“Gnosticism”— a Rhetorical Term which has Come to Mean “Everything” and “Nothing”

Many today likewise use the term “Gnosticism” pejoratively to describe other forms of Christian spirituality with which they don’t want to associate. This is a day when many are calling others with whom they disagree a “Gnostic.” This term is being frequently bandied about without full discernment as to what actually is its deepest and most fundamental  dynamic. 

Unfortunately, “Gnosticism” is a term that is frequently hijacked by practitioners of “Deism” to scare people away from seeking, expecting, and experiencing the unmediated presence of God for themselves. Remember, “Deism” is that icy belief system that says God is a remote presence that leaves the world to pretty much run on its own. 

Tragically, Deism’s distant God doesn’t speak directly TO us, intervene directly FOR us, or live vibrantly IN us. The concept of “intimacy with God” vexes these Deists so much that they have pejoratively pigeonholed all who seek such interactions as Gnostic. And that careless misuse of the term “Gnosticism” is bad form, both spiritually and intellectually. 

Here is why.

A famous 1966 conference in Messina gathered scholars and experts seeking to reach a consensus on the definition of Gnosticism, taking into account all the allegedly new discoveries about it from the Nag Hammadi library.  They notoriously failed.

“In the afterward to the second edition to the Nag Hammadi Library in English, Richard Smith has provided a handy survey of some of the [dubious] appropriations of the term ‘Gnosticism’ in modern times, including the poetry of William Blake, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the psychological theory of Carl Jung, the fiction of Herman Hesse, the politics of Eric Voegelin, and several other examples. The late Ioan Culianu once offered a similar survey, though with little sympathy toward what he attacked as the overstretched comparisons now so commonly drawn. Opening with some premonitory sarcasm, Culianu mused: 

‘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 occurs again. 

I was to learn soon, however, that I was naive indeed. Not only Gnosis was gnostic, but the catholic authors were gnostic, the Neoplatonic too, the Reformation was gnostic, Communism was gnostic, Nazism was gnostic, liberalism, existentialism and psychoanalysis were gnostic too, modern biology was gnostic, Blake, Yeats, Rilke, Proust, Joyce, Musil, Hesse, and Thomas Mann were gnostic. From very authoritative interpreters of Gnosis, I learned further that science is gnostic and superstition is gnostic; power, counter-power, and lack of power are gnostic; left is gnostic and right is gnostic; Hegel is gnostic and Marx is gnostic; Freud is gnostic, and Jung is gnostic; all things and their opposite are equally gnostic.’

The problem, as Culianu observes, is with a word, a ‘sick sign,’ that has come to mean too much, and therefore perhaps very little.”   Michael Williams, RETHINKING “GNOSTICISM”: AN ARGUMENT FOR DISMANTLING A DUBIOUS CATEGORY, by Princeton University Press (1996).

Harvard Professor Karen King agrees in her 2003 book, “WHAT IS GNOSTICISM?” King notes that the new finds at Nag Hammadi varied greatly, in conceptual terms, not only with  each other, but also previous Gnostic-related definitions: “the variety of phenomena classified as ‘Gnostic’ simply will not support a single, monolithic definition, and in fact, none of the primary materials fits the standard typological definition” ( King, 226).

King concludes: “Because none of the texts contains all the listed characteristics, typical phenomenology [or definition by a listing of traits] raises the question of how many elements of the ideal type of any particular case has to evince in order to qualify as an example of Gnosticism” (King, 226).

In other words, don’t misuse the word Gnosticism to pigeonhole experiential Christianity. That usage just couldn’t be further from the truth.

Deism is the real enemy with a real definition. Gnosticism, by contrast, is a phantom menace with an even more formless definition. 

But, does this mean we can draw no meaningful conclusions at all about Gnosticism? No, I believe we can draw a handful of very broad cautionary attributes of Gnosticism. But beyond these broad points, there is little uniformity. Thus, Gnosticism’s devils are NOT in the details, but rather only in the generalizations.

Some Gnostics may dualistic in their thinking, but that’s not what Gnosticism IS.

Some Gnostics may be “matter-relishing” epicureans, but that’s not what Gnosticism IS.

Some Gnostics may be “matter-detesting” ascetics, but that’s not what Gnosticism IS.

Some Gnostics may be Docetic, some Diestic, and some Polytheistic, but none of these things define what Gnosticism IS.

What Gnosticism IS comes to definitional light in the following statement. Gnosticism IS a hyper-intellectual worldview which believes that ONLY the credentialed and initiated intelligentsia of their own chosen “mental culture” are the ones who have accurate “knowledge” of God. 

