Probing Gnosticism & Its Modern Derivatives

In 1910 a curious little pamphlet was pub­lished in London under the title Gnosticism: The Coming Apostasy. The author, D.M. Panton, presumably a clergyman, warned that gnosticism, condemned as heresy by the early Church, had come out of hiding in the 20th century, in the form of spiritualism, Theosophy, Christian Science, Campbellism, and the “New Theology,” as the principal rival and threat to Christianity. “Modern conditions,” Panton wrote, “have exactly reproduced the natural soil of gnosticism.” He did not pursue this line of argument, but the intuition behind it was sound. If gnosticism is the characteristic form of contemporary spirituality, it is because the “postmodern” megalopolis has given rise to forms of social life uncannily reminiscent of the Hellenistic empire — that sprawling, polyglot empire that proved so vulnerable, in its hyperextension, not only to military raids along its borders but to the incursions of Eastern mysticism. The Hellenistic age bears a close and uncomfortable resemblance to our own. Then as now, the decline of small property and local self-government encouraged the centralization of political and economic power. The classic polis had ceased to exist. Private life was preferred to citizenship, and political loyalties, insofar as they had any life at all, attached themselves not to civic institu­tions but to the person of the emperor. The militarization of government and civic life was an added discouragement to any form of popular participation. The widening gap between the rich and the poor did not prevent a rapid circulation of elites or the rise of a parvenu class that was widely traveled and superficially sophisticated but only half edu­cated. The most striking parallel between Hellenistic society and our own was the per­vasive sense of homelessness in the mercantile and administrative classes, the members of which had been uprooted from their home­lands and condemned, by trade and the poli­tics of imperial expansion, to a migratory life.

In the 20th century a like configuration of social conditions leads to a like response — to forms of spirituality that combine homesick­ness with a contempt for everything homelike, aesthetic refinement with superstition, despair with a crazy kind of optimism.

In The Coining Apostasy Panton endorsed the contention, already advanced in 1907 by a writer in the British Congregationalist, that the “reproduction to-day of the second century Gnosticism is extremely close, often startling.” Since gnosticism had always been a “drift, a tendency…rather than a coherent creed,” its influence betrayed itself not in a single movement, let alone a church, but in a great variety of doctrinal aberrations and panaceas: vegetarianism, the temperance crusade, the campaign against monogamy conducted by Victoria Woodhull and other spiritualists, and a large assortment of dietary and sexual re­forms, all of which oscillated “between severe asceticism and gross carnality.” When Mary Baker Eddy dismissed Jehovah as a tribal god, when Helena Blavatsky announced that “Jehovah is Cain,” or when a respected histo­rian of religion, Adolf Harnack, produced an admiring biography of St. Paul’s heretical fol­lower Marcion, they carried on the gnostic tradition, according to which matter is evil and the physical universe the creation of an evil spirit or lesser deity, not the handiwork of God. Unlike George Fox, Elias Hicks, Emanuel Swedenborg, and other recent forerunners, 20th-century gnostics, Panton observed, no longer bothered to conceal their heretical be­liefs. They denied the humanity of Jesus — a “doctrine peculiarly characteristic of Gnosti­cism.” They insisted that salvation comes not from love but from knowledge. They were “frankly and jubilantly Gnostic.” Thus R.J. Campbell explicitly traced his New Theology back through Hegel to the “old Greek think­ers,” as Panton called them, while Theosophists tried to combine the hermetic, cabalis­tic, and gnostic traditions into a synthetic re­ligion far wider in its appeal, they claimed, than the parochial religions dominant in the past. All these movements carried within them the “throbbing heart of Gnosticism, perhaps the most dreaded foe the Christian faith ever confronted,” said Panton. They portended the invasion of the West by the “demonic philos­ophies of the hoary East,” which “rot away all the heart, while [they] maintain the husk, of the revelations of God.”

Panton’s proved to be only the first of several warnings against a gnostic revival, is­sued from time to time during the course of the 20th century by observers having little else in common. A suspicion that gnosticism might turn out to have more than merely historical interest drew the Jewish scholar Hans Jonas to the study of gnosticism in the 1920s and 1930s. It was not until the 1950s, however, that Jonas began to see gnosticism as the pro­totype of “modern nihilism.” Meanwhile, Eric Voegelin defended the “classic and Christian tradition” against the “growth of Gnosticism” in his Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago in 1951. Voegelin regarded gnosticism as the original source of the Western tradition of millennialism, which included not only Christian millenarians and Reformation theo­logians but secular thinkers like Comte, Hegel, and Marx, and culminated in modern totalitar­ianism. Voegelin’s argument anticipated the critique of millennialism spelled out a few years later by Norman Cohn, who traced modern totalitarianism to underground reli­gious movements in the Middle Ages, which sought to fulfill scriptural prophecy by estab­lishing a revolutionary commonwealth. The 17th-century Puritan revolution in England, according to Voegelin, served as the model for subsequent attempts to engineer a “change in the nature of man and the establishment of a transfigured society.” Gnosticism deified man and society and turned politics into a means of “eschatological fulfillment.” Totalitarianism, the “existential rule of Gnostic activists,” car­ried the “essence of modernity” to its logical conclusion. It represented the “end form of progressive civilization.”

