Gnosticism, Ancient and Modern
by Robert A. Segal
Christian Century
November 1995Robert A. Segal, who teaches in the department of religious studies at Lancaster University in England, is the editor of The Gnostic Jung and The Allure of Gnosticism.
A Gnostic Book of Hours: Keys to Inner Wisdom
By June Singer: HarperSanFrancisco, 164 pp., $20.00.A History of Gnosticism
By Giovanni Filoramo. Translated by Anthony Alcock.
Blackwerll, 269 pp., $44.95.The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism.
By Ioan P. Couliano. Translated by H. S. Wiesner and Ioan P Couliano.
HarperSanFrancisco, 296 pp., $24.95.IN A RECENT article on "Jungians and Gnostics" in the journal First Things (October 1994), psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover denounced the contemporary world for its "pagan" proclivities--its materialism, libertinism, amorality and self-centeredness. Satinover took as his chief example of a modern pagan Carl Jung, through whom he linked paganism to Gnosticism. Satinover claimed that in its striving for wholeness Gnosticism accommodates matter as well as spirit and accepts human evil as well as good. In seeking to transcend conventional morality, Gnosticism relativizes morality. Finally, in postulating a divine spark within human beings, Gnosticism makes humanity the center of the cosmos.
This condemnation of Gnosticism as materialistic, promiscuous, relativistic and anthropocentric is preposterous. Ancient Gnosticism, which emerged in the first centuries A.D., rejects matter as irremediably evil and abhors sex as the most egregious form of indulgence in matter. Though Gnosticism pits conventional morality (pagan no less than Christian) against its own ethic, it does not spurn morality altogether. On the contrary, Gnostics pride themselves on a more rigorous morality than that preached by any of their ancient rivals. Finally, Gnosticism maintains that the spark of knowledge resides in an elite, not in all humanity, and is to be cultivated at the expense of the merely human side of the personality.
Satinover's invocation of the term "Gnostic" to damn the modem world is hardly original. "Gnostic" has become a buzzword used either to castigate or laud contemporary society. But it is often not clear what is designated by the use of the term.
Until the 20th century, Gnosticism was regarded as an obscure Christian heresy which had died out millennia ago. Today nearly all scholars acknowledge that Gnosticism antedated Christianity and influenced it, and that there were pagan and Jewish Gnostics. Instead of being considered a variant of other religions, Gnosticism is now often taken as an ancient religion in its own right.
Gnostics espouse a radical, irreconcilable dualism composed of immateriality, seen as divine and wholly good, and of matter, considered wholly evil. For Gnostics, the predicament is that pieces or sparks of immateriality have fallen into matter: human souls are trapped in bodies. (In tripartite rather than dualistic varieties of Gnosticism, the immaterial spirit lies trapped in the soul as well as the body.) Because the spark is not merely trapped but hidden, liberation requires the revelation of one's divinity. Salvation for the individual means the extrication of the spark from the body and its return to its immaterial home. Salvation for the cosmos means the return of all sparks. The aim is to terminate any connection between immateriality and matter.
In applying the term to current developments, contemporary thinkers identify Gnosticism with the belief that human beings are alienated either from their true selves or from the world. Neither the true self nor the world need be immaterial. Indeed, there need be no fixed self or any world beyond the material one. There certainly need be no god. Contemporary Gnosticism apparently need not even involve the cosmos. The dualism can be between parts of the personality, between nations or between classes. The dualism need not even be antagonistic. The thinkers most credited with the application of the label "Gnostic" to modernity have paralleled but not equated the ancient outlook with the modern one. They have often been concerned with the differences as well as the similarities between the two.
THE PHILOSOPHER Hans Jonas was the first to compare ancient Gnosticism with modern existentialism (Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism, 1952). For Jonas, the central tenet of both is the entrapment of human beings in a world at odds with their true nature. Jonas emphasizes that the two outlooks are far from identical. In Gnosticism the world is demonic and hostile; in existentialism it is impersonal and indifferent. In Gnosticism one is presently separated from one's true self; in existentialism one has no fixed nature. In Gnosticism the alienation is surmountable; in existentialism it is not. Still, the Gnostic conception of the human condition is for Jonas as unremittingly dour as the existentialist one.
