Gnosticism

← Encyclopedia

The visible world is not the work of the highest God. Beyond it — beyond the stars and the powers that turn them — stands the true Deity, unknown, unbegotten, and remote; the cosmos in which human beings find themselves was fashioned lower down, by a craftsman who botched what he did not understand. Yet buried in the human being lies a spark of the world above, fallen and forgotten, and what rescues it is neither faith nor law but knowledge — gnosis, the knowing that wakes the spark and tells it where it belongs. A Valentinian teacher compressed the whole liberation into four questions: what frees is the knowledge of “who we were, what we have become, whence we came, whither we hasten” — the formula of Theodotus, preserved in the excerpts that Clement of Alexandria made of his school.

The loose family of religious movements that taught this flourished in the second and third centuries, mostly within or alongside early Christianity. “Gnosticism” itself is a scholarly construction. In classical Greek gnostikos meant simply “fitted for knowing” — Plato contrasts the practical and the gnostic arts in the Statesman — and as the name of a heresy it dates to 1669, when the Cambridge Platonist Henry More coined “Gnosticisme” in an exposition of the seven letters of Revelation, to label the corruption at Thyatira. Nineteenth-century German scholarship generalized it into a category of the history of religions; Adolf von Harnack’s verdict made the whole phenomenon the “acute Hellenization of Christianity.” The ancients it names did not call themselves Gnostics as a group: Irenaeus applies gnostikos now to one particular sect, now loosely to many, and the only circle he says took the name for themselves were the followers of the teacher Marcellina. Whether the family is a single thing at all has become one of the sharpest disputes in the field — a question taken up below, because the career of the category is now part of the subject.

The recurring picture is a cosmic accident. Out of the unknowable First — the fullness the texts call the pleroma — the divine unfolds by emanation into the aeons, the living powers of the higher world. The youngest of them, Sophia, Wisdom, conceives a desire to know the Father alone and out of order, and her misstep brings forth a being unlike the others: Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge, craftsman of this world. In the Apocryphon of John — the nearest thing the movement has to an anchor scripture — he steals his mother’s power, withdraws, and fashions a counterfeit cosmos governed by his archons, the rulers of the planetary spheres, each sharing his deficiency. Ignorant of everything above him, he declares himself the sole and jealous God; the texts hear in that boast the voice of the God of the Hebrew scriptures, recast as ignorant or hostile rather than supreme. When the light from above shows itself, the archons mold Adam to capture it, and the stolen power passes into the human frame — which is why their every subsequent move, the paradise, the concealed tree, the flood, is an attempt to keep humanity asleep, and why the labor of heaven ever since has been to send down the call that wakes it. The redeemer of these books — sometimes Christ, sometimes the Father’s forethought, sometimes a heavenly Seth — saves not by sacrifice but by reminding: the spark hears where it came from, and the hearing itself is the rescue.

Particular schools filled this frame in their own ways. The most sophisticated were the followers of Valentinus, an Egyptian schooled in Alexandria who taught at Rome in the middle of the second century and — by Tertullian’s account — came within reach of the city’s bishopric before being passed over. The Valentinians mapped the pleroma as a precise architecture of paired aeons, read the fall as Sophia’s, and divided humanity into three natures — the hylic, bound to matter; the psychic, capable of faith; and the pneumatic, in whom the seed of the fullness lives — with a sacramental life to match, culminating in the bridal chamber taught in the Gospel of Philip. The school split into Eastern and Western branches, and the Gospel of Truth recovered at Nag Hammadi is plausibly Valentinian work. The Sethians traced their lineage to Seth, the third son of Adam, and received their revelations through Barbelo, the first emanation of the highest God, the primordial Mother-Father who leans down through the ages as a feminine revealer. Theirs is the oldest stratum that can still be seen: a version of the Apocryphon of John was already on Irenaeus’s desk by about 180, and the school’s later, Platonizing treatises — Zostrianos, Allogenes — carried the Sethian ascent into the lecture rooms of the philosophers. In Alexandria, Basilides taught under the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius — roughly 117 to 161, on the dating Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis allows — and his system reaches the record doubly: Irenaeus reports an emanationist chain of powers and 365 heavens, while Hippolytus transmits an apophatic cosmogony in which the universe is seeded from non-being by a God beyond existence. Which Basilides is the original has been argued ever since.

