Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God - Part 1

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Here is Part 1 of " Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God " .

 

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Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God - Part 1

 

(P.129) ...Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we do not know where you are going; how

can we know the way?' Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life;

no one comes to the Father, but by me.' [1]

 

The Gospel of John, which contains this saying, is a remarkable book that many

gnostic Christians claimed for themselves and used as a primary source for

gnostic teaching [2]. Yet the emerging church, despite some orthodox opposition,

included John within the New Testament. What makes John acceptably 'orthodox'?

Why did the church accept John while rejecting such writings as the 'Gospel of

Thomas' or the 'Dialogue of the Savior?' In considering this question, remember

that anyone who drives through the United States is likely to see billboards

proclaiming this saying from John - billboards signed by any of the local

churches. Their purpose is clear: by indicating that one finds God only through

Jesus, the saying, in its contemporary context, implies that one finds Jesus

only through the church. Similarly, in the first centuries of this era,

Christians concerned to strengthen the institutional church could find support

in John.

 

Gnostic sources offer a different religious perspective. According to the

'Dialogue of the Savior', for example, when the disciples asked Jesus the same

question ('What is the place to which we shall go?') he answered, 'the place

which you can reach, stand there!' [3] (P.130) The 'Gospel of Thomas' relates

that when the disciples asked Jesus where they should go, he said only, 'There

is light within a man of light, and it lights up the whole world. If he does not

shine, he is darkness.' [4] Far from legitimizing any institution, both sayings

direct one instead to oneself - to one's inner capacity to find one's own

direction, to the 'light within'.

 

The contrast sketched above is, of course, somewhat simplistic. Followers of

Valentinus themselves demonstrated - convincingly - that many sayings and

stories in John could lend themselves to such interpretation. But Christians

like Irenaeus apparently decided that, on balance, the gospel of John

(especially, perhaps, when placed in sequence after Matthew, Mark, and Luke)

could serve the needs of the emerging institution.

 

As the church organized politically, it could sustain within itself many

contradictory ideas and practices as long as the disputed elements supported its

basic institutional structure. In the third and fourth centuries, for example,

hundreds of catholic Christians adopted ascetic forms of self-discipline,

seeking religious insight through solitude, visions, and ecstatic experience.

(The terms 'monk' and 'monastic' come from the Greek word 'monachos', meaning

'solitary', or 'single one', which the 'Gospel of Thomas' frequently uses to

describe the gnostic.) Rather than exclude the monastic movement, the church

moved, in the fourth century, to bring the monks into line with episcopal

authority. The scholar Frederik Wisse has suggested that the monks who lived at

the monastery of St. Pachomius, within sight of the cliff where the texts were

found, may have included the Nag Hammadi texts within their devotional library.

[5] But in 367, when Athanasius, the powerful Archbishop of Alexandria, sent an

order to purge all 'apocryphal books' with 'heretical' tendencies, one (or

several) of the monks may have hidden the precious manuscripts in the jar and

buried it on the cliff of the Jabal al-Tarif, where Muhammad 'Ali found it 1,600

years later.

 

Furthermore, as the church, disparate as it was internally, increasingly became

a political unity between 150 and 400, its leaders tended to treat their

opponents - an even more diverse range of groups - as if they, too, constituted

an 'opposite' political unity. When Irenaeus denounced the heretics as

'gnostics', [6] he referred less to any specific doctrinal agreement among them

(indeed, he often castigated them for the variety of their beliefs) than to the

fact that they all resisted accepting the authority of the clergy, the creed,

and the New Testament canon.

 

(P.131) What - if anything - did the various groups that Irenaeus called

'gnostic' have in common? Or, to put the question another way, what do the

diverse texts discovered at Nag Hammadi have in common? No simple answer could

cover all the different groups that the orthodox attack, or all the different

texts in the Nag Hammadi collection. But I suggest that the trouble with

gnosticism, from the orthodox viewpoint, was not only that gnostics often

disagreed with the majority on such specific issues as those we have explored so

far - the organization of authority, the participation of women, martyrdom: the

orthodox recognized that those they called 'gnostics' shared a fundamental

religious perspective that remained antithetical to the claims of the

institutional church.

