by Stephan A. Hoeller

Are we witnessing a rediscovery of Gnosticism?
To judge from the burgeoning new
literature and the increased use of the terms "gnosis" and
"Gnosticism" in popular publications, the answer would seem to be yes.
Only twenty-five years ago, when one used the word "Gnostic," it was very likely
to be misunderstood as "agnostic," and thus have one's statement turned into its
exact opposite. Such misapprehensions are far less likely today. Nevertheless, increased
academic attention (beginning with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scriptures in 1945)
and the ensuing popular interest have produced a confusion of tongues which is anything
but helpful for the sincere inquirer into matters Gnostic. It is often difficult even to
tell what is meant by the word.

The difficulty in defining Gnosticism is not entirely of recent origin. As early as
1910, a small book was published in London that in many ways foreshadowed current trends,
including the difficulties in definition. The title of the work was Gnosticism: The
Coming Apostasy; the author, a certain D.M. Panton, was an anxious defender of
Christian orthodoxy, which he felt was menaced by an emerging Gnostic revival. Gnosticism,
Panton wrote, had surfaced in the twentieth century in the forms of Theosophy, Christian
Science, some forms of spiritualism, and in what was called the "New Theology,"
which had been introduced primarily by German writers on religion. (A biography of Marcion
by theologian Adolf von Harnack created much interest and controversy at that time.) While
earlier crypto-Gnostics, such as Emanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, George Fox, and Elias
Hicks camouflaged their heretical beliefs, Panton argued, twentieth-century Gnostics no
longer bothered with concealment. The gnosticizing movements of the early twentieth
century, wrote Panton, were "frankly and jubilantly Gnostic"; their thought and
their movements carried within them the "throbbing heart of Gnosticism, perhaps the
most dreaded foe the Christian faith ever confronted."

In some ways Panton's anti-Gnostic tirades have an advantage over much of the more
recent literature, for Panton still possessed a clear understanding of what constitutes
Gnosticism. Such is not the case today. If we contrast these early-twentieth-century
analyses with some current ones, we may recognize how unclear our understanding has
become. In a European publication concerned with contemporary aspects of Gnosticism, Ioan
Culianu writes:

Once I believed that Gnosticism was a well-defined phenomenon belonging to the
religious history of Late Antiquity. Of course, I was ready to accept the idea of
different prolongations of ancient Gnosis, and even that of spontaneous generation of
views of the world in which, at different times, the distinctive features of Gnosticism
occur again.

I was soon to learn however, that I was a naïf indeed. Not only Gnosis was gnostic,
but the Catholic authors were gnostic, the Neoplatonic too, Reformation was gnostic,
Communism was gnostic, Nazism was gnostic, liberalism, existentialism and psychoanalysis
were gnostic too, modern biology was gnostic, Blake, Yeats, Kafka were gnostic…. I
learned further that science is gnostic and superstition is gnostic…Hegel is gnostic
and Marx is gnostic; all things and their opposite are equally gnostic.¹

At least one circumstance emerges from this statement that is widely overlooked in
America. In Europe "Gnosis" and "Gnosticism" are almost always used
interchangeably. The suggestion that term "gnosis" ought to be used to describe
a state of consciousness, while "Gnosticism" should denote the Gnostic system,
has never caught on. The use of such classical Gnosticism of Valentinus, Basilides, et
al., persists in European literature, including the writings of such scholars as Gilles
Quispel, Kurt Rudolph, and Giovanni Filoramo (to mention some of the most recent ones). It
is true that the late Robert McLachlan put forth a proposal to use these terms otherwise,
but current usage in Europe has not followed it.