Marcion of Sinope stands at the family’s boundary. Born on the Black Sea coast around 85 and dead around 160, he was excommunicated at Rome in 144 and founded a rival church on the starkest two-God theology of all — the just creator of the law set against the alien good God revealed in Christ — and gave it the first fixed Christian canon, one gospel (the Euangelion) and a collection of Paul’s letters (the Apostolikon). Yet he taught no aeon-myth and no salvific gnosis, and whether he belongs among the Gnostics at all is itself a classic debate; Harnack, his greatest modern student, treated him separately.

For most of Christian history these movements were known almost entirely through their enemies. The heresiologists built them a genealogy that began with Simon Magus, the sorcerer of Acts, arch-ancestor of every error. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing about 180, gave the literature its founding work, whose proper title — Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called, echoing the warning of the First Letter to Timothy — announces the program; Hippolytus compiled his Refutation of All Heresies around 222–235, of which the second and third books are lost; and Epiphanius of Salamis closed the tradition with the Panarion of 374–377, a work so vast that no complete English version existed until Frank Williams’s translation of 1987–1994. Their summaries are hostile and selective — the stock charge of libertine ritual is now read as polemic, since the surviving primary texts trend ascetic — and yet for seventeen centuries they were nearly the whole record.

Nearly — because three Coptic books had slipped through. The Askew Codex, bought by the British Museum in 1785, preserved the Pistis Sophia, a long dialogue of the risen Jesus with his disciples, men and women both, first edited by Schwartze in 1851 and put into English by G. R. S. Mead in 1896, with a revised edition in 1921. The Bruce Codex, carried out of Egypt by the traveler James Bruce in the eighteenth century, held the Books of Jeu and an untitled apocalypse, published by Carl Schmidt in 1892. The Berlin Codex, purchased in 1896 with the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Mary inside, waited until Walter Till’s edition of 1955 — by which time the ground had moved. In December 1945, near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a sealed jar yielded thirteen Coptic codices: fourth-century copies of mostly second- and third-century works, among them the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, and three further copies of the Apocryphon of John. With the believers’ own books in hand, the polemics lost their monopoly; the story of the find and its slow publication, complete in English by 1977, belongs to the Nag Hammadi library. Nor has the recovery ended: in 2006 the National Geographic Society published the Gospel of Judas from the Codex Tchacos, a manuscript radiocarbon-dated to about 280 CE, edited by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst.

The movement’s neighbors knew it well enough to fight it. Porphyry reports that Gnostics frequented Plotinus’s school in Rome, carrying apocalypses under the names of Zoroaster, Zostrianos, and Allogenes, and Plotinus answered them in the treatise titled Against the Gnostics: a cosmos that descends in unbroken goodness from the One through Nous cannot be the malice of a botching maker, and souls that despise the world have misread their own descent. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism shared the ascent and quarreled over the cosmos — and the same line divides the Gnostics from the Hermetists. The gnosis taught by Hermes Trismegistus also wakes the divine in the human being and sends it upward through the spheres, but the Poimandres calls the cosmos beautiful, and the Hermetic books never curse the maker; the anti-cosmic dualism is Gnosticism’s own signature. In late antiquity the three currents kept their separate vocabularies and fought as rivals — though an alchemist like Zosimos of Panopolis could already write with Gnostic and Hermetic language in the same breath, and later esoteric imagination drew all three together into a single lineage of saving knowledge.

