Gnosticism

“Gnosticism” is a modern label for a range of religious movements of the second and third centuries CE, mostly within or alongside early Christianity, that placed special value on gnosis, Greek for “knowledge”. This was not book learning but a saving insight into the true nature of God, the world and the self. Many of these groups taught that the highest God is utterly beyond the material world, which was made by a lesser and often ignorant creator, the demiurge.

In myths preserved from the circles scholars call Sethian, the divine realm, the pleroma (“fullness”), is filled with emanations called aeons. One of them, Sophia (“Wisdom”), acts without her partner’s consent, and from this fault comes a flawed creator, sometimes named Yaldabaoth, who shapes the material cosmos and rules it through his powers. Sparks of divine light are nonetheless trapped in human beings, and a saviour, often identified with Christ, descends to awaken them to their true origin. Teachers associated with such ideas include Basilides in Alexandria and Valentinus, who taught in Rome in the mid-second century and whose followers formed a learned and influential school.

These movements were vigorously opposed by other Christian leaders. Around 180 CE Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon wrote a long work, usually called Against Heresies, whose full title speaks of exposing “knowledge falsely so called”; later writers such as Hippolytus and Epiphanius added further accounts. As the church that became orthodox consolidated its creeds and scriptures in the fourth century, these groups faded, though related ideas reappeared in Manichaeism and later dualist movements.

For centuries Gnostic teachings were known almost entirely through their opponents, whose accounts were polemical. That changed with manuscript discoveries. The Bruce and Askew codices reached Britain in the eighteenth century, and the Berlin Codex, containing the Gospel of Mary, was acquired in 1896. Above all, in 1945 local farmers near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt found thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices in Coptic, copied in the fourth century and containing more than fifty texts, among them the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, the Secret Book of John and Hermetic and Platonic writings.

These books allowed scholars to read such groups in their own words, and they revealed more variety than the heresy-hunters suggested. Some texts are mythological, others meditative or ethical; the Gospel of Thomas, often grouped with them, is a collection of sayings of Jesus with no elaborate creation myth. Scholars such as Michael Williams and Karen King have therefore questioned whether “Gnosticism” describes a single religion at all, noting that the word was coined only in the seventeenth century. Many now prefer to speak of specific groups, such as Sethians and Valentinians, or use the term with care.

Origins are also debated. Earlier scholars proposed pre-Christian roots in Iranian or Babylonian religion. Most now see these movements as emerging from the meeting of Jewish scripture and interpretation, Platonic philosophy and early Christian belief in the cosmopolitan cities of the Roman Empire.

One community often described as Gnostic still exists: the Mandaeans, who revere John the Baptist and practise repeated baptism in flowing water. Long settled in southern Iraq and south-western Iran, many have been forced by war and persecution to emigrate and now live in Australia, Europe and North America. Scholars debate how closely their tradition relates to the ancient movements.

In the modern West, gnosis has been taken up in many forms. Nineteenth-century occultists and Theosophists admired the Gnostics as keepers of a suppressed wisdom, and small Gnostic churches were founded in France from the 1890s. Carl Jung saw Gnostic myths as expressions of the psyche. The publication of the Nag Hammadi texts in English in 1977, followed by Elaine Pagels’s prize-winning The Gnostic Gospels (1979), brought them to a wide audience.

Gnostic themes, such as a false world ruled by deceptive powers and a hidden spark awakened by knowledge, echo through modern literature and film, from the novels of Philip K. Dick to The Matrix (1999). Mainstream Christian churches continue to regard the classical Gnostic systems as departing from orthodox teaching, while some contemporary spiritual seekers find in them a vision of personal awakening. Historians try to do justice to both, reading the texts as evidence of the remarkable diversity of early Christianity.