Gnosticism

Trigger warning: Rape.

Here’s some common ground for mainstream theistic Christians and metaphysically naturalistic atheists: something neither of us believe in. Gnosticism is a variety of religion, possibly a form of early Christianity but arguably not, which existed from about the first Christian century until going into decline around the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. It might have been the other way round, in which case mainstream Christians would’ve been the heretics and they’d be orthodox, but this is how it really turned out.

The word “Gnosticism” is derived from the Greek γνωσις, which both means and is cognate with the English word “knowledge” and the Sanskrit word ज्ञान, jñāna. The general idea is that Jesus provided special esoteric knowledge to a few people, such as his disciples, which can be discovered by analysing what he said. Because history went the way it did, Gnosticism comes across as odd to today’s Christians, and also has a flavour more akin to Eastern religions such as Buddhism than Judaism or the other Abrahamic religions. A possibly over-simplified version of Gnosticism goes as follows: There is an ultimate true God known as the Λογος, Logos, or Word, who rules over all and is ultimately good. This God is hermaphrodite and defined only negatively, for instance as the Unmoved. Several steps down from this God is the Δημιουργός, Demiurge or artisan, carpenter perhaps, who fashioned the physical Cosmos and has trapped souls in matter. This Universe as we know it is therefore effectively the Matrix. This is the origin of the idea that we might be living in a simulation, and the secret knowledge we gain enables us to escape. I often think this makes the film series ‘The Matrix’ and Elon Musk’s and others’ idea that we are in a simulation distinctly unoriginal. Some Gnostic Christians saw Christ as the manifestation of the Logos and contrasted the New Testament God with God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as being the Logos and the Demiurge respectively.

Now for a bit more detail.

This is a diagram of the πληρωμα (pleroma). This is literally “fullness” and is a concept used in both orthodox and Gnostic Christianity. It means the totality of divine power. There is, incidentally, a lot of overlap between the concepts of orthodox and Gnostic Christianity and the word is used many times in the New Testament. It contrasts with κένωμα, kenoma, emptiness, and there may be a third contrast with κοςμος, kosmos (more usually spelt with a C in English). I should point out, incidentally, that when I say “orthodox Christianity” I’m actually referring to the version of Christianity which is directly ancestral to the Roman Catholic, Protestant and of course Orthodox denominations of the Church, and not just the Orthodox churches, although at the time what was to become mainstream Christianity was also to become the Orthodox Church. Terminology just is confusing here. A general trend of sophistication can be traced in the New Testament between the earlier synoptic gospels and the later Fourth Gospel and Johannine writings, and this trend continued with Gnosticism becoming more esoteric. Therefore the Pleroma as shown above works like this. The point at the top is the Monad, which seems to be another word for the Logos but I’m not sure (I’ll come back to that). This emanates into νους & αληθεια (I’m having to shift between Greek and English keyboards here all the time, hence the ampersand in the middle of that – it’s quite tiresome!), which are Mind and Truth. The word for “truth” is negative in Greek, meaning something like “non-forgetfulness” or “the state of not being hidden”, hence the “a-“, as in “atypical”, “asymmetrical” and “atheism”, also found in the related Sanskrit. This reflects the tendency in Gnosticism to pursue the via negativa, i.e. describing things as what they are not because the divine passes all understanding and therefore cannot be described positively – we don’t have appropriate concepts for God. This could lead into something interesting, and it will in a bit. Every point in that diagram within or on the larger circle represents one of the emanations of the divine, and the circle itself is referred to as the Boundary, Cross (Stake as in σταυρος), i.e. the same word used for the instrument of Jesus’s execution. The pleroma is where the ‘αιωνης (I’m not sure of that plural) dwell. These Æones (singular “Æon”) are the enamations of the Monad. Emanations are things which are “thrown off” the Monad without it being diminished. I tend to think of them as separate beings but I’m not sure this is correct. A similar idea is found in Zoroastrianism with the 𐬀𐬨𐬆𐬱𐬀 𐬯𐬞𐬆𐬧𐬙𐬀, Amesha Spenta, seven divine and personified emanations of Ahura Mazda representing various virtuous attributes of God. Since these are personified, I assume they are also in Gnosticism, which has thirty of them.

The kenoma could be linked to kenosis, an important concept in orthodox Christian theology. Kenosis is the idea that in becoming human Jesus emptied himself out and “became nothing for us”, and is a useful concept, for example, in the idea that Jesus was gang-raped before the crucifixion by Roman soldiers. One of the most popular posts on this blog is ‘Was Jesus Raped?‘ which goes into this in more detail, but it should be noted that there are many people who describe themselves as Christian now who object to such things as this statue:

A photo of the Jesus the Homeless Statue by Timothy Schmalz outside
Date
22 April 2014, 14:15:07
Source
Own work
Author
Pjposullivan

This statue is sometimes objected to on the grounds that it attempts to debase Christ, and similarly there are attempts on Yahoo! Answers to insult Christians by bringing up the question of him being gang raped. Kenosis focusses on the idea of Jesus becoming the lowest of the low: a homeless man, born in a stable, who happened to be God. The Gnostic concept of the Kenoma is of the emptiness or void outside of the Boundary of the Monad, and is the world as we perceive it by our senses. Each Æon in the pleroma has a corresponding entity in the kenoma.

The reason all this stuff is speculated about is that it’s supposed to be secret knowledge which carries the key to the Universe, and it’s also an attempt to reconcile Christian philosophy with Neoplatonism. My first impulse is to throw all of this into some kind of conceptual dustbin as completely idle and pointless esotericism, but one thing that stops me is the fact that, and this opens me to potential ridicule, I actually believe Nostradamus made successful, unambiguous and accurate predictions, and he based his technique on Neoplatonism. Also, the esoteric has a draw to me: it can be seen in alchemy, the Qabbalah, choirs of angels and the likes of the chakra system in Yoga.

I am, of course, coming out of the dominant strand of Christianity, some of which was to evolve into evangelical Protestantism, and consequently I’ve inherited the dismissive attitude of the early Church from about the fifth Christian century onwards, which regards Gnosticism as heretical. This history of early Christianity may, however, help to explain a couple of notable features of today’s mainstream Christian faith. Christianity as I understand it has an oddly sparse and austere cosmology. Any other world faith seems to have accumulated complex models of the spiritual universe such as many deities, the various worlds of Buddhism, the emanations of Zoroastrianism, the complexity of the Talmud in Rabbinical Judaism and the names of God in Islam. Some denominations of the Christian faith share that kind of concretion, but not the likes of the Society of Friends or Evangelical Protestantism, the two aspects wherewith I have most to do. I also place ethical considerations right at the centre of my life, something which occurred to me when I first looked at the Qabbalah, because the idea there seemed to be that “doing the Right Thing”, which in that case probably meant following the Talmud perfectly, was simply the first stage of the Tree Of Life, whereas to me that makes the entire thing redundant because it constitutes a distraction from that duty and a waste of time and energy. This plainness and austerity, in the context of what became orthodox Christianity, seems like a continuation of the trend which began with the rejection of Gnosticism.

There is, though, an opposite trend which is equally apparent in Evangelical Protestantism, and the fact that these two seem to coëxist in it really puzzles me. If you look at, for example, Judaism, that has a list of thirteen precepts arrived at by Moses Maimonides which sums up its basis, although of course you then have the sophistication of Torah, Talmud and perhaps even the Zohar. Islam has its Five Pillars and Buddhism its Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. All of these amount to just one principle: do good deeds in the world and you will achieve a higher state of being. Evangelical Protestantism is markèdly unlike this. It has no “elevator pitch”. In order to do the right thing according to that, you have to repent and commit to Christ, the uniquely fully human and fully divine sinless person who died on the Cross for you in order to atone for the inherited sins of the human race due to the first people’s disobedience from God, and it isn’t good deeds which help here but just the one deed of letting Christ in. Maybe it’s just because I’m closer to it, but all that seems a lot more complicated than other religions. And somehow, this austerity and complexity comfortably occur together as features of Evangelical Protestantism. Which is weird. However, I think this complexity is probably inherited from Gnosticism, because a clear trend can be seen towards it in the chronological order of the New Testament texts.

