Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God - Part 2

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

We concluded Part 1 with:

 

(P.132) " Many gnostics, then, would have agreed in principle with Ludwig

Feuerbach, the nineteenth-century psychologist, that 'theology is really

anthropology' (the term derives, of course, from 'anthropos', and means 'study

of humanity'). For gnostics, exploring the 'psyche' became explicitly what it is

for many people today implicitly - a religious quest. (P.133) Some who seek

their own interior direction, like the radical gnostics, reject religious

institutions as a hindrance to their progress. Others, like the Valentinians,

willingly participate in them, although they regard the church more as an

instrument of their own self-discovery than as the necessary 'ark of

salvation'. "

 

The Gnostic Gospels

(Long Buried And Suppressed, The Gnostic Gospels Contain

The Secret Writings Attributed To The Followers of Jesus)

Chapter 6, Pg. 132-133

Elaine Pagels

Phoenix Publishers - St. Martin's Lane, London

ISBN 13: 978-0-7538-2114-5

 

Here now is Part 2.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God - Part 2

 

(P.133) Besides defining God in opposite ways, gnostic and orthodox Christians

diagnosed the human condition very differently. The orthodox followed

traditional Jewish teaching that what separates humanity from God, besides the

essential dissimilarity, is human sin. The New Testament term for sin,

'hamartia', comes from the sport of archery; literally, it means 'missing the

mark'. New Testament sources teach that we suffer distress, mental and physical,

because we fail to achieve the moral goal toward which we aim: 'all have sinned,

and fall short of the glory of God'. [16] So, according to the gospel of Mark,

when Jesus came to reconcile God and humanity, he announced: 'The time is

fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the

gospel.' [17] Mark announces that Jesus alone could offer healing and

forgiveness of sins; only those who receive his message in faith experience

deliverance. The gospel of John expresses the desperate situation of humanity

apart from the Savior:

 

For God sent the Son into the world ... that the world might be saved through

him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is

condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of

God. [18]

 

Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what

involves a person in suffering. The gnostic movement shared certain affinities

with contemporary methods of exploring the self through psychotherapeutic

techniques. Both gnosticism and psychotherapy value, above all, knowledge - the

self-knowledge which is insight. They agree that, lacking this, a person

experiences the sense of being driven by impulses he does not understand.

Valentinus expressed this in a myth. He tells how the world originated when

Wisdom, the Mother of all beings, brought it forth out of her own suffering. The

four elements that Greek philosophers said constituted the world - earth, air,

fire, and water - are concrete forms of her experiences:

 

Thus the earth arose from her confusion, water from her terror; air from the

consolidation of her grief; while fire ... was inherent in all these elements...

as ignorance lay concealed in these three sufferings. [19]

 

(P.134) Thus the world was born out of suffering. (The Greek word 'pathos', here

translated 'suffering', also connotes being the passive recipient, not the

initiator, of one's experience.) Valentinus or one of his followers tells a

different version of the myth in the 'Gospel of Truth':

 

....Ignorance ... brought about anguish and terror. And the anguish grew solid

like a fog, so that no one was able to see. For this reason error is powerful...

[20]

 

Most people live, then, in oblivion - or, in contemporary terms, in

unconsciousness. Remaining unaware of their own selves, they have 'no root'.

[21] The 'Gospel of Truth' describes such existence as a nightmare. Those who

live in it experience 'terror and confusion and instability and doubt and

division', being caught in 'many illusions'. [22] So, according to the passage

scholars call the 'nightmare parable', they lived

 

as if they were sunk in sleep and found themselves in disturbing dreams. Either

(there is) a place to which they are fleeing, or, without strength, they come

(from) having chased after others, or they are involved in striking blows, or

they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from high places, or

they take off into the air though they do not even have wings. Again, sometimes

(it is as) if people were murdering them, though there is no one even pursuing

them, or they themselves are killing their neighbors, for they have been stained

with their blood. When those who are going through all these things wake up,

they see nothing, they who were in the midst of these disturbances, for they are

nothing. Such is the way of those who have cast ignorance aside as sleep,

leaving [its works] behind like a dream in the night.... This is the way

everyone has acted, as though asleep at the time when he was ignorant. And this

is the way he has come to knowledge, as if he had awakened. [23]

 

Whoever remains ignorant, a 'creature of oblivion', [24] cannot experience

fulfillment. Gnostics said that such a person 'dwells in deficiency' (the

opposite of fulfillment). For deficiency consists of ignorance:

 

....As with someone's ignorance, when he comes to have knowledge, his ignorance

vanishes by itself; as the darkness vanishes when light appears, so also the

deficiency vanishes in the fulfillment. [25]

