What is Gnosticism?

May 11th, 2019

So what I tried to do is give as concise and overview as I could of what both the term Gnosis and Gnosticism meant that covers both what they would have meant to a speaker of Ancient Greek who was encountering the terms, as well as how they apply to the religion of Gnosticism, both classical and modern. I’ll start with a short definition and then get into the particulars of the terminology:

Gnosticism is a mystical tradition that believes the primary purpose of Jesus of Nazareth’s ministry was as a means of bringing about a transformation of consciousness in the minds of his adherents, providing them a path to liberate themselves from the pain and misery inherent in the world that humanity has come to inhabit.

What is mysticism?

There many definitions for this word, depending on the context. However, when taking the big picture view of comparative religion, the most common way of using the term is in reference to elements of a spiritual tradition that are designed to cultivate or alter the inner world of a practitioner. This can be contrasted to the dogmatic elements of a religion, where the dominant focus is the world outside the individual, and how one should understand and interact with it. Typically this is done through absolute claims regarding the structure of the universe and the divine, and rigid, unyielding behavioral requirements to put one in accord with it.

To take Islam as an example, the religion’s firm assertions on the the creation and stewardship of this world and its proscriptions on behavior (in most contexts) are dogmatic practices, since they are concerned with how we understand the outside world, what behaviors we must adhere to in order to place ourselves in accordance with it, and how we can live productively and harmoniously with other beings who share this external world with us. By contrast, the Sufis, such as the whirling dervishes, who engage in the practice of heavily ritualized spinning so as to enter a trance and attain unity with the divine, are clearly practicing a form of mysticism. This is, of course, painting things in broad over-generalizations, for Sufi practice insists that adherence to the moral precepts of the Quran is an essential first step to begin honing the mind towards mystical insight. On the flip side it is not entirely uncommon for more traditional Muslims to experience some sense of inner contact with the divine when engaging in the daily prayers even though those prayers are, at their core, meant to demonstrate submission to Allah.

As a whole (again using super broad strokes), the Eastern religious traditions, particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, tend to fall on the mystical side of this spectrum, while the Western religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam tend to be more dogmatic. Of the latter three, both Judaism and Islam have mystical traditions that have been integrated into the broader religious framework: Kabbalism and Sufism respectively. While these mystical sects often clash with the views of the more dogmatic hard liners, they still allow an individual interested primarily in mystical experience a culturally acceptable means of exploring these urges. By contrast, as Christianity developed, it began to regard it’s mystical traditions as heretical by default, and something to be purged from the “true faith”. By the sword if necessary. Again, there are a few exceptions, such as St. John of the Cross, some of the practices of the monastic orders, and many of the desert fathers, but these have been comparatively rare since the religion began to shape into the form we know today.

One final thing to note is that I have chosen mysticism and dogmatism to describe this dichotomy, but the terms esoteric and exoteric are also often used. In many ways these would be the more sensible choices, since they derive from the Greek prefixes of “eso”, meaning inner, and “exo”, meaning outer. However, these same words are often used to also describe practices that are aimed towards a small, typically more cultivated minority versus those that are designed to be applicable to all members. Since there is often a great deal of overlap between a religion’s inward oriented practices and the practices that are designed for a select few, it can make things confusing. This confusion is augmented by the fact that most online dictionaries tend to default to the small vs large group definition, and these explanations are geared towards people who might not be familiar with these practices, and who, quite reasonably, may need to look stuff up to bring themselves up to speed. It is simply worth noting that in this particular corner of the internet, esoteric and exoteric practice are most often used in the same way I have used mystical and dogmatic.

What are the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth?

Early Gnosticism was the pobably first Christian sect whose main focus was on mystical development and self cultivation, and it arose more or less in tandem with the more dogmatic sects that eventually won out and became modern Christianity. What this means is that the Gnostics were practicing their faith long before the 4th and 5th century church councils that selected from the hundreds of Christian documents available at that time the twenty seven that best conformed to their dogmatic interpretation of Jesus’ life, ministry, and death. It also means that, unlike later Christian mystical movements, which were forced to draw sustenance from the teat of this those documents, Gnosticism was able to develop it’s own radically different interpretation of Jesus’ life and teaching from what the Proto-Orthodox eventually forced upon the whole of Christendom. The collection of scriptures used by the Gnostics was, with the exception of a handful of texts that made their way into New Testament, otherwise completely different from the Christian scriptures we know today.