It is evident that a word used in such contradictory ways has lost its meaning. No
wonder GNOSIS writer Charles Coulombe despairs over the situation when writing recently in
a Catholic publication:

In reality, "Gnosticism," like "Protestantism," is a word that has
lost most of its meaning. Just as we would need to know whether a "Protestant"
writer is Calvinist, Lutheran, Anabaptist, or whatever in order to evaluate him properly,
so too the "Gnostic" must be identified.²

A Political Confusion

One of the most confusing voices comes from the discipline of political science. In his
Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago in 1951, émigré scholar Eric Voegelin
rose to the defense of what he called the "classic and Christian tradition"
against what he perceived as the "growth of Gnosticism." This opening salvo was
followed by such books as The New Science of Politics, the multivolume Order and
History, and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Voegelin became a prophet of a
new theory of history, in which Gnosticism played a most nefarious role. All modern
totalitarian ideologies were in some way spiritually related to Gnosticism, said Voegelin.
Marxists, Nazis, and just about everybody else the good professor found reprehensible were
in reality Gnostics, engaged in "immanentizing the eschaton" by reconstituting
society into a heaven on earth. Since Gnostics did not accept the conventional Christian
eschaton of heaven and hell, Voegelin concluded that they must be engaged in a millenarian
revolutionizing of earthly existence. At the same time, Voegelin was bound to admit that
the Gnostics regarded the earthly realm as generally hopeless and unredeemable. One
wonders how the unredeemable earthly kingdom could be turned into the "immanentized
eschaton" of an earthly utopia. That Voegelin's new Gnostics had no knowledge of or
sympathy with historical Gnosticism did not bother him either. Gnostics they were, and
that was that.

Voegelin's confusion was made worse by a number of conservative political thinkers,
mainly with Catholic connections. Thomas Molnar, Tilo Schabert, and Steven A. McKnight
followed Voegelin's theories despite their obvious inconsistencies. In Molnar's view,
Gnostics were not only responsible for all modern utopianism, but also for the inordinate
attachment of modern people to science and technology. The scientific world view, said
these folk, is in fact a Gnostic world view, and it is responsible for treating humans as

machines and for making societies into machinelike collectives.

The politicized view of Gnosticism continues to have its adherents, but these are
increasingly recruited from the lunatic fringe. Gnostics are still represented as
dangerous subversives in pulp magazines and obscure conspiracy pamphlets
"exposing" Freemasons, Satanists, and other pests. Meanwhile, respectable
conservative thinkers have dropped the Gnostic issue. Some, like scholar and former U.S.
Senator S.I. Hayakawa, have subjected Voegelin and his theories to severe criticism and
ridicule.

Traditionalist Difficulties

Another sometimes confusing voice comes from writers who are bent on proving that
within the existing major religions a secret tradition of gnosis may be found which is not
identical to the "heretical" Gnosticism of the early Christian centuries. In his
1947 work The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley promulgated a kind of gnosis that
was in effect a mystery reserved for elites, revealed at the dawn of history and handed
down through various religious traditions, where it still maintains itself in spite of its
ostensible incompatibility with the official dogmas of those traditions. With this view,
Huxley approximated the more radical position held by Traditionalists such as René
Guénon and Frithjof Schuon.

Huxley, on the other hand, never passed judgment on anyone who called himself a
Gnostic. One could only wish the same could be said of other Traditionalists. Followers of
Guénon (who, born a Catholic, converted to Islam in a somewhat untraditional manner)
often castigate the early Gnostic teachers in a manner reminiscent of the more extreme
ancient polemicists like Irenaeus or Tertullian. The Traditionalists' division of Gnostic
writers into "false Gnostics" and "authentic Gnostics" reflects
standards that are nothing if not arbitrary; contemporary research indicates that during
the first three of four centuries A.D. there was as yet no true orthodoxy and thus no
heresy either. Instead, many opinions on religious matters, including gnosis, flourished
side by side. Certainly there were disagreements, but to arbitrarily extrapolate standards
of falsity and authenticity from these polemics does not seem justified.

Academic Ambiguities

The 1988 edition of The Nag Hammadi Library contains a lengthy afterword
entitled "The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism."³ Its author, Richard Smith, ostensibly reviews
the numerous developments in Western culture which appear to be related to Gnosticism. One
would hope that here at last we might find a definition of true Gnosticism and a list of
modern writers and thinkers who might appear as its representatives. Unfortunately this is
not the case.

