Gnosticism: Esoteric Insight and/or Christian Heresy?

Part One

Discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, and the rise of Counter-cultural spiritualiy in the the sixties and after, sparked new interest in Gnosticism. Recently Gnosticism has been a topic of interest elsewhere in this forum, but unfortunately more attention has been given to polemical attacks on mainstream Christianity than a dispassionate examination of Gnosticism itself. My hope on this thread is to remedy that problem by providing a place for exploring this religion in a relatively objective, systematic manner--including its distinguishing characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. Before we're finished, I hope to explore the nature and history of Gnosticism and its precursors, the major varieties of Gnostic thought, and the pros and cons of the religion. I hope that we can pursue this in a civil manner, and invite the moderators to intercede if anyone should try to hijack or sabotage this endeavor by inflammatory polemics. I plan to use as principal sources the Nag Hammadi Library (James Robinson, ed.); Bernard Simon's The Essence of the Gnostics; Elaine Pagels Gnostic Gospels; and April DeConick's The Gnostic's New Age. I hope you'll join me in discussing this fascinating religion.

What is Gnosticism?

As a working definition, I'd say a religious belief that :
(1) the cosmos is divided between matter, which is evil, and a spiritual realm, which is
good;
(2) the material world is governed by an inferior or evil deity, while a superior or true unknowable deity governs the spiritual realm;
(3) salvation (from ignorance rather than sin) can attained, not by faith, but by direct personal intuitive insight, arrived at by interior or introspective means;
(4) this insight is esoteric (secret) knowledge, accessible only to a few;
(5) through this esoteric wisdom, humans can get in touch with their spiritual natures and liberate themselves from their imprisoned condition achieve their spiritual destiny.
(We may note in passing similarities to depth psychology or psychoanalysis. Also to modern secret societies like the Masons and the Rosicrucians.)

There are many varieties of Gnosticism, with complex metaphysical tenets, but I think these are the basic characteristics of the belief system. as I understand it.

 

I don't really understand what it is.

 

That's probably because I explained it in the next post after I tried to erase this one. I'll transfer some of that material here. Try again. Sorry for the confusion. (For the benefit of the reader, the material above wasn't up there when Neon brought it to my attention; he was right, there was nothing there.) It may still not be clear, but Gnosticism is a complicated subject.

 

Part Two . History:
Is Gnosticism Christian?

Gnostic sects claiming to be Christian appeared in the second century and grew during the third century C.E. They drew heavily upon Platonic and Pythagorian metaphysics, as well as Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian mysticism, and possibly even Buddhism. Some scholars think Gnosticism originated even earlier in a pre-Christian form in first century Jewish sects of the Diaspora living in Egypt, where they were exposed to such influences. There is a non-Christian Gnostic group today in Iran, the Mandaeans, who view John the Baptist as their prophet and regard Jesus as a renegade. There was also another Jewish community in the vicinity of Babylon, the Ecclesaites, which showed Gnostic as well as Jewish characteristics. Active as early as the time of Jesus were baptizing sects, one led by John the Baptist. Christian heresy hunters claim that one of these, led by Simon Magus, were the first Gnostics. They claimed that the earth was made by an evil angel, that baptism could overcome natural death, and that the leaders of the sect, Simon and his disciple Meander of Antioch were revealers of secret knowledge. The Barbeloites, a Jewish baptizing group, were named after Barbelo, the Gnostic name for the first Aeon to emanate from the unknown High God. They merged with what became a major Gnostic group, the Sethians. Also active were the Merkalah, chariot or ascension sects who claimed to have visions of ascending to Heaven and returning with personal revelations. The once esteemed scholar John Allegro lost his reputation by contending that Jesus was a non-existent figure concocted by sects influenced by the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria. (The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross). Christians may be reminded that Paul claimed to have ascended to the third heaven in one of his visions, and in another, to have received a direct personal communication from Jesus, which enabled him to claim Apostolic status. In Lost Christianities, Bart Ehrman remarks that the earliest Christians were a diiverse lot, some worshipping one God, but others worshipping as many as 30 or 365. The ones worshiping those many gods were Gnostics-- Ehrman apparently considering Aeons and Archons, emanations from the unknown god, to be gods instead of angels. (Is it me, or does this sound an awful lot like Hinduism?)

