, while the Faith faced with the same problems proves to be existential and dynamic in its approach to reality.
By the attempt for a rational synthesis of dogma, the slavish echoing of contemporary thought is a cause of heresy… Heresy is through it implicit in its latent philosophic conformism, in its theology it will be conservative, speculatively it is not revolutionary in itself.
Orthodoxy, on the other hand, which is not principally a philosophy is actually most original and creative under the pressure of biblical revelation and its often existential categories are the themes taken over from Hellenism appraised, changed, corrected, completed, unknown distinctions are brought in.33
The faith never admitted that the world itself and God's redemptive action in it was evil or separated from the world in some radical way. Quite the contrary. The Incarnation and Redemption guaranteed the goodness and hence reality of the world. Moreover, the salvation of man was for all men by faith, a faith that retained contact with historical events in the world. But faith demands that the structure of the world is not man's to form. Gnosis is just the opposite for it implies that the world is wholly open to man's intellect--that is, the world that counts, the gnosis that saves. The result of this theory, in every form, is the reconstruction of a mythological world based on a projection of man's own views. Man no longer, therefore, stands to the absolute as receiver but as maker, he becomes, as Genesis tells, like god.
James V. Schall, S.J.
Endnotes
1 Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, trans. R. M. French (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), p. 197.
2 Cf. Jules Lebreton and Jacques Zeiller, The History of the Primitive Church, trans, Ernest C. Messenger (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), pp. 1213-33; Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 25-72.
3 Cf. Kenneth Scott Latourette, The First Five Centuries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), pp. 162-70.
4 Cf. R. P. Casey, "The Study of Gnosticism," The Journal of Theological Studies, XXXVI (1935), 35; Eugene de Faye, Gnostiques et Gnosticisme (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1925), pp. 3-22.
5 W. C. van Unnik, Newly Discovered Gnostic Writings (London: SCM Press, 1960), p. 35.
6 "The characteristic of Gnosticism in all its forms is syncretism, blending together elements of every sort, and finding room for every type of thought, from the highest mysticism to the lowest forms of magic. There is in consequence no one uniform set of ideas that may be singled out as Gnostic; rather it is a matter of a type of thought which manifests itself in different ways in different groups." R. McL. Wilson, The Gnostic Problem (London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1958), p. 69.
7 Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), Vol. I, pp. 495-574. Cf. also Lebreton, pp. 617-52. A good brief treatment can also be found in F. Sagnard's introduction to Irenee de Lyon, Contre Les Heresies (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1952), pp. 44-60.
8 It is interesting here to note how Plotinus who also was a great adversary of the Gnostics differed from them. The Gnostics sought a salvation for the elect; they sought to refashion the world according to their vision of the cosmos. For Plotinus, however, man did not really need salvation; he was already saved and needed only to wake up to the fact. Cf. A. H. Armstrong, "Salvation, Plotinian and Christian," The Downside Review, LXXV (April, 1957), 126-39.
9 De Faye, p. 453. Sagnard, in his classic study of Valentinius, notes a similar conclusion: "Il est curieux de constater que le theme que j'ai indique comme primordial dans la structure de la gnose valentinienne (et de la gnose en general).--a savoir la chute de la parcelle divine et sa liberation des puissanecs de ce monde (grace a la 'connaisance'),--ce theme est precisement celui qui constitute la gnose de Simon d'apres la notice d'Irenee." Francois M-M Sagnard, La Gnose Valentinienne (Paris: J. Vrin, 1947), p. 613. Cf. also Henry Longueville Mansel, The Gnostic Heresies of the First and Second Centuries (London: John Murray, 1875), pp. 1-15. (Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this essay are the author's.)
10 G. Faggin, "Gnosi e Gnosticismo," Enciclopedia Filosofica, c. 840.
11 De Faye, p. 475.
12 Karl Rahner, "Gnosis," Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1960), Vol. IV, cc. 1020-21.
13 Cf. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1958), p. 27.
14 Kelly, p. 26. Cf. also Faggin, cc. 843-45; Wilson, Chapters III-V.
15 Erik Peterson, "Gnosi," Enciclopedia Cattolica, c. 876.
16 Peterson, cc. 877-78.
17 Peterson, c. 878.
18 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1954), pp. 139-62.
19 Rudolf Bultmann, Primitive Christianity, trans. R. H. Fuller (New York: Living Age Books, 1959), p. 167.
20 Bultmann, p. 170.
21 Bultmann, p. 171.
22 H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Torch-books, 1951), p. 87.
23 Wolfson, p. 503.
24 Cited in Casey, p. 45.
25 Gilles Quispel, Gnosis als Weltreligion (Zurich: Origo Verlag, 1951).
26 Adolf Harnack, Outlines of the History of Dogma, trans. Edwin Knox Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 58.
27 Quispel, p. 19.
28 Quispel, p. 48.
29 Hans Jonas, "Gnosticism," Handbook of Christian Theology (New York: Living Age Books, 1958), p. 147.
30 Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 126. Cf. also Ellis Sandoz, "Voegelin's Idea of Historical Form," Cross Currents, XII (Winter, 1962), 41-64. "Gnosticism, as Voegelin describes it, is an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei, the cognition of faith will afford. Gnosticism may express itself primarily in an intellectual form, as in the case of Hegel, in an emotional form, as in certain paracletic sectarian leaders, or it may assume the form of an activist redemption of man and society, as in the case of Comte, Marx, and Hitler." John H. Hallowell, "Political Science Today," Social Order, VII (March, 1961), 117. Cf. Voegelin, p. 124.
31 Voegelin, p. 129.
32 Voegelin, p. 151.
33 Paul Henry, "Fruhchristliche Beziehungen Zwischen Theologie und Philosophie," Zeitschrift fur Katholische Theologie, LXXXII (1960), 431.
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