Modern mainstream Christianity, including in fact heterodox sects such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, emerges from a tradition which defined itself as “Not Gnosticism”, although there are other heresies such as Arianism and Monophysitism, while also inheriting Gnostic features. One legacy is the via negativa, that is, describing the Divine by what it’s not. There is a view that metaphysically naturalistic, scientifically realist atheism is the result of a Christian world view because of its separation between the Divine and the created realms, the latter of which is taken to be amenable to logic and governed by physical laws, and ultimately leading to the redundancy of the concept of God. Some other forms of atheism are remarkably different. For instance, some Indian atheists simply saw karma as a sufficient explanation for everything an therefore rejected the concept of God. But to me the most appealing other option to theism, and probably the one closest to my own theism, is theological non-cognitivism, also known as “ignosticism”, which is the view that religious language, including talk of God, is not about semantic meaning, and therefore that “there is no God” is just as invalid as “God exists”. It’s similar to ethical non-cognitivism – the idea that a sentence like “this is the right thing to do” in fact means “I approve of this, do so as well”. It is also true that the via negativa edges into that, and if I were to reach another set of beliefs from where I currently am, I would probably just decide that atheism and theism are equally crass and ill-conceived. This idea can be traced back to Gnosticism, although it crops up in other belief systems, such as logical positivism. There is no point at which I would ever claim to be atheist, for that reason, unless I change my mind about the idea that there is always a strong emotive element in meaning. My narrative tends to be psychological even though I’m externalist, but ignosticism also works as a way of highlighting the possibility that our notion of God, among other religious ideas, may simply be incoherent.

I don’t consider Gnosticism to be a good thing. To my mind, it removes the distinctiveness of Christianity and makes it more like Buddhism and Hinduism in that it leads one to view matter as evil. This has negative consequences in the real world. For instance, Ayurvedic medicine is influenced by the idea that reincarnation is an undesirable consequence in that it sees in utero development as painful for the fetus and pregnancy as an unhealthy state, so it brings misogyny with it. Women are, for Ayurvedic medicine, undesirable vessels which trap us all in life as opposed to Nirvana. The same kind of thing happens with Gnosticism, since it views matter as evil and something to be escaped. Adopting such an attitude undercuts the urge to make a positive difference to the world, since life is effectively an illusion anyway. The modern Church has also accused transgender people of Gnosticism, which I won’t cover since this is the wrong blog for it: here is a pamphlet from the Christian Institute on the matter, so to speak.

There are opposing views regarding whether the New Testament itself contains Gnostic elements. It had a tendency to use words also used in the New Testament, and the Septuagint, but elaborated way beyond their usual meaning, which accords with its esotericism. The Fourth Gospel (“John”) of course mentions the Logos in a prominent position and there seems to be something odd going on with its prose style which I’ve never been able to put my finger on, possibly chiasmus, which might be used to extract some kind of hidden meaning. Analysing the texts of the gospels themselves, some claim that earlier and later versions can be distinguished in such as way that Jesus was viewed differently as time went by. Specifically, the Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical gospel which, however, appears to be Q, an early long-undiscovered apparent source for other canonical gospels, seems to focus on the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand and doesn’t refer to the idea of the End Times. This could reflect on a change in attitude when the apparently promised imminent end of the world didn’t happen. To my mind, it seems that paradoxically the idea that the world was about to end is a later idea, although this may not be sustainable considering the apparently apocalyptic focus of much contemporary Judaism. It’s also possible that Paul was influenced by Gnosticism, because his focus was on the Gentiles, who would at the time have been more comfortable with Greek ideas, although the Jews were themselves quite Hellenised at this time. He may even have been Gnostic himself, referring to “knowledge” in such texts as 1 Corinthians 8:10 –

Εαω γαρ τις ιδη σε τον εχοντα γνωσιν εν ειδωλειω κατακειμενον ουχι η συνειδησις αυτου ασθενους οντος οικοδομηθησεται εις το τα ειδωλοθυτα εσθειν;

For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 

I don’t know about you, but to me this looks a bit contrived, since the “knowledge” might simply be the usual Pauline theology of salvation.

To conclude, if Gnosticism had become the dominant form of Christianity I don’t think it would’ve been a good thing. Even as it stands, Christianity may have been instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire because people simply didn’t care about the world any more, and with Gnosticism it would’ve been even more so. It’s popular in certain circles and has influenced Christianity as we know it, pun intended, but it isn’t a good thing. It’s still quite interesting though.