Playing with Fire
Pondering the significance of a group of thinkers who were condemned as heretics by the early Christian church
In 1945, a field worker in Egypt unearthed an ancient clay jar. The jar contained texts that had been buried in the ground for more than fifteen hundred years.
The Nag Hammadi Library, as the codices would be dubbed, shed new light on an intellectual movement known as gnosticism.
The gnostics are hard to categorize. I call them an intellectual movement, but they’re also considered a religious movement. Some scholars have resisted using the term “gnostic” as a categorization because the varieties among the gnostics are too different to fit under one label.
“Gnosis” is a Greek word for knowledge or insight.
In general, the gnostics were seekers of something deeper than factual knowledge. What they sought was more akin to spiritual wisdom or self-awareness. They sought kernels of wisdom wherever they could be found, without discrimination, across the complex worlds of religion and philosophy.
The origin of gnosticism, in general, precedes Christianity — but a group of distinctly Christian gnostics asserted themselves into the theological conversation in the years following the life of Jesus.
For the sake of clarity, in this post I’m talking about the gnostic Christians who wrote and taught during the early centuries of the Common Era.
The Nag Hammadi texts themselves are dated between 350 - 400 CE, but they are translations of texts that were likely produced between 50 - 200 CE. The original gnostic texts were contemporaries of the canonical books that ended up in the New Testament.
In these early centuries, orthodox church fathers established an “apostolic succession” tracking back to Jesus Christ himself. Bishops within this order were the true heirs of Christianity — the only ones who could be properly trusted to interpret the canonical scriptures.
Orthodox Christianity, whose essential dogma was enshrined in the Apostle’s Creed, survived and formed the basis for the institutional church we know today. The victory of orthodoxy was cemented in 313 CE, when Emperor Constantine proclaimed Christianity the official church of Rome.
Any chance for the gnostics to assert their own interpretations onto Christendom had, by this time, expired. Church authorities would have surely destroyed any gnostic texts found in circulation.
The institutional Christian creed says: God is the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth. Jesus’s unique divinity, his bodily incarnation, his death and resurrection — these factors are salvific for human beings, who are inherently corrupted by sin.
This creed may have been specifically crafted to isolate the gnostics, who believed in a dualistic separation between the corrupted material world and a pure spiritual deity.
Gnostics rejected the idea that bishops held special authority over scriptural selection and interpretation. A common trait among gnostics was the belief that select individuals had the capacity to access profound spiritual wisdom. The mystics — not the bishops — were the authority on spiritual truths shared by Jesus. The mystics were the true heirs to Christ’s teachings.
Church leaders detected an institutional threat. They wrote scathing denunciations of gnostic teachings.
One of the main heretics was a gnostic teacher named Valentinus.
Here is a clip from the Valentinian text The Gospel of Truth, discovered at Nag Hammadi:
That is the gospel of him whom they seek, which he has revealed to the perfect through the mercies of the Father as the hidden mystery, Jesus the anointed. Through him he enlightened those who were in darkness because of forgetfulness. He enlightened them and gave them a path. And that path is the truth that he taught them. For this reason error was angry with him, so she persecuted him. She was distressed by him, so she was made powerless. He was nailed to a tree. He became a fruit of the knowledge of the father. He did not, however, destroy them because they ate of it. He rather caused those who ate of it to be joyful because of this discovery.
This excerpt illustrates some of the differences between gnostic and orthodox Christianity. According to the gnostics, Jesus is a vehicle for enlightenment, not a sacrificial offering. His teaching is a pathway to profound insight, which is salvific. This fruit of knowledge is a blessing, not a curse.
We don’t know what gnostics would be like today, but they probably wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas in the same way.
Christmas is about incarnation — the physical embodiment of God into a human being.
Gnostics had a negative view of the material world. The pure spirit would never completely inhabit a human body.
Spiritual enlightenment was an escape.
To study the gnostics is not to denigrate the institutional church. It is unlikely that a gnostic movement, untethered from a formal institution, could have survived the tumult of two thousand years of human history.
It’s fair to say, however, that the institutional church overreacted to the threat posed by the gnostics. Why couldn’t they co-exist?
But you never really know. Maybe the church fathers were right. Maybe unification under a strict hierarchy of authority was the only pathway to longevity.
Whatever your conclusions, the discovery of the gnostic gospels adds complexity to the historical origins of the Christian community.
There are remnants of spiritual radicalism found in contemporary Christian theology. It’s not gnosticism, but it is mysticism.
Something like this, from Anthony de Mello, SJ, in his book Awareness:
Where's the fire? Where's the love? Where's the drug uprooted from your system? Where's the freedom? This is what spirituality is all about. Tragically, we tend to lose sight of this, don't we? This is what Jesus Christ is all about. But we overemphasized the "Lord, Lord", didn't we? Where's the fire? And if worship isn't leading to the fire, if adoration isn't leading to love, if the liturgy isn't leading to a clearer perception of reality, if God isn't leading to life, of what use is religion except to create more division, more fanaticism, more antagonism? It is not from lack of religion in the ordinary sense of the word that the world is suffering, it is from lack of love, lack of awareness.
Here’s to finding the fire in the year 2022.
Sources
The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels
The Gnostic Bible, by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch