A rchive Date
[ 25-05-2000 ]
Category
[ Philosophy ]
sub-Categoy
[ Gnosticism ]

http://www.helsinki.fi/teol/hyel/gnosti/english/gnosticism.html

What Was Gnosticism?

Defining "Gnosticism"

At present, there is a heated discussion among scholars as to how the term "

" should be defined or whether it is precise and useful enough to be used at all. Those who want to abandon it altogether think that the connotations of "Gnosticism" are so generalized as to be more misleading than helpful when individual texts and phenomena, traditionally called gnostic, are studied.

Other scholars insist that even if the term "Gnosticism" is not abandoned, the historian should recognize the ideological and apologetic ways in which the term has been used in the ancient and modern discourses of orthodoxy and heresy.

In the present website the terms "

Gnosticism

" and "gnostic" characterize those religious doctrines and myths of late antiquity that maintain or presuppose that the cosmos is a result of the activity of an evil or ignorant creator and that salvation is a process in the course of which a human being receives the knowledge of his/her divine origin and returns to the realm of light after having been freed from the limitations of the world and the body.

In gnostic Christianity knowledge is not necessarily seen as a reference to the intellect but has a religious significance. The object of knowledge is the divine origin of humanity, which the individual can be reminded of and to which he/she is urged to return. The question is really one of a saving knowledge. In gnostic Christianity knowledge is not necessarily seen as a competitor with faith, but as complementing and deepening faith. One gnostic Christian defined saving knowledge thus:

We are not only saved by baptism, but by the knowledge of
Who we were and where we came from,
Where we have been and where we have come to,
Where we are going and from what we have been freed,
What is birth and what is rebirth. -

Clement of Alexandria, Excerpts from Theodotus, 78.2

Gnosticism is also referred to in a looser sense as the stress on the spiritual and seeking for truth within. However, this is an unnecessarily imprecise description of the content of Gnosticism. Such spiritual endeavours were very common in antiquity, as they are today, and it is not meaningful to describe them as gnostic.

The Origins of Gnosticism

The problem of the relation of Gnosticism to Christianity has for the moment not been the object of consensus. Researchers are divided into two camps on this question. Some consider that Gnosticism was an independent, non-Christian religion which arose at the same time as Christianity and only gradually began to acquire Christian elements. Other researchers suppose that Gnosticism developed under the influence of Christianity and was one of its early interpretations.

Sources: How Do We know about Gnosticism?

Key to the modern study of Gnosticism is the Coptic-language Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945. A good number of these texts are gnostic writings, on the basis of which we can know more precisely what the gnostics themselves actually thought.

Many of the gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi library stem from Sethian Gnosticism. As a matter of fact, the centrality of this branch in the history of Gnosticism and our awareness of its main doctrines are the direct result of the study of the Nag Hammadi texts. Another major part of the Nag Hammadi texts are Valentinian writings. The library thus confirms that Valentinian Gnosticism was one of the most important forms of Christian Gnosticism in the second and third centuries.

Prior to the discovery of the library, our knowledge of Gnosticism was largely confined to references by the Church Fathers and a few original documents. When the Church Fathers describe Gnosticism, they mainly present summaries of gnostic doctrines though they also include some direct quotations from the writings of gnostic teachers. The reason why the Church Fathers deal with Gnosticism is in order to condemn it as a Christian heresy. For this reason, their descriptions of Gnosticism are often hostile and tendentious, but that is not to say that they have lost their relevance for the study of Gnosticism after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library. The texts found at Nag Hammadi have shown that, at least in certain cases, the Church Fathers used original gnostic sources.

The Key Features of Gnostic Thought

The gnostic writings have a colourful intellectual background in which ideas deriving from Judaism, Christianity and Greek philosophy have been combined. The distinctive element of Gnosticism in antiquity was the idea of an inferior Creator-God, the demiurge (Gr. demiurgos, "the workman"). According to the gnostic viewpoint, the demiurge created the world without knowing the highest God, falsely believing himself to be the only God. Since the demiurge was seen as acting in ignorance, his creation was also considered imperfect. In Gnosticism therefore there is a strict divide between the world of the true God and the visible world.

