The Gnostic Gospels (12 page)

How was the bishop who defined his role in traditional Roman terms, as ruler, teacher, and judge of the church, to respond to this gnostic critique? Irenaeus saw that he, as bishop, had been placed in a double-bind situation. Certain members of his flock had been meeting without his authority in private sessions; Marcus, a self-appointed leader, whom Irenaeus derides as an “adept in magical impostures,”
⁷¹
had initiated them into secret sacraments and had encouraged them to ignore the bishop’s moral warnings. Contrary to his orders, he says, they did eat meat sacrificed to idols; they freely attended pagan festivals, and they violated his strict warnings concerning sexual abstinence and monogamy.
⁷²
What Irenaeus found most galling of all was that, instead of repenting or even openly defying the bishop, they responded to his protests with diabolically clever
theological
arguments:

They call [us] “unspiritual,” “common,” and “ecclesiastic.” … Because we do not accept their monstrous allegations, they say that we go on living in the hebdomad [the lower regions], as if we could not lift our minds to the things on high, nor understand the things that are above.
⁷³

Irenaeus was outraged at their claim that they, being spiritual, were released from the ethical restraints that he, as a mere servant of the demiurge, ignorantly sought to foist upon them.
⁷⁴

To defend the church against these self-styled theologians, Irenaeus realized that he must forge theological weapons. He believed that if he could demolish the heretical teaching of “another God besides the creator,” he could destroy the possibility of ignoring or defying—on allegedly theological grounds—the authority of the “one catholic church” and of its bishop. Like his opponents, Irenaeus took for granted the correlation between the structure of divine authority and human authority in the church. If God is One, then there can be only one true church, and only one representative of the God in the community—the bishop.

Irenaeus declared, therefore, that orthodox Christians must believe above all that God is One—creator, Father, lord, and judge. He warned that it is this one God who established the catholic church, and who “presides with those who exercise moral discipline”
⁷⁵
within it. Yet he found it difficult to argue theology with the gnostics: they claimed to agree with everything he said, but he knew that secretly they discounted his words as coming from someone unspiritual. So he felt impelled to end his treatise with a solemn call to judgment:

Let those persons who blaspheme the Creator … as [do] the Valentinians and all the falsely so-called “gnostics,” be recognized as agents of Satan by all who worship God. Through their agency Satan even now … has been seen to speak against God, that God who has prepared eternal fire for every kind of apostasy.
⁷⁶

But we would be wrong to assume that this struggle involves only members of the laity claiming charismatic inspiration, contending against an organized, spiritless hierarchy of priests and bishops. Irenaeus clearly indicates the opposite. Many whom he censured for propagating gnostic teaching were themselves prominent members of the church hierarchy. In one case Irenaeus
wrote to Victor, Bishop of Rome, to warn him that certain gnostic writings were circulating among his congregations.
⁷⁷
He considered these writings especially dangerous because their author, Florinus, claimed the prestige of being a priest. Yet Irenaeus warns Victor that this priest is also, secretly, a gnostic initiate. Irenaeus warned his own congregations that “those whom many believe to be priests, … but who do not place the
fear of God
supreme in their hearts … are full of pride at their prominence in the community.” Such persons, he explained, are secretly gnostics, who “do evil deeds in secret, saying, ‘No one sees us.’ ”
⁷⁸
Irenaeus makes clear that he intended to expose those who outwardly acted like orthodox Christians, but who were privately members of gnostic circles.

How could the ordinary Christian tell the difference between true and false priests? Irenaeus declares that those who are orthodox will follow the lines of apostolic succession:

One must obey the priests who are in the church—that is … those who possess the succession from the apostles. For they receive simultaneously with the episcopal succession the sure gift of truth.
⁷⁹

The heretics, he explains, depart from common tradition and meet without the bishop’s approval:

One must hold in suspicion others who depart from the primitive succession, and assemble themselves in any place at all. These one must recognize as heretics … or as schismatics … or as hypocrites. All of these have fallen from the truth.
⁸⁰

Irenaeus is pronouncing a solemn episcopal judgment. The gnostics claim to have two sources of tradition, one open, the other secret. Irenaeus ironically agrees with them that there
are
two sources of tradition—but, he declares, as God is one, only one of these derives from God—that is the one the church receives through Christ and his chosen apostles, especially Peter. The other comes from Satan—and goes back to the gnostic teacher Simon Magus (literally, “magician”), Peter’s archenemy,
who tried to buy the apostle’s spiritual power and earned his curse. As Peter heads the true succession, so Simon epitomizes the false, demon-inspired succession of the heretics; he is the “father of all heresies”:

All those who in any way corrupt the truth, and harm the teaching of the church, are the disciples and successors of Simon Magus of Samaria.… They put forth, indeed, the name of Jesus Christ as a kind of lure, but in many ways they introduce the impieties of Simon … spreading to their hearers the bitter and malignant poison of the great serpent (Satan), the great author of apostasy.
⁸¹

Finally he warns that “some who are considered to be among the orthodox”
⁸²
have much to fear in the coming judgment unless (and this is his main practical point) they now repent, repudiate the teaching of “another God,” and submit themselves to the bishop, accepting the “advance discipline”
⁸³
that he will administer to spare them eternal damnation.

