Chapter 2. The Meaning of Gnosis and the Extent of the Gnostic Movement

(a) SPIRITUAL CLIMATE OF THE ERA

At the beginning of the Christian era and progressively throughout the two following centuries, the eastern Mediterranean world was in profound spiritual ferment. The genesis of Christianity itself and the response to its message are evidence of this ferment, but they do not stand alone. With regard to the environment in which Christianity originated, the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls have added powerful support to the view, reasonably certain

before, that Palestine was seething with eschatological (i.e., salvational) movements and that the emergence of the Christian sect was anything but an isolated incident. In the thought of the manifold gnostic sects which soon began to spring up everywhere in the wake of the Christian expansion, the spiritual crisis of the age found its boldest expression and, as it were, its extremist representation. The abstruseness of their speculations, in part intentionally provocative, does not diminish but rather enhances their symbolic representative-ness for the thought of an agitated period. Before narrowing down our investigation to the particular phenomenon of Gnosticism, we must briefly indicate the main features that characterize this contemporary thought as a whole.

First, all the phenomena which we noted in connection with the "oriental wave" are of a decidedly religious nature; and this, as we have repeatedly stated, is the prominent characteristic of the second phase of Hellenistic culture in general. Second, all these

currents have in some way to do with salvation: the general religion of the period is a religion of salvation. Third, all of them exhibit an exceedingly transcendent (i.e., transmundane) conception of God and in connection with it an equally transcendent and other-worldly idea of the goal of salvation. Finally, they maintain a radical dualism of realms of being—God and the world, spirit and matter, soul and body, light and darkness, good and evil, life and death—and consequently an extreme polarization of existence affecting not

only man but reality as a whole: the general religion of the period is a dualistic transcendent religion of salvation.

(b) THE NAME "GNOSTICISM"

Turning to Gnosticism in particular, we ask what the name means, where the movement originated, and what literary evidence it left. The name "Gnosticism," which has come to serve as a collective heading for a manifoldness of sectarian doctrines appearing

within and around Christianity during its critical first centuries, is derived from gnosis,

the Greek word for "knowledge." The emphasis on knowledge as the means for the attainment of salvation, or even as the form of salvation itself, and the claim to the possession of this knowledge in one's own articulate doctrine, are common features of the numerous sects in which the gnostic movement historically expressed itself. Actually there were only a few groups whose members expressly called themselves Gnostics, "the Knowing

ones"; but already Irenaeus, in the title of his work, used the name "gnosis" (with the addition "falsely so called") to cover all those sects that shared with them that emphasis and certain other characteristics. In this sense we can speak of gnostic schools, sects, and cults, of gnostic writings and teachings, of gnostic myths and speculations, even of gnostic religion in general.

In following the example of the ancient authors who first extended the name beyond the self-styling of a few groups, we are not obliged to stop where their knowledge or polemical interest did and may treat the term as a class-concept, to be applied wherever

the defining properties are present. Thus the extent of the gnostic area can be taken as narrower or broader, depending on the criterion employed. The Church Fathers considered Gnosticism as essentially a Christian heresy and confined their reports and refutations to systems which either had sprouted already from the soil of Christianity (e.g., the Valentinian system), or had somehow added and adapted the figure of Christ to their otherwise heterogeneous teaching (e.g., that of the Phrygian Naassenes), or else through a common Jewish background were close enough to be felt as competing with and distorting the Christian message (e.g., that of Simon Magus). Modern research has progressively broadened this traditional range by arguing the existence of a pre-Christian Jewish

and a Hellenistic pagan Gnosticism, and by making known the Mandaean sources, the most striking example of Eastern Gnosticism outside the Hellenistic orbit, and other new material. Finally, if we take as a criterion not so much the special motif of "knowledge" as the dualistic-anticosmic spirit in general, the religion of Mani, too, must be classified as gnostic.

