Gnostic scriptures are as esoteric as advertised. But the wild ride they take you on is worth the tedious struggle of making sense of them! Unfortunately, Irenaeus's rejoinder to the Gnostics, that our hope is in the renewal of creation, not in our escape from it, seems lost on many contemporary Christians. A lot of people who got all bent out of shape at The Da Vinci Code are, ironically, crypto-Gnostics without realizing it. My paper on one Gnostic text, The Gospel of Truth, is below the fold:
This paper will examine some of the
major themes of the Gnostic Gospel of Truth: creation, theodicy, the
person and work of Jesus Christ, and the life of those who live in the truth,
and then briefly summarize the Catholic response to Gnosticism as exemplified
by Irenaeus’ Against Heresies.
After an initial declaration that
“The gospel of truth is joy,” the text so named for its opening words expounds
a creation myth that seems to teach a doctrine of the preexistence of souls, or
minds, or human nature (the precise identity of “the totality” is obscure). These
souls/minds collectively reside within God--a vaguely panentheistic concept--except
that at this point, there is not yet a creation that God could contain while
exceeding, as panentheism holds. Instead, the world came about as the result of
a primordial catastrophe. Like fish who cannot describe the sea in which they
swim, the human race in nuce could not discover the God in whom they
lived and moved and had their being. This failure to understand precipitated a
fog of anguish and terror which Error, now having taken on a life of its own,
refined into the world as we know it. True, it is a world of power and beauty,
but one ought not confuse the glory of a sunset or the power of the storm’s
wind with the truth of the incomprehensible, inconceivable one (Gos. Truth
17.5-20).
Thus the human dilemma is ignorance,
not sin. The world does not lie under a curse that God imposed upon it as the
result of human disobedience. The miseries of creation are a kind of mist through
which unenlightened humans are condemned to march. Consequently, the redemption
that God offers humanity in the person and work of Jesus Christ is the lifting
of that fog of ignorance. The Gospel of Truth describes Christ’s work of
redemption with various compelling metaphors.
“He was nailed to the tree and he
became a fruit of the knowledge of the Father” (Gos. Truth 18.24-5).
In a powerful reversal of the forbidden fruit story in the canonical Genesis,
the author asserts that eating the fruit of this tree is no act of
disobedience; it is an act of self-discovery. Jesus discovers whose are his,
and those who believe in him discover him within themselves.
“He was nailed to a tree; he published the
edict of the Father on the cross” (Gos. Truth 20.25-7). Just as a
sealed will contains the destiny of those who are named in it, a destiny that
is revealed only when the person dies, so Jesus revealed the destiny of “the
living who are inscribed in the book of the living” in his death (Gos. Truth
21.4-5). Insofar as the cross is a divine proclamation, the metaphor contains a
distant echo of Colossians 2, but for the author of The Gospel of
Truth, what is proclaimed in the crucifixion is not God’s cancelling the
debt of sin but new insight into one’s personal identity. “It is about
themselves that they receive instruction” (Gos. Truth 21.5).
How does The Gospel of
Truth characterize the life of those so enlightened by Christ? The sermon
makes few ethical demands on its hearers. One exhortation is, “If indeed these
things have happened to each one of us, then we must see to it that the house
will be holy and silent for the Unity (Gos. Truth 25.19-25).
Perhaps a silent and holy house is a Gnostic Christian who has subdued the
raging passions within him/herself through an ascetic regime.
No preacher can say everything in a
single sermon, and there is evidence from other Nag Hammadi documents that the
Gnostic view of the created order as evil did lead Gnostics to punish the body
(Ehrman 126). The lack of oughts and musts in The Gospel of Truth may
not indicate a libertine attitude so much as it may indicate that the preacher and
congregation had a shared set of assumptions on how to live a restrained life
in the fog of this world, assumptions which needed no further explication.
What the preacher does exhort the
congregation to do is “Speak of the truth with those who search for it” (Gos.
Truth 32.35-6). With a range of metaphors every bit as evocative as
those he employs in describing the work of Christ (feed the hungry, give repose
to the weary, wake up the sleeping), the preacher encourages Gnostic Christians
to enlighten those whom they can with the knowledge of their origin and destiny.
He also advises them not to waste time on those who are beyond persuasion: “Do
not strengthen those who are obstacles to you who are collapsing, as though you
were a support for them” (Gos. Truth 33.20-4). In this sentence
there may be a warrant for withdrawing from the established Church to found a
new, Gnostic Christian community if the Gnostics can make no headway with the
pillars of the congregation. Most importantly, the Gnostic Christian is to stand
in the light in which they have been illumined and not fall back into the
twilight of mere Catholic Christianity. “Do not return to what you have vomited
to eat it” (Gos. Truth 33.15, cf. Ehrman 129).
