Gnosticism Gnosis: Redemptive Knowledge on the origin and the vocation of man; Gnostikos: one possessing this knowledge. Discursive fight between gnostics

Gnosticism

Gnosis: Redemptive Knowledge on the origin and the vocation of man;

Gnostikos: one possessing this knowledge.

Discursive fight between gnostics and Christians

Gnosticism

Main sources:

Nag Hammadi Codices (/in Coptic/. e.g. Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Philip, Acts of Thomas, On the Origin of the World, Apokryphon of John)

Anti-heretical literature of the 2-3th centuries AD

• e. g. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullianus

Gnosticism

Defining Gnosticism in the largest sense of the term:

A doctrine teaching:

a) a dualism between spirit and matter;

b) that the world was created by some power (identified with the God of the Old Testament) which is different from the supreme God

Gnosticism

Origin of the gnosticism

Greek philosophy?

Jewish literature?

Christianity?

Zoroastrism?

Since the discovery of the NH codices quasi-consensus:

Most of the gnostic writings are to be interpreted in the context of the Bible.

Exegesis of both Testaments.

Gnosticism

Genres: mostly scriptural (Gospel, Acts, Revelation) and: sayings, treatises

Style: poetical, enygmatic, symbolic language, aphoristic, mythical.

Gnosticism

Doctrine

Divine sphere

Supreme God: The first father (Propatór) incomprehensible, unnamable, unsayable, inaccessible by means of concepts

Emanated divine beings (Aeons) – male-female pairs.

His first emanation (Monogenes – the only-born) is the only one to know and reveal him.

The male-female coples pf successive emanations form the Pleroma (plenitude, totality)

Gnosticism

The first drama in the pleroma

(Gospel of Truth, Irenaus, Against Heresies book I.)

– From the ignorance of the Father: anguish and fear. Creating the matter as substitute of the knowledge

A new emanated divine being restores the order: Christ

Final hierarchical structure.

Horos (border-line)

Gnosticism

The second drama in the Pleroma (Valentinian gnosticism – Gospel of Truth):

The femal member of the lowest couple (Sophia) wants to procreate alone.

The first archon is the Demiurge,• Identified with the God of the Ancient Testament

• Ignorant and jealous who prohibits man to serve other gods.

Gnosticism

Compare: Exodus 20:5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me

Hiis offsprings and servants : the archons

Apocryphon of John(Sethian gnosticism)

The creation of man: battle between the archons and some emissaries of the Pleroma (and the repenting Sophia).

The (first version of) body and the passions – by the archons

The life, the mouvement: by the aeons.

The Paradise – prepared by the Archons

Gnosticism

The serpent: the envoy of the upper world.

Eve: sent by the Aeons to bring down the light.

The tree of the knowledge of the good and the evil: the redemptive knowledge offered.

The expulsion from the Paradise: the precipitation of the couple into the darkness of the matter and incarceration into the actual, perishable body.

Gnosticism

Eve raped by the archons: Cain and Abel was born.

The man was given a counterpart soul.

The knowledge keeps being transmitted by the line of Seth

Redemption:

By the revelation of the knowledge by Jesus Christ.

Incarnation interpreted as having taken place in a body of appaerance.

The revelation of Christ is taking place within the mind,

by a way of inside illumination.

His resurrection is not an event accessible to the sense perception.

Mary-Magdeleine saw him in a vision

Gnosticism

The age of revelation is not over.

Even now a sacred writing can be composed.

Predestination:

Pneumatikoi, psychikoi, hylikoi.

Marcion

c. 85 (Sinope) – c. 160

Excommunicated from the Church (?)

Established his own church (?)

His work: Antitheses – meant to show the contradictions between the two Testaments

The first Canon? (Gospels and 10 Epistles of Paul)

His Theology

Two versions in the sources: (probably the original one) Two gods: a good and an evil

One: The Gods of the two Testaments

The Evil God has created this world The Good God has earlier created a spiritual word. The Good God sent Jesus Christ, incarnated in a body of

appearance.

Marcion

An other, probably later version (originating with later Marcionites):

Three Gods: the Good God, the Just God and the Matter (the source of the evil)

The Greek Apologists of the second century

Main representatives:

Justin martyr, Theophilus of Antiochia, Tatianus, Aristides, Athenagoras

Main characteristics:

Especially to outsiders (works offen dedicated to emperors) – in the context of the persecutions

Defense against (partly legal) accusations and criticism (atheism, immorality, irrational faith)

Also accusation and polemics (against Pagans, Heretics and Jews).

