Gnosis Gnosticism

7/27/2019 Gnosis Gnosticism

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Gnosis and Gnosticism

lecture delivered by the Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, Ph.D.at the Calvin Didier Memorial Lectures, sponsored by House of Hope

Presbyterian Church, St. Paul, Minnesota, April 24, 2010.

As you may have noticed, I drew a lot on the Gospel of Thomas when I gave my last talk.

And I did so deliberately, because of all the early Christian sacred texts, Thomas is the

one that most consistently and accurately reflects the non-dual nature of Jesuss

teachings. Its also, by present scholarly consensus, one of the earliest written sources,

and its authenticity is now widely acknowledged.

But to do so inevitably raises a red flag because its not canonical. Even more of a

red flag is the fact that it belongs among that trove of texts recovered at Nag Hammadi in

1945 and quickly dubbed the Gnostic Gospels. So Thomas must be Gnostic, right?

Most Christians dont know exactly what the word Gnostic means, but they do

know that its not orthodox, off-the-mark in some significant way. The classic textbooks

still widely read in seminaries describe it as a competing religion to Christianity, tinged

with aspects of pagan mystery worship, that was successfully fought down by Christian

Orthodoxy by the fourth century, which is why these sacred texts landed in the dustbin.

Scholars faithfully pass on the core characteristics of Gnosticism: that its dualistic;

docetici.e., rejecting the reality of Christs incarnation; elitistprofessing secret,

initiatic knowledge; and either excessively ascetic or excessively libertine.

The problem is, when you actually read the Gospel of Thomas, youll find no

more than one of these supposed Gnostic earmarksand not even one, if you translate

the text correctly. By contrast, the Pauline letters and the Gospel of John can be shown to


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exhibit at least three or four out of a list of ten characteristics that comprise the typology

of Gnosticism. So what gives, anyway?

What gives is one of the most flagrant demonstrations of circular logic ever to

block the intellectual playing field anywhere. And even though leading edge scholarship

has now decisively disposed of the bogeyman of Gnosticism, the word has not yet

trickled down into either theological understanding or the popular imagination.

The result of this massive misinformation is that we are blocked from accessing

with an open mind the very texts that Christianity so desperately needs to heal itself, to

regain an accurate understanding of its origins, and hence to move confidently into the

future.

Lets see if we can untangle this gnarled ball of yarn

To begin with, we need to realize that the word gnosis is a perfectly acceptable

New Testament word. Paul uses it repeatedly throughout his letters, and if we could hear

them in Greek, wed get a whole different slant on the subject. Gnosis means, basically,

knowledge by experience or love: the same visionary and intuitive knowledge weve

been exploring all weekend; the same knowledge that Jesus brought, taught, and

imprinted.

When reservations about this mode of knowing began to creep in during the

doctrinal controversies of the second and third centuries, it was always a complaint about

so-calledgnosis. The problem was not with gnosis itself, but with people who claimed

false ownership. And incidentally, the word Gnosticism was never used at all in these


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early polemical controversies; it was not coined until the 17th

century. The Christians

under attack during those early days in the Churchs identity formation were always

called heretics, not Gnostics.

So how did we get this idea about a rival religion with its theology and doctrine,

which was finally vanquished by the early Church Fathers, saving the day for

Christianity?

Before we can begin to answer this question, we need to come to terms in a more

general way with the whole process of early Christian identity-formation. And here

contemporary scholars such as Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, and Karen King have been

extremely helpful in calling to our attention that identity-formation is always less about

divine edict and transcendent theology than it is about power and politics.

To the victor goes not only the spoils, but the right to tell the story. And by the

fourth century, perhaps the most powerful spoil of the Orthodox triumph was the right to

eliminate all the variant stories and re-vision the tradition as one unbroken lineage of

Truth, flowing directly from the mouth of Jesus in an unbroken faithful succession. That

is the lens through which the Church sees itself today. The idea of an original, pure

doctrine, handed down from apostle to apostle in what is known as the apostolic

succession has had such a pervasive influence on the way Christianity understands itself

that the early 20th century Biblical scholar dubbed it The Master Story. And it is

certainly the lens through which the so-called Gnostic controversy was first understood

by contemporary scholars.

What we now know, of course, is that Christianity was born in extreme pluralism,

not the oneness of faith, hope, and love so nostalgically spun in the book of Acts. There


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were many lost Christianities, as Bart Ehrman calls them, representing different

cultural takes as well as different levels of spiritual understanding. There were the Proto-

Orthodox, but also the Jewish Christians, Aramaic Christians of Jesuss own immediate

circle, Ebionites, Marcionites, and varieties of Hellenistic Christians. And at first, though

the controversy was lively, no one group was advantaged against any other. Nor was

there any consensus that unity meant everyone being on the same page theologically.

That was, once again, an assumption that gained sway only with the triumph of

Orthodoxy.

