GNOSTICISM
Gnosticism was a philosophic-religious movement that developed
during the first three Christian centuries. The beginnings of
Gnosticism are unknown, but certain gnostic "tendencies"
appeared here and there throughout the Orient long prior to the
rise of any definite system or teacher. Gnosticism existed as
a religion in its own right, apart from other religions, as is
shown from such writings as the Corpus Hermeticum
and the Oracula Chaldaica. But during the first
century A.D. it began to gradually intermingle with other religions
such as Judaism and later with Christianity. At its Jewish stage,
Gnosticism is represented by Simon Magus, a Jewish heterodox teacher
from Gitta in Samaria, who considered himself as the magical incorporation
of the great power of God (Acts 8:9-10). Gnosticism reaches its
fully developed form in relation to Chrisitianity. It claimed
to be more profound and truer interpretation of Christianity.
Gnosticism as a Christian heresy was attacked by Irenaeus, Tertullian,
Hippolytus and others of the early Church Fathers. It expressed
itself in a number of different systems or "schools."
Four of these at least are known from the writings of the early
Church Fathers. Bishop Westcott in his Introduction to
the Study of the Gospels gives the following fourfold
classification:
- Judaizing Gnosticism. Cerinthus and the Ebionites are examples
of an extreme Jewish party in the church who considered the writings
of Matthew and James in the New Testament as containing the true
Christian doctrine. Cerinthus, the contemporary of the Apostle
John, taught that Jesus was no more than a righteous man endowed
with the Spirit of God. The Ebionites, further, considered that
Jesus did not become the Christ until the Holy Spirit descended
on him at his baptism. They claim to find this distinction between
the man Jesus and the Aeon Christ in a writing called the Gospel
to the Hebrews. Judaizing gnosticism may also be found in the
so-called Clementine writings: two of these pseudepigraphal works
which are ascribed to St. Clement of Rome, the Homilies
and the Recognitions, are Christian romances belonging
to the first half of the second century. Jesus is represented
as the eighth greater teacher, only greater in degree than his
seven predecessors -- Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
and Moses. The creation of the world is due to the expansion
of the Monad into Dual, i.e. God and His Wisdom. In this way
successive pairs are multiplied, the first or male element being
superior down to the time of the creation of man. After that
the order is reversed, the second principle being stronger and
truer.
- Doceticism. This form of gnosticism taught that the incarnation
of Christ was not real but only an appearance. (Doceticism comes
from the Greek verb dokein which means "to seem,"
or "to appear.") One Docetic school held that the Christ-spirit
came upon Jesus at the baptism and left him again at his crucifixion.
This, according to the Docetic Gospel of Peter,
was the meaning of Jesus' cry of dereliction, which it renders
in the form "My power, my power, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Another variety of Doceticism represents Jesus' humanity as being
a complete phantom, so that those who crucified him were deceived;
an alternate docetic idea was that it was really Simon of Cyrene
who was crucified, while Jesus looked on from a place of safety.
According to Bishop Westcott the Docetics preferred the Gospel
of Mark and were examples of the extreme followers of the school
of St. Peter.
- Marcionites. Marcion of Sinope, the son of a bishop of
Sinope, in Pontus, was born about A.D. 120. He came to Rome to propagate
his opinions and there became acquainted with a teacher like-minded
as himself, one Cerdon a Syrian, who had according to Irenaeus
taught in the imperial city during the pontificate of Hygenius
(139-142 A.D.). He tried in vain to induce the clergy of Rome to
receive him into communion, and upon being refused founded a separate
church. Marcion taught that
- God as portrayed in the Old Testament is not, to all appearances,
the same God described by Christ in the Gospels; and that
- absolute justice is incompatible with perfect love. The God
of the Old Testament governed the world with strict and undeviating
justice, of the kind which Aristotle contrasts with equity, and
consequently he only regards with favor those men who observe
the just though imperfect law given to his chosen people. Those
who had not attained to the righteousness which is by the Law
lay under the displeasure of the God of this world, although they
were no less capable of good than the so-called just persons.
According to Marcion Christ appeared suddenly -- the record of
his birth was pure fiction -- in the synagogue of Capernaum in
the fifteenth year of Tiberius and proclaimed the true God of
love. The God of this world, being angry, stirred up the Jews
to crucify Christ. Christ's appearance on earth was entirely
unreal; He did not actually die, though his seeming suffering
had a purpose in teaching mankind to despise death and pain.
After his resurrection Christ taught the truth to the Demiurge
and to Paul, the only preacher of the genuine gospel. According
to Marcion redemption consisted of the imparting of this higher
knowledge; redemption was not from sin but from ignorance. Marcion
like other Gnostics divided humanity into spiritual, psychical
or natural, and carnal. But unlike some of
his gnostic predecessors he insisted upon the rigid purity of
life and regarded martyrdom with at least as much reverence as
the orthodox teachers of the Church. Since about two-thirds of
the New Testament was opposed to Marcion's doctrine, he rejected
all except the writings of Luke and Paul. But even these he did
not accept all as genuine but subjected them to a thorough revision
and rejected the Pastoral Epistles as not genuinely Pauline.
- Pure Gnosticism. Pure Gnosticism, unlike the other forms
of Gnosticism, was a radical dualism of mind and matter, light
and darkness, good and evil. This radical dualism gave the theology,
cosmology, anthropology, soteriology and ethics of Gnosticism
a distinctive character.