Main genres: speech of defense (Cf. Socrates) (modified), dialogues, treatises.

Christian doctrine as philosophy

Middle Platonist background (negative theology, incomprehensible Father, Logos as mediator)

The Greek Apologists of the second century.Justin

Justin martyr (100-165)

Extant writings: Apology (I-II), Dialogue with the Jewish Trypho

The explanation of the common elements between Christan doctrine and Pagan philosophies

Doctrine of the seminal reasons (logoi spermatikoi).

• Compare to Clement of Alexandria (two lines of the revelation)


Criticizing Platonic anthropology

No kinship between man and God

Gap between creator and created being as unbegotten and begotten

Purification as preconditon for seeing God.

What has a beginning must have an end – theoretically.

The man is neither mortal or immortal. (Cf: Philo: the middle state of man)

It depends indirectly on his free will.

(against Stoic determinism).

The soul is the principle of life to the body, but not the life itself – contra Plato's Phaedo

The soul is participating in life. His life depends on the will of God.


The life-giving principle to the soul is „the spirit of life” (cf. Genesis 2: 7)

“For to live is not its attribute, as it is God’s; but as a man does not live

always, and the soul is not for ever conjoined with the body, since,

whenever this harmony must be broken up, the soul leaves the body, and

the man exists no longer; even so, whenever the soul must cease to exist,

the spirit of life is removed from it, and there is no more soul, but it goes

back to the place from whence it was taken.”

The Greek Apologists of the second century.Theophilus of Antiochia (c.120-c.180)

To Autolycus

Negative theology

Argumentation in favour of the faith (see next slide)

The interpretation of Gen. 1:26-27: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.”

The reason for the plural: the two hands of God

• His Word and his Wisdom (Son and Holy Spirit)

The distinctiveness of the situation of man:

Created by God not with his sole word, but with his hand.

Theophilus: Argumentation in favour of the faith (To Autolycus I.8.)

„Do you not know that faith is the leading principle in all matters? For what husbandman can reap, unless he first trust his seed to the earth? Or who can cross the sea, unless he first entrust himself to the boat and the pilot? And what sick person can be healed, unless first he trust himself to the care of the physician? And what art or knowledge can any one learn, unless he first apply and entrust himself to the teacher? If, then, the husbandman trusts the earth, and the sailor the boat, and the sick the physician, will you not place confidence in God, even when you hold so many pledges at His hand? For first He created you out of nothing, and brought you into existence (for if your father was not, nor your mother, much more were you yourself at one time not in being), and formed you out of a small and moist substance, even out of the least drop, which at one time had itself no being; and God introduced you into this life.”


The first man as a child

The vocation of man: growing into divinity from a middle nature between mortality and immortality.

And God transferred him from the earth, out of which he had been produced, into Paradise, giving him means of advancement, in order that, maturing and becoming perfect, and being even declared a god, he might thus ascend into heaven in possession of immortality. For man had been made a middle nature, neither wholly mortal, nor altogether immortal, but capable of either ...


God's command in the Paradise:

Not form jealousy – against Gnostics

The fruit is good in itself

The essence of the Fall:

disobedience

a premature striving to know what is good what is evil

A premature desire of divinisation

Anti-gnostic argumentation in the Greek Apologists of the second century.

Theophilus of Antiochia (c.120-c.180)

The first man as a child

The vocation of man: growing into divinity from a middle nature between mortality and immortality.

And God transferred him from the earth, out of which he had been produced, into Paradise, giving him means of advancement, in order that, maturing and becoming perfect, and being even declared a god, he might thus ascend into heaven in possession of immortality. For man had been made a middle nature, neither wholly mortal, nor altogether immortal, but capable of either …

Cf. Justine martyr: The man is neither mortal or immortal. (Cf: Philo: the middle state of man)

It depends indirectly on his free will

Anti-gnostic argumentation in the Greek Apologists of the second century.

Theophilus of Antiochia (c.120-c.180)

God's command in the Paradise: Not from jealousy – against Gnostics

The tree and the fruit are good in themself The essence of the Fall:

disobedience a premature striving to know what is good what is

evil A premature desire of divinisation

Irenaeus of Lyons (-202)

Against Heresies (On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Knowledge)

(Ἔλεγχος καὶ ἀνατροπὴ τῆς ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως)

The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching.

