Conclusion - Part 1

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

We concluded Chapter 6 of 'Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God with the

following:

 

(P.146) Obviously, such a program of discipline, like the higher levels of

Buddhist teaching, would appeal only to a few. Although major themes of gnostic

teaching, such as the discovery of the divine within, appealed to so many that

they constituted a major threat to catholic doctrine, the religious perspectives

and methods of gnosticism did not lend themselves to mass religion. In this

respect, it was no match for the highly effective system of organization of the

catholic church, which expressed a unified religious perspective based on the

New Testament canon, offered a creed requiring the initiate to confess only the

simplest essentials of faith, and celebrated rituals as simple and profound as

baptism and the eucharist. The same basic framework of doctrine, ritual, and

organization sustains nearly all Christian churches today, whether Roman

Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. Without these elements, one can scarcely

imagine how the Christian faith could have survived and attracted so many

millions of adherents all over the world, throughout twenty centuries. For ideas

alone do not make a religion powerful, although it cannot succeed without them;

equally important are social and political structures that identify and unite

people into a common affiliation.

 

The Gnostic Gospels Chapter 6, pg. 146

 

Here now is Part 1 of the final chapter titled 'Conclusion'.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

 

Conclusion - Part 1

 

(p.147) It is the winners who write history - their way. No wonder, then, that

the viewpoint of the successful majority has dominated all traditional accounts

of the origin of Christianity. Ecclesiastical Christians first defined the terms

(naming themselves 'orthodox' and their opponents 'heretics'); then they

proceeded to demonstrate - at least to their own satisfaction - that their

triumph was historically inevitable, or, in religious terms, 'guided by the Holy

Spirit'.

 

But the discoveries at Nag Hammadi reopen fundamental questions. They suggest

that Christianity might have developed in very different directions - or that

Christianity as we know it might not have survived at all. Had Christianity

remained multiform, it might well have disappeared from history, along with

dozens of rival religious cults of antiquity. i believe that we owe the survival

of Christian tradition to the organizational and theological structure that the

emerging church developed. Anyone as powerfully attracted to Christianity as I

am will regard that as a major achievement. We need not be surprised, then, that

the religious ideas enshrined in the creed (from 'I believe in one God', who is

'Father Almighty', and Christ's incarnation, death, and bodily resurrection 'on

the third day', to faith in the 'holy, catholic, and apostolic church') coincide

with social and political issues in the formation of orthodox Christianity.

 

(p.148) Furthermore, since historians themselves tend to be intellectuals, it

is, again, no surprise that most have interpreted the controversy between

orthodox and gnostic Christians in terms of the 'history of ideas', as if ideas,

themselves assumed to be the essential mainspring of human action, battled

(presumably in some disembodied state) for supremacy. So Tertullian, himself a

highly intelligent man, fond of abstract thought, complained that 'heretics and

philosophers' concerned themselves with the same questions. The 'questions that

make people heretics' [1] are, he says, the following: Where does humanity come

from, and how? Where does evil come from, and why? Tertullian insists (at least

before his own violent break with the church) that the catholic church prevailed

because it offered 'truer' answers to these questions.

 

Yet the majority of Christians, gnostic and orthodox, like religious people of

every tradition, concerned themselves with ideas primarily as expressions or

symbols of religious experience. Such experience remains the source and testing

ground of all religious ideas (as, for example, a man and a woman are likely to

experience differently the idea that God is masculine). Gnosticism and

orthodoxy, then, articulated very different kinds of human experience; I suspect

that they appealed to different types of persons.

 

For when gnostic Christians inquired about the origin of evil they did not

interpret the term, as we do, primarily in terms of moral evil. The Greek term

'kakia' (like the English term 'ill-ness') originally meant 'what is bad' - what

one desires to avoid, such as physical pain, sickness, suffering, misfortune,

every kind of harm. When followers of Valentinus asked about the source of

'kakia', they referred especially to emotional harm - fear, confusion, grief.