A number of Catholic conservatives, in­cluding Thomas Molnar, Tilo Schabert, and Stephen A. McKnight, followed Voegelin both in singling out gnosticism as the “essence of modernity” and in associating it with “utopia, the perennial heresy,” in Molnar’s phrase. Recently Molnar has decided, however, that utopianism “may be less than the whole answer.” The essence of modernity, he now argues, lies in the “mechanical model of man and the universe.” “Both gnostics and adepts of the mechanical model agree on downgrad­ing, denying, eliminating the concept of the soul.” From this point of view, totalitarianism originates not so much in the millenarian tra­dition as in the “Cartesian heritage in which animals were regarded as automata.” It grows out of the “scientific worldview,” which “aims at having to deal with machines, in­stead of human beings, and not only with machine-like [individuals], also with machine-­like collectivities” or planned societies, uto­pias.

Like Molnar, Jonas came to believe in the need for a critique of technological reason, which he too interpreted as the “heritage of Cartesian dualism.” His understanding of gnosticism, however, sharply diverged from that of Voegelin or Molnar. For Jonas, the thread that connected gnosticism, Cartesian philosophy, and the modern cult of technolo­gy was dualism. By splitting mind from na­ture, Descartes had prepared the way for “philosophy’s retreat into the mental half of the dichotomy — which left all of ‘nature’ to victorious science and substituted epistemology of science for the philosophy of nature.” Increasingly impressed with the need for an “organic” ethic “grounded in the breadth of being, not merely in the singularity or oddness of man,” Jonas turned, after World War II, to the revision of the “dualistic premise” as the “indispensable first step” to such an ethic. His early studies of gnosticism — a movement in which “everything stands out with the sharpness of unblushing naïveté” — now seemed to illuminate the modern condition, because they brought to light the spiritual background of modern dualism and exposed both its ethical and emotional undercurrents.

Other attempts to link the modern malaise to gnosticism could be cited, but enough has already been said to indicate that gnosticism remains an elusive thing — “hydra-headed,” as Panton aptly described it. If anything, it was easier to define gnosticism in 1910 than it is today. The gnostic movements that flour­ished in the Hellenistic empire have now been subjected to intensive scholarly examination — itself another indication, though it is seldom acknowledged in scholarly works, that those movements appear to have some bearing on our own time. The result, however, is to add to the difficulty of arriving at a satisfactory understanding of second-century gnosticism, not to mention its modern derivatives. By the mid-1960s, the proliferation of definitions prompted an ambitious attempt to organize a consensus by bringing together the entire community of scholars in the field. The collo­quium that assembled at Messina in April 1966 was attended by all the outstanding authorities on gnosticism. Its published proceedings, which ran to 800 handsomely print­ed pages, included papers in four languages, based in turn on sources in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, Aramaic, Syriac, Sanskrit, Mid­dle Persian, Mandaic, Arabic, and even Aztec. Apart from a number of cumbersome lists of characteristics, however, the conference did not produce much in the way of workable definitions. A proposal to restrict the term gnosticism to certain second-century move­ments, “which every one agrees are to be designated with this term,” and to use the broader term gnosis to refer to “knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved for an elite” did not promise to clear up the confusion.

The search for definitions is never a very fruitful procedure to begin with, not at least in the social sciences, where everything depends on the historical context in which actions and ideas unfold and where superficial resemblances, accordingly, may conceal crucial dif­ferences of nuance and tone, just as an under­lying identity of mood may unite seemingly dissimilar bodies of thought and practice. Since the scholarly debate about gnosticism turns on precisely such nuances, it is not likely to be resolved by definition. What the student needs, in Jonas’s phrase, is a “musical ear.”

The attempt to pin down a definition of gnosticism grows out of a controversy about its origins. Was it a heretical offshoot of Chris­tianity or did it have a pre-Christian history that can be reconstructed from second-century sources? Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos (1913), one of the earliest of the modern studies bearing on the history of gnosticism, argued that it was a form of “Hellenistic-Oriental mystical piety,” neither Christian, Judaic, nor classical, but inhabiting a “strange world of its own with a special and un­mistakable structure.” Those who followed in Bousset’s footsteps often disagreed about the relative weight to be assigned to Hellenistic and strictly Oriental influences, but most of them tended to stress the differences between gnosticism and both of its major rivals, Juda­ism and Christianity.