- Theology. According to the gnostic doctrine of God, God
is absolutely transcendent. He (or It) is utterly alien in nature
to the world, which he neither created nor governs (absolutely
no immanence). God is the complete antithesis to the world as
light is the opposite of darkness. This absolutely transcendent
God is totally hidden from all creatures and is unknowable by
natural concepts. Knowledge of God requires supernatural illumination,
and even then can hardly be expressed except in negative terms.
- Cosmology. The world, according to Gnosticism, is the
work of lowly powers who do not know the utterly transcendent
God and who obstruct the knowledge of Him or It in the cosmos
over which they rule. The gnostic conception of the universe
is roughly what we might call Ptolemaic. Around and above the
world are the cosmic spheres (most often seven, but sometimes
multiplied to vast numbers) arrange like concentric enclosing
spheres. The significance of this cosmic architecture is that
everything which intervenes between here and the beyond serves
to separate man from God. The celestial spheres are the seats
of the Archons (rulers), especially the seven planetary gods borrowed
from Babylonian astrology. The Archons collectively rule over
the world and each individually in his sphere is like a warder
of a prison, each celestial sphere like a ward of the prison,
and earth like the inner-most ward or dungeon. Their tyrannical
world-rule, called Destiny or Fate, is physically the law of nature
and morally the law of "justice" as imperfectly exemplified
in the Mosaic law which issued from the "world-creating angels"
(Jehovah) for the enslavement of man. As guardian of his sphere,
each Archon bars the passage to the souls who seek to ascend after
death in order to prevent their escape from the world. The Archons
are sometimes presented as the creators of the world although
more often under the influence of Platonic philosophy (especially
that of Plato's Timaeus) from which the doctrine
is borrowed that the Demiurge (artificer) is responsible for the
creation of the world.
- Anthropology. Man, according to Gnosticism, is composed
of body, soul and spirit. The body and soul are the product of
the cosmic powers, which shaped the body in imitation of the divine
Primal Man and animated it with their own psychical forces: these
together make up the astral soul of man, his psyche. Through
his body and soul man is a part of the world and subject to destiny or fate.
Enclosed in the body and soul is the spirit, or pneuma,
a portion of the divine substance which has fallen into the world.
In its cosmic exile, thus imprisoned in the soul and body, the
"inner man" as an alien element is unconscious of itself,
stupefied, asleep or intoxicated by the poison of the world; in
brief, it is "ignorant."
- Soteriology. The spirit of man imprisoned in the soul
and body, and ignorant from whence it came finds salvation from
this condition in two stages. In this present life salvation
is an awakening which is affected through "knowledge."
Salvation is by knowledge and hence the name of this movement
-- Gnosticism -- which is derived from the Greek word gnostikos,
one who has gnosis, "knowledge.". This knowledge
is not ordinary or scientific knowledge but a special and higher
kind of knowledge about the transmundane God and about man himself.
This knowledge has been withheld from man by his very situation,
since "ignorance" is the essence of mundane existence.
Hence the necessity of divine illumination or revelation. The
bearer of this divine revelation is a messenger from the world
of light who penetrates the barrier of the spheres, outwits the
Archons, awakens the spirit from its earthly slumber, and imparts
to it the saving knowledge "from without." (In the
Christian Gnosticisms this savior-messenger is identified with
the Christ.) Equipped with this saving gnosis the "inner
man" or the spirit of man is prepared for the second stage
of its salvation, the liberation from the bonds of the world at
death and the return to its own native realm of light. The gnosis
is the potent formula for overcoming the "gate-keepers"
who would hinder the soul after death on its journey to the realm
of light. As it travels upward the spirit leaves behind at each
sphere the psychical "vestment" contributed by it on
the spirit's downward flight at birth: thus the spirit is stripped
of all foreign accretions such as individual personal identity
until it reaches God beyond the world and becomes reunited with
and absorbed into the divine substance.
- Ethics. In this life, the general principle of gnostic
conduct is hostility toward the world. The world and the body
are evil and the source of the ignorance and the cause of the
slumber of the soul. From this principle two contrary ways of
ethical conduct could and have been drawn: the ascetic and the
libertine. The ascetic way deduces from the possession of the
gnosis the obligation to avoid further contamination by the world
and therefore tries to reduce its use and contact to a minimum.
The libertine way derives from the same possession the privilege
of the absolute freedom: to the spiritual all things are permitted,
since the law as representing the will of the Demiurge does not
obligate the spirit, which is "saved in its nature"
by the possession of saving knowledge and can neither be soiled
by its conduct nor frightened by the threat of archontic retribution.
Because of the similarity of language but not the spirit, the pure
gnostic considers the writings of the Apostle John as expressing
the true interpretation of Christianity. In the period of the
early church this pure form of Gnosticism as a Christian heresy
is found in the writings and teachings of Basilides and Valentinus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bettenson, Henry, ed.
Documents of the Christian Church.
London: Oxford University Press., 1966
Bruce, F. F.
The Spreading Flame.
Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 1954
Carrington, Philip
The Early Christian Church, Vol. I
The First Christian Century.
Cambridge: The University Press., 1957
Carrington, Philip
The Early Christian Church, Vol. II
The Second Christian Century.
Cambridge: The University Press., 1957
Encyclopedia Britannica.
"Gnosticism.", 1967
Foakes-Jackson, F. J.
The History of the Christian Church,
From the Earliest Times to A.D. 461.
Chicago: W. P. Blessing Co. 8th ed., 1927
A Handbook of Christian Theology.
"Gnosticism."
New York: Meridan Books, Inc., 1958
Jacobus, Melancthon, et al, ed.
A New Standard Bible Dictionary.
New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1936
Stevenson, J.
A New Eusebius, Documents Illustrative of the
History of the Church to A.D. 337.
New York: The Macmillan Co., 1957.