The demiurge was thought to have come indirectly from the world of the true God, which gnostics often referred to as the "fullness" (Gr. pleroma). This "fullness" was the abode of the true God, the Father of the Universe, as well as a host of eternal beings who lived in perfect harmony with each other. However, this harmony was shattered by one of the eternal beings, Wisdom (Gr. sophia), which was not content with its own position but wanted to imitate the Father of the Universe in creating for itself. Wisdom's creation failed. This unsuccessful creation by Wisdom was the demiurge, who, expelled from God's world, created the material world and his assistant powers.

Humanity has a special role in the creation by the demiurge. The body was created by the demiurge, but it contains a divine spirit which thereby establishes a connection with the highest God. In this way, the human being is superior to its creator, the demiurge. The aim of the body created by the demiurge is to get the human to forget the divine spirit inside. The dormant divine spark within the person can enter human consciousness when a messenger figure wakes the person from its dream of forgetfulness and reminds the human of its divine origin. In gnostic Christian texts the task of Christ is to function as this messenger.

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Schools of Gnostic Thought

Gnosticism was not a monolithic way of thinking. In antiquity different schools and groups of Gnosticism flourished with divergent opinions. These groups had different conceptions of, for instance, how negative a character the lower creator or demiurge was. The relation of these groups to Christianity also varied: certain groups were clearly more Christian than others. The best known of the schools of gnostic thought are Valentinian Christianity and Sethian Gnosticism.

Valentinian Christianity

Valentinian Christianity is the clearest example of a gnostic school which stresses Christian elements. The group received its title from a Christian named Valentinus, a native of Egypt, who was a teacher in congregations in Rome in the second half of the second century. It is however unclear to what extent the distinctive doctrines of Valentinianism can be ascribed to Valentinus personally, since at least part of those doctrines developed among his followers in the years subsequent to his death.

The Christian input in the Valentinian school can be seen in the fact that its members searched the New Testament to find supporting arguments. The earliest known commentary on the Gospel of John in fact comes from a member of this school, Heracleon. At least a part of the Valentinians thought of themselves as representing a deeper, "spiritual" version of Christianity. In their view, the majority of Christians belonged to a lower group of "psychic" Christians who needed faith and good deeds to be saved.

This division of Christians into two levels does not mean that Valentinians separated themselves into their own communities. It is told how they participated in normal church services in Rome, and at least one Valentinian is known to have been a close advisor to the bishop of Rome as late as the end of the second century. One of the distinctive features of the Valentinian school is that its followers did not hold the demiurge to be a completely negative figure. They stressed that the demiurge was the mediator for Wisdom in the creation of the world. In addition, they believed that in coming to the world Christ had also turned the demiurge to his side. For this reason, the demiurge was believed to take special care of Valentinian Christians.

Sethian Gnosticism

Sethian Gnosticism derives its name from Seth, the third son of Adam, who was considered to be the mediator of divine knowledge to mankind. Sethian gnostics referred to themselves as the "descendants of Seth". Christian material plays a smaller role in Sethian than in Valentinian Gnosticism, indeed part of the Sethian writings contain no reference at all to Christianity. Instead many Sethian texts contain a notable amount of material stemming from Judaism, such as names of Semitic origin.

The Sethian view of the creator god is clearly more negative than that of the Valentinians. In the Sethian writings the creator god is known by the Semitic name Yaldabaoth, but he is also referred to as "the fool" and "the blind god". Yaldabaoth is presented as a demonic figure, the leader of the other spirit beings and as the enemy of humanity. The Sethian writings radically reinterpret the creation story found in the Old Testament, describing, for instance, how Yaldabaoth, tormented by desire, ravished Eve and fathered two sons, Cain and Abel; only Seth is Adam's own son. In the latest research, Sethian Gnosticism is beginning to be considered as one of the earliest forms of gnostic thought, indeed as a certain kind of "classical Gnosticism", from which later forms of Gnosticism such as Valentinianism gradually developed. Certain scholars have even suggested that the word "Gnosticism" should be reserved for Sethian thought alone.