Gnosticism isn’t so much about WHAT you believe as it is HOW you believe. There is no standard system of Gnostic thought because of the variant sects and diverse emphases. Thus, it’s much more instructive and beneficial to see HOW Gnostics thought rather than WHAT they thought, lest we become bogged down in the swamp of discordant mindsets described below.

Gnosticism is, “That strange, obscure movement, partly intellectual, partly fanatical … in the 2d century spread with the swiftness of an epidemic over the church from Syria to Gaul’ (Law, The Tests of Life, 26.) It is therefore of high importance to gain a right conception of the nature of this potent anti-Christian influence. This is not easy. The difficulty in dealing with Gnosticism is that it was not a homogenous system of either religion or philosophy, but embraced many widely diversified sects holding opinions drawn from a great variety of sources.

The infinitely varied shapes assumed by the systems render it’s almost impossible to classify them, or even to give an account of their leading ideas, which shall not be open to objection. We might as well try to classify the products of a tropical jungle, or the shapes and hues of the sunset clouds, which change under our view as we look at them.” (Orr, James, The Progress of Dogma, 58.)

The differing Gnostic beliefs come from the particular “mental culture” which operates within each respective sect. Dr. Orr writes, “Gnosticism may be described generally as the…the blending of certain Christian ideas — particularly that of redemption through Christ — with speculation and imaginings derived from a medley of sources, (Greek, Jewish, Parsic; philosophies; religions, theosophies, mysteries) in a period when the human mind was in kind of ferment, and when opinions of every sort were jumbled together in an unimaginable welter. It involves, as the name notes, a claim to ‘knowledge,’ knowledge of a kind of which the ordinary believer was incapable, and in the possession of which ‘salvation’ in the full sense consisted. This knowledge of which the Gnostic boasted, related to the subjects ordinarily treated of in religious philosophy; Gnosticism was a species of religious philosophy” (The Early Church, 71).

My aim here, then, is to focus on the WAY Gnostics thought rather than WHAT Gnostics taught. They ALL sought to redefine and/or replace organic and personal “faith” with the trinity of mind, intellect and knowledge. 

The “mental culture” usurps the “heart culture.” Whereas normative Christian Mysticism rightly esteems the gut, conscience and heart, Gnosticism esteems the mind, intellect, and knowledge.

Under Gnostic belief, the intellect’s obtaining of  knowledge is our raison d’être (reason for being). The result is that only the opinions of the credentialed intelligentsia  (in our particular “mental culture”) matter. 

In other words, one must be initiated into the sect of “the scholar or sage” (of whatever Gnostic system toward which one adheres) to obtain the secret knowledge necessary to form an accurate opinion about divine matters.

Anyone without the heightened knowledge of the initiated scholar should be forbidden to opine about divine truths. These ignorant ones are the mass of the uninitiated, uninformed and the uneducated, and should be ignored or dismissed as errant.

Again, Gnosticism occupies no singular system of thought. Rather it elevates “thought” itself TO divine status. 

Famed German theologian and church historian Johann Neander  has described Gnosticism  as “the first notable attempt to introduce into Christianity the existing elements of ‘MENTAL CULTURE,’ and to render it more complete on the hitherto rather neglected side of THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE; it was an ATTEMPT OF THE MIND of the ancient world and its yearning after knowledge, and in its dissatisfaction with the present, to bring within its grasp into appropriate the treasures of this kind which Christianity presented” (Antignostikus, Intro, 199).”

“Gnosticism was distinguished by an unethical, LOVELESS INTELLECTUALISM. This seems to be the explanation of the false teaching against which this epistle (1 John) is directed. The apostle describes the dry head knowledge which left the heart and life untouched by love, and which lead man, while they profess to love God, nevertheless to remain destitute of love to their fellow man.” Dr. James Orr, ISBE, GNOSTICISM.

As I indicated above, although there are sects with differing views, Gnosticism generally believes that Christ’s personal presence wasn’t and isn’t REALLY here on this corrupted earthly and temporal plane, either at His supposed incarnation or even now. This often results in Gnostic Docetism (God is perfect Spirit and cannot inhabit this imperfect material world) or Gnostic Deism (God is remotely located elsewhere in the realm of Spirit and has left this material plane for us to deal in with His absence). 

Thus, some Gnostics tended to be Dualistic, Docetic  and Diestic, which meant they were separatist in their thinking when it came to spirit and matter. This then often resulted in two extremes. Either the sect would be ascetic, deploring this “prison of matter” and seeking to starve out all affection for its pleasures by ascetic discipline, OR, by contrast, the sect would lean toward an antinomian existence grounded in sensual and epicurean enjoyment, for what we do “here” is meaningless because the material world is a “burning ship” which will never reach eternity’s shores. 