Were Irenaeus’ religious convictions nothing but political tenets in disguise? Or, conversely, were his politics subordinate to his religious beliefs? Either of these interpretations oversimplifies the situation. Irenaeus’ religious convictions and his position—like those of his gnostic opponents—reciprocally influenced one another. If certain gnostics opposed the development of church hierarchy, we need not reduce gnosticism to a political movement that arose in reaction to that development. Followers of Valentinus shared a religious vision of the nature of God that they found incompatible with the rule of priests and bishops that was emerging in the catholic church—and so they resisted it. Irenaeus’ religious convictions, conversely, coincided with the structure of the church he defended.

This case is far from unique: we can see throughout the history of Christianity how varying beliefs about the nature of God inevitably bear different political implications. Martin Luther, more than 1,300 years later, felt impelled by his own religious experience and his transformed understanding of God
to challenge practices endorsed by his superiors in the Catholic Church, and finally to reject its entire papal and priestly system. George Fox, the radical visionary who founded the Quaker movement, was moved by his encounter with the “inner light” to denounce the whole structure of Puritan authority—legal, governmental, and religious. Paul Tillich proclaimed the doctrine of “God beyond God” as he criticized both Protestant and Catholic churches along with nationalistic and fascist governments.

As the doctrine of Christ’s bodily resurrection establishes the initial framework for clerical authority, so the doctrine of the “one God” confirms, for orthodox Christians, the emerging institution of the “one bishop” as monarch (“sole ruler”) of the church. We may not be surprised, then, to discover next how the orthodox description of God (as “Father Almighty,” for example) serves to define who is included—and who excluded—from participation in the power of priests and bishops.

III

God the Father/God the Mother

U
NLIKE MANY
of his contemporaries among the deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine Husband or Lover of any.
¹
He can scarcely be characterized in any but masculine epithets: king, lord, master, judge, and father.
²
Indeed, the absence of feminine symbolism for God marks Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in striking contrast to the world’s other religious traditions, whether in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome, or in Africa, India, and North America, which abound in feminine symbolism. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians today are quick to point out that God is not to be considered in sexual terms at all.
³
Yet the actual language they use daily in worship and prayer conveys a different message: who, growing up with Jewish or Christian tradition, has escaped the distinct impression that God is
masculine
? And while Catholics revere Mary as the mother of Jesus, they never identify her as divine in her own right: if she is “mother of God,” she is not “God the Mother” on an equal footing with God the Father!

Christianity, of course, added the trinitarian terms to the Jewish description of God. Yet of the three divine “Persons,”
two—the Father and the Son—are described in masculine terms, and the third—the Spirit—suggests the sexlessness of the Greek neuter term for spirit,
pneuma.
Whoever investigates the early history of Christianity (the field called “patristics”—that is, study of “the fathers of the church”) will be prepared for the passage that concludes the
Gospel of Thomas
:

Simon Peter said to them [the disciples]: “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her, in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
⁴

Strange as it sounds, this simply states what religious rhetoric assumes: that the men form the legitimate body of the community, while women are allowed to participate only when they assimilate themselves to men. Other texts discovered at Nag Hammadi demonstrate one striking difference between these “heretical” sources and orthodox ones: gnostic sources continually use sexual symbolism to describe God. One might expect that these texts would show the influence of archaic pagan traditions of the Mother Goddess, but for the most part, their language is specifically Christian, unmistakably related to a Jewish heritage. Yet instead of describing a monistic and masculine God, many of these texts speak of God as a dyad who embraces both masculine and feminine elements.

One group of gnostic sources claims to have received a secret tradition from Jesus through James and through Mary Magdalene. Members of this group prayed to both the divine Father and Mother: “From Thee, Father, and through Thee, Mother, the two immortal names, Parents of the divine being, and thou, dweller in heaven, humanity, of the mighty name …”
⁵
Other texts indicate that their authors had wondered to whom a single, masculine God proposed, “Let us make man [
adam
] in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Since the Genesis account goes on to say that humanity was created “male and
female” (1:27), some concluded that the God in whose image we are made must also be both masculine and feminine—both Father and Mother.

How do these texts characterize the divine Mother? I find no simple answer, since the texts themselves are extremely diverse. Yet we may sketch out three primary characterizations. In the first place, several gnostic groups describe the divine Mother as part of an original couple. Valentinus, the teacher and poet, begins with the premise that God is essentially indescribable. But he suggests that the divine can be imagined as a dyad; consisting, in one part, of the Ineffable, the Depth, the Primal Father; and, in the other, of Grace, Silence, the Womb and “Mother of the All.”
⁶
Valentinus reasons that Silence is the appropriate complement of the Father, designating the former as feminine and the latter as masculine because of the grammatical gender of the Greek words. He goes on to describe how Silence receives, as in a womb, the seed of the Ineffable Source; from this she brings forth all the emanations of divine being, ranged in harmonious pairs of masculine and feminine energies.