 

For orthodox Christians insisted that humanity needs a way beyond its own power

- a divinely given way - to approach God. And this, they declared, the catholic

church offered to those who would be lost without it: 'Outside the church there

is no salvation.' Their conviction was based on the premise that God created

humanity. As Irenaeus says, 'In this respect God differs from humanity; God

makes, but humanity is made.' [7] One is the originating agent, the other the

passive recipient; one is 'truly perfect in all things', [8] omnipotent,

infinite, the other an imperfect and finite creature. The philosopher Justin

Martyr says that when he recognized the great difference between the human mind

and God, he abandoned Plato and became a Christian philosopher. He relates that

before his conversion an old man challenged his basic assumption, asking, 'What

affinity, then, is there between us and God? Is the soul also divine and

immortal, and a part of that very regal mind?' Speaking as a disciple of Plato,

Justin answered without hesitation, 'Certainly.' [9] But when the old man's

further questions led him to doubt that certainty, he says he realized that the

human mind could not find God within itself and needed instead to be enlightened

by divine revelation - by means of the Scriptures and the faith proclaimed in

the church.

 

But some gnostic Christians went so far as to claim that humanity created God -

and so, from its own inner potential, discovered for itself the revelation of

truth. This conviction may underlie the ironic comment in the 'Gospel of

Philip':

 

....God created humanity; [but now human beings] create God. That is the way it

is in the world - human beings make gods, and worship their creation. It would

be appropriate for the gods to worship human beings! [10]

 

(P.132) The gnostic Valentinus taught that humanity itself manifests the divine

life and divine revelation. The church, he says, consists of that portion of

humanity that recognizes and celebrates its divine origin. [11] But Valentinus

did not use the term in its contemporary sense, to refer to the human race taken

collectively. Instead, he and his followers thought of 'Anthropos' (here

translated 'humanity') as the underlying nature of that collective entity, the

archetype, or spiritual essence, of human being. In this sense, some of

Valentinus' followers, 'those...considered more skillful' [12] than the rest,

agreed with the teacher Colorbasus, who said that when God revealed himself, He

revealed himself in the form of 'Anthropos'. Still others, Irenaeus reports,

maintained that

 

the primal father of the whole, the primal beginning, and the primal

incomprehensible, is called 'Anthropos' ... and that this is the great and

abstruse mystery, namely, that the power which is above all others, and contains

all others in its embrace, is called 'Anthropos'. [13]

 

For this reason, these gnostics explained, the Savior called himself 'Son of

Man' (that is, Son of 'Anthropos'). [14] The Sethian gnostics, who called the

creator Ialdabaoth (a name apparently derived from mystical Judaism but which

here indicates his inferior status), said that for this reason, when the

creator,

 

Ialdabaoth, becoming arrogant in spirit, boasted himself over all those who were

below him, and explained, 'I am father, and God, and above me there is no one,'

his mother, hearing him speak thus, cried out against him: 'Do not lie,

Ialdabaoth; for the father of all, the primal 'Anthropos', is above you; and so

is 'Anthropos', the son of 'Anthropos'.' [15]

 

In the words of another Valentinian, since human beings created the whole

language of religious expression, so, in effect, humanity created the divine

world:'...and this ['Anthropos'] is really he who is God over all'.

 

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, Pg. 129-133

Elaine Pagels

Phoenix Publishers - St. Martin's Lane, London

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

 

 

Notes:

 

[1] John 14:5-6

 

[2] Irenaeus, AH 3.11.7. For discussion, see E. Pagels, 'The Johannine Gospel in

Gnostic Exegesis' (Nashville, 1973)

 

[3] 'Dialogue of the Savior' 142.16-19, in NHL 237.

 

[4] 'Gospel of Thomas' 38.4-10, in NHL 121.

 

[5] F. Wisse, 'Gnosticism and Early Monasticism in Egypt', in 'Gnosis:

Festschrift fur Hans Jonas (Gottingen, 1978), 431-40.

 

[6] B. Layton, ed., 'The Rediscovery of Gnosticism' (forthcoming).

 

[7] Irenaeus, AH 4.11.2.

 

[8] ibid., 4.11.2.

 

[9] Justin Martyr, 'Dialogue with Trypho' 4.

 

[10] 'Gospel of Philip' 71.35-72.4, in NHL 143.

 

[11] Irenaeus, AH 1.11.1.

 

[12] ibid., 1.12.3.

 

[13] ibid., 1.12.3.

 

[14] ibid., 1.12.4.

 

[15] ibid., 1.30.6.