To be sure, the controversies could be intense. But it was hard at first to pick out

who were the Orthodox and who were the heretics because those courts of final

appeala fixed New Testament canon and an authoritative statement of creedal belief

did not exist yet; they would come into being only in the fourth century. Even the word

hairesis, from which heresy derives, only means a school of thoughtlike todays

Jungians, or Wilberitesnot a wrong doctrine. And among these early Doctors of the

Church inspiration and heresy could run very close together. Valentinus, now known as

one of the most notorious of the second century Gnostics, narrowly missed being elected

bishop of Rome. And Origen, vastly admired in his own times, was later demonized as a

heretic. The dividing lines were not yet firm.

That very urgency and lack of an ultimate court of appeal fueled the rhetoric in

the polemical controversies of the second, third, and fourth centuries, from which

churchmen such as Tertullian and Irenaeus emerged as the champions of Orthodoxy.

Their voluminous treatises against heresy contain long paraphrases of the arguments of

their opponents, intended to discredit and ridicule. As Harvard scholar Karen King


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observes, they not only accomplished their goalper se, but also established the strategies

which to this day tend to dominate the field in doctrinal controversies with opponents.

Their intent was never to elucidate these texts, but to demonize thema fact

unfortunately overlooked when scholars began to re-encounter these texts in the late 19th

century in their attempts to explore the origins of Christianity.

The outcome of all this ferment was a solid victory for the Proto-Orthodox, as

Proto-Orthodoxy became Orthodoxy and the Master Story of early Christian origins

was cast in stone. By 325 Christianity, now established as the imperial religion, had its

Nicene Creed, and in 367 Bishop Athanasiuss initial shortlist of the official books of

the New testament sent the unsuccessful competitors into oblivionor cold storage, as

the case may be. The predominant scholarly opinion is that the 46 texts discovered at Nag

Hammadi in 1945 were in fact most likely placed there by monks of a nearby Pachomian

monastery whoas in legends and folktales everywherecould not bear to murder

their darlings and hence consigned them to safe-keeping in a well-hidden cave, until a

kinder and gentler theological era might yet again be willing to receive this sacred time

capsule.

And that was thatfor about fifteen hundred years. Then, toward the end of the

nineteenth century, a renewed interest in Biblical archeology, language, anthropology,

and historical criticism launched the History of Religions movement as major scholars

such as Alfred Harnack, Rudolf Bultmann, and Hans Jonas began to investigate the

origins of Christianity in the light of the new, more scientific mentality of their era. Itt

was in this intellectual climate that the historically reconstructed Gnosticism took root.


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The two major contending theories became that (a): Gnosticism was a specifically

Greek heresy, a combination of Platonic theology and mystery cult spirituality, or (b):

that Gnosticism was a pre-existent Mystery religion, probably of Iranian origin, which

Christianity successfully resisted while at the same time incorporating some of its mythic

elements. These two theories, or some combination thereof, formed the basic paradigm of

modern Biblical scholarship still firmly holding sway when the Nag Hammadi trove was

discovered in 1945.

At any rate, armed with this paradigm and a penchant for constructing typologies

(lists of characteristics) in the quasi-scientific fashion, early twentieth century scholars

such as Wilhelm Bousset and Hans Jonas set out to construct a master typology of

Gnosticism. Their respective lists featured ten or eleven pronounced tendencies, the most

important being:

1. a sharp cosmic dualism2. radical pessimism toward this world3. a sense of existential alienation4. esoteric or initiatic5. mythic6. docetic7. either excessivesly ascetic or completely libertine

You will find these typologies still dominating the pages of seminary textbooks.

And of course, for anyone with even a rudimentary theological training it is manifestly


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clear that these ideas are incompatible with incarnational Christianity as we understand it

today. They are heretical. Hence, Gnosticism is to be eschewed and shunned.

The fly in the ointment, however, is that in constructing this list of characteristics

no primary texts were consulted, since they had not yet been discovered. What did these

scholars turn to, then? Parallels from the Greek and Manichaean literature (which in the

latter case turn out to have been incorrectly dated), and the thumbnail descriptions of

these texts in the polemicals against heresy of Tertullian and Irenaeus. It goes without

saying that this is a little bit like using a deposition testimony in a bitterly contested

divorce case as a character witness!

Things were on track, then, for a very rude awakening when scholars finally had a

chance to study the Nag Hammadi material first hand. So firmly were the basic tenets of

the master story in place, however, that at first the universal assumptions were: 1) that

these texts were late (since, according to the Master story, Christianity was presumed to

have originated in pure doctrine which was only corrupted later, and 2) that they were in

some flagrant way or another theologically defective; heretical. It was assumed that

they had been placed in those urns because they demonstrated a high incidence of those

Gnostic characteristics, as delineated by the History of Religions movement. So firmly

were these assumptions still in place in 1979 that Elaine Pagels , in a sweepingly

influential but unfortunate labeling, titled her groundbreaking study of these texts The

Gnostic Gospels.

Little by little, the corrections came. The texts ranged in date, but they could not

uniformly be dismissed as late. Somesuch as the Gospel of Thomasproved to be


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among the earliest writings of the church: contemporary with or even earlier than Mark,

the earliest of the canonical gospels. This of course, increased the turmoil. Had the seeds

of unorthodoxy been planted so early?