The family also has cousins and survivors. The Mandaeans, a baptizing community of the Middle East with a cognate mythology of light, exile, and saving knowledge, continue to this day — the living remnant of the wider Iranian–Mesopotamian gnosis. Manichaeism, founded by the prophet Mani in the third century, organized a kindred dualism into a missionary religion of light. And the medieval dualists — the Bogomils of the Balkans and the Cathars of Languedoc, the Albigenses whom the Church ultimately stamped out — have drawn the comparison ever since, their enemies accusing them of the same traits, though whether any direct line of descent connects them to the ancient schools remains disputed.

The modern afterlife began among the Theosophists. G. R. S. Mead, working within the Theosophical movement, translated the Pistis Sophia and gathered the whole pre-Nag-Hammadi record into Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1900; second edition 1906), a learned synthesis that pressed the scattered schools into a single perennial “Gnosis” — the frame through which English readers met the material for half a century, and one that current scholarship handles with care. Carl Jung approached the myths from the side of the psyche, reading the fall of Sophia, the sleeping spark, and the call from beyond as the soul’s own story of fragmentation and awakening; through him, and after him Gilles Quispel, the Demiurge and the archons entered the vocabulary of depth psychology.

The career of the category

The category itself has a documented career, and the scholarship that built and then broke it now belongs to the subject. Hans Jonas’s Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (1934), reworked in English as The Gnostic Religion (Beacon Press, 1958), read all the systems as one existential posture — the alien God against the world, the human being a stranger thrown into it — and defined the mid-century picture. The colloquium convened at Messina in April 1966, whose proceedings Ugo Bianchi edited as Le Origini dello Gnosticismo (Brill, 1967), proposed reserving “Gnosticism” for the second-century systems and “gnosis” for the broader knowledge of divine mysteries; parts of the field later judged the definition almost unusable in a historical sense. Bentley Layton’s The Gnostic Scriptures (Doubleday, 1987; second edition with David Brakke, Yale University Press, 2021) gave the texts their standard critical anthology and argued that gnostikoi was the self-designation of one identifiable sect — the corpus modern scholars call Sethian — whose literary history John D. Turner reconstructed stage by stage in Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition (Presses de l’Université Laval / Peeters, 2001), from a baptizing speculation around Barbelo to the Platonizing treatises that reached Plotinus’s seminar. The demolition came from Michael Allen Williams, whose Rethinking “Gnosticism” (Princeton University Press, 1996) showed that the traits alleged to unify the category — anti-cosmism, libertinism, protest exegesis — fail across the primary sources, and proposed “biblical demiurgical traditions” in its place; Karen L. King’s What Is Gnosticism? (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) then traced how the category had been manufactured out of heresiology and passed down through Ferdinand Christian Baur, Harnack, the history-of-religions school, and Jonas. David Brakke’s The Gnostics (Harvard University Press, 2010) marks the influential middle position — retire the umbrella, keep “the Gnostics” for the school that plausibly used the name — and Aviram Sariel’s “Jonasian Gnosticism”, in the Harvard Theological Review (116:1, 2023), carries the historiography up to the present, anatomizing how Jonas’s construction rose and came under siege. What survives every dismantling is narrower and harder: 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 movement’s fortunes are easiest to read in one figure. Valentinus came to Rome as one of the most brilliant Christian teachers of his generation and left the record as a condemned heretic, his school divided, his teaching preserved for seventeen centuries chiefly in the summaries and rebuttals of his opponents. Then the jar at Nag Hammadi opened, and in its first codex lay the Gospel of Truth, a work close enough to his reported teaching that many scholars hear the master’s own voice in it. The bishops kept the churches; Egypt kept the codices — and the question Williams and King forced, of whether the category names anything at all, is now argued over a shelf of primary texts that no heresiologist ever meant posterity to have.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (2nd ed. 1906) · Pistis Sophia (Mead, 1921) · Mead — Simon Magus: An Essay (1892) · Mead — The Gnostic John the Baptizer (1924) · Plotinus — Against the Gnostics (Ennead II.9, MacKenna) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Nous · Emanation · Nag Hammadi Library · Dualism · Aeon · Abraxas · Irenaeus · Basilides · Marcion Of Sinope · Simon Magus · Mandaeism