Gnosticism is growing in leaps and bounds on and off-line. But if you ask any two people what gnosticism really is, you’re likely to get rather different answers. Some will try to say it’s the “original” version of Christianity, before it became distorted by the church. Others will claim it’s a pre-Christian religion, and still others will say that it’s the underlying current from which all other Western esoteric streams spring. Historically, it seems that gnosticism meant many different things to different groups, and so it makes sense that’s still the case today.
The popular image of gnosticism seems to usually focus around the theological story system of the demiurge and the archons. Wikipedia has a good basic summary of it:
Gnosticism generally taught that the Earth was ruled over by a lesser “god” called Yaldabaoth, also known as the Demiurge, after Plato (Gr. demiurgos - ‘one who shapes’). The Demiurge was the head of the Archons, “petty rulers” and craftsmen of the physical world. But human bodies, although their matter is ‘fallen’, contained within them a divine spark or pneuma that fell from the Source, or Nothingness from which all things came. Knowledge (gnosis) enables the divine spark to return to the Source whence it came.
Let’s chop out all the Greek terms from that. We’re left with a story about a bad god with a bunch of nasty henchmen who are trying to keep us all oppressed. But we have a secret method of getting out from their control. So from this, we can distill a few basic characteristics of the generic gnostic myth:
- The observation of limitation
- The intuitive knowledge of potential beyond limitation
- The experience of transcending limitation into potential
Aside from the plot of Good Will Hunting or every 80’s movie, what do we see in the above steps? We see a process. We see a methodology rooted in experience. The first experience is based on observation. We observe that the world seems limited, flawed, or that certain things that happen to us don’t make sense. This is where we get the classic characterization of gnostics as “world haters” or that they think matter is evil. This confusion caused by the exterior world turns one inward, where one finds the intuitive knowledge of greatness, of potential, of perfection. In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus announces: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you.” Since you can’t exist solely in the perfect ideal inner world, the goal of gnosticism seems to be to bring forth the perfection that you know is possible into the outer world. (Incidentally, this act of will might be described as the basis for magickal systems such as Crowley’s) Gnosis seems to be the name of that event whereby the boundaries between the two are transcended.
I don’t know a ton about Greek philosophical history, but what it seems to me is that the ideal inner world relates to the world of Platonic ideal forms, and the exterior world relates to empirical Aristotelian approach. Gnosticism seems almost to “bridge the gap” between these two systems - although I’ve never seen anybody explicitly talk about that (I’d like to read it if anybody knows a source). And the way it seems to do integrate the two is by valuing all stages of the game from observation, to intuition. Seems that you’ve got to fully activate each in order to reach the third stage of transcendent experience whereby the two merge fully.
Does that bring us any closer to understanding what gnosticism is all about? For me it does. Gnosticism seems to be a methodology of experience, from which story-systems seem to arise that mytho-symbolically support or explain that basic sequence of experience. For more info on this, check out Jeremy’s attempts to frame a set of criteria for determining what constitutes a gnostic myth.
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4 Comments
I’m still struggling with a definition of gnosis and gnosticism. The definitions with an emphasis on experience don’t really distinguish gnosticism from mysticism generally. The Wikipedia description is specific to 2nd century Christian Gnosticism and not general enough to cover gnosticism in other times, places and cultures. Your basic idea of limitation and its transcendance is common to virtually all religions and even to most philosophical or secular moral thinking (such as Plato or Confucius). The idea that an inner spiritual value or entity or potential (such as soul or higher Self) will save you is also common to all religions, especially in their mystical forms.
The only elements that ring true for me are:
* Gnosis is closest to the “know” we experience in close friendship or love. “The gnostic in any form is a ‘friend of God’.” (source) Not all mystics emphasize this element of religious experience. God is often seen as “up there” - awesome or mighty - but for the gnostic, God is also “down there” and ultimately as human as we ourselves are.
* Gnostic insight is expressed through creative and playful forms (myths, poetry) rather than intellectual or rigid forms (theology). (source) All religions use myth, stories, poetry, etc, to convey their message but gnosticism encourages the continued creation of new stories, new myths, new expressions of old truths.
The latter element - the creative and playful and ongoingly inventive aspect - is clearly what most appeals to you, Tim. The friendship idea, too, but not quite so prominently.
Yes, I saw your comments on Jordan’s post about the “gnostic streams” where you asked a similar question. His response as to why he called it “gnosticism” rather than “mysticism” didn’t make a lot of sense to me. It was basically “that doesn’t apply here.” But I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question. And as far as I can tell, you’re right. Gnosticism and mysticism seem to be the same thing by the definition I gave above. In order to narrow it down, we’d have to add in a bunch of ad hoc qualifiers such as “mentions Jesus, mentions Sophia,” etc. Which I personally don’t think are really necessary to get at what gnosticism is really about. I like the two ideas that you attached much more that going that route.
One other thing I wanted to add in the notes to this essay is the similarity to the 3 points I outlined above to the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism:
Though the wording is different (desire as the root cause, etc), the biggest difference to my eyes is that Buddhism lays out a pathway to get you from one place to the next. Maybe that’s what I was really getting at in terms of gnosticism as a methodology. And perhaps that methodology comes from the two things you added as qualifiers: “friendship” with God, and continual creative invention. Maybe the creative-play is the gnostic equivalent of the Eightfold Path. The Gospel of Thomas seems very much to convey a specific methodology as well. It might be worth trying to boil it down into a set of essential principles, something like the Eightfold Path.
It does make sense to say that Gnosticism means different things to different folks. I mean, look how many emperical versions of Christianity there are, and yet they claim to be one church!
yeah, but there’s a real danger in saying ‘anything can be gnostic,’ too– it’s not anything to anybody. i think your three points are good, but they could be applied to any process of seeking. there’s more to it than just this process, otherwise we could just say ‘hey, everyone seeking to overcome limitation is a gnostic,’ which isn’t the case. it’s definitely a distinct tradition; for instance, zen buddhism (which, as you know, i think is a close parallel to gnosticism) is really awesome, but it’s not gnosticism.
there’s a definite tradition involved, and i don’t think one can ignore the eucharistic aspect, either. i have more to say on this, but i’m still thinking on it– more later.
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