I'd say the Gnostic sects that claimed to be following Jesus, which seems to have been most of them, were Christian--i.e., folks who thought Jesus was sent to enlighten them and liberate them from the bondage of the material world. Christian Gnostics regarded Jesus either as a man possessed by a divine spirit or as a spirit simulating human form with a mission to enlighten humans about their condition rather than to die for our sins. This view conflicted with the prevailing orthodoxy of the mainstream Christian hierarchy that was in the process of consolidating its authority and developing a canon based on Paul's idea of Jesus as sacrifice and salvation as faithful acceptance of it. These issues might seem picky to us, but they were an enormous deal back in the day. After the mainstream Christians were accepted by Constantine, the Gnostics were increasingly persecuted and their books destroyed. Fortunately, monks saved some in the jar that was discovered at Nag Hammadi.

Why did the Gnostics lose out in the battle for the hearts and minds of Christians? I'd venture three explanations, other than the immediate one that the mainstream Christians won over Constantine: (1) the Gnostics were more fragmented and disorganized, lacking a clear hierarchy. They had their gurus, but individuals were encouraged to have their own visions and insights. The mainstream Christians, on the other hand, copied the organization of the Roman Empire. (2) the emphasis on secret esoteric knowledge excluded many ordinary Christians who weren't into it. Perhaps the most influential of the Gnostics, Valentinus, taught that there were three kinds of people: spiritual (who could get the gnosis and be saved), psychical (ordinary Christians who faced greater difficulty), and material (who were doomed never to get it,) (3) the anti-worldly orientation turned many people off; and (4) the esoteric metaphysics were too damned complicated for most people to relate to.

 

Part Three. Clarifications. Gnosticism in Relation to the Earliest Christians

Gnosticism is a complex subject, and one about which there's lots of confusion. I'll try to clear these up as best I can.

1. Were the first Christians Gnostics? The answer seems to be "No". Christian Gnosticism wasn't fully developed until the mid-second century, although there were elements of "proto-Gnosticism" beginning to form. The first Christians seem to have been practicing Jews--specifically, the sects called Nazerenes (or Nasoreans) and Ebionites of the Jerusalem Church led by Jesus' brother James and Peter, who was on the road as a missionary. They called themselves The Way, believed that Jesus was a fully human man "adopted' as God's Son at his Baptism,thought of themselves as Jews; and kept the Jewish Laws, including circumcision and kosher dietary laws. After awhile, they began reaching out to Gentiles, but at first insisted that to join them the Gentiles had to become circumcised and keep kosher.. There's no inherent conflict between being a practicing Jew and being a Gnostic. The Essenes, one of the sects of Judaism at the time of Jesus were had a mystical orientation along the same wavelengh, and Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged ties or similarities between the early church and the Essenes. Peter began to relax these restrictions after a dream in which God told him eating "unclean" foods was no longer forbidden for those following "the Way"Paul, the first to join leadership ranks who did not know Jesus personally, went much further in arguing that Gentiles didn't have to obey the law at all.

2. Was Paul a Gnostic? Was John? Good questions. Christians who eventually became mainstream or proto-orthodox claimed Paul as the source of their fundamental orientation: Jesus' mission was to sacrifice Himself as the metaphorical Paschal Lamb to atone for our sins. Interestingly, though, some Gnostics also considered him to be "the Great Apostle", because he claimed direct revelation from Jesus, had a vision in which he ascended into the third heaven, wrote about the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, and was thought at the time to have written the letter to the Colossians (now regarded as pseudopigraphal) in which he uses a favorite Gnostic concept, pleroma. Elaine Pagels explores these connections in The Gnostic Paul. She doesn't claim that Paul was a Gnostic, but argues that he had some characteristics that Gnostics found attractive. Valentinus, a leading Gnostic, was taught Christianity by Theudas, a disciple of Paul. The Prayer of Paul and the Apocalypse of Paul were Gnostic texts found in the Nag Hammadi library. Yet Paul was the opposite of Gnostic in being more interested in Jesus' death than His life, and emphasizing His vicarious penal atonement for our sins. The other main figure of the canonical Christian scriptures who attracted Gnostics was John the Evangelist, putative author of the Fourth Gospel and Revelation (most scholars think those came out of a Johanine community claiming John as their founder). The depiction of Jesus as the Logos, existing before time and becoming flesh to dwell among you, and the talk about "Light" have a Gnostic ring to them. Raymond Brown argues that "The Johannine picture of a savior who came from an alien world above, who said that neither he nor those who accepted him were of this world, and who promised to return to take them to a heavenly dwelling could be fitted into the Gnostic world picture." Proto-Gnostic would be a better label, since John 3:16 taught that "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life"--a most un-Gnostic concept. It was the John Gospel more than the others that Saint Irennaeus used in his effort to refute the Gnostics.