(c) THE ORIGIN OF GNOSTICISM

Asking next the question where or from what historical tradition Gnosticism originated, we are confronted with an old crux of historical speculation: the most conflicting theories have been advanced in the course of time and are still in the field today. The early Church Fathers, and independently of them Plotinus, emphasized the influence upon a Christian thinking not yet firmly consolidated of Plato and of misunderstood Hellenic philosophy in general.

Modern scholars have advanced in turn Hellenic, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Iranian origins and every possible combination of these with one another and with Jewish and Christian elements. Since in the material of its representation Gnosticism actually is a product

of syncretism, each of these theories can be supported from the sources and none of them is satisfactory alone; but neither is the combination of all of them, which would make Gnosticism out to be a mere mosaic of these elements and so miss its autonomous essence.

On the whole, however, the oriental thesis has an edge over the Hellenic one, once the meaning of the term "knowledge" is freed from the misleading associations suggested by the tradition of classical philosophy. The recent Coptic discoveries in Upper Egypt (see below, sec. e) are said to underline the share of a heterodox occultist Judaism, though judgment must be reserved pending the translation of the vast body of material.¹ Some connection of Gnosticism with the beginnings of the Cabbala has in any case to be assumed, whatever the order of cause and effect. The violently anti-Jewish bias of the more prominent gnostic systems is by itself not incompatible with Jewish heretical origin at some distance. Independently, however, of who the first Gnostics were and what the main religious traditions drawn into the movement and suffering arbitrary reinterpretation at its ha

nds, the movement itself transcended ethnic and denominational boundaries, and its spiritual principle was new. The Jewish strain in Gnosticism is as little the orthodox Jewish as the Babylonian is the orthodox Babylonian, the Iranian the orthodox Iranian, and so on. Regarding the case made out for a preponderance of Hellenic influence, much depends on how the crucial concept of "knowledge" is to be understood in this context.

¹See Chapt. 12.

(d) THE NATURE OF GNOSTIC "KNOWLEDGE"

"Knowledge" is by itself a purely formal term and does not specify what is to be known; neither does it specify the psychological manner and subjective significance of possessing knowledge or the ways in which it is acquired. As for what the knowledge is about, the associations of the term most familiar to the classically

trained reader point to rational objects, and accordingly to natural reason as the organ for acquiring and possessing knowledge. In the gnostic context, however, "knowledge" has an emphatically religious or supranatural meaning and refers to objects which we nowadays should call those of faith rather than of reason. Now

although the relation between faith and knowledge (pistis and gnosis) became a major issue in the Church between the gnostic heretics and the orthodox, this was not the modern issue between faith and reason with which we are familiar; for the "knowledge” of the Gnostics with which simple Christian faith was contrasted

whether in praise or blame was not of the rational kind. Gnosis meant pre-eminently knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical transcendence of the deity it follows that "knowledge of God" is the knowledge of something naturally un-

knowable and therefore itself not a natural condition. Its objects include everything that belongs to the divine realm of being, namely, the order and history of the upper worlds, and what is to issue from it, namely, the salvation of man. With objects of this

kind, knowledge as a mental act is vastly different from the rational

cognition of philosophy. On the one hand it is closely bound up with revelationary experience, so that reception of the truth either through sacred and secret lore or

through inner illumination replaces rational argument and theory (though this extra-rational basis may then provide scope for independent speculation); on the other

hand, being concerned with the secrets of salvation, "knowledge" is not just theoretical information about certain things but is itself, as a modification of the human condition, charged with performing a function in the bringing about of salvation. Thus gnostic "knowledge" has an eminently practical aspect. The ultimate "object" of gnosis is God: its event in the soul transforms the knower himself by making him a partaker in the divine existence (which means more than assimilating him to the divine essence). Thus in the more radical systems like the Valentinian the "knowledge" is not only an instrument of salvation but itself the very form in which

the goal of salvation, i.e., ultimate perfection, is possessed. In these cases knowledge and the attainment of the known by the soul are claimed to coincide—the claim of all true mysticism. It is, to be sure, also the claim of Greek theoria, but in a different sense. There, the object of knowledge is the universal, and the cognitive relation is "optical," i.e., an analogue of the visual relation to objective form that remains unaffected by the relation. Gnostic "knowledge" is about the particular (for the transcendent deity is still a particular), and the relation of knowing is mutual, i.e., a being known at the same time, and involving active self-divulgence on the part of the "known." There, the mind is "informed" with the forms it beholds and while it beholds (thinks) them: here, the subject is "transformed" (from "soul" to "spirit") by the union with a reality that in truth is itself the supreme subject in the situation and strictly speaking never an object at all.

These few preliminary remarks are sufficient to delimitate the gnostic type of "knowledge" from the idea of rational theory in terms of which Greek philosophy ha

d developed the concept. Yet the suggestions of the term "knowledge" as such, reinforced by the fact that Gnosticism produced real thinkers who unfolded the con-

tents of the secret "knowledge" in elaborate doctrinal systems and used abstract concepts, often with philosophical antecedents, in their exposition, have favored a strong tendency among theologians and historians to explain Gnosticism by the impact of the Greek ideal of knowledge on the new religious forces which came to the

fore at that time, and more especially on the infancy of Christian thought. The genuine theoretical aspirations revealed in the higher type of gnostic speculation, bearing out as it seemed the testimony of the early Church Fathers, led Adolf von Harnack to his famous

formulation that Gnosticism was "the acute Hellenization of Christianity," while the slower and more measured evolution of orthodox theology was to be regarded as its "chronic Hellenization." The medical analogy was not meant to designate Hellenization as such

as a disease; but the "acute" stage which provoked the reaction of the healthy forces in the organism of the Church was understood as the hasty and therefore disruptive anticipation of the same process that in its more cautious and less spectacular form led to the incorporation of those aspects of the Greek heritage from which Christian thought could truly benefit. Perspicacious as this diagnosis is, as a definition of Gnosticism it falls short in both the terms

that make up the formula, "Hellenization" and "Christianity." It treats Gnosticism as a solely Christian phenomenon, whereas subsequent research has established its wider range; and it gives way to the Hellenic appearance of gnostic conceptualization and of the concept of

gnosis itself, which in fact only thinly disguises a heterogeneous spiritual substance. It is

the genuineness, i.e., the underivative nature, of this substance that defeats all attempts at derivation that concern more than the outer shell of expression. About the idea of "knowledge," the great watchword of the movement, it must be emphasized that its objectification in articulate systems of thought concerning God and the universe was an autonomous achievement of this substance, not its subjection to a borrowed scheme of theory. The combination of the practical, salvational concept of knowledge with its theoretical satisfaction in quasi-rational systems of thought—the rationalization of the supranatural—was typical of the higher forms of Gnosticism and gave rise to a kind of speculation previously unknown but never afterwards to disappear from religious

thought.

Yet Harnack's half-truth reflects a fact which is almost as integral to the destiny of the new oriental wisdom as its original substance: the fact called by Spengler "pseudomorphosis" to which we have alluded before. If a different crystalline substance happens to fill the hollow left in a geological layer by crystals that have disintegrated, it is forced by the mold to take on a crystal form not its own and without chemical analysis will mislead the observer into taking it for a crystal of the original kind. Such a formation is called in mineralogy a "pseudomorphosis." With the inspired intuition that distinguished him, amateur as he was in the field, Spengler discerned a similar situation in the period under view and argued that the recognition of it must govern the understanding of all its utterances. According to him, disintegrating Greek thought is the older crystal of the simile, Eastern thought the new substance forced into its mold. Leaving aside the wider historical vista within which Spengler places his observation, it is a brilliant contribution to the diagnosis of a historical situation and if used with discrimination can greatly help our understanding.

From Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 31-37.