The Gnostic Gospels (23 page)

But Ptolemy and Heracleon, the leading teachers of the Western school of Valentinians, disagreed. Against Theodotus, they claimed that “Christ’s body,” the church, consisted of two distinct elements, one spiritual, the other unspiritual. This meant, they explained, that
both
gnostic and non-gnostic Christians stood within the same church. Citing Jesus’ saying that “many are called, but few are chosen,” they explained that Christians who lacked
gnosis
—by far the majority—were the many who were called. They themselves, as gnostic Christians, belonged to the few who were chosen. Heracleon taught that God had given them spiritual understanding for the sake of the rest—so that they would be able to teach “the many” and bring them to
gnosis
.
⁶⁴

The gnostic teacher Ptolemy agreed: Christ combined
within the church both spiritual and unspiritual Christians so that eventually all may become spiritual.
⁶⁵
Meanwhile, both belonged to one church; both were baptized; both shared in the celebration of the mass; both made the same confession. What differentiated them was the level of their understanding. Uninitiated Christians mistakenly worshiped the creator, as if he were God; they believed in Christ as the one who would save them from sin, and who they believed had risen bodily from the dead: they accepted him by faith, but without understanding the mystery of his nature—or their own. But those who had gone on to receive
gnosis
had come to recognize Christ as the one sent from the Father of Truth, whose coming revealed to them that their own nature was identical with his—and with God’s.

To illustrate their relationship, Heracleon offers a symbolic interpretation of the church as a temple: those who were ordinary Christians, not yet gnostics, worshiped like the Levites, in the temple courtyard, shut out from the mystery. Only those who had
gnosis
might enter within the “holy of holies,” which signified the place “where those who are spiritual worship God.” Yet one temple—the church—embraced both places of worship.
⁶⁶

The Valentinian author of the
Interpretation of the Knowledge
agrees with this view. He explains that although Jesus came into the world and died for the sake of the “church of mortals,”
⁶⁷
now this church, the “place of faith,” was split and divided into factions.
⁶⁸
Some members had received spiritual gifts—power to heal, prophecy, above all,
gnosis
; others had not.

This gnostic teacher expresses concern that this situation often caused hostility and misunderstanding. Those who were spiritually advanced tended to withdraw from those they considered “ignorant” Christians, and hesitated to share their insights with them. Those who lacked spiritual inspiration envied those who spoke out in public at the worship service and who spoke in prophecy, taught, and healed others.
⁶⁹

The author addresses the whole community as he attempts to reconcile both gnostic and non-gnostic Christians with one
another. Drawing upon a traditional metaphor, he reminds them that all believers are members of the church, the “body of Christ.” First he recalls Paul’s words:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.… The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”
⁷⁰

Then he goes on to preach to those who feel inferior, lacking spiritual powers, who are not yet gnostic initiates:

 … Do not accuse your Head [Christ] because it has not made you as an eye, but a finger; and do not be jealous of what has been made an eye or a hand or a foot, but be thankful that you are not outside the body.
⁷¹

To those who are spiritual, who have
gnosis
, and who have received “gifts,” he says:

 … Does someone have a prophetic gift? Share it without hesitation. Do not approach your brother with jealousy … How do you know [that someone] is ignorant? … [You] are ignorant when you [hate them] and are jealous of them.
⁷²

Like Paul, he urges all members to love one another, to work and suffer together, mature and immature Christians alike, gnostics and ordinary believers, and so “to share in the (true) harmony.”
⁷³
According to the Western school of Valentinian gnostics, then, “the church” included the community of catholic Christians, but was not limited to it. Most Christians, they claimed, did not even perceive the most important element of the church, the spiritual element, which consisted of all who had
gnosis.

From the bishop’s viewpoint, of course, the gnostic position was outrageous. These heretics challenged his right to define what he considered to be his own church; they had the audacity to debate whether or not catholic Christians participated; and
they claimed that their own group formed the essential nucleus, the “spiritual church.” Rejecting such religious elitism, orthodox leaders attempted instead to construct a
universal
church. Desiring to open that church to everyone, they welcomed members from every social class, every racial or cultural origin, whether educated or illiterate—everyone, that is, who would submit to their system of organization. The bishops drew the line against those who challenged any of the three elements of this system: doctrine, ritual, and clerical hierarchy—and the gnostics challenged them all. Only by suppressing gnosticism did orthodox leaders establish that system of organization which united all believers into a single institutional structure. They allowed no other distinction between first- and second-class members than that between the clergy and the laity, nor did they tolerate any who claimed exemption from doctrinal conformity, from ritual participation, and from obedience to the discipline that priests and bishops administered. Gnostic churches, which rejected that system for more subjective forms of religious affiliation, survived, as churches, for only a few hundred years.