His main thesis against both Gnostics and Marciontes:

The supreme God, the Creator and the Redemptor is the same God.

Two schemes of the history of salvation.

1. Linear scheme: growth – cf. Theophilus

Deus facit – homo fit : God is making – man is being made (is becoming)

2. Cyclic scheme: doctrine of recapitulation (anakephalaiōsis)

Adam – Christ; Eve – Mary; tree – cross (cf. Satisfaction theory?)

Irenaeus: Adversus Haereses 4. 37-39.

(To Jerusalem) How often would I have gathered your children together, and you would not, (Matthew 23:37)

„God mad man free from the beginning”.

God has not coerced any body, but he gived good conseil (bonum consiulium) to everybody.

An objection

Free will is the cause of the fall, thus it can not be the gift of the real

God, good, just, prescient and omnipotent.

The Creator is a weake God, unable to create all the angels and men

as being incapable to commit any sin.


Irenaeus’ counterarguments: in this case:

1) there would be no merit and no grounds of the divine judgment

This would also be the case if some people were good, some eivl from

nature (See gnostic doctrine of predestination)

2) The Biblical commandments, injunctions and prohibitions would not make

any sense.

3) they would not appreciate their own being good.

For the good can be appreciated only if one has to struggle for it.

To Irenaeus the struggle for the good implies to the awareness (or experience)

of the evil to resist. Circumscribing the strictly moral sense of the term

„good”.


The logical and the epistemological interdependence of virtue and vice.

1) Virtue can not be logically conceived without knowing what evil is

and inversely.

2) Virtue is grasped only by comparison with vice.

„ Without the experience of vice, the good in us is unknown,

because it is not result of training.”

The necessity of temptation alone, or the necessity of the sin itsellf?

Gellius 7. 1. 3-6(Chrysippus, On Providence)

There is absolutely nothing more foolish than those men who think that good could exist, if there were at the same time no evil. For since good is the opposite of evil, it necessarily follows that both must exist in opposition to each other, supported as it were by mutual adverse forces; since as a matter of fact no opposite is conceivable without something to oppose it. 4 For how could there be an idea of justice if there were no acts of injustice? or what else is justice than the absence of injustice? How too can courage be understood except by contrast with cowardice? Or temperance except by contrast with intemperance? How also could there be wisdom, if folly did not exist as its opposite? 5 Therefore, said he, why do not the fools also wish that there may be truth, but no falsehood? For it is in the same way that good and evil exist, happiness and unhappiness, pain and pleasure. 6 For, as Plato says, they are bound one to the other by their opposing extremes; if you take away one, you will have removed both.


In the process of education of man by God the apostasy of man and the lomg-suffering of God play important role.

„Man has been instructed by means of apostasy. He even quotes

Jeremiah 2:19 : Your own apostasy shall instruct you”

(allusion to the Fall)

The inner experience of the evil is necessary for growing up.


Objection: Could not God have exhibited man as perfect from beginning?”

Answer: God would have been capable to do it,

but the man as created thing could not be perfect from the beginning?

He must go through a process of growing up, the stages of wich are childhood,

adultness – i.e. the real human existence - and deification.

Man thus had to come into existence as a child, who is still not a real man. He

has to undergo a process of training in the course of wich man is gradually

getting made in God’s image and after His likeness.


The final phase of deification is promised by Psalm 81 (82),7: … You are gods; an all of you are children of the most High. This verse brings to one’s mind the promise of the Devil in Genesis 3:4-5: "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (cf. 4,38,2)

Theoretically, the idea was not wrong, but premature.


Man has received this knowledge (agnitione accepta boni et mali).

The wisdom obtained by the sin is a gift divine.

The sin is necessary not in itself, but accompanied by its punishment.

Origen (185-250)

Origen's method of teaching Method of research

The different status of propositions Obvious on the basis of the Bible Not obvious but one can infer it with certainty comparing

all the relevant Biblical passages Not obvious and can be affirmed only in terms of

probability.

Origen (185-250)Examples for the three levels of propositions. 1.

There is one God, who created and arranged all things, and who, when nothing existed, called all things into being.

God is just, good and omnipotent.

The Holy Spirit he Holy Spirit was associated in honour and dignity with the Father and the Son.

