on Gnostics - a summary

 

The different Gnostic and Heretical sects of the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial period reflect the various psychological types found in humanity. The wide array of practices which differentiate the cults allow the seeker to find one which reflects their psychological makeup. The choices ranged from full monastic seclusion like the Desert Fathers, to libertines who allowed full vent to the passions.

 

Gnostics

 

The Gnostics were followers of a variety of religious movements which stressed salvation through gnosis (Gk.) or ‘knowledge’, above all of one’s origins.

 

Because they had no central authority or canon of Scriptures, the Gnostics taught a bewildering variety of views. Central and essential to clearly Gnostic systems was a dualism, which set over against each other the transcendent God and an ignorant and presumptuous demiurge (see Platonism*), often a caricature of the OT Yahweh... In every case the material creation was viewed as evil....

 

Thus awakened, the Gnostics escape from the prison of their bodies at death and traverse the planetary spheres of hostile demons to be reunited with God.

 

Since salvation is not dependent upon faith or works but upon the knowledge of one’s true nature, some Gnostics indulged deliberately in licentious behaviour. Carpocrates for example, urged his followers to sin, and his son Epiphanes taught that promiscuity was God’s law.

 

Most Gnostics, however, took a radically ascetic attitude towards sex and marriage, deeming the creation of woman the source of evil, and the procreation of children but the multiplication of souls in bondage to the powers of darkness.

 

We know very little about the cult and community of the Gnostics. As a general rule they interpreted rites such as baptism and eucharist as spiritual symbols of gnosis. Women were prominent in many of their sects.[1]

 

On the Gnostics

 

...I read of the Nag Hammadi discovery while studying for a routine Oxford essay on ‘Gnosticism’. The ‘official’ view held that Gnosticism was a Christian heresy based on a travesty of Christian doctrine, corrupted by magic, loaded by an impossible weight of mythology and crazy thinking which would lead to an abyss where ‘salvation’ was lost. I remember writing that the Gnostic myths could be seen as a kind of ‘map’ of the mind’s experience as it searches for the root of itself and its meaning - those things which could only be expressed in richly imaginative terms, those things for which the heart has reasons the reason knows not of.[2]

 

On Heresy

 

Not all scholars agree, however, that Gnosticism was a derivative philosophy, although it clearly borrowed elements from many sources. It was, they say, a new movement, rebelling against what seemed to its adherents to be an absurd and wicked world. For Gnostics were often sensitive, intelligent and religious men whose beliefs arose from personal experience. Some authorities do not regard them as heretics at all in the Christian era but as forming a new religion with special views about God, the world and men. God is a suffering God; the world is in error (an expression reminiscent of Christian Science); man is a stranger here, for Heaven is his home; and his inward self is of the same substance as God.... Gnosticism, though beginning before Christianity, had early connections with it.[3]

 

Heresy Defined

 

Heresy connotes doctrinal deviation from the fundamental truths taught by Scripture and the orthodox Christian Church, and active propagation of the same. The primary Greek word hairesis,... fundamentally meant a school of thought or sect... Hairesis, secondly, developed the meaning of schism or faction that developed within the Church due to a strong party spirit or lack of love... The meaning that came to predominate in Christian usage is that of false theological doctrine... In a sense, the history of the church is the history of heresies.[4]

 

On the Mystical Experience

 

Even those who know nothing else of Neoplatonism are aware that Plotinus was a mystic. ‘Mystic’, it must be stressed, is here used not in the sense of ‘irrationalist’, ‘occultist’ or ‘teacher of esoteric doctrine’, but in its strict sense of one who believes himself to have experienced union with God or Ultimate Reality.

 

Plotinus’ experience of union with the One corresponds to the experience which W. T. Stace [Mysticism and Philosophy, London 1961] calls the ‘undifferentiated unity’, a state in which sensuous imagery and conceptual thought are transcended, the mind becomes perfectly unified and individual limitations are felt to be abolished. Porphyry states that Plotinus experienced this state four times during the six years of their acquaintance and that he himself had in his old age once attained it, while Plotinus, in a work written before he met Porphyry, describes himself as having often experienced it. Where Plotinus differs from most mystics is that for him, as for Plato, the soul’s purification is accomplished primarily through philosophy, though like other mystics he regards moral self-discipline as essential and regards abstract reasoning as of limited value unless it culminates in intuitive vision and finally in mystical union.

 

Harmonisation of Neoplatonism’s metaphysical and religious aims was facilitated by the association, both in Pythagorean-Platonic tradition and in mystical discipline, of degrees of unity with degrees of perfection. Hence the One of the Greek philosophical tradition could be identified with the mystics’ ‘undifferentiated unity’ and the philosopher’s ascent, whether through contemplation of the external world or by turning his attention within, could be seen as traversing the same stages. Yet the result of Plotinus’ approach to religious experience was the transposition of Greek philosophy into a new key. This was due not so much to the introduction of the mystical experience itself, which, if not certainly to be found in the Classical Writers, is present in religious writings of the pre-Neoplatonic period, notably some of the Hermetica (Ch. X. 4-6) and perhaps (though this is disputed) in the Hellenising Jewish Philosopher Philo of Alexandria. The decisive step was rather Plotinus’ identification of metaphysical realities with states of consciousness.

 

For Plotinus,... not all thought is conscious; more precisely, our surface consciousness is only one of several levels of awareness, and many elements in our mental life normally escape our notice. In fact Plotinus’ observations on unconscious mental states form some of the most fascinating and modern sounding passages of his works.

 

Neoplatonism thus stands not as an abandonment of Greek rationalism, but as an adaptation of the categories of Greek thought to the world of inner experience.[5]

 

 

The Legacy of Greece

 

I am equally reluctant to assume, without evidence, that the later Platonism, whether we call it religion or philosophy, is unhellenic. It is quite unnecessary to look for Asiatic influences in a school which clung close to its Attic tradition. It is more to the purpose to show how a religious philosophy of mystical revelation and introspection grew naturally out of the older nature philosophies, just as in our own day metaphysics and science have both been driven back upon the theory of knowledge and psychology. It should not be necessary to remind Hellenists that ‘Know Thyself’ passed for the supreme word of wisdom in the classical period, or that Heracletius revealed his method in the words ‘I searched into myself’.’[6]