Gnosticism

This most problematic of cults arose in Palestine in the first century BC - its exact origins are still disputed by scholars - and spread in the following century from a secondary centre in Alexandria. It was an extraordinary phenomenon: a religion of extremes, nurtured in the same atmosphere of apocalyptic syncretism into which Jesus came. In both Palestine and Egypt at the end of the Hellenistic age, unorthodox Jews mingled with Greek philosophers and Persian dualists; and somewhere in that confused but thrilling encounter Gnosticism was born, the religion of Gnosis - knowledge of the true nature of things. Of all the religions treated in this book, it is the most un-Roman: it needed the desert and the impetus of Oriental fanaticism. Decadent Alexandria was a more fertile soil for it than burgeoning Rome, but once it had taken root there, it put out adventitious sprouts of protean diversity all around the Mediterranean for four centuries and more.

The most radical tenet of Gnosticism is that the world is a stupendous mistake, created by a foolish or vicious creator-god. This creator or Demiurge is a god of a very low grade on the celestial hierarchy, himself the result of an error, who thinks that he is supreme. His pride and incompetence have resulted in the sorry state of the world as we know it, and in the blind and ignorant condition of most of mankind. The Gnostic, however, is not fooled. Although like every man he suffers under the tyranny of this monster, he knows that far above the Demiurge there is another God. He believes, moreover, that humanity is not totally without hope of reaching this true God whom the Demiurge does his best to hide, both from himself and from his subjects.

Given this fundamental attitude, Gnosticism is able to fasten like a parasite upon Platonism, Persian dualism or Christianity. The Platonists explain that from the higher gods emanate lower gods, in a vast hierarchy that stretches down from the One and the archetypal Ideas to the Demiurgic Jupiter, who made the planet we live on. The human soul, naturally a part of the higher planes, is sunk in matter and in ignorance, and its task is to journey laboriously upwards, leaving behind the world of substance to rejoin its native star, or even to be subsumed in the very Absolute itself. A Gnostic Platonist, such as Plotinus found cause to combat (Enneads 2,9), would say that Jupiter was a tyrant and a usurper, and that all who challenged his powers (like the Titans, or Prometheus) deserved credit for looking above and beyond his miserable empire.

A Gnostic would also be sympathetic to the Persians, who saw the universe as the theatre for a perpetual battle between the powers of light and those of darkness. The Demiurge now becomes identified with Ahriman, the dark power, whose realm is matter; and Ahura Mazda, the God of Light, corresponds to the Deus absconditus, the hidden Supreme God. But the Gnostic by no means regards the two as equal: only on earth do the evil forces enjoy parity with, even superiority over, the good.

In respect to Judaism the Gnostics turn the whole Old Testament upside-down. Jehovah is the wicked Demiurge, and the whole testament is the story of his tyranny and egotism, as enforced on a people who were tricked into worshipping him as the Supreme God. An emissary of the true God appeared to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as the Serpent, and taught them what wisdom they could learn before Jehovah expelled them into the utter darkness of 'ordinary life'. Thereafter, all the villains of Jewish history - Cain, Esau, the Sodomites, etc. - become heroes for resisting his persecution.

The advent of Christ was recognized by the later Gnostics as a cosmic event of the utmost magnitude. For at the Baptism, there entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth the direct influence of the True God. Christ is his son, not Jehovah's, and a god in his own right from a level far above the Demiurge. He descended to teach men the only thing that will get them out of their appalling predicament: knowledge of the true state of affairs.

The utter contempt in which the Gnostics held the entire created world and its creator did not make for the encouragement of the arts. Very little of Gnostic literature or artefacts has come down to us, for these people simply did not see any point in creating fresh errors or in leaving memorials behind them. Nearly all that we know of their doctrines comes from what their opponents and detractors had to say about them. Perhaps the most straightforward is Marcion, born a bishop's son in AD 85 and called by St Jerome a 'veritable sage'. He worked to separate Christianity totally from its Jewish roots, regarding the Old Testament merely as a catalogue of the Demiurge's crimes against humanity. He has Jesus descend to Hell after the Crucifixion to rescue the Old Testament 'villains' and all the Gentiles, leaving behind Abraham, Moses and all the other henchmen of Jehovah.

A similar bouleversement of accepted ideas is found also in the Gnostic ethical teachings, exemplified by Basilides' dictum: 'The perpetration of any voluptuous act whatever is a matter of indifference.' Basilides (early first century AD) and his successor Valentinus, the great masters of Alexandrian Gnosticism, favoured a strict amorality: the only rule was that there are no rules. If, as many initiates preferred, one's bent was ascetic, that was fine; if one was completely promiscuous, that was also fine: for the world is only an illusion in the brain of the non-God. Real life lies elsewhere, beyond human distinctions of good and evil. Some Gnostics, like Carpocrates, went further than Basilides' indifference and actually urged their followers to ‘sin’: to stoke the forbidden fires of desire so as to reduce them to ashes. They rejected private property and marital fidelity as typically restrictive inventions of the Demiurge, and held orgies in which the free indulgence of every perversion seems to have been mingled with ritual magic: a field in which Gnostic ideas are rife to this day. Yet the primary sources of later Gnosticism, the recently-discovered Nag Hammadi scrolls (hidden in the late fourth century AD), propose a much more sober doctrine based on the highest ethics. While their theology is as radical as any, the reader feels closer to Zen Buddhism than to modern Satanism when confronted with their koan-like paradoxes, and instructed by the true God: 'Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or at any time. Be on your guard!' (Nag Ham.madi Library, p. 271).