The soul, having a substance and life of its own, shall, after its departure from the world, be rewarded according to its deserts;

Every rational soul is possessed of free-will and volition.

It has a struggle to maintain with the devil and his angels, and opposing influences

The world was made and took its beginning at a certain time, and is to be destroyed on account of its wickedness

The Angels, the Devil and his Angels exist.

Origen (185-250)Examples for the three levels of propositions/2

(Not obvious but one can infer it with certainty comparing all the relevant Biblical passages)

Whether God is corporeal or incorporeal? What nature the Holy Spirit has?

Origen (185-250)Examples for the three levels of propositions/3

The nature and way of existence of the Angels, the Devil and his angels.

What is the origin of the individual souls? What did exist before this world and what will exist after it?

Origen: Protology

Father and Son: First God, Second God Logos = the world of Ideas

Simile for the production of the Logos

The will rising from the mind. The Father is uncomprehensible, unnameable He does not care directly about the world. The logos is a mediator both in cosmological

and epistemological terms.

Origen. The theory of rational creatures

In the center of this doctrine: the teaching of the free willl.

"In the beginning all intellectual natures were created equal and alike, as God had no motive for creating them otherwise" (De principiis II.6.).

Against Gnostics: None group of rational beeings is necessariely good or evil, but from his own free will.

Origen. The theory of rational creatures

Against Gnostcs: None group of rational beings is necessariely good or evil, but from his own free will.

They was originally on the same moral level from which some

of them fell onto a lower rank from his free will.

The production of the material world is due to the fall of the spirits from God.

Angels stars, men, and demons.

Angels include: thrones, and dominions, and principalities,

and powers.

Origen. Eschatology.

The ultimate aim of God in the creation of matter out of nothing was not punishment, but the upraising of the fallen spirits.

God so ordered the universe that all individual acts work together toward one cosmic end.

The aim of the entire cosmic process is the return to the original way of existence.

Through the worlds which follow each other in eternal succession, the spirits are able to return to Paradise.

Theory of Apocatastasis.

I Cor 15: 28: When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.

Origen. Eschatology

Whether (a) incorporeal or (b) corporeal end?

Arguments for both side.

For (a): God will be all in all

In this case, the recurring of the Fall is less probable

For =b): only the God can be incorporeal

Distinction between Creator and the created being

Origen seems to opt for a corporeal end.

The matter changes into celestial matter.

The answer can be risked only in terms of probability – in a hesitating manner.

Origenism

Rufinus (340-410) The young Jerome (347-430) Desert Fathers

Macarius of Egypt (301-390) Evagrius of Pontus (354-399)

The condamnation of the Origenism:

553. II. Oeconomical Council in Constantinople

Opponents

The mature Jerome

Theophilus of Alexandria (died in 412)

Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis (c.320-403)

Justinian I (527-565)

The most criticized propositions of Origen or the Origenist; the main objections relating to them

1) concerning Trinity

The Logos is subordinated to the Father

(the danger of Arianism) 2) Concerning Human nature

Negative view of the human body, sexuality and marital life. Gen. 1:28 allegorically interpreted:

„Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth” The original state of man is uncorporeal. Only nous.

The allegorical interpretation of Gen. 1: 23. To Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them. (Origen: Against Celsus 4.40.)

The assumption of the body as a punishment.

The most criticized propositions and the objections relating to them

The preexistence of the soul. The lost of the image and the likeness to God A man can transform into demon and vice versa. The creation of all reasonable things includes only

intelligences without bodies and altogether immaterial The conversion and the salvation of the Satan

Thesis injust toward the saints.

E

The most criticized propositions and objections relating to them

In terms of theology of nature, history and salvation

The multiplicity of cosmoses

The apoctastasis, the conversion of all rational beings

The end will be like the beginning.

Incorporeal end. The Fall and the redemption may recur.. How can be saved both the Devil and the saints? How can be they saved in the same manner?

The sin of the Angels is the precondition of the coming in to being of the man

the instrumentalization of the sin of the angels

The most criticized propositions and objections relating to them

- The moon and the stars are also rational beings;

- the actual kinds of rational beings come into being only because they turned towards evil;

- all the rational beings will be united (no number, no distinct personalities).

Documents

Gnosticism Gnosis: Redemptive Knowledge on the origin and the vocation of man; Gnostikos: one possessing this knowledge. Discursive fight between gnostics