Notes on the Basics of Gnosticism

 

         The Gnostics were an early sect of Christianity who had various beliefs, scriptures, and branches. Gnosticism derived its name from the Greek word “gnosis” which means knowledge. However, for them it signified an intimate, experiential knowledge of the divine and esoteric wisdom that are necessary for liberation. The Gnostics generally claimed that this world was created by a false God known as the Demiurge who is the god of the Hebrew Bible and is an evil vengeful god. While the Demiurge claims to be the highest God, in reality it is a creation of an emanation or Aeon, Sophia, of the absolutely transcendent real God, the Monad or the Neoplatonic idea of the One. Human beings are essentially divine spirits trapped within physical bodies and through proper gnosis or knowledge, one can achieve spiritual enlightenment and salvation and this gnosis was taught by Jesus Christ.

In their cosmology, Aeons emanate from a transcendent, ineffable divine source known as the Pleroma or Fullness and these emanations represent different divine attributes, such as wisdom, love, or power. Sophia or wisdom is the creator of the Demiurge. Sophia attempts to penetrate the depths of the Pleroma in order to attain access to knowledge of the Pleroma but fails resulting in a chaotic emanation which is the Demiurge. The Demiurge is ignorant of his true origins and believes himself to be the supreme god and creates the material world as a flawed and evil reflection of the spiritual realm. Jesus is often separated from Christ in gnostic literature as they believe that he was a human that was possessed by the divine spirit to impart secret knowledge to his followers. When Jesus was crucified, it was the man that was killed but the Christ spirit left him and returned to heaven. In other versions Christ is a divine being which has taken human form in order to lead humanity back to recognition of its own divine nature rather than possessing the human Jesus and in other versions he was simply a man who achieved enlightenment and taught the secret gnosis. Many Gnostic texts suggest that the soul undergoes a series of reincarnations in the material world with each having an opportunity for growth and the eventual attainment of gnosis. In some versions, each Aeon has a partner and Sophia emanated without one which resulted in the Demiurge who steals the pleroma from Sophia and places it into human beings.

         There were many denominations within the Gnostic movement. The Sethians, named after the biblical figure Seth, emphasized the role of a divine redeemer who imparts secret knowledge to the chosen few. Valentinianism, founded by Valentinus, developed an extremely complex cosmology involving divine emanations called Aeons and the concept of the Demiurge. Manichaeism, an influential Gnostic movement that spread across the ancient world, combined elements of Christianity, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, teaching a dualistic cosmology and the necessity of a spiritual battle against evil. Marcionism, founded by Marcion, is sometimes classified under Gnosticism and he held that the god of the Hebrew Bible and of the Christian Bible were two separate gods. Some branches of Gnosticism were dualistic while some where monistic such as the Valentinians mentioned earlier. As Christian orthodoxy developed and spread, Gnosticism diminished and their writings were deemed heretical and were lost and destroyed until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt in 1945 where several gnostic gospels were found sealed away such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, The Apocryphon of John, and The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles. Most of these writings can be dated to the 2nd-4th centuries. Prior to this discovery, most of the knowledge of Gnosticism came from the works of heresiologists such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian.