GNOSTICISM

GNOSTICISM. Divided about its origins, many scholars hold that it was a first and second century movement deeply influenced by Persian dualism, mediated by heretical Jewish and Christian thought, elements of popular pagan religion, and a sort of middlebrow Platonism (q.v.). The result for Christianity (Christian gnosticism) was a pattern of religious thinking that, though it spawned a bewildering variety of systems, had certain common traits: 1) the assertion that the physical world is evil; therefore 2) that its creator is evil and not the God of Jesus Christ, who only appeared to be human; thus 3) that the Old Testament is the work of an evil Demiurge while the Gospel of Christ is the message of the Divine Being.

This dualism was further reflected in the division of human beings into two or three categories: the fleshly, i.e., those belonging wholly to this world and so immune to spiritual truth, and the spiritual, for whom Christ descended from the heavenly realm above this world of delusion. The spiritual are further divided into those who know the truth and those still unaware of who must receive the saving knowledge (q.v.), gnosis in Greek-hence the name of the movement. Gnosticism produced an immense literature, almost entirely lost until discovery of a 4th-c. cache of texts near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi in 1945 and 1946. The find included treatises, “gospels,” apocalypses, epistles, etc., many of which purported to come from an apostle, Mary Magdalene, or Christ himself.

The response of the Great Church (q.v.) to gnosticism was twofold. While pointing out the pagan features of gnosticism and its emphasis on secrecy, Irenaeus of Lyons (q.v.) defended the public and continuous institutional integrity of the Church, its sacraments and Scriptures (q.v.), limited to the four Gospels, the epistles of Paul, and the Old Testament (Septuagint) Scripture. His defense included a vigorous apology for the created goodness of the world, the reality of the Incarnation, and the Eucharist (q.v.) as the central affirmation confirming all the above. The Alexandrians, Clement and Origen (qq.v.), sought to redeem the authentic interests of gnosticism in the subjective and experiential by exploring the human psyche and presenting an ideal and method of Christian spirituality. Hence Clement produced an outline of the Christian (orthodox) “gnostic” that foreshadowed the enlightened elders of later monasticism (q.v.), while Origen employed allegory (q.v.) to interpret Scripture, in particular the Old Testament, into a journal and guidebook of the soul’s return to God. (For Russian gnosticism see Doukhobors.)