Those Naughty Gnostics

Demiurge, by Ymir

Creeps and Scoundrels: Gnosticism

A Reading from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians:

Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies …

He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

A Reading from Leaves in the Wind, by David Bentley Hart:

There is much to find odd and often even risible in ancient gnostic sources, no doubt. The mythopoeic excesses are difficult to love, as are the seeming metaphysical deficits. But no one truly familiar with, say, The Apocryphon of John or The Gospel of Truth could possibly think that the passion pervading the gnostic literature of the early Christian centuries is a hope for some pathetic diachronic perpetuity in some illusory Neverland.

Rather, it is a passion for truth in its eternal splendor, a longing for spiritual deliverance from all illusion, as well as a yearning to be freed from the merely successive time of death (chronos) and granted entry into the fully realized divine aeonian time above, where the redeemed spirit might come to know the divine fullness (the pleroma) in its true glory. It is the longing for reconciliation with the one true God, beyond the heavens of the fallen order.

Far from being a desire for mere personal immortality, it is a hunger for communion with the divine, even if it is also encumbered by a tragic sense of all the malignant powers around us that seek to prevent that communion from coming to pass.

It is the same hope that was cherished by all the early Christians as well, darkened by the same anxieties regarding the cosmic “archons” who serve “the god of this cosmos” (2 Corinthians 4:4). In the case of those we call “gnostics,” both that hope and those anxieties might have been understood in excessively dualistic terms; but even that, arguably, differed from the more “orthodox” narrative only by degree.

Here ends the reading.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Welcome back to Creeps and Scoundrels, our midweek Lenten catechetical series on the Christian heresies that shaped Christian orthodoxy. By learning a bit about what the Church would not teach, we discover why we proclaim what we do. So far we’ve covered Marcionism—the notion that Christianity must be purged of any and all Jewish influence—as well as its opposite extreme, Judaizing—the idea that one could only become a Christian by first becoming Jewish.

Tonight we’re going to talk about Gnosticism, which is about as close to sexy as a heresy gets. Gnosticism proves perennially popular. Gnosis means “secret knowledge” in Greek, and that’s precisely what Gnosticism offers: the hidden history of Christianity, the conspiracy that bishops don’t want you to know, the real deal Mrs Peel. And there’s a significant draw to that, isn’t there? We all want the inside scoop. It makes us feel special, makes us feel smart.

When I was a young warthog, back in my undergraduate days, Gnosticism held pride of place as one of the four or five primal heresies, the earliest of Christian debates. Here’s how it went. The Gnostics, we were told, believed that the world was so bad, that matter was so corruptible and base, that it couldn’t have been made by God, not by the true God, who is of course Spirit and Truth.

Thus the earth as we know it had to have been made by some other, darker, lesser spirit. And mythologies grew up to explain this. The most popular one had to do with Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, an emanation or angel of God, who wanted to create something beautiful on her own, independent of the Creator. Alas, the only offspring she produced was misshapen, wicked, evil. Ialdabaoth, they called him, a name of unknown etymology.

Ialdabaoth tore his mother apart and scattered the shards of her spirit throughout the material cosmos, which he then shaped in his image as demiurge. And he told the inhabitants of this fallen world of his that he was their creator, he was their god. Yet sparks of Wisdom, of Sophia, lived on in the souls of the select few, who through secret knowledge could escape this material world and rise to realms above.

That’s how I was taught Gnosticism: that they thought anything physical was bad, and that salvation is a hidden gift offered only to the select few. This is still a popular notion today, as evidenced by bestsellers like The Da Vinci Code. Secret knowledge, right? Even neopaganism builds on this, constantly insisting, against all historical evidence to the contrary, that Christian holidays have secret pagan roots, so that Easter is Ishtar and Santa is Odin and other such balderdash. And we eat it up, don’t we? We love a good conspiracy theory.

A further offshoot or outgrowth of gnostic thought was called Docetism, from δόκησις, meaning “appearance” or “phantom.” Docetists believed that Jesus Christ was pure spirit sent from the true God above to save us from this fallen world—but that He never became human. He never truly incarnated, because of course flesh, base matter, was corrupted, filthy, wicked. And so Jesus only appeared to be human, appeared to suffer, appeared to be crucified. Yet it was all an illusion, and Christ a phantasm. He was never really one of us.

While Gnosticism as a term appears more popular than ever—both as a pejorative and also as a selling point, depending on your audience—it has rather fallen out of favor in academic circles. That’s because it creates more heat than light. As a blanket term, “gnostic” covers so much ground that scholars these days tend to ask whether Gnosticism as such, as any sort of cohesive movement, can be said to have existed at all. Others just fling the name around at anything they tend to dislike.

Insofar as it represents a yearning to ascend into greater truth, greater fulness, greater life, indeed communion with the divine, it must surely be a good and Christian calling. We’re all at least a little bit gnostic in that sense. But the excesses associated with Gnosticism—its extreme dualism, its revulsion toward the fleshly and physical, its denial of Jesus’ humanity—these we cannot endorse, let alone teach. The scandal of the Incarnation is a hard pill to swallow; yet it’s the only thing that makes Christianity worthwhile.

Our whole deal, our entire worldview, is predicated upon the notion that this poor, itinerant, outlawed, executed Middle Eastern Jew is in fact God Almighty; and that the symbol of His ignominious murder, sanctioned by state-sponsored terror, represents the ultimate triumph of life over death, truth over falsehood, liberation over slavery, and self-giving love over violence, greed, cruelty, and oppression.

The punch of that story, the Good News of the Gospel, only makes sense if Jesus is fully, truly human and fully, truly God. He is the Creator become part of Creation. The notion that He would never deign to join us in the flesh, to suffer at our hands and for our sake, to taste death once for all, robs love of its teeth. What God does for us in Jesus Christ is never an illusion. Rather, He is truth incarnate, truth made flesh.

This is no secret to be hidden beneath a basket. This to be shouted from the rooftops! This is the God-Man raised upon the Cross to draw all the world unto Him! So while we affirm the goodness of the universal human desire for Heaven, while we affirm the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Church rejects Gnostic notions of salvation as a secret, along with Docetist decrees that Christ was God but never Man.

Jesus is the new Adam, the new humanity, the New Creation. As all in Adam die, so all in Christ shall be made alive. It’s not just that Jesus is human; it’s that He’s more human than we are, the only truly human being. He is whom we’re meant to be. And thanks be to God: for in becoming one of us, Christ makes all of us one in Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.