VI

Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God

 … Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”
¹

T
HE GOSPEL OF JOHN
, which contains this saying, is a remarkable book that many gnostic Christians claimed for themselves and used as a primary source for gnostic teaching.
²
Yet the emerging church, despite some orthodox opposition, included John within the New Testament. What makes John acceptably “orthodox”? Why did the church accept John while rejecting such writings as the
Gospel of Thomas
or the
Dialogue of the Savior?
In considering this question, remember that anyone who drives through the United States is likely to see billboards proclaiming this saying from John—billboards signed by any of the local churches. Their purpose is clear: by indicating that one finds God only through Jesus, the saying, in its contemporary context, implies that one finds Jesus only through the church. Similarly, in the first centuries of this era, Christians concerned to strengthen the institutional church could find support in John.

Gnostic sources offer a different religious perspective. According to the
Dialogue of the Savior
, for example, when the disciples asked Jesus the same question (“What is the place to which we shall go?”) he answered, “the place which you can reach, stand there!”
³
The
Gospel of Thomas
relates that when the disciples asked Jesus where they should go, he said only, “There is light within a man of light, and it lights up the whole world. If he does not shine, he is darkness.”
⁴
Far from legitimizing any institution, both sayings direct one instead to oneself—to one’s inner capacity to find one’s own direction, to the “light within.”

The contrast sketched above is, of course, somewhat simplistic. Followers of Valentinus themselves demonstrated—convincingly—that many sayings and stories in John could lend themselves to such interpretation. But Christians like Irenaeus apparently decided that, on balance, the gospel of John (especially, perhaps, when placed in sequence after Matthew, Mark, and Luke) could serve the needs of the emerging institution.

As the church organized politically, it could sustain within itself many contradictory ideas and practices as long as the disputed elements supported its basic institutional structure. In the third and fourth centuries, for example, hundreds of catholic Christians adopted ascetic forms of self-discipline, seeking religious insight through solitude, visions, and ecstatic experience. (The terms “monk” and “monastic” come from the Greek word
monachos
, meaning “solitary,” or “single one,” which the
Gospel of Thomas
frequently uses to describe the gnostic.) Rather than exclude the monastic movement, the church moved, in the fourth century, to bring the monks into line with episcopal authority. The scholar Frederik Wisse has suggested that the monks who lived at the monastery of St. Pachomius, within sight of the cliff where the texts were found, may have included the Nag Hammadi texts within their devotional library.
⁵
But in 367, when Athanasius, the powerful Archbishop of Alexandria, sent an order to purge all “apocryphal books” with “heretical” tendencies, one (or several) of the monks may have hidden the
precious manuscripts in the jar and buried it on the cliff of the Jabal al-Tarif, where Muammad ‘Ali found it 1,600 years later.

Furthermore, as the church, disparate as it was internally, increasingly became a political unity between 150 and 400, its leaders tended to treat their opponents—an even more diverse range of groups—as if they, too, constituted an
opposite
political unity. When Irenaeus denounced the heretics as “gnostics,”
⁶
he referred less to any specific doctrinal agreement among them (indeed, he often castigated them for the variety of their beliefs) than to the fact that they all resisted accepting the authority of the clergy, the creed, and the New Testament canon.

What—if anything—did the various groups that Irenaeus called “gnostic” have in common? Or, to put the question another way, what do the diverse texts discovered at Nag Hammadi have in common? No simple answer could cover all the different groups that the orthodox attack, or all the different texts in the Nag Hammadi collection. But I suggest that the trouble with gnosticism, from the orthodox viewpoint, was not only that gnostics often disagreed with the majority on such specific issues as those we have explored so far—the organization of authority, the participation of women, martyrdom: the orthodox recognized that those they called “gnostics” shared a fundamental religious perspective that remained antithetical to the claims of the institutional church.

For orthodox Christians insisted that humanity needs a way beyond its own power—a divinely given way—to approach God. And this, they declared, the catholic church offered to those who would be lost without it: “Outside the church there is no salvation.” Their conviction was based on the premise that God created humanity. As Irenaeus says, “In this respect God differs from humanity; God makes, but humanity is made.”
⁷
One is the originating agent, the other the passive recipient; one is “truly perfect in all things,”
⁸
omnipotent, infinite, the other an imperfect and finite creature. The philosopher Justin Martyr says that when he recognized the great difference between the human mind and God, he abandoned Plato and became a
Christian philosopher. He relates that before his conversion an old man challenged his basic assumption, asking, “What affinity, then, is there between us and God? Is the soul also divine and immortal, and a part of that very regal mind?” Speaking as a disciple of Plato, Justin answered without hesitation, “Certainly.”
⁹
But when the old man’s further questions led him to doubt that certainty, he says he realized that the human mind could not find God within itself and needed instead to be enlightened by divine revelation—by means of the Scriptures and the faith proclaimed in the church.

But some gnostic Christians went so far as to claim that humanity created God—and so, from its own inner potential, discovered for itself the revelation of truth. This conviction may underlie the ironic comment in the
Gospel of Philip
: