Gnosticism

No ancient person belonged to a religion called Gnosticism. The word was coined in the seventeenth century by the English philosopher Henry More, and modern scholars use it as an umbrella for a range of teachers, schools and texts of the second to fourth centuries. What they share, in varying degrees, is a conviction that salvation comes through gnosis, a revealed knowledge of the true God and of the divine spark within the self. Some ancient groups did call themselves ‘gnostics’, ‘those who know’, and the church father Irenaeus used the word for them; but the boundaries of the category remain hotly debated.

These movements grew in the lively religious world of the Roman Empire, above all in Alexandria and Syria, where Jewish scripture, Greek philosophy, especially Platonism, and the new Christian message met. Most of the known teachers saw themselves as Christians, often as Christians with a deeper understanding. Basilides taught in Alexandria in the early second century. Valentinus, an Egyptian, taught in Rome from about 136 to 160 and was reportedly once considered for the office of bishop; his followers, the Valentinians, formed the most influential school. Other texts, which scholars group as ‘Sethian’, gave a central role to Seth, the third son of Adam, and drew heavily on Jewish speculation about Genesis.

Gnostic texts tell a story of how the world came to be that differs sharply from the plain reading of Genesis. Above everything is a perfect, unknowable God, the Father or Invisible Spirit. From this God flow paired divine beings, the aeons, who together make up the pleroma, the ‘fullness’ of the divine realm. The last of the aeons, Sophia, ‘Wisdom’, acts without her partner, in some versions out of a longing to know the Father, and her act gives rise to a flawed being outside the pleroma.

This being is the demiurge, the ‘craftsman’, named Yaldabaoth in the Apocryphon of John. Ignorant of the higher world, he makes the material cosmos with his powers, the archons, and boasts that he is the only God. Many Gnostic texts identify him with the creator God of the Hebrew Bible, a reading that their opponents found deeply offensive. Human beings, in this myth, carry a spark of light from the pleroma, trapped in bodies and in a world ruled by the archons.

Salvation is the awakening of that spark. A saviour comes from the realm of light, identified with Christ in Christian Gnostic texts, to remind humans of their origin. Those who receive this knowledge will, at death, rise past the archons and return to the pleroma. Some texts reinterpret biblical stories accordingly: the serpent in Eden can become a bringer of knowledge, and Eve an agent of awakening. Teachings varied greatly between schools, and the Valentinians, for instance, painted a gentler picture of the demiurge than the Sethians did.

For centuries these movements were known almost only through their critics. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around 180, set out their teachings in order to refute them, and later writers such as Hippolytus and Epiphanius added further reports. These works are invaluable but hostile, and scholars read them with care.

Everything changed in December 1945, when farmers digging near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt found a sealed jar containing thirteen leather-bound books. The codices, copied in Coptic in the fourth century, held about fifty-two texts, most of them previously unknown, among them the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Philip. Their owners may have buried them as stricter definitions of orthodoxy spread, though who they were, perhaps monks of a nearby monastery, is still debated. After long delays the whole collection was published in English in 1977.

The texts reveal something of Gnostic religious life. Valentinians met within or alongside ordinary Christian congregations and practised baptism and anointing; the Gospel of Philip speaks of a mysterious rite called the ‘bridal chamber’. Some texts teach the passwords the soul must speak to pass the archons. Many were meant to be read slowly and meditated upon, as guides to inner transformation.

The Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the best known of the finds, is not a story of Jesus’ life but a collection of 114 sayings attributed to him, some close to those in the New Testament gospels and others unfamiliar. Scholars disagree about its date and whether it should be called Gnostic at all. The Gospel of Truth, which some attribute to Valentinus himself, is a meditation on how ignorance of the Father is dispelled by knowledge. The Apocryphon of John, which survives in four copies, sets out the full Sethian myth of creation and fall. Read together, these texts show that the people later called Gnostics were not a single sect but writers and communities exploring, in many different voices, what salvation and knowledge might mean.

As church leaders drew up lists of accepted scriptures and creeds in the third and fourth centuries, the Gnostic schools were condemned as heresies, and after Christianity became the favoured religion of the empire they lost ground steadily. By the fifth century little is heard of them in the Roman world, though related dualist ideas lived on in Manichaeism, a separate religion founded by Mani in the third century.

Later movements have often been called Gnostic. The medieval Cathars of southern France and northern Italy held a dualist view of a good God and an evil creator of the material world, and were destroyed by crusade and inquisition in the thirteenth century; historians, however, doubt that they descended directly from the ancient schools. The Mandaeans, who revere John the Baptist, practise repeated baptism in flowing water and keep scriptures such as the Ginza Rba, are often classed with Gnosticism by scholars. They are a living community, with their ancient homeland in southern Iraq and Iran and a growing diaspora in Europe, Australia and North America, and they understand their faith as a tradition in its own right.

Since 1945 Gnostic ideas have attracted wide interest, from the psychologist Carl Jung to novelists and filmmakers, and some small modern churches describe themselves as Gnostic. For historians, the Nag Hammadi library has above all shown how varied early Christianity was, and how many voices took part in the debates that shaped it. It has also prompted scholars to rethink the very category of Gnosticism: some prefer to speak simply of Valentinians, Sethians and other named groups, each studied on its own terms, rather than of one ancient religion that never existed as such.