3. Were Gnosticism and Christianity Drug-Induced?
In a previous post, I mentioned Allegro's theory that Jesus was a mushroom--more accurately that He was a hallucination produced by ingestion of amanita muscaria by mushroom eating cults. I should make clear that I don't beleive this, nor do most scholars who have studied the subject. The available evidence, albeit slendor points to Jesus being a real person of first century Galilee. I've argued this at lengths in posts back in the spring of 2014 (See especially Post #95 ff in Christianity on the thread Jesus Myth Theories, in which I give at least ten supporting arguments and debate them at length; no need to rehash that). Allegro's thesis is loose to put it most charitable, but I don't think hallucinogens can be ruled out in some of the visions and mystical experiences that contributed to religion in general and Gnosticism in particualr. In the case of Paul, some scholars suspect epilepsy as the "thorn in the flesh" Paul was plagued with. (I'm obviously skeptical of visions, being a brute empiricist at heart.) Professor Robert Grant of the University of Chicago thought that Gnostiocism developed from the remnants of appcocalyptic eschatological movements after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans dashed hopes of an imminent earthy Divine kingdom. So ti may have been stress-induced.

 

Do any Gnostic texts refer to any kind of meditation practice? Specifically "third eye" meditation?

 

I just still don't see what the obsession with Jesus is. If, for some reason, God thought we would be better off with a figurehead of some sort than just vague notions of a deity or what. I don't think it worked, though. It didn't work for me. It seems to go against the whole gnostic belief as well, then, that the material is evil. Jesus was of the world, there is no doubt about that. So much is said about his flesh. I mean, Catholics eat his flesh. In the form of crackers. But crackers are material as well.

Maybe it's all about humbling yourself before a man. And that's what people need. I can see that if there's just a vague notion of God, then people won't be humble, but rather competitive to be in God's favor, or to become powerful like God. But if there's a solitary man who is "the best," then the tendency is to humble oneself. But still it detracts from the glory of God, doesn't it, to be so obsessive about Jesus? Though I know people think they are one in the same.

 

Gnosticism: Esoteric Insight and/or Christian Heresy?

It could very well be both. But who gives a shit about the latter (other than certain dogmatic followers of organized christianity)?

 

I agree that this Gnosticism is so damn complicated, it is bound to put off some. I really don't consider myself dumb; but when reading all of this I am, without a doubt, dumb as a rock.

It seems that it would be necessary to understand the basic tenets of Gnosticism to know if one agrees or disagrees with it...and I believe the average person is not smart enough to even do that.

I've always believed in the metaphysical, and I personally find life to be steeped in metaphysical aspects. What teeny bit of gnosticism I think I have been able to understand, it does acknowledge the metaphysical, which is something that MANY people that claim Christianity refuse to even contemplate.

That is all I have.

I will be following this thread and trying to comprehend something. lol

 

Good question, but probably above my pay grade. "Third eye" is Hindu/Buddhist yogic metaphysics and is similar to the Eye of Horus or Eye of Osiris in Egyptian metaphysical traditions that have some resemblance to Gnosticism. It supposedly provides perception beyond ordinary sight, so would fit right in with Gnostic teachings. The Eye of Horus is personified by the Egyptian goddess Wadjet, a cobra associated with protection of the Egyptian pharaoh and the tutelary deity of Lower Egypt and the Nile Delta. As I'll eventually explain, snakes were big in certain Gnostic cults as conveyers of wisdom and insight, I think because of the Egyptian connection as well as a revisionist treatment of the Garden of Eden myth. For what its worth, I'll pass on the following, which may be more New Age than authentic or classical Gnostic.
How To Reach Gnosis? Meditation. Raise Your Thought Vibration – EOC Institute
Practice Gnostic Meditation To Unlock Inner Wisdom And Peace – EOC Institute
Gnostic Order of Christ: Basic Meditation
Practices - Remembering The Gnostic Movement

 

