Friday, April 07, 2006
(11:01 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Thoughts on Gnosticism
The recent discovery of the Gospel of Judas will likely precipitate yet another predictable round of conspiracy-theory type discussions about how terrible it is that the church suppressed Gnosticism, about how they must be keeping something from us, about how terrible it is that they won't include this in the Bible now -- probably they can't handle the truth, etc., etc. However, as I have commented on a thread on The Valve, sadly joined by one of my arch enemies[*], Gnosticism wasn't necessarily this really cool thing that is being kept from us.Everything you hate about Christianity was present in Gnosticism, except worse. Do you object to Christianity's devaluation of the body? Gnostics were even worse. Do you think that orthodox doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation are needlessly complex and abstract? The multiple emanations of deity in the pleroma are much more complex, with seemingly infinite room for further complications. Do you find the symbolism and numerology in Revelation and other parts of the Bible repellant? Well then, you'll certainly hate most Gnostic texts even worse. Do you object to the almost instinctive anti-Semitism of the Christian tradition? Well, one of the leading Gnostic teachers, Marcion, taught that the God of the Hebrew Bible was evil and that Jesus came to save us from that God. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that a good first step in understanding Gnosticism would be to take the least appealling aspects of Christianity as popularly understood and then step it up a notch.
I know this is all horribly elitist to call someone's religious beliefs stupid -- and Gnosticism was nothing if not hugely popular, kind of like evangelical Republicanism is today -- but what do you know? Gnosticism was itself hugely elitist! Once again, take the rather grim doctrine of double predestination, but step it up a notch: not only are some people predetermined to be saved and others to be damned, but the saved people have a different nature. That's right: it's not just that we're all equally unworthy humans and God decides in his grace to save only some of us, it's that the saved people are also inherently better from the start. And one proof of this superiority? They alone can understand these bizarre speculations about the emanations of the divine in the pleroma....
In this case, then, I think that the catholics were right to reject Gnosticism, unequivocally right. In fact, I think that the dismissive tone of Irenaeus is exactly right as well. Christianity would undoubtedly be a much worse and stupider religion today if something like the Gospel of Judas had been included in the canon. The established church is not maliciously trying to hide this beautiful countercultural extra-super-special populist truth from you by refusing to admit Gnostic texts into the canon of Scripture. The fact that Gnostics are opposed by the established church does not make Gnosticism automatically good, any more than the Republican party's opposition to fundamentalist Islamic terrorism makes terrorism really cool. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, etc.
[*] I consider my top three blogging arch-enemies to be as follows:
- Toadvine
- The Troll of Sorrow
- Rich Puchalsky
