Gnosticism

JUSTIN M. LASSER

The term gnosticism derives from the Greek gnosis, which can be translated as “knowl­edge” or “wisdom.” Gnosis commanded a variety of uses and applications in pre­Christian Hellenistic schools. The concept of gnosis, however, was never the possession of any one school; nor did there ever exist a particular group that condemned gnosis per se; rather, each group of teachers in the ancient world sought to lay claim to the “true” gnosis in their own unique way. The knowledge expressed by gnosis is not some form of secret knowledge as is often assumed, but a certain enlightened perspective. The Orthodox claimed their own form of gnosis, as expressed by figures such as Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus of Lyons, whereas competing theologians, such as Valentinus and Herac- leon, claimed their own. The early Ortho­dox heresiologists were concerned with protecting their faithful from what they considered dangerous corruptions of Chris­tian theology. These early heresiologists wrote treatises detailing and exposing the theological systems of the “gnosis false so- called,” as Irenaeus and other fathers called it (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses; Tertullian,

On the Prescription of the Heretics; Hippol- ytus, Refutation of all Heresies). The modern term Gnosticism, and the presupposition that it was a single school of thought, is largely the creation of 19th-century schol­arship often falsely extrapolating data it has synthesized from the heresiologists’ hostile accounts. These presuppositions have been extensively challenged by contemporary scholarship.

For centuries scholars interested in the gnostics had to rely on the works of ancient writers who opposed the movement. This changed in 1945, however, with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in Upper Egypt near what was once the first Pachomian monastery at Chenoboskion. These codices challenged many of the pre­sentations of the early heresiologists. The Nag Hammadi collection contains a great variety of texts which cannot be described as gnostic in any meaningful sense (fragments of Plato’s Republic, the Sentences of Sextus, and so on). This discovery revealed that the Nag Hammadi library was not necessarily a “gnostic collection” in the first place, also that the gnostics were hardly a coherent or theologically consistent group. The Nag Hammadi codices produced two main currents of modern research in the study of the gnostics: the first seeks to harmonize the diverse Nag Hammadi texts into a coherent theological system, and the sec­ond seeks to attend to the uniqueness of each single treatise within the corpus of finds. Scholars working within the second trajectory have questioned the basic rele­vance of the term gnosticism altogether. From the close study of the Nag Hammadi texts it would seem that Irenaeus, in his time, was critiquing primarily one particu­lar gnostic group, those associated with the teacher Valentinus. Apart from Valentinus, about whom there is much confusion as to what he taught, there really exist only two groups of gnostics that can be discussed with any precision: the Manicheans and the Mandaeans, the latter of which still survives in modern Iraq.

The primary difference between early gnostic and Orthodox theology seems to concern the status of the material world. For the Orthodox, the material world is good (Gen. 1.31) and created directly by God, but for the gnostics the material world was generally the result of a cosmic accident, and produced at several removes from the True and beneficent God. This belief in the accidental character of materiality needs to be distinguished from the belief that the material world was evil; the latter being the position of Marcion and Mani, not necessarily held by all the gnostics. The Valentinian theology con­cluded from the evil and suffering that existed in the world that something drastic had gone wrong in its production.

In this theology Valentinus was attempting to “protect” God from the responsibility of cosmic disasters by radically demarcating the Unknown and Transcendent True God from the material world. The gnostic systems were generally more comfortable with per­sonifying the various attributes of God (hypostatization) than the early Orthodox fathers were, though Orthodox theology is itself familiar with this form of personifica­tion in relation to its biblically found exam­ples, such as the designation of the Wisdom of God as Sophia. Sophia also played a seminal role in many of the gnostic systems as the expression of the Wisdom of God as a distinct hypostasis (see St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses I, 2). Despite their hostile reaction to the gnostic teachers, the gnostic thinkers did provide the church with a significant part of the technical vocabu­lary that it would borrow and use itself in new ways to articulate the mysteries of the Divine Trinity.

The Orthodox anxiety about gnosticism in general faded away by the late 3rd century as the prolixity of philosophically specula­tive schools in Late Antiquity itself declined in the light of the massive economic collapse and the incessant civil wars that racked the 3rd-century empire. By the time of the new empire of Constantine, in the Golden Age of the fathers of the church, the Orthodox theologians were able to look back on Irenaeus as a definitive “response” to the problems of the Pseudo-Gnosis, even though he was no longer much read by that stage. It was Clement and Origen, however, who in many ways can be seen as bringing the best of the gnostic insights into the mainstream, and censuring what they saw as their greatest threats to Orthodoxy. Irenaeus had abstracted from his localized anti-gnostic reactions certain broader prin­ciples that he recommended and which would become constitutive of all later Orthodoxy. Three of them can be listed in particular. The first was the apostolic suc­cession of an ordered line of bishops. By this he meant bishops in a delineated tradition, a conservative line of teachers that the larger churches recognized and could list, a practice Eusebius underlines in his Church History, and thus which excluded specula­tive innovators from arising to proclaim “new” doctrine. The bishops were now afforded the sole right to speak for authen­tic Orthodox doctrine. Irenaeus thus put the episcopal principle of church authority on a significant new footing, which it would never lose in later Orthodox history. The second of the large anti-gnostic reactions was the underscoring of the need for a limit to what scriptures would be regarded as holy, and which would thus be read in the gatherings for worship. Irenaeus grea­tly advanced, therefore, the church’s pas­sage to a closed canon of scripture, which Athanasius, Gregory the Theologian, and Amphilokios helped to finalize with preci­sion in the late 4th century. Irenaeus, aided in this greatly by Origen and the later

Alexandrian fathers, made the focus of all Orthodox theology the earthly and directly personal incarnation of the Logos. This christocentricity gave Orthodox thought thereafter a very concrete and historical root­edness, less speculative and more grounded in the sayings tradition of the four gospels. Despite Origen’s popularizing of symbolic exegesis (in his deliberate attempt to bring Valentinian patterns of scripture commen­tary into the mainstream Orthodox world) the Orthodox largely rejected the Gnostic preference for highly symbolistic and cosmo­logical readings ofthe scriptures in preference for moral interpretations; and in affirming the substantive unity of Old and New Testaments, the Orthodox drew a strong line of connection between God as Maker and Sustainer, and the creation in which he was profoundly and continuingly involved. The first stanza of the Nicene Creed reflects this position starkly and boldly. The third principle was what Irenaeus called the priority of the regula fidei, or the manner in which established liturgical practice (especially the simple baptismal creed) ought to be held up against doctrinal spec­ulation as a rule or canon of judgment. All of these things became constitutive of mainline Orthodox belief.

So, while the Orthodox rejection ofmany Gnostic propositions helped them to affirm a more positive and direct link between God and the world, and taught them to erect as defensive shields the organizing principles of canonical scripture, episcopal authority, and the primacy of liturgy, nevertheless the story of the interaction is not all one way, and not entirely a question of whole­sale rejection. The wide ranging insights of the gnostic movements taught the Orthodox Church much about the impor­tance of establishing principles of exegesis. It also led many in the intellectual ascetic movement to treasure mystical insights concerning the vastly cosmic nature of the battle of good and evil, and the divine presence in the soul. Its encounter with gnosticism, in short, took Orthodox theo­logy out of its somewhat narrow perimeters of the 2nd century, towards a much larger perspective of thought appropriate to its new role, after the 4th century, as the main­stream of Christian religious reflection.

SEE ALSO: Apostolic Succession; Ecology; Episcopacy; Fatherhood of God; Heresy; Sophiology

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Edwards, M. J. (2009) Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press.

King, K. L. (2003) What is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lawson, J. (1948) The Biblical Theology of St. Irenaeus. London: SPCK.

Robinson, J. M. (ed.) (1990) The Nag Hammadi Library, revd. edn. San Francisco: Harper. Rudolph, K. (1987) Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism. San Francisco: Harper.

Steenburg, M. C. (2008) Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic Christ and the Saga of Redemption. Leiden: Brill.