Jesus helps put a human face on a mystery. My "born again" evangelical friends think of Jesus as their buddy they go fishn' with on weekends. Unlike the Father, who is obviously a stern parent, Jesus is a lovable big brother and good ol' boy, all about peace, love and understanding. I think Jesus was actually a real man who preached a compelling gospel of inclusion and was nailed up for it. The human Jesus became larger than life in embodying metaphorically powerful ideals that, if embraced, have the potential for healing the world and ourselves. But that's just my take. I suspect that the death of the man his disciples were expecting to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth by overthrowing the Roman empire produced a crisis of confidence that could have led either to depression or a way to reframe the situation. So they came to believe He rose from the dead and would come again to establish that kingdom. And it worked; his followers did take over the Roman Empire. I don't know about the humbling part, but awareness that I'm a flawed being does help me in finding empathy with others similarly flawed. And it's nice to think there was only one who wasn't. At least that's my take. BTW, I'm a heretic. Gnostics ask why traditional Christians are obsessed with Jesus' death instead of His life and message. Traditional Christians ask Gnostics why the Unknown God had to send a messenger to convey esoteric truths to a chosen few. Sure they didn't have cell phones or twitter back then, but surely an omnipotent deity could come up with something better. If we get too aalytical about metaphors, they loose their value in making sense of our condition.

 

Gnomeiscism

 

gnome - Yahoo Video Search Results
How annoying!

 

Gnostic Dualism: the Unknown God versus the Demiuge

Basic to the Gnostic scheme of things is that there are two deities, one perfect and one inferior and deluded and/or evil. This idea was probably influenced by Zoroastrianism and/or Plato. Zoroastrian ideas filtered into Palestine and the Mediterranean world as a result of the success of the Persian empire under Cyrus the Great and his successors. After the Cyrus liberated the Jewish elite from their Babylonian captivity, the Holy Land became a Persian protectorate, beholden to the Persians for its existence. The influence of Persian ideas of a struggle between the power of Light and the power of Darkness became especially prominent among the Essenes, and was taken over by the Gnostics. This was a "mitigated" dualism, in which one of the deities (Light; Mazda) was much stronger than the other (Darkness; Ahriman), although the weaker didn't know it. In the Hellenistic world that followed Alexander's conquest of Persia, these ideas blended with the prevailing Greek philosophies, Neo-Platonism and Neo-Pythagorianism. In the dialogue Timaeus, Plato draws on the ideas of his mentor Pythagoras, presenting the high God as the Monad (the one), the highest good, which is so above it all that it has to generate an inferior Demiuge to do the grunt work of creation. Plato's Demiurge is an emanation of the Monad the agent which acts as an agent in fashioning the preexisting materials of chaos according to the models of eternal forms, thereby producing all the physical things of the material world. Plato's Demiurge was a good guy, but the Gnostics merged it with the Zoroastrian concept of Ahriman to arrive at a Demiurge who is flawed or evil, and he occurs several stages down the path of successive emanations or Aeons (think Angels). The farther the Aeons got from the source, the more flawed they were until one of them, naturally a female named Sophia (worldly Wisdom) rebelled and tried to reproduce without a consort, thereby producing a monster Aeon, the Demiurge called Yaldaboath, whom the Gnostics identified with the Hebrew God Yahweh. It was this god who created the material world, which naturally sucked, and then tried to keep knowledge of the higher reality away from humans. To assist him in this task, he created Archons (think Fallen Angels or Zoroastrian devas, or Judeo-Christian demons. Are you with me so far? Is your head spinning yet?

Interestingly, a somewhat earlier dualist system who identified Yahweh as an inferior God but lacked other elements of Gnostic thinking was a Christian named Marcion. Unlike the Gnostics, though, Marcion did not believe that some humans possessed a divine spark and that Jesus' mission was to enlighten them. He was a devotee of Paul, and saw salvation in terms of faithful acceptance of Christ's sacrifice. So Marcion is interesting as a transitional figure between Pauline and Gnostic Christianity.

These developments reflect the widening split between Christians and Jews that were going on since the late first century-early second century c.e. After destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, which Christians blamed on the Jews' rejection of Jesus, tensions between the two communities became intense. Thanks to the missionary efforts of Paul and his successors, the Curch was becoming increasingly Gentile. Probably in the 90s, Jews excluded Christians from the synagogue. That was probably shortly before the appearance of the John Gospel, which has Jesus saying: You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. (John 8:44). It's not hard to understand how words like this could lead some Christians to conclude that the Jewish god must be a false god. And most of us who have read the Old Testament understand how Gentile readers might have been turned off by all the gore and genocide. Put it together with Platonic-Zoroastrian dualism and voila.

 

I just hate knowledge and information.

 

Gnosticism is definitely not for you then!

 

No, probably not. Seems kind of cool, though. Kind of mysterious like the druids or something.

 

That is a lot of information to take in and to fully understand.

 

Yeah I also think Druid's are pretty cool. I don't know much about them, save for what I read in Anne Rices Vampire Chronicles, so I'm sure it wasn't even close, but if it was I do like them.

 

Don't get me started on Druids!