 

Self-ignorance is also a form of self-destruction. According to the 'Dialogue of

the Savior', whoever does not understand the elements of the universe, and of

himself, is bound for annihilation:

 

(P.135) ... If one does not [understand] how the fire came to be, he will burn

in it, because he does not know his root. If one does not first understand the

water, he does not know anything.... If one does not understand how the wind

that blows came to be, he will run with it. If one does not understand how the

body that he wears came to be, he will perish with it... Whoever does not

understand how he came will not understand how he will go... [26]

 

How - or where - is one to seek self-knowledge? Many gnostics share with

psychotherapy a second major premise: both agree - against orthodox Christianity

- that the psyche bears 'within itself' the potential for liberation or

destruction. Few psychiatrists would disagree with the saying attributed to

Jesus in the 'Gospel of Thomas':

 

'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If

you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will

destroy you.' [27]

 

Such insight comes gradually, through effort: 'Recognize what is before your

eyes, and what is hidden will be revealed to you.' [28]

 

Such gnostics acknowledged that pursuing 'gnosis' engages each person in a

solitary, difficult process, as one struggles against internal resistance. They

characterized this resistance to 'gnosis' as the desire to sleep or to be drunk

- that is, to remain unconscious. So Jesus (who elsewhere says 'I am the

knowledge of the truth') [29] declares that when he came into the world

 

I found them all drunk; I found none of them thirsty. And my soul became

afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their hearts and do not

have sight; for empty they came into this world, and empty they seek to leave

this world. But for the moment they are drunk. [30]

 

The teacher Silvanus, whose 'Teachings' [31] were discovered at Nag Hammadi,

encourages his followers to resist unconsciousness:

 

.... end the sleep which weighs heavy upon you. Depart from the oblivion which

fills you with darkness... Why do you pursue the darkness, though the light is

available for you? ... Wisdom calls you, yet you desire foolishness.... a

foolish man ... goes the ways of the desire of every passion. He swims in the

desires of life and has foundered.... he is like a ship which the wind tosses to

and fro, and like a loose horse which has no rider. For this (one) needed the

rider, which is reason ... before everything else ... know yourself ... [32]

 

The Gnostic Gospels, Pg. 133-135

(Long Buried And Suppressed, The Gnostic Gospels Contain

The Secret Writings Attributed To The Followers of Jesus)

Elaine Pagels

Phoenix Publishers - St. Martin's Lane, London

ISBN 13: 978-0-7538-2114-5

 

Notes:

 

[16] Romans 3:23.

 

[17] Mark 1:15.

 

[18] John 3:17-19.

 

[19] Irenaeus, AH 1.5.4.

 

[20] 'Gospel of Truth' 17.10-16, in NHL 38.

 

[21] ibid., 28.16-17, in NHL 42.

 

[22] ibid., 29.2-6, in NHL 43.

 

[23] ibid., 29.8-30.12, in NHL 43.

 

[24] ibid., 21.35-6, in NHL 40.

 

[25] ibid., 24.32-25.3, in NHL 41.

 

[26] 'Dialogue of the Savior' 134.1-22, in NHL 234.

 

[27] 'Gospel of Thomas' 45.30-33, in NHL 126.

 

[28] ibid., 33.11-13, in NHL 118.

 

[29] 'Book of Thomas the Contender' 138.13, in NHL 189.

 

[30] 'Gospel of Thomas' 38.23-9, in NHL 121. For a discussion of these

metaphors, see H. Jonas, 'The Gnostic Religion' (Boston, 1963), 48-96, and G.

MacRae, 'Sleep and Awakening in Gnostic Texts', in 'Le Origini dello

Gnosticismo, 496-507.

 

[31] Professors M.L. Peel and J. Zandee have stated that the 'Teachings of

Silvanus' is clearly 'non-Gnostic' (NHL 346). Nevertheless, what Peel and Zandee

describe as characteristic of gnostic teaching (dualistic theology, docetic

Christology, the doctrine that 'only some persons are saved " by nature " ') does

not, as they apparently assume, characterize such teaching as that of Valentinus

(which undisputably 'is' gnostic). The 'Teachings of Silvanus' certainly is

unique among the Nag Hammadi find in that most of its elements do not contradict

orthodox doctrine. Whether or not it is itself a gnostic document, I suggest

that what warrants its inclusion with gnostic writings is its premise that

divine reason (and, apparently, divine nature) is discovered 'within' oneself.

 

[32] 'Teachings of Silvanus' 88.24-92.12, in NHL 349-50.