According to the 'Gospel of Truth', the process of self-discovery begins as a

person experiences the 'anguish and terror' [2] of the human condition, as if

lost in a fog or haunted in sleep by terrifying nightmares. Valentinus' myth of

humanity's origin, as we have seen, describes the anticipation of death and

destruction as the experiential beginning of the gnostic's search. 'They say

that all materiality was formed from three experiences [or: sufferings]: terror,

pain, and confusion ['aporia'; literally, 'roadlessness', not knowing where to

go].' [3]

 

Since such experiences, especially the fear of death and dissolution, are

located, in the first place, in the body, the gnostic tended to mistrust the

body, regarding it as the saboteur that inevitably engaged him in suffering.

(p.149) Nor did the gnostic trust the blind forces that prevail in the universe;

after all, these are the forces that constitute the body. What can bring

release? Gnostics came to the conviction that the only way out of suffering was

to realize the truth about humanity's place and destiny in the universe.

Convinced that the only answers were to be found within, the gnostic engaged on

an intensely private interior journey.

 

Whoever comes to experience his own nature - human nature - as itself the

'source of all things', the primary reality, will receive enlightenment.

Realizing the essential Self, the divine within, the gnostic laughed in joy at

being released from external constraints to celebrate his identification with

the divine being:

 

The gospel of truth is a joy for those who have received from the Father of

truth the grace of knowing him...For he discovered them in himself, and they

discovered him in themselves, the incomprehensible, inconceivable one, the

Father, the perfect one, the one who made all things. [4]

 

In the process, gnostics celebrated - their opponents said they overwhelmingly

exaggerated - the greatness of human nature. Humanity itself, in its primordial

being, was disclosed to be the 'God over all'. The philosopher Plotinus, who

agreed with his master, Plato, that the universe was divinely created and that

non-human intelligences, including the stars, share in immortal soul, [5]

castigated the gnostics for 'thinking very well of themselves, and very ill of

the universe'. [6]

 

Although, as the great British scholar Arthur Darby Nock has stated, gnosticism

'involves no recoil from society, but a desire to concentrate on inner well

being', [7] the gnostic pursued an essentially solitary path. According to the

'Gospel of Thomas', Jesus praises this solitude: 'Blessed are the solitary and

the chosen, for you will find the Kingdom. For you are from it, and to it you

will return.' [8]

 

This solitude derives from the gnostics' insistence on the primacy of immediate

experience. No one else can tell another which way to go, what to do, how to

act. The gnostic could not accept on faith what others said, except as a

provisional measure, until one found one's own path, 'for', as the gnostic

teacher Heracleon says, 'people at first are led to believe in the Savior

through others', but when they become mature 'they no longer rely on mere human

testimony', but discover instead their own immediate relationship with 'the

truth itself'. [9] (p.150) Whoever follows second-hand testimony - even

testimony of the apostles and the Scriptures - could earn the rebuke Jesus

delivered to his disciples when they quoted the prophets to him: 'You have

ignored the one living in your presence and have spoken (only) of the dead.'

[10] Only on the basis of immediate experience could one create the poems,

vision accounts, myths, and hymns that gnostics prized as proof that one

actually has attained 'gnosis'.

 

The Gnostic Gospels

(Long Buried And Suppressed, The Gnostic Gospels Contain

The Secret Writings Attributed To The Followers of Jesus)

Chapter 6, Pg. 147-150

Elaine Pagels

Phoenix Publishers - St. Martin's Lane, London

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

 

Notes:

 

[1] Tertullian, DE PRAESCR. 13.

 

[2] 'Gospel of Truth' 17.10-11, in NHL 38.

 

[3] Irenaeus, AH 1.5.4.

 

[4] 'Gospel of Truth' 16.1-18.34, in NHL 37-8.

 

[5] Plotinus, 'Against the Gnostics', 'Enneads' 2.9.

 

[6] A.D. Nock, 'Gnosticism', in 'Arthur Darby Nock; Essays on Religion

and the

Ancient World', ed. Z. Stewart (Cambridge, 1972), Vol. 2, 943.

 

[7] Nock, 'Gnosticism', 942.

 

[8] 'Gospel of Thomas' 41.27-30, in NHL 123.

 

[9] Heracleon, Frag. 39, in Origen, COMM. JO. 13.53.

 

[10] 'Gospel of Thomas' 42.16-18, in NHL 124.