chistory_gnosticism

Pure Gnosticism, unlike the other forms of Gnosticism, was a radical dualism of mind and matter, light and darkness, good and evil. This radical dualism gave the theology, cosmology, anthropology, soteriology and ethics of Gnosticism a distinctive character.

1.  Theology. According to the gnostic doctrine of God, God is absolutely transcendent. He (or It) is utterly alien in nature to the world, which he neither created nor governs (absolutely no immanence). God is the complete antithesis to the world as light is the opposite of darkness. This absolutely transcendent God is totally hidden from all creatures and is unknowable by natural concepts. Knowledge of God requires supernatural illumination, and even then can hardly be expressed except in negative terms.

2.  Cosmology. The world, according to Gnosticism, is the work of lowly powers who do not know the utterly transcendent God and who obstruct the knowledge of Him or It in the cosmos over which they rule. The gnostic conception of the universe is roughly what we might call Ptolemaic. Around and above the world are the cosmic spheres (most often seven, but sometimes multiplied to vast numbers) arrange like concentric enclosing spheres. The significance of this cosmic architecture is that everything which intervenes between here and the beyond serves to separate man from God. The celestial spheres are the seats of the Archons (rulers), especially the seven planetary gods borrowed from Babylonian astrology. The Archons collectively rule over the world and each individually in his sphere is like a warder of a prison, each celestial sphere like a ward of the prison, and earth like the inner-most ward or dungeon. Their tyrannical world-rule, called Destiny or Fate, is physically the law of nature and morally the law of “justice” as imperfectly exemplified in the Mosaic law which issued from the “world-creating angels” (Jehovah) for the enslavement of man. As guardian of his sphere, each Archon bars the passage to the souls who seek to ascend after death in order to prevent their escape from the world. The Archons are sometimes presented as the creators of the world although more often under the influence of Platonic philosophy (especially that of Plato’s Timaeus) from which the doctrine is borrowed that the Demiurge (artificer) is responsible for the creation of the world.

3.  Anthropology. Man, according to Gnosticism, is composed of body, soul and spirit. The body and soul are the product of the cosmic powers, which shaped the body in imitation of the divine Primal Man and animated it with their own psychical forces: these together make up the astral soul of man, his psyche. Through his body and soul man is a part of the world and subject to destiny or fate. Enclosed in the body and soul is the spirit, or pneuma, a portion of the divine substance which has fallen into the world. In its cosmic exile, thus imprisoned in the soul and body, the “inner man” as an alien element is unconscious of itself, stupefied, asleep or intoxicated by the poison of the world; in brief, it is “ignorant.”

4.  Soteriology. The spirit of man imprisoned in the soul and body, and ignorant from whence it came finds salvation from this condition in two stages. In this present life salvation is an awakening which is affected through “knowledge.” Salvation is by knowledge and hence the name of this movement — Gnosticism — which is derived from the Greek word gnostikos, one who has gnosis, “knowledge.”. This knowledge is not ordinary or scientific knowledge but a special and higher kind of knowledge about the transmundane God and about man himself. This knowledge has been withheld from man by his very situation, since “ignorance” is the essence of mundane existence. Hence the necessity of divine illumination or revelation. The bearer of this divine revelation is a messenger from the world of light who penetrates the barrier of the spheres, outwits the Archons, awakens the spirit from its earthly slumber, and imparts to it the saving knowledge “from without.” (In the Christian Gnosticisms this savior-messenger is identified with the Christ.) Equipped with this saving gnosis the “inner man” or the spirit of man is prepared for the second stage of its salvation, the liberation from the bonds of the world at death and the return to its own native realm of light. The gnosis is the potent formula for overcoming the “gate-keepers” who would hinder the soul after death on its journey to the realm of light. As it travels upward the spirit leaves behind at each sphere the psychical “vestment” contributed by it on the spirit’s downward flight at birth: thus the spirit is stripped of all foreign accretions such as individual personal identity until it reaches God beyond the world and becomes reunited with and absorbed into the divine substance.

5.  Ethics. In this life, the general principle of gnostic conduct is hostility toward the world. The world and the body are evil and the source of the ignorance and the cause of the slumber of the soul. From this principle two contrary ways of ethical conduct could and have been drawn: the ascetic and the libertine. The ascetic way deduces from the possession of the gnosis the obligation to avoid further contamination by the world and therefore tries to reduce its use and contact to a minimum. The libertine way derives from the same possession the privilege of the absolute freedom: to the spiritual all things are permitted, since the law as representing the will of the Demiurge does not obligate the spirit, which is “saved in its nature” by the possession of saving knowledge and can neither be soiled by its conduct nor frightened by the threat of archontic retribution.

Because of the similarity of language but not the spirit, the pure gnostic considers the writings of the Apostle John as expressing the true interpretation of Christianity. In the period of the early church this pure form of Gnosticism as a Christian heresy is found in the writings and teachings of Basilides and Valentinus.