Jonas employs the term "Gnostic" neither to applaud nor to denounce but simply to pinpoint one central aspect of modernity. By contrast, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin uses the term to condemn modernity. For him, modern Gnosticism encompasses movements as diverse as "progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism." In The New Science of Politics (1952) he goes so far as to define modernity as "the growth of gnosticism." Modern individuals and movements share six characteristics that Voegelin calls "the gnostic attitude": dissatisfaction with the world; confidence that the ills of the world stem from the way it is organized; certainty that amelioration is possible; the assumption that improvement must "evolve historically"; the belief that human beings can change the world; and the conviction that knowledge-gnosis-is the key to change (Science, Politics and Gnosticism [1968]).
The aspects of modernity that Voegelin calls "Gnostic" might better be termed "apocalyptic" or "millenarian" because the modern goal is to perfect the world rather than, as in ancient Gnosticism, to escape from it. Furthermore, modern reliance on knowledge is reliance more on knowledge of the world than on knowledge of the self, While Voegelin's assessment of modernity is based on far more reflection and erudition than Satinover's, his use of the epithet "Gnostic" to berate modernity is no less misguided.
WHEREAS VOEGELIN uses the term "Gnostic" negatively, Jung uses it positively. Like Jonas, Jung merely compares, rather than identifies, Gnosticism with modernity. But whereas for Jonas the chief similarity between Gnosticism and modernity is 'alienation from the world, for Jung it is alienation from oneself. Human beings project their alienation onto the world, but the world is only the manifestation, not the source, of alienation.
Jung applauds Gnostics as budding Jungians. The hidden spark which they seek is really the unconscious. In their dissatisfaction with their present lives, their quest for something more, and their joyful discovery of a self from which they have been severed, Gnostics are akin to Jungians, and psychology is the modern counterpart of ancient Gnosticism: "The rapid and worldwide growth of a psychological interest over the last two decades shows unmistakably that modern man is turning his attention from outward material things to his own inner processes….The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century, We can compare it only to the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ" (The Spiritual Problem of Modem Man [1933]).
Jung's enthusiasm for Gnosticism, like Voegelin's revulsion toward it, involves a special reading of Gnosticism. The Jungian goal is the reconciliation of ego consciousness with the unconscious. The original Gnostic goal, by contrast, is the uncompromising rejection of the body for the soul--in Jungian terms, the rejection of ego consciousness for the unconscious. The Gnostic goal is the psychological opposite of the Jungian.
Three recent books continue the arguments and confusions over Gnosticism. In A Gnostic Book of Hours the distinguished analyst June Singer offers a fuller exegesis of actual Gnostic texts than Jung himself ever did. Her book is divided into eight periods of meditation corresponding to the eight hours of the Catholic breviary. Each period contains selections from ancient Gnostic texts, followed by Singer's Jungian interpretation.
For example, Singer reads the "Exegesis on the Soul," which describes the cosmic fall and redemption of the soul, as a tale of the travails of the human psyche. The text describes the soul's initial unity with the divine Father, fall into the material world, break with the Father, marriage to the bridegroom sent by the Father, and eventua1 return home. Singer interprets his text as an account of the ego's initial submergence in the unconscious, development into an independent entity, break with the unconscious, and eventual reconnection to it.
Following Jung's unfortunate lead, Singer equates the Gnostic with the Jungian aim: the reconciliation rather than the severance of opposites. In conventional Gnostic interpretations, the marriage of the soul to the bridegroom marks the reunion of one spark of divinity with another. Singer, however, differentiates the soul from the spark within it and from the bridegroom, though she does equate the spark with the bridegroom. The marriage is therefore not of spark with spark but of soul with spark and bridegroom-in Jungian terms, of ego with unconscious. Opposites are harmonized.
In translating the wandering of the soul on earth into human terms, Singer stresses the universality of the Gnostic message:
Although we are whole at the moment of our birth, our lives become more and more fragmented as we live in the world. Each moment demands something else from us, and we are pulled away from our center. ...We become like automatons, going where we are" led by the information that is fed us, by the fashions of the times, and by the words of those whose wisdom we fail to question. We become as the living dead. This used to be called "loss of soul," but in our time it is termed depression, ennui, or complacency.
Thus the Gnostic search for wholeness becomes a model for human beings in any age.
GIOVANNI FILORAMO'S History of Gnosticism is, despite the title, less a history of Gnosticism than a survey of Gnostic themes. Following Jonas, Filoramo views Gnosticism as an ancient religion of its own, not as a hybrid: "Gnosticism is not a multi-colored Harlequin costume whose patches can be taken apart to reveal the origin of each one, but a historical constellation endowed with an internal principle and equipped with direction, coherence and autonomy."