Smith lists a number of important figures of modern culture from the eighteenth century
onward who were sympathetic to Gnosticism. Reading this afterword, however, one gets the
impression that few of these seminal figures possessed an adequate definition of
Gnosticism, and that they thus more often than not misused and misappropriated the term.
The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, for example, is accused of a
"mischievous lie" in referring to the Gnostics in complimentary terms.
(Admittedly Gibbon did not share the low esteem in which the Church Fathers held Gnostics,
but does this make him a liar?) And the Gnostic and Manichaean sympathies of Voltaire are
represented as being motivated by his opposition to churchly authority. But could the
great philosophé have had other reasons for his views? It is well known that Voltaire was
an ardent Freemason, and he might have received favorable information about Gnostics
through the esoteric currents flowing in the secret fraternities of his time. Maybe he was
privy to knowledge unknown to Smith.

In the same vein, Smith implies that C.G. Jung appropriated Gnosticism by turning it
into psychological theory. "Jung takes the entire dualist myth and locates it within
the psyche," Smith writes.⁴
Personally I have devoted the major part of my life to exploring the relationship of
Jung's thought to Gnosticism, so such statements touch a nerve.

Jung was not only interested in the Gnostics, but he considered them the discoverers
and certainly the most important forerunners of depth psychology. The association between
Jung's psychology and Gnosticism is profound, and its scope is increasingly revealed with
the passage of time and the wider availability of the Nag Hammadi scriptures. My studies
have convinced me that Jung did not intend to locate the content of Gnostic teachings in
the psyche pure and simple. To say that Gnosticism is "nothing but" psychology
would have horrified Jung, for he opposed the concept of "nothing but." What
made Jung's view radically different from those of his predecessors was simply this: he
believed that Gnostic teachings and myths originated in the personal psychospiritual
experience of the Gnostic sages. What originates in the psyche bears the imprint of the
psyche. Hence the close affinity between Gnosticism and depth psychology. Jung's view may
thus be called an interpolation, but not an appropriation. The need for definitions
appears greater than ever in the light of such controversies.

Psychological and Existentialist Models

The Italian scholar Giovanni Filoramo calls attention to the fact
that the Nag Hammadi scriptures were favorably received by a wide public in part because
"certain areas of the cultural panorama showed a disposition, a peculiar sensitivity
to the…texts,…which dealt with a phenomenon that they themselves had in some way
helped to keep alive."⁵

One of the persons who kept the Gnostic phenomenon alive was C.G. Jung's close
associate, the Gnostic scholar Gilles Quispel, who labored long and hard on relating the
ancient gnosis of Valentinus and other teachers to the modern gnosis of analytical
psychology. He saw the Gnostic effort as involving deep insight into the ontological self,
and thus as analogous to the best in depth psychology. Quispel's major work on the
subject, Gnosis als Weltreligion ("Gnosis as a World Religion," published
in 1972), explains in detail the relationship of Jung's model to Gnostic teachings.
Quispel, like Jung himself, did not reduce Gnostic teachings to depth psychology, but
rather pointed to depth psychology as a key to understanding Gnosticism.

Another key figure in the reevaluation of ancient Gnosticism was Hans Jonas. A pupil of
existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger in the 1930s, Jonas turned his attention to
the wisdom of the Gnostics, and discovered in them an ancient relative of existential
philosophy. Existentialism's pessimism about earthly life and high regard for experience
as against theory thus found a forebear and analogue. Although critical of the Gnostics'
apparent "nihilism," Jonas was, along with Jung, one of the most important
figures to bring Gnostic teachings into modern perspective.

The linkage effected by Jung and Jonas between Gnosticism in the past and living
philosophies in the present was of crucial importance and came very close to supplying
gnosis and Gnosticism with vital, living definitions. The questions posed (and answered)
by the ancient Gnostics revealed themselves now, not as outlandish and bizarre, but as
earlier discussions of issues addressed in more recent times by Freud, Jung, Kierkegaard,
Heidegger, and many others.

CONTINUE

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