And there is joy! Beyond the implied
demand to restrain the passions of the flesh, and the obligation to enlighten
those in darkness, the preacher counsels his congregation to enjoy the fruits
of knowledge, enlightenment and self-discovery. To know where one has come from
and where one is going is to attain perfection. Indeed, God’s children are
“perfect and worthy of his name” (Gos. Truth 43.20, cf. 36.19-20,
39.26-29); so shout it out! “Say, then, from the heart that you are the perfect
day and in you dwells the light that does not fail” (Gos. Truth
32.31-34). Just as the rising sun chases away the mist, the unfailing light in
the Gnostic Christian’s heart puts to flight the evils that beset the unenlightened,
revealing them to be illusions. “When the light shines on the terror which that
person had experienced, he knows that it is nothing” (Gos. Truth
28.28-31). Knowing the truth about oneself and the world eases the anxious
heart. Rest, the beautiful, blissful fruit of the knowledge of the truth, need
not tarry until the believer’s death. Gnosis makes it available now. In The
Gospel of Truth there is no hint of Pauline groaning in labor pains for a hoped-for
redemption at an undefined point in the future. Eternal repose can be yours
today (Gos. Truth 42.11-38).
Gnosticism thus provided a unique
and, to some at least, compelling solution to the problem of evil that
creatively drew upon the language and characters of mainstream Christianity. Ultimately,
however, Catholic Christianity could and would not integrate Gnosticism into
its beliefs and practices. Irenaeus’ Against Heresies makes the
following arguments against Gnostic ideas like those found in The Gospel of
Truth:
First, the very appeal of the warm
and evocative language of a sermon like The Gospel of Truth is a tip-off
that something is wrong. “By skillful language” the pseudo-intellectual dupe
the simple-minded, Irenaeus argues. The Bishop’s long sojourn among the Celts,
a people of “barbarous language,” may have compromised his own rhetorical skill,
but he is still sharp enough to recognize the difference between fool’s gold
and the real thing (Adv. Haer. I.1-3).
Secondly, Irenaeus convincingly defines
Christianity in such a way that it cannot accommodate Gnostic thought. The
Church rests on a three-legged stool of a canon containing four (and only
four!) gospels, apostolic succession, and the rule of faith (Adv. Haer.
III). Within this iron triangle, Gnostic creation myths run into difficulty
everywhere they turn. The Gospel of John speaks for the rest when it declares
that all things were created by God through the Word, and dignifies the stuff
of creation with the account of Jesus turning water into wine. The Roman Church
has never been a redoubt for Gnosticism, and to be on the outs with Rome is a
warning sign (Adv. Haer. III.3.2). The faith handed down from generation
to generation, recognized even by the illiterate who cannot read the gospels,
contains no such Gnostic ideas (Adv. Haer. III.4.2). Unlike the
three-legged stool of Catholic Christianity, Gnosticism has not a leg to stand
on. It is an innovation (Adv. Haer. III.4.3), and its attempts to
explain away non-Gnostic ideas in scripture or tradition amount to impugning
the character of the Church’s founders (Adv. Haer. III.5).
Lastly, Gnosticism is a denial of
Irenaeus’ eschatological hope for God to redeem the world, not to snatch the
enlightened out of it. Noting that there are so many prophecies from scripture
which remain as yet unfulfilled, such as the promise to Abraham to inherit the
land, and the prediction that the lion will lie down with the lamb, Irenaeus
argues that the fulfillment of these prophecies could only entail a
transformation of the created order, rather than leaving it behind (Adv.
Haer. V.32-3). Irenaeus counters the Gnostic teaching that the created
order and its attendant evils are illusory with an expansive hope of a renewed
and very material creation. Anything less would be unjust and unbecoming of
God’s sovereignty over all things, for “it is just that… in the same order they
suffered bondage they should reign” (Adv. Haer. V.32).
In the end, early Christians may
have found groaning in hope a more credible way to deal with the vagaries of life
than willing them away through assent to secret teaching. Irenaeus’
ecclesiology certainly made it more difficult for those within the Church to
crown a rudimentary Catholic faith with Gnostic teachings. And in an age which
venerated antiquity and abhorred change, the multiplicity and novelty of
Gnostic sects and thought doomed their long term survival.
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