GNOSTICISM

Gnosticism discussing the history, beliefs and practices

Gnosticism discussing the history, beliefs and practices

Gnosis in this sense does not refer to understanding of truths about the human and natural world that can be reached through reason. It refers to a "revealed knowledge" available only to those who have received the secret teachings of a heavenly revealer. All other humans are trapped in ignorance of the true divine world and the destiny of the Gnostic soul to return to its home there. For some Gnostic groups, the return of the soul to the divine was pictured as a reunion with a heavenly counterpart. Ritual enactment of the "marriage" between the soul and her consort seems to have been typical of groups that traced their teaching to Valentines, a Gnostic teacher active among Christians in Rome in the middle of the second century. Other groups placed more emphasis on freeing the soul from all its attachments to the material world by an ascetic overcoming of the passions. For them, sexuality and femininity were evils that had to be rejected at every turn. The Gnostic Thomas traditions that may have originated in Syria represent this approach. Those influenced by the mystical side of Platonism seem to have practiced rituals in which the soul ascended to contemplation of the divine. The philosopher Plotinus opposed the claims of such persons among his disciples.

One of the most striking features of Gnostic teaching is the elaborate mythology that explains how this world of darkness, dominated by a demonic god and his powers, came into being. Most of these myths begin with a harmonious unfolding of the heavenly world from an indescribable divinity. The divinity may be represented as a "one" beyond all beings or may be given the epithet "Mother-Father." Since matter, passions, darkness, and discord have nothing in common with the divine; the myths eventually tell the story of a "fall" or a "flaw" in the heavenly realm.

History

The theological designation 'Gnosticism' derives from the Greek word gnosis ('knowledge') and was coined in the eighteenth century to refer to certain religious movements from the first two or three centuries whose doctrines allegedly centered around the importance of special 'knowledge'. The most well-attested of these movements were Christian, but some evidence suggests that similar movements may have existed independently of, and perhaps even prior to, early Christianity (Pearson 1990). Before 1945, only a few writings from 'Gnostics' themselves were extant, and the principal evidence for such teachings were polemical descriptions found in the writings of ancient Christian heresiologists. But the quantity of original source material was greatly increased in 1945 by the discovery near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt of several fourth-century Coptic codices whose contents included numerous writings containing doctrines of the general sort that was by then conventionally classified as 'Gnostic' (Robinson 1988).

Perhaps the most famous feature in such sources is the assertion that the material cosmos was not created by the highest God but by a lower being (or a group of ...