Gnosticism

"Gnosticism grew up within Judaism, the mystery religion Orphism, and Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, and it had a particularly rich career in Christianity. Gnostics in any of these groups tended to see themselves as the elite of that group. In fact, they were often the community leaders. But like many mystics before and after them, they believed that not everyone could handle the secret truth of the world: in this case, that the creator God was not good. With Gnosticism, the whole question of doubt gets spun on its head. The Gnostic idea was that human beings have within them the spark of something absolutely transcendent, something completely alien to this world. This spark, our consciousness, is a spark off the fire of an unimaginable God. Our humanity is the same stuff as this entirely distant, otherworldly God. This God did not make the world. Instead, the world was made by a creator God, a much less extraordinary figure. In many interpretations, the creator God was downright evil. Human beings have been worshiping this creator God by mistake, explained the Gnostics, but they should not do so. Gnostics called this creator God “Saklas,” the Blind One; or “Samael,” God of the Blind; or “the Demiurge,” the Lesser Power. As Gnostics saw it, human beings are of more value than the creator God since we contain a spark of what is true, good, and transcendent. Whereas religions generally looked at the cosmos and reported that such a wonderful world must have been made by an amazing intelligence, the Greek and Roman philosophers had wondered if there could be a God since the world was such a cruel series of ruptures and distress. The Gnostics took this idea in another direction: they saw the world as a limiting, nasty, frustrating cage and assumed a cruel God had made it. They cursed this God and felt superior to him. His limitations or villainy explained evil in the world, and his lack of the transcendent spark made a new kind of sense of our alienation from the world. Humanity has humanness—meaning, compassion, and love—and the universe does not, but just outside the universe, somehow, lives the true God and this true God has humanness, too. In fact, that is where we got ours. Gnostics were believers. They belong to the history of doubt because over the centuries, within the history of Judaism and Christianity, Gnostics doubted all of the personal characteristics of that God. Doubting God’s benevolence is as fundamental a matter as doubting God as thinking, creating, all-powerful, or eternal. For the Gnostics, all the crowing about the magnificent order of the cosmos was suddenly cast as wrongheaded: order and natural law were not to be celebrated, they were to be derided. Why marvel at the economy or grace of a law that effectively keeps you trapped on the surface of the planet, destined to die and rot in the ground or go up in smoke? Why marvel that God made beaches, wheat, and honeycombs if, on the important questions, any fairly decent human being would have done a better job; would, for instance, neither invent torture nor allow it to be invented? That would go for any kind of torture, and meanwhile, look how many kinds there are. They were very clear on the point that human beings owe no allegiance to the creator God. Our sense of ethics, pity, and care makes us far superior to the universe in which we are trapped. It is a celebration of the human. Our only mission is to come to know who we are, to realize that we belong elsewhere, and to try to find our way back to our home outside this world. We find our way back by cultivating our alienation here below. People were to wean themselves from life—not to reconcile themselves to it, but rather actively to seek alienation from it. Most religions suggest that there is something to be learned from the observation that, for the great material universe, all our striving, our vanity, our longing, is meaningless. The Gnostic paradigm says No, there is no lesson there for us. Whatever we have inside us, whatever is most like us and least like the rest of the known universe, that is the actual reality, and all we have of truth. Gnosticism was in the mainstream of early Christianity: about 140 CE, one of the most prominent and influential early Gnostic teachers, Valentinus, seems to have been under consideration for election as the Bishop of Rome. By the end of his life some twenty years later, he had been forced from the public eye and branded a heretic. There was growing hostility to Gnosticism’s secret knowledge and its continuous creation of new scripture. By 180 CE, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, was attacking Gnosticism as heresy. By the end of the fourth century Gnosticism was eradicated, its remaining teachers were murdered or driven into exile, and its sacred books were destroyed. Until recent finds, all we knew of it was the polemical denunciations and fragments preserved in the Christian documents on heresies. But thrilling new finds have given us the other side of the story. The newest finds include the Nag Hammadi collection, discovered in 1945 by an Arab peasant digging in his field. In the large earthenware jar he uncovered were a library of texts that Gnostic monks had buried sometime around the year 390 to save them from the hands of the orthodox Church. Elaine Pagels, one of Gnosticism’s most eminent scholars, has written that “to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God: this is the secret of gnosis.… Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.”24 There is something very individualist in a doctrine that allows each person to access truth. It was an odd choice, dogma over mysticism, because the mystic vision is less susceptible to doubt. It makes few universal claims about details—meaning there is little to be contradicted; it encourages self-altering practices that try to bring the adherent to God through experience, not reason; and last, it never claims that philosophy or texts are proof of anything, so that whole approach to questioning religion is invalidated. So the mystic position would have been easy to defend but, as I noted, it afforded each believer a lot of interpretive power. Gnosticism recreated the problem of doubt by imagining a way to find the world woefully beneath humane standards, reject the Creator God in those terms, and yet preserve belief in God. It cursed the Judeo-Christian God for death and disease, heartache and loss, drought, fire, flood, and famine, all that has gone wrong with history all these many years. Furthermore, it left room for men and women to do their own thinking, to work out their own relationship to their inner self and the strangely hostile world in which it finds itself. Along with Epicureanism and Stoicism, Manichaeism and the larger world of Gnosticism were the major competitors of mainstream Christianity. Then there were the heresies. These took over huge swaths of Christendom, sometimes for many centuries, because the people who followed them believed that the orthodox Church was wrong and that following it would lead to damnation..."

Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson by Jennifer Hecht: https://a.co/6UOsJYp