First, it is important to provide a brief overview of "Gnosticism" as
it has evolved over the last hundred years.
Early Christianity was a highly unstable mix of many different
strands of evolution of Christianity. What we know as "the New
Testament" was not really stabilized until the Council of Nicea.
And many different elements of what constituted "Christianity" only
into being after extensive internal arguments among various
Christian groups.
One should study the evolution of heresies within the early
Church, as that process characterizes the formation of both the
New Testament and Christianity itself. Even the nature of Jesus was
itself an evolving process.
What many people do not know is that the early Church was in
a serious fight for its own survival. The religious movement known
as "Mithraism" was well integrated into the Roman army, and in
turn the entire Roman civilization depended on the existence of
the Army. Also, during the first two centuries Egyptian religion
played an active role in the religious movements of Rome.
And then there was Gnosticism, which was a religious movement
that seemed to incorporate and integrate elements of Christianity,
which in turn generated intense reactions from various Christian
leaders. Mithraism was an independent religion and as such
well defined, but Gnosticism used various Christian elements as
part of its own teaching. And that led to intense reactions against
those who taught within the "Gnostic context".
Now, what is that "Gnostic context"?
A gross simplication is that Gnosis is a specific form of "knowing" or
"knowledge" that provides an inner understanding or a consciousness
that frees a person from suffering and ignorance. It may be a knowing
of a myth or set of myths, or it may be an inner realization, but
whatever it is, the one who has Gnosis is somehow different from
other people who do not have Gnosis.
And in turn, the early Church Fathers went to extreme lengths to
find out who various Gnostics were, and to destroy their teachings
and written texts. All that was left were descriptions in various
canonical texts which would then be used as references for later
heresy-hunters to identify whether or not a particular Gnostic
heresy had survived.
In time, then, all that was left of the Gnostic movement were the
various fragments as contained within the writings of the early
Church Fathers.
And so that condition remained from around 350 AD until the latter
part of the nineteenth century. But as the Ancient Civilization of
Egypt began to be recovered with the deciphering of the Rosetta
Stone, so also people began to search for the foundations of what
Christianity was really about, and that in turn led to a revival of
interest in Gnostic teachings. Madam Blavatsky would initiate
the strange hybrid movement known as Theosophy, and in turn
writers of Theosophy began to project the concept that there was
an Ancient worldwide spirituality that lay both outside of and
before Christianity. One aspect of that was the existence of the
Gnostic movement. One of her followers, one George R.S. Meade,
wrote the book, "Fragments of a Faith Forgotten" as well as the
English translation of a Coptic Gnostic text discovered in the late
`1700s, that translation coming from the German translation and
edition of Carl Schmidt and published as "Pistis Sophia".
Shortly after the turn of the century, the great Swiss psychologist
Carl Jung began to explore various Gnostic teachings in terms of
his own worldview (weltenschaungen) and himself channelled
a set of dialogues on Abraxas.
Then in 1947, a complete library of Coptic gnostic texts was
discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and by 1978, the world
was able to begin studying English translations of various
Gnostic works, so that such works could be studied without
the filtering and distortions of the Catholic Church Fathers.
The years since the 1978 publication have seen an explosion of
interest in Gnosticism, although on some levels what Gnosis actually refers to
remains a mystery.
That is my intent, I will lead you as readers through the pathways of my own
research. Perhaps the situation will become clearer in the days ahead.
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