Gnosticism

What the ancient teachers grouped under this name share, to the extent that they share anything, is a diagnosis. The human problem is not sin, and not disobedience, but ignorance. Human beings do not know what they are, where they came from or how to get back, and what saves is gnosis, a knowledge that is not information but recognition, the kind of knowing in which one wakes up rather than learns a fact.

The reason for the predicament is usually a defective creation. The visible world was not made by the highest god. Above and beyond it is an unknowable source, and around that source the pleroma, the fullness, containing ranked pairs of divine beings called aeons. Something goes wrong within the pleroma, in the Valentinian version, the aeon Sophia, wisdom, attempts something beyond her station and produces a misbegotten offspring outside it. That offspring is the demiurge, the craftsman who makes the material world, ignorant of what is above him and announcing that he is the only god. He is not usually depicted as evil so much as limited and arrogant, which is the more interesting version of the idea.

The human being is therefore a mixture: a divine spark or seed, of the same substance as the world above, encased in a body and a psyche belonging to the demiurge's world. The spark is dormant and must be woken. A revealer descends from the pleroma to wake it, passing through the ranks of hostile powers, the archons, who govern the planetary spheres and obstruct the soul's return. In Christian versions of the system that revealer is Christ, whose function is to teach rather than to atone; the crucifixion is often marginal or reinterpreted, and in some texts he does not suffer at all.

The consequences run all the way down. If the maker of the world is not the highest god, the scriptures that praise him as such are at best partial, and several of these teachers read the Hebrew Bible against its own grain, treating the serpent of Eden as a benefactor and the prohibition as an attempt to keep humanity ignorant. If matter is not the work of the highest god, the body has no ultimate claim, although what follows from that in practice is disputed, and the ancient charge that these groups were therefore libertine is among the least reliable things reported about them.

For most of the history of the subject, everything known about these groups came from their enemies. The heresiologists (Irenaeus of Lyon in the later second century, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Epiphanius in the fourth), wrote to refute, and they organised their material accordingly: as a family tree of error descending from Simon Magus, with each teacher a corruption of the last. They quote real texts, and where their quotations can now be checked they are often accurate, but they select for absurdity, they impose a genealogy for polemical reasons, and they attribute practices to their opponents that no opponent describes of himself.

This changed in December 1945 near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, where a jar was found containing thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices in Coptic, some fifty-two tractates, translated from Greek and copied in the fourth century. The find included the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Truth and much else. For the first time these writings could be read as their authors wrote them, in something close to their own order and proportion, rather than as excerpts chosen by hostile readers.

What the texts showed complicated the picture rather than confirming it. The variety is much greater than the heresiologists suggested, the schemes do not reduce to a single system, and several of the tractates are not obviously Christian at all while others are Platonic, or Hermetic, or Sethian in a way that cuts across the older categories. The libertinism alleged by the opponents is nowhere in evidence; ascetic discipline is common.

This produced the central methodological argument of the modern field. Michael Williams, in 1996, argued that the category itself should be dismantled, on the grounds that it has no agreed definition, that the groups placed in it do not share a common set of features, and that almost none of them used the name of themselves. Karen King made a related case in 2003, tracing how the category was built by heresiologists in order to define orthodoxy by contrast, and then inherited uncritically by modern scholarship. Others have defended a narrower use, restricting the term to a specific body of texts and to the group Irenaeus reports as calling themselves gnostikoi.

No settlement has been reached, and this is a live disagreement rather than a resolved one. The practical effect is that careful writing now tends to name specific groups and texts (Valentinian, Sethian, Basilidean), and to use the general term with an acknowledgement that it is a modern construct.

The best-attested teachers are individuals with schools. Valentinus, an Alexandrian who taught at Rome around the middle of the second century, was by one report nearly elected bishop there; his followers, including Ptolemy and Heracleon, remained inside the churches, produced the earliest known commentary on the Gospel of John, and elaborated the most refined version of the pleroma scheme. Basilides, also Alexandrian and slightly earlier, taught a system that the sources describe in two incompatible ways, which is itself a warning about the sources. The Sethians, named for their descent from Seth, are a textual grouping rather than a documented institution, and the Apocryphon of John is their key document.

Marcion is regularly listed alongside these and does not belong there. He distinguished the just god of the Hebrew scriptures from the good and previously unknown god revealed by Jesus, and he assembled the first known fixed Christian canon by editing Luke and ten letters of Paul. But he had no pleroma, no aeons, no divine spark in humanity and no doctrine of saving knowledge. He was a scriptural critic who built a church, and that church survived for centuries.

Movements later called gnostic are best treated case by case. Manichaeism, founded by Mani in third-century Mesopotamia, is a genuinely independent world religion built on a dualist scheme and is not a branch of anything here. Mandaeism survives in Iraq, Iran and diaspora and is the only living religion of this type from antiquity. The medieval Bogomils and Cathars held a dualist theology and rejected the material creation, and older scholarship posited a chain of transmission from late antiquity through the Balkans to Languedoc; that chain is now widely doubted, and some historians argue that the Cathars as described are substantially a construction of the inquisitors who suppressed them.

The modern reception has been vigorous. C. G. Jung read these texts as psychological documents, and the codex named after him was the first of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts to be published. Small ecclesiastical bodies have revived gnostic liturgy since the late nineteenth century. Elaine Pagels's popular treatment in 1979 brought the material to a wide readership, and the texts now circulate far beyond the academy, often flattened into a single doctrine that the sources themselves do not support.