Either way, Gnosticism divinizes the human intellect  as the only functioning instrument of deity left here on the broken earth. Our intellect, mental culture, and the scholarly knowledge both reach here then becomes the only divine residue left on this temporal plane. And we must therefore submit ALL things to it. We literally worship the particular “knowledge” of our specific “mental culture.” 

Cold, clinical, and credentialed “knowledge,” which only the initiated intelligentsia can ever obtain, now becomes the measure of all things spiritual. At its root then, Gnosticism is Christianity hijacked by hyper-intellectualism. It a “head knowledge” which “puffs up” egos but deflates the organic heart dynamic described in Galatians 3:2 as “the hearing of faith”(Galatians 3:2).

The words that chill me the most as I have studied this challenging topic are Dr. Orr’s description of Gnosticism as “loveless intellectualism.” Rather than quickly finger-pointing Gnostic accusations at others with whom we experientially and theologically disagree, I think the wiser course of action is to remove any plank of “loveless intellectualism” from our own eye. Our bind-spot comes because we are lured into believing WHAT we think makes us a Gnostic rather than HOW we think. 

“Not all intellectualism is Gnosticism, but Gnosticism, as it is the nec plus ultra of intellectualism, can tell us something about the larger and less specific of the two categories within which it nestles. One must also take care to note that intellectualism is not always given away by its style, although there is a definite type of polysyllabic prose typical of the illuminatus. Sometimes, however, as in the case of the verbally Plain-Jane Vidal, intellectualism takes the form, not of a baroque vocabulary and a convoluted syntax, but rather of a set of characteristic assumptions.” Intellectualism and the Gnostic Debacle: Julian the Apostate in the Modern Literary Imagination, by Thomas F. Bertonneau,  Anthropoetics 10, no. 1 (Spring / Summer 2004).

Simply put, Gnosticism exalts our respective “mental cultures” into Temples built to a God of “knowledge.” What Jesus prefers are “heart cultures” where we move in ALL  the divine promptings: intellect, emotion, intuition, imagination, epiphany and visceral valor. 

Faith, by contrast, is OF the heart. Faith trumps intellect and head knowledge wherever they conflict. Faith can certainly put intelligence to good use, but it doesn’t serve it. Faith does away with the need for “mental popes” whose rings we must kiss because of their credentialed  knowledge. Jesus picked 12 disciples with no “knowledge credentials” at all to build His Kingdom of light and love. Rather, they had the “heart credentials” Jesus was looking for– those with good and honest hearts committed to dialoguing with His divine Spirit by organic faith.

To be anti-Gnostic is simply to be an anti-intellectualist. French theologian Henri De Lubac made a critical distinction between an “anti-intellectual” and an “anti-intellectualist.” The first is against intelligence, while the second is against the tendency to reduce the Christian revelation to a doctrinal system of mere ideas, when it is first and foremost the manifestation of a Person, the Truth of an individuated Person. — Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri De Lubac, by Susan k. Wood, Eerdmans (1998). 

So, someone who merely OPPOSES the Gnostic idea that we can’t REALLY hear God’s inner voice, sense Christ’s interior presence, or be guided by the Spirit’s personal promptings, is NOT being “anti-intellectual.” However, this person may certainly be an “anti-intellectualist,” and thus anti-Gnostic. We live by faith, not by Gnostic knowledge.

“Still further, this Gnosticism issued in an attitude towards men . . . the Gnostic aimed . . . at an elaborate, esoteric, and secret knowledge. Clearly such a knowledge was not for every man. Ordinary people were too involved in the everyday work and life of the world ever to have time for the study and training and discipline which were necessary; and, even if they had such time, there were many who were intellectually quite incapable of grasping and understanding the involved and elaborate mysteries of the theosophy. This produced quite an inevitable result: those qualified and those not” (William Barclay, John and Jude’s Epistles, p. 13).

The Gnostics of Irenaeus’ day declared “that the consummation of all things will take place when all that is spiritual has been formed and perfected by gnosis (knowledge). By this they mean spiritual men who have ATTAINED to the perfect knowledge of God … They represent themselves to be these persons.” Irenaeus, Against Heresies, (Against Heresies I:5:6 – I:6:3) 183-186 AD.

Thus, whatever else may be broadly said about the dense cloud of Gnosticism, it’s most reprehensibly salient feature is that it denies the common believer access to the knowledge of God. Only those who are highly educated, deeply initiated, and formally credentialed into the Gnostic “mental culture” in question may obtain true, competent, and saving knowledge of God. This “laity conquering” hardly comports with the awe-inspiring truth of Hebrews 8:11. “And  they shall  not  teach  every man  his neighbour , and  every man  his  brother , saying , Know  the Lord : for  all  shall know  me , from  the least   to the greatest.”