Gnosticism and the History of Religions

David G. Robertson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350137714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Building on critical work in biblical studies, which shows how a historically-bounded heretical tradition called Gnosticism was 'invented', this work focuses on the following stage in which it was "essentialised" into a sui generis, universal category of religion. At the same time, it shows how Gnosticism became a religious self-identifier, with a number of sizable contemporary groups identifying as Gnostics today, drawing on the same discourses. This book provides a history of this problematic category, and its relationship with scholarly and popular discourse on religion in the twentieth century. It uses a critical-historical method to show how and why Gnosis, Gnostic and Gnosticism were taken up by specific groups and individuals – practitioners and scholars – at different times. It shows how ideas about Gnosticism developed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, drawing from continental phenomenology, Jungian psychology and post-Holocaust theology, to be constructed as a perennial religious current based on special knowledge of the divine in a corrupt world. David G. Robertson challenges how scholars interact with the category Gnosticism, and contributes to our understanding of the complex relationship between primary sources, academics and practitioners in category formation.

1 Against all heresies: Gnosticism before modern scholarship

The first appearance of Gnostics in history is in the work of Irenaeus (c.130–c.202 CE), a Greek-speaking Christian from Smyrna in modern Turkey.¹ He was a fierce defender of the primacy of the Roman church and the earliest surviving source to stress the primacy of the four canonical Gospels we know today. He became the bishop of Lyon around 177 CE and is regarded with such importance that he is a saint for both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Shortly after his ordainment, Irenaeus wrote the ‘Unmasking and Overthrow of So-Called Knowledge’, more commonly known by the title of a later Latin translation, Adversus Haereses.² The Greek original is now lost, but the complete Latin translation dating from around 380 CE exists in three manuscripts, the earliest of which is from the tenth or eleventh century.³ Adversus Haereses may have drawn from earlier works, including a no-longer-extant work by Justin Martyr, but regardless, its impact on later heresiologists, and on the category Gnosticism, can still be felt today.⁴

Irenaeus was writing at a time when Christianity was entering a period of consolidation and systematization. The establishment of an ecumenical hierarchy was only just beginning, and the formalization of Christian theology in the Nicene Creed was still a century and a half in the future. Irenaeus was an advocate for a systematic theology out of the developing canon of texts – the four Gospels, as well as Acts, the Pauline letters and Revelation. While it is common for Irenaeus to be presented as a staunch defender of an established orthodox tradition, John Behr argues that Irenaeus was rather representing an emerging, if unarticulated, self-understanding among Christian leaders and establishing a unity in belief, even where there was still diversity in practice.⁵ Indeed, his presentation of orthodoxy and its others in Adversus Haereses was rather innovative – as the need for five volumes to argue for it might suggest.⁶ Yet in forcefully presenting orthodoxy, Irenaeus also constructed all others as heresy.

Hairesis was then generally used in Greek to refer to different schools of thought – Platonism, for example – but early Christian writers, lacking the institutional might that their fourth-century counterparts could rely upon, turned this neutral term into a negative by applying it to any interpretation other than what they understood to be ‘true’ Christianity. Therefore, a heretic became a ‘false Christian’. These debates over heresies were coeval with the enshrining of many of the theological and doctrinal factors considered fundamental by Christians today.⁷

The English word ‘gnosis’ is derived from the Greek γνῶσις, usually translated as ‘knowledge’, and was in common usage among Christians, Platonists and those identified as Gnostics alike in Antiquity. Its fine-grained meaning shifted over that period, however. For Platonists, gnosis was the original knowledge of the human condition, now lost, but potentially recoverable. But in many philosophical schools – haireses – of Late Antiquity, such as Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and some Jewish and Christian groups – including, but not exclusively, those we now refer to as gnostic – gnosis came to signify divinely revealed knowledge, exclusive to initiates.⁸

The idea that faith and gnosis make up a dialectical pair, with conformist Christians having one and ‘true Christians’ the other, is present in these early writings, but is by no means the only or even the predominant dialectic – righteous/unrighteous, pure/defiled, blind/enlightened all also feature.⁹ For example, Pauline Christians, who particularly stressed the importance of faith, frequently employed gnosis too – the author of the Epistle of Barnabas sought to give his readers gnosis as well as faith,¹⁰ and for Clement of Alexandria, gnosis was the aim of the Christian life.¹¹ Both of these are considered examples of what would later become mainstream Christian theology.

In 1 Timothy 6:20, on the other hand, we see evidence of schisms emerging and perhaps even new revelation being claimed under the term ‘gnosis’, here with the familiar accusatory ‘falsely so-called’ epithet:

Turn a deaf ear to empty and irreligious chatter, and the contradictions of knowledge (gnosis) so-called, for by laying claim to it, some have strayed far from the faith.¹²

Clement and others use the term to refer to ‘spiritually mature Christians who had attained an advanced philosophical understanding of Christianity’.¹³ So Irenaeus’s ‘gnosis falsely so-called’ should be read as a mocking rejection of such claims, functioning something along the lines of the way that ‘pseudoscience’ or ‘fake news’ does today. Gnosis was not the problem, but rather the illegitimacy of these particular claims to gnosis.

The first volume of Adversus Haereses is a catalogue of heretical schools, and the four subsequent volumes argue against specific heretical positions. Theologically speaking, Irenaeus’s charges were threefold:

1. That the heretic so-called Gnostics rejected the Hebrew God as the creator and ruler of the cosmos;

2. That they rejected the physical suffering of Jesus (were docetics, in other words);

3. That they rejected the need for morally good works, as a spiritual elite would be saved regardless.¹⁴

Irenaeus uses the term hoi gnostikoi (the Gnostics) to refer to them throughout the first volume, though not exclusively. He does not use hoi gnostikoi consistently, however. Only once, in 1.25.6, does he refer clearly to a self-designation: the followers of one Marcellina, who ‘call themselves Gnostics’, though this could be a general description – and a rather mocking one at that – rather than the name of the group (as, e.g., ‘Robertson, who calls himself a historian’). These Marcellina Gnostics created images of Jesus which they worshipped alongside Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. Elsewhere are a number of references to ‘a group (hairesis) called gnostic’, which might indicate self-designation, designation by others or, again, a more general description.

Significantly, in 1.11.1, Valentinus (c.100–c.160 CE) is described as adapting the ideas of this hairesis called gnostic and formalizing them into a school. Valentinus’s ideas were popular in Rome, and there were Valentinian communities in Syria, Egypt and southern Gaul.¹⁵ Valentinian theology – known to us only through fragments and the developments of his students – posited that humans were divided into three groupings: the spiritual, the psychical and the material.¹⁶ Those of a spiritual nature could receive gnosis, enabling them to return to the pleroma (fullness; here understood as the totality of the various emanations from the unknowable god), while those of a psychic nature (i.e. non-Valentinian Christians) would receive a lesser form of salvation. There was no hope for those of a purely material nature. Valentinus also developed an emanationist cosmogony – that is, in which the cosmos emanates outwards in a series of levels from the unitary Godhead – similar to that of the Neoplatonic writer Plotinus. Irenaeus tells us this cosmogony, replete with the now-familiar Aeons (lower deities) Sophia (Wisdom) and the demiurge (or Yaldaboath), was shared with ‘falsely-called Gnostics’ of whom he will later speak. Note that here the problem again is not with gnosis per se, but rather with gnosis ‘falsely so-called’.¹⁷ In fact, Irenaeus equates ‘true Gnosis’ with Catholic Christianity:

True Gnosis is that which consists in the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient constitution of the church throughout the whole world, and the character of the body of Christ according to the succession of bishops, by which they have handed down that which exists everywhere.¹⁸

Irenaeus may be describing the group who inspired Valentinus in 1.29–30, where he describes a ‘multitude of Gnostics’ who have arisen from the followers of Simon Magus and who worship an Aeon and its spirit, named Barbelo. At other times, however, he seems to be using gnostici/gnosticorum to refer to any or all heretical groups.¹⁹ Here then, Irenaeus’s charge is not to do with knowledge, but rather legitimacy. The problem is not that they are Gnostics; the problem is that they are the wrong kind of Gnostics, because their lineage is illegitimate. In contrast to the genealogy of the bishops of Rome, Irenaeus sets out an alternative genealogy back to Simon Magus. Irenaeus’s basic strategy continues to underpin historical scholarship on Gnosticism to this day:

Describing various texts and teachings, emphasising their differences from one another, while at the same time and despite clear recognition of their manifold differences connecting them in a linear genealogy to a single origin and a single essential character.²⁰

Later heresiological works drew heavily from Adversus Haereses. Hippolytus of Rome’s third-century Refutatio Omnium Haeresium adds many groups to Irenaeus’s list of he...