But Christianity itself took shape in the Hellenistic world — in the Hellenization of Judaism, according to many authorities — and came to resemble gnosticism so closely, in its Pauline version, that Marcion, Valentinus, and other gnostics could regard themselves as legitimate heirs of the Christian movement. The apparent affinity between gnosticism and the Christianity of the Pauline letters and the Fourth Gospel led a new generation of scholars to argue, in opposition to Bousset and his followers, that a sharp distinction between heresy and Christian orthodoxy emerged only in retrospect and should not be projected back into Christianity’s formative period. Even Judaism began to look less monolithic, less resistant to the Hellenistic temper, after the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in 1945, which revealed a ferment of eschatological speculation in Essene Judaism and a pes­simistic view of the world that seemed to have a good deal in common with the gnostic mood. The familiar antithesis between the Hellenic and Hebraic traditions now seemed untenable to many scholars. Studies of “Jewish gnosticism” — something that once would have been considered a contradiction in terms — and of the Jewish origins of the gnostic movements began to proliferate in the 1950s and 1960s. Second-century gnosticism, it ap­peared, was only one manifestation of a gen­eral impulse, rooted in the “wave of pessi­mism that swept over the West” in the later stages of Hellenistic civilization, as E.R. Dodds called it — “this terrifying rupture,” in the words of Simone Petrement, “between the two orders to which man belongs, the order of Reality and that of Value.”

A growing awareness of the common themes in gnosticism, Christianity, and Jewish “gnosticism” might suggest that all three movements represented different answers, in effect, to the same questions — long-standing questions concerning the meaning of life and death given new urgency by the bleak mood that settled over the late Hellenistic age. A famous Valentinian text, quoted by Clement of Alexandria in his attack on gnosticism, defines the objects of gnostic speculation as the liber­ating knowledge of “who we were, what we have become, where we were or into what we have been thrown, whither we are hurrying, whence we are being ransomed, what is birth, what is rebirth.” The gnostics did not hesitate to give very definite answers to these ques­tions, and it was perhaps not even the sub­stance of these answers so much as their in­sistence on the need for them and their demand that the answers be definitive that distinguished gnosticism from Judaism and Christianity. “Knowledge puffeth up,” wrote St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, “but charity edifieth…. Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” Paul was hardly indifferent to the question of “what is birth, what is rebirth,” but his insistence on the commandment of love encouraged Chris­tians to make ethics, not speculative knowl­edge, the center of their attention. Even with the help of Christ’s revelation, man’s capacity to fathom the mysteries of life and death was severely circumscribed. “Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” The ultimate revelation was still to come.

The Jewish religion was even more firmly opposed to the equation of religion with spir­itual enlightenment. Jonas quotes a rabbinical saying: “He who speculates on four things would better not have been born: what is above and what is below, what was before and what comes after.” These are precisely the questions that obsessed the gnostics; but the very urgency with which the gnostics raised them, in a cultural climate highly conducive to bold speculation about ontological and existen­tial issues, made them inescapable for others as well. Hence the deceptive appearance of a considerable common ground between gnosti­cism and rival movements of the times — an appearance that dissipates, it might be argued, when the key issues in the gnostic controversy are more closely examined.

A reconstruction of the original controver­sies surrounding the gnostic movement would seem to be a promising line of inquiry. With a few notable exceptions, however, this is not the direction research has taken. To enter into the controversy between gnosticism and Chris­tianity carries the risk of historical partisanship and thus seems to threaten the historian’s sta­tus as an impartial, objective observer. Since the ideal of scholarly objectivity is now ex­posed to a very different kind of threat — the poststructuralist dogma that all historical narratives are fictions, that the choice among them is unavoidably arbitrary, and that no appeal to the evidence can arbitrate among conflicting interpretations — we should proba­bly be grateful to historians of gnosticism for their scrupulous adherence to the available evidence and their refusal to pass judgment on any particular creed. Yet an antiseptic type of scholarship that withholds judgment is not much more satisfactory than one that hands out judgments with a vengeance because it regards them as political instruments in an ongoing struggle against oppression. Indeed the postwar cult of scholarly objectivity and the “pluralism” that now claims to replace it, on the grounds that the choice between rival points of view is inescapably and entirely political, share a common premise — that moral arguments can never be resolved except by the forcible “imposition” of one set of val­ues on others. Faced with a choice between bland neutrality and the type of partisanship currently in vogue (exemplified, in the area of gnostic studies, by Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, which treats the gnostic movement as part of the struggle against male supremacy) — in which a claim to speak for the voiceless and dispossessed is held to invalidate all competing claims — neutrality appears the lesser evil. It is a poor substitute, however, for the active engagement exemplified by scholars like Jonas and Molnar, in which a commit­ment to objective truth coexists with a recogni­tion that it can be reached only along the rough road of political and ideological contro­versy, not by a detour that seeks to avoid controversy in the interest of scholarly consen­sus.