Filoramo veers between confining Gnosticism to the ancient period and broadening it to encompass modernity. He devotes his introduction and a portion of his first chapter to Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, Novalis, Hesse and other modems who have been called Gnostic. For Jonas, both ancient Gnosticism and modem existentialism are deeply pessimistic in their stress on alienation. For lung, both movements are fundamentally optimistic in their emphasis on reconciliation.
For Filoramo, ancient Gnosticism is pessimistic but modem Gnosticism is optimistic. As he says of Hegel and Schelling, "From the Gnostic myths of the second century A.D. ...what had appeared as a radically pessimistic view of the world for more than a thousand years now emerged, in the most typical representatives of speculative idealism, in the seductive guise of an optimism and an idealistic, progressive, unquenchable rationalism, a monistic pantheism which seems to have little or nothing in common with the ancient matrix." Yet FiloTamo is still prepared to call these and other modern figures Gnostic because of their quest for the self. Filoramo’s stress on the undaunted confidence of modern Gnostics in the perfectibility of the very world from which the ancient Gnostics fled echoes Voegelin, who himself is mentioned once.
IN THE Tree of Gnosis Ioan Couliano does what Filoramo neglects to do: he surveys the history of Gnosticism from its ancient beginnings through the medieval Bogomils and Cathars down to the present. Yet Couliano is more ambivalent than Filoramo about the range of Gnosticism. On the one hand he finds Gnosticism almost everywhere in Western history. He includes as modern Gnostics such figures as Blake, Shelley, Byron, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche.
On the other hand, Cbuliano contrasts ancient Gnosticism to "modern nihilism." Modernity is nihilistic rather than Gnostic because it lacks a transcendent reality: "Like Romanticism, existentialism closely resembles Gnosticism, yet it is the obverse thereof: Whereas Gnosticism is the champion of transcendence, existentialism is the final acknowledgment of its absence." Where ancients cultivated escape from the world, moderns, in Sartre's phrase, have no exit. In his juxtaposition of ancients with moderns, Couliano mainly repeats Jonas. But unlike Jonas, who balances the similarities against the differences, Couliano rigidly insists on categorizing modern figures as either Gnostic or not.
Couliano's assessment is complicated by his application of Claude Levi-Strauss's structuralism. As a professed Levi-Straussian, Couliano attributes Gnosticism to human thinking alone. For him, the dualisms of Gnosticism express not any specific thoughts but the structure of thinking. Couliano virtually defines Gnosticism as dualism. In Levi-Straussian fashion, each Gnostic myth or system is for him 'merely the transformation of other ones.
So enchanted by structuralism is Couliano that he uses it to account not only for Gnostic dualism but even for its nihilistic absence. Instead of taking nihilistic worldliness as the dualistic opposite of Gnostic otherworldliness, he speaks of nihilism as the yearning for lost otherworldliness. Nihilism no less than Gnosticism thus craves an escape from the world, but it finds none: “Both [Gnosticism and existentialism] recognize the necessity of transcendence; but dualism affirms it and existentialism complains about its complete absence."
For all his embracing of Levi-Strauss, Couliano actually reverses Levi-Strauss's position. Myth for Levi-Strauss serves to alleviate, not to preserve, dualism. The presence, not the absence, of dualism is to be bemoaned. Myth reconciles human beings to the world.
Couliano sets his structuralist explanation of Gnosticism against all prior ones, which root Gnosticism in experience of some kind--social, political, economic or psychological--rather than in the mind. Yet Levi-Strauss himself sees no incompatibility between the mind and experience. On the contrary, for him human beings project the dualistic structure of their minds onto the world and thereby experience the world as filled with polarities. Couliano fails to see the relationship that Levi-Strauss posits between the mind and the world.
In his discussion of would-be modern Gnostics, Couliano makes no mention of Jung--a strange oversight for one so eager to derive Gnosticism from the mind rather than the world. Like Levi-Strauss, Jung is obsessed with identifying in myth expressions of the innate polarities of the mind, but Jung goes far beyond Levi-Strauss in giving content to those polarities and in showing the disparate forms they take.
Singer, Filoramo, Couliano and their predecessors single out different aspects of both Gnosticism and modernity. By evaluating ancients through modern eyes, they are projecting onto Gnosticism their own hopes, anxieties and convictions.