Gnosticism

         “Psst! Hey, buddy!” [loud whisper]

         “Yeah, what’s up?”

         Looks around, conspiratorially, “Wanna know the secret?”

         “I mean, yeah, who doesn’t want to know a secret?”

         “No, no, not the indefinite article, ‘a’ secret, the definite article, ‘the’ secret!”

         “Look, grammar really isn’t my strong suit.”

         “Don’t sweat it, all will be revealed if you follow me. Also, you owe me fifty bucks.”

         “But you haven’t told me anything yet.”

         “Haven’t I?” [chuckles]… “Haven’t I?” [hearty chuckles]… ‘Haven’t I?” [Okay, now the chuckling is         
         getting creepy]

t’s attractive, isn’t it? That there is secret, hidden knowledge available to a few, select individuals and that you have been invited to share in its mysteries. If the great temptation of Christian theologians is to seek to overexplain and eliminate any hint of ambiguity, who furiously fret at the hem of anything that smacks of ‘mystery,’ unraveling as much as they can and sweeping anything leftover under the rug, thereby winding up in heresy, there is another path to heresy when people don’t understand Christianity as a unity within itself. In other words, if we are free to take stuff that we like and excise the parts we don’t, we wind up as heretics.   

Gnosticism was a syncretic religion, which meant it took bits and bobs of various religious and philosophical systems, like someone at a spiritual Golden Corral, filling their plate with carbs and sweets and leaving behind the vegetables. Although the origins of Gnosticism are still disputed, it developed early on in the church’s history, rising in its first hundred years until being stamped out as the first heresy in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

What we know of its teachings are largely due to the arguments against it. It seems to have been a system that prized personal revelation above scripture. It held that matter was evil, and the demiurge[1] (associated with Yahweh of the Old Testament) rose up against the Spiritual World, and the ‘divine spark’ was dislodged from the Spiritual Reality and lodged in human beings. Jesus (Logos[2]) was sent to restore the souls with the divine spark back to the spiritual world by rejecting material things through revelation of special, divine knowledge (gnosis[3]).

While a theologian might wish for a systematic exploration and understanding of the Faith, there is another tendency in mankind and that is the desire for esoteric, hidden knowledge. Knowledge that isn’t available from books, not handed down through the Church, but instead, is revealed through personal revelation and has been hidden from those who can’t understand and is only available to a select, special few, which you can be part of, if you follow ‘the path’ (usually, for a price).

The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are fairly unique in the history of religion. Most religions have tended towards what scholars refer to as ‘mystery cults,’ unwritten, hidden, esoteric knowledge bestowed on a select few who have spent time (and considerable money) in its pursuit.

 Today, we typically call any tendency to see the material world as ‘bad’ and to see humans not as a being composed as Soul & Body but merely a Soul trapped in a Body as ‘gnostic’. As such, Gnosticism still plagues us to this day. But apart from its theological errors, the tendency of us to pick and choose parts of Scripture, to combine various religions and philosophies, to develop systems that require the adherent to abandon the Church and instead follow individual fulfillment that can only be achieved by various gurus and the like will forever be a problem as long as there are men and women on the Earth.

The gnostic tendency is to bifurcate the spiritual from the flesh and place it solely, not in the soul, but the mind. It then, ironically, sets up a part of the body as arbiter of one’s spiritual progress, the emotions. The orthodox position has always held that the Will should be in charge of one’s emotions and that the arbiter of one’s spiritual progress should be God Himself and the proof of that should be born out in one’s relationship with God and others in love.  

[1]  From demiurgus, a Latinised form of the Greek δημιουργός or dēmiurgós, meaning ‘maker’ or ‘crafter,’ appeared in Plato’s Timaeus.

[2] Λόγος, or logos in Ancient Greek meant ‘word’ or ‘reason.’ Refering to Jesus as ‘the logos’ is derived from John’s Gospel, chapter 1, verse 1: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (KJV)

[3] γνῶσις, or gnosis is the Greek word for ‘knowledge’.