Gnosticism

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Gnosticism is the modern name for a loose family of religious movements that flourished in the second and third centuries, mostly within or alongside early Christianity, and that shared one daring premise: the visible world is not the good work of a good God but the flawed product of a lesser power, and what rescues a person from it is knowledge — gnosis — rather than faith or law. The term is a scholarly construction, coined in the seventeenth century and generalized in the nineteenth; the people it names did not call themselves Gnostics as a group, and whether they form a single thing at all is now an open question.

The recurring picture is a cosmic accident. Above the world stands the true God, unknown and remote; from the fullness of the divine realm something falls or strays, and through that error the material cosmos is fashioned by a botching craftsman — the Demiurge, often identified with the God of the Hebrew scriptures and cast as ignorant or hostile rather than supreme. Trapped in the bodies he made lies a spark of the higher world, and the redeemer’s task is to bring the knowledge that wakes the spark to its origin. Particular schools fill this frame differently. The followers of Valentinus, the most sophisticated of them, mapped an elaborate hierarchy of divine emanations and read the fall as the misstep of Wisdom, Sophia; the Sethians traced their lineage to Seth, the third son of Adam, and to a feminine revealer-figure; surviving Coptic books such as the Apocryphon of John and the Pistis Sophia preserve versions of the myth in the believers’ own voices.

For most of Christian history these movements were known only through their opponents. The heresiologists — Irenaeus above all, writing late in the second century — described Gnostic teaching in order to refute it, and their summaries, hostile and selective, were nearly the whole record. That changed in 1945, when a sealed jar near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt yielded a cache of Coptic codices, letting the texts speak at length on their own terms for the first time.

The discovery sharpened a scholarly unease that has since hardened. The unity once assumed behind “Gnosticism” looks, on the primary sources, far more ragged than the category suggests; some specialists now argue the word groups together texts and groups that had little to do with one another, and a few would retire it altogether. What can be said with more confidence is narrower: that a cluster of late-antique thinkers found the world too broken to be the direct work of the highest God, and located salvation in an awakening to the self’s divine source. The resemblance to the contemplative turn in Neoplatonism, and to the ascent taught in the Hermetic writings, is close enough to have drawn the three together in later esoteric imagination — though each kept its own vocabulary, and the ancient Platonists, for their part, wrote against the Gnostics as rivals.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) · Pistis Sophia (Mead, 1921)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Nous · Emanation