Instead of attempting, then, to reconstruct the fierce debates between gnosticism and its second-century rivals — debates on which scholars might be tempted to pass judgment — gnostic studies, proceeding along the safe, familiar bypass of least resistance, have con­cerned themselves with the sources of gnostic thought in Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and other parts of the ancient world; with the residues of earlier belief systems; with the contribution of neo-Platonism, the parallels be­tween gnosticism and ancient Eastern reli­gions, and the reworking of old mythologies; in short, with the familiar problem of religious syncretism in the Hellenistic world. The unavoidable effect of this approach is to blur distinctions rather than to sharpen and clarify them. This is why the early gnostic movement seems to recede from view the more it is brought into focus. The more it is subjected to scholarly attention, the more it loses the char­acter of a definite movement of thought and becomes a vague impulse that can be found all over the ancient world, even in movements to which it was radically opposed. The few scholars who still adhere to the increasingly unpopular and “traditional view of Gnosticism as a Christian heresy with roots in speculative thought” themselves concede that although gnosticism belonged to a “particular situation in time and place,” as Arthur Darby Nock once wrote, it “may fairly be related to certain human attitudes and predispositions which are extremely widespread” — a good statement of the current consensus. Just what those atti­tudes were and how gnosticism was “related” to them, Nock did not explain; and it is this vagueness, coexisting with so much concreteness in the specification of intellectual influ­ences and antecedents, that afflicts the other­wise exuberant growth of gnostic studies and gives rise to an uneasy feeling, even among those who have contributed to them, that the object of their inquiry seems to have eluded them.

In 1958 R. McL. Wilson could already complain — in a monograph, The Gnostic Prob­lem, that illustrates many of the difficulties in which scholars now find themselves — that “no two writers use the word in the same way.” Those who allegedly saw gnosticism as a “pre-Christian” movement, like Bousset and Jonas, confused the issue, according to Wilson. “Their use of the term is much too wide.” The real source of confusion, however, lay in the question that had come to dominate scholarly investigation: Was there a pre-Christian gnos­ticism? In his eagerness to show that there was not, Wilson managed to stretch the term even further, notwithstanding his intention to restrict it.

Gnosticism, he argued, grew out of an “attempt to express Christianity in Hellenistic terms.” When Christianity broke away from Judaism, it had to be “reinterpreted in terms of contemporary thought” if it hoped to ap­peal to the gentile world. The gnostic Chris­tians, unable to walk the line between adapta­tion to Hellenistic thought and absorption by it, “conceded too much” to Hellenism, “yield­ed too easily to the attractions of their environment.” But Wilson used such broad strokes in depicting the religious environment to which Christianity had to adapt that Helle­nism and gnosticism finally became indistin­guishable, and the sharp outlines he tried to draw around the object of his study began to dissolve.

His description of the Hellenistic mind — with its “dualistic conception of the world,” its belief that “the body is a prison from which the soul longs to escape” — sounded like a description of gnosticism itself. Yet the leading Hellenistic thinker, Plotinus, wrote an attack on gnosticism — not mentioned in Wilson’s account — in which he took issue precisely with the views summarized by Wilson as the “central thought” of the Hellenistic age. The phenomenal world is only a pale copy of the real world of ideas, Plotinus argued, but as a copy, it reveals the higher world behind it and cannot, as the gnostics claim, be regarded as evil. That pagan writers took part in the condemnation of gnosticism ought to have strengthened the suspicion that it was sui generis, unassimilable to any of the main reli­gious or philosophical traditions, no matter how freely it borrowed from all of them. But Wilson, like many other scholars in the field, confused this plunder of other traditions — which often had the object of parody and subversion, as in the gnostic treatment of Old Testament themes — with the syncretism so prevalent in the Hellenistic world. “The char­acteristic of Gnosticism…is syncretism…finding room for every type of thought.”

Shapeless and excessively accommodating, gnosticism, in Wilson’s account as in so many others, blends into the “general religious medley of the times.” By the time Wilson finished with it, gnosticism lost even its quasi-Christian character and became, “when all is said…not Christian, but a phase of heathe­nism.” Once again it vanished into the Orien­tal mist.