Elaine Pagels stepped forward as the pioneer in the revisioning effort. Her book

The Gnostic Gospels, published in 1979, rightfully won the Pulitzer Prize for its

groundbreaking efforts to make sense of these texts from a historical critical perspective.

She realized that winners and losers in the canonical sweepstakes were determined not by

divine edict the triumph of pure doctrine but in the far worldlier realm of politics.

What we now call orthodoxy came into being through the tug of war of opposing

viewpoints around developing issues of Christian order and doctrine. Prominent among

these issues were the role of women, the question of apostolic authority, the relationship

between the Old and New testaments, and the meaning of the resurrection of the body.

But as a scholar of her times Pagels still saw the playing field as divided between Jewish

Christian and Gnostic camps, each of which seemed to arrive with fixed positions and

fully formed theologies. It would be another quarter of a century before the revisioning

could mature to the point where Karen King could make the bold statement, I never call

the Gospel of Mary Magdala a Gnostic text for the for the simple reason that there is no

such thing as Gnosticism. (3)

No such thing as Gnosticism? She has to be kidding, doesnt she? Not only is her

statement here variance with nearly two thousand years of apostolic teaching, it flies in

the face of our own times as well. Gnosticism is highly fashionable these days, and in its

current pop culture revival there is indeed an effort to portray it as a fully articulated

alternative religion to Christianity, complete with its own theology and Mystery rituals.


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(4) Certainly the energy around TheDaVinci Code runs off this assumption. But while

there may be short range gratification (and even a kind of wicked glee) in recasting

Gnosticism as the religion of the eternal feminine with Jesus and Mary Magdalene as its

chief hierophants, in the long range this kind of fuzzy thinking does a lot more harm than

good to the cause of liberating Christianity from centuries of fuzzy thinking. Karen

Kings point is intuitively brilliant, and once you see its what shes driving at, it liberates

the playing field far more sweepingly than even the most flambuoyant of the neo-Gnostic

speculations.

What King has come to recognize is that Gnosticism is the inevitable shadow cast

by the master story itself. If one starts with the assumption of an original standard of

orthodoxy against which all variants are weighed in the balance and found wanting, then

these variants will inevitably tend to reify into an opposite and equal story whose

collective name becomes Gnosticism. But these are both, she claims, simply the view

from the winners circle: a mythological reconstruction of an earlier era of Christianity on

the basis of theological and political agendas firmly in place at the time the myth was

spun. Gnosticism came into being hand-in-hand with developing standards of orthodoxy,

to be the scapegoat for the devil sowing weeds in the field of pure doctrine, as

stipulated by the master story. But the real culprit all along has been the master story

itself.

So that is the report now from the leading edge of scholarship, and the news is

still very slowly working its way down the pile. It is for us now to work out the

implications of this amazing breakthrough. Here, to my mind, are the three top priorities:


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First of all, I would call for a moratorium on the use of the term Gnosticism. It

carries so many connotations, most of them negative and hugely inaccurate, that it

sheds far more heat than light. And in fact, as Karen King points out, that was

precisely its original intent. As a lineal descendent of the label heresy,

Gnosticism was used with negative intent: to demonize and ostracize any material

judged not to belong to the orthodox fold. This is still the intent, and the tactic is as

effective today as when it was first employed eighteen centuries ago.

Second, we need to deprogram the negative imprinting and begin to encounter these

texts again on their own terms, with accurate translations and empathetic

understanding.

For example, I mentioned before that Thomas is an ancient text,

comprising 114 sayings which most scholars feel can be authentically attested to

Jesus. (In other words, it is a powerful primary text!) About 2/3 of these sayings

overlap with sayings in the Synoptic gospels and shed new light on them. The

others tend to have to do with singleness and establish strong and fascinating

links between Jesuss understanding of practical kenosis and the emergence of a

state of unitive or non-dual awareness: what the Eastern traditions would today call

enlightenment. But even here we labor under old prejudices. Because the word

single is not recognized for what it so clearly is within the context of this

gospela description of the nondual stateit gets translated even by first rate

scholars like Pagels as solitary and then used to prove that this text is an


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explanation of a spiritually advanced or elite celibate life not intended for the

many: a misreading that confirms the old Gnostic stereotype of spiritual elitism and

is flatly contradicted by the text itself!

Finally, we need to stop thinking about these texts as uniformas if they

all espouse a single philosophy or Gnostic point of view. They span several

centuries, and like the canonical gospels themselves, they reflect a variety of

viewpoints and levels of spiritual understanding. But even the ones that we might

today find most alien or weird in fact offer valuable insights into many parts of

our lost Christian tradition. For example, as Karen King points out, some of the

texts that reflect the most pronounced cosmic dualism as weve been trained to

identify it also display a strikingly affirmative (even contemporary) understanding

of the feminine and fascinating insights into what we would today call holistic

healing. They are worth our respect, worth a second lookwhich is what the word

respect literally means. And on their own terms.

For if nothing else, they confirm in spades the point we most need to hear

today: that our Christianity is not boxed in but spacious; not a doctrinal rubics cube

to be solved in one way only, but a symphonyin fact, sometimes a cacophony

of viewpoints, from which the music of love somehow sounds loud and true. It is

that music we need to hear again.


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