Gnosticism

Defined most narrowly, gnosticism was an obscure Christian heresy that flourished in the first few centuries after Christ. Defined more broadly, as has become the custom, gnosticism, while still a long dead movement, antedated Christianity and even influenced it. There were Jewish and pagan as well as Christian varieties of gnosticism, and gnosticism might best be seen as a religion in its own right.

By this broader definition, gnosticism was the belief in a radical, irreconcilable dualism of immateriality and matter. Immateriality was divine and wholly good. Matter was irredeemably evil. The cosmic predicament was that pieces, or sparks, of divinity had become trapped in matter. Human souls lay trapped in bodies. (In tripartite gnosticism, an immaterial spirit lay trapped in the soul as well as the body.) Because the sparks were not merely trapped but hidden, liberation required the revelation to humans of their divinity. The cosmic goal was for all sparks to be extricated and returned to their immaterial home.

Gnosticism can be defined much more broadly still as a contemporary, not merely an ancient, movement. The dualism often lies entirely within human beings and not in the cosmos. It is the alienation of humans from their true selves. Or the dualism is political or social, between nations, classes, or races. The true self is not specifically immaterial, and the place in which it resides is not specifically the body. The alienation of humans from the world may remain, but the world is not specifically material, and no immaterial world beyond beckons. Ordinarily, there is no alienation from any divinity, for most brands of contemporary gnosticism are atheistic. Just as there is no world beyond or god beyond, so, as often as not, there looms no true self beyond. Contemporary gnosticism still requires a revelation, but the revelation can be that all that one knows of oneself and the world is all that there is to know.

Contemporary gnosticism need not even be radically dualistic. The dualism can be irenic. In radically dualistic gnosticism, ancient or modern, one's old identity is to be rejected for a new one. In irenic gnosticism, which is exclusively modern, one's new identity is to be harmonized with the prior one.

Modernity per se has been called gnostic. Others have identified postmodernism with gnosticism. Scores of writers and thinkers of the last few centuries have been labeled gnostic—for example, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Blake, Hegel, Byron, Marx, Conrad, Nietzsche, Yeats, Hesse, Toynbee, Heidegger, Sartre, Simone Weil, and Jung. Americans labeled gnostic include Emerson, Melville, Wallace Stevens, Walker Percy, Jack Kerouac, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Pynchon. Harold Bloom has characterized American religion as gnostic. Admittedly, the application of the term gnostic can be loose. Only a few of the figures named, such as Jung, were even familiar with gnosticism, let alone deemed themselves gnostics. Individuals aside, there exist in the United States today self-professed gnostic groups with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of members. The biggest are the Ecclesia Gnostica and the Gnostic Association.

See alsoAgnosticism; Atheism; Body; New Age Spirituality; Revelation.

Bibliography

Altizer, Thomas J. J. "The Challenge of Modern Gnosticism." Journal of Bible and Religion 30 (1962): 18–25.

Bloom, Harold. The American Religion. 1992.

Brooks, Cleanth. "Walker Percy and Modern Gnosticism." Southern Review 13 (1977): 677–687.

Eddins, Thomas. The Gnostic Pynchon. 1990.

Jonas, Hans. "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism." In The Gnostic Religion, edited by Hans Jonas, 2nd ed. 1963.

Segal, Robert A., with June Singer and Murray Stein, eds. The Allure of Gnosticism. 1995.

Voegelin, Eric. Science, Politics and Gnosticism. 1968.

Robert A. Segal