While the most immediate difference between Gnostic and Proto-Orthodox scripture is the admittedly complex system of Gnostic mythology, which asserts, among other things, a vast cosmic realm of wholly benevolent beings that we humans are to a large extent alienated from, I will get into this matter a little later. For now, simply focusing on the life of Jesus Christ, we see a peculiar paradox within Gnostic understanding of this all-important figure. On the one hand, they were not bound by the rather perplexing decision made at the Council of Chalcedon to assert that Jesus was at once fully human and fully divine, and then to utterly refuse any attempt to explain what this means while simultaneously responding with hatred and violence to all those who questioned this teaching. There is much variety in Gnostic thought, but they often choose to understand Jesus as a fully divine being who, naturally enough, did not suffer in any meaningful way by his crucifixion and death. Yet at the same time, the Gnostics, especially the early ones, do not accept the notion that the heightened consciousness displayed in the words and deeds of Jesus was entirely the result of his divine birth, nor that our position as sinful humans utterly obliterates the possibility of reaching a similar state of union with the Divine. Rather the Gnostic Gospels, particular those of Thomas and Philip, hold that humans, at least some of them, can by way of diligent self-cultivation, arrive at a state of unity in this very lifetime, and that the core purpose of Jesus’ ministry was to provide guidance in how one can do just that.

Is this Gnostic conception of Christ any less paradoxical than the Proto-Orthodox one? Not really. But the different emphasis allows for drastically different modes of understanding Jesus to arise, which in turn lead to drastically different modes of practice, worship, ritual, and living.

What is meant by a state of consciousness or transformation of consciousness?

Language by its very nature breaks both the world and human experience into discrete words and concepts, and these divisions often vary to a great degree, reflecting the values and culture of its speakers. To give an example: in Australia, there is an aboriginal language known as Guugu Yimithirr, which, interestingly enough, provided us with the English word Kangaroo. In Guugu Yimithirr, there is a strong emphasis placed on what we call the cardinal and ordinal directions: North, West, Southeast, etc. So vital are these concepts to the thinking of their speakers, that the language does not contain any means of distinguishing whether an object is in front of, behind, or to the sides of another object. Rather, native speakers of Guugu Yimithirr are so adept at knowing how objects relate to one another in a global rather than a local sense that they have no difficulty simply using global directional terms to fulfill the function of many English prepositions. “He is standing right East of her” rather than “He is standing right in front of her” and so on. Now enough ink to blacken the Mississippi has been spilled over whether this sense of global direction is an effect of culture on language or vice versa, and I am nowhere near qualified to give any kind of worthwhile opinion on the subject, but fortunately for my current purposes I don’t need to. What matters is simply that a connection between the way the Guugu Yimithirr speakers use language and their cultural values exists.

With that in mind we can turn our attention to the Ancient Greek language, and its massive set of distinctions between various kinds of knowledge. While English has a handful of words for knowledge that have slightly different meanings, such as “understanding”, “insight”, and “wisdom”, they are not clearly defined and are much more dependent on connotation than denotation. In other words, it is unlikely that you would refer to the carpenter who did an excellent job repairing your house as possessing “wisdom in the craft of home building” as opposed to saying that they were “a knowledgeable builder”. However, you would not be incorrect in using the latter, save insofar as it relates to the matter of not sounding like a particularly bombastic Shakespeare character.

This stands in sharp contrast to the terminology used by the Ancient Greeks to describe the various kinds of knowledge. There are probably over a dozen words distinguishing knowledge in Greek, and many of them are marked by clear delineations that are simply not present in their English equivalents. There is Episteme, which is often translated either as “scientific knowledge” or simply “knowledge”, both of which are vague and a little inaccurate. The word refers to a knowledge of firm, unchanging principles (which often, but not necessarily, fall under the domain of what we now call science) as can be contrasted against other fluctuating or more practical modes of knowledge. For instance, if you were to study Newton’s laws of motion, you would be acquiring Epesteme, but if you were to apply these matters to study the velocities of two real world objects, even if you were using Newtonian laws to make your final judgment, it would not fall within the definition of Episteme. There is also Phronesis, often translated as “prudence” or “practical wisdom”, which deals with the understanding of what is and isn’t good for you, and Tekne, which deals with the specific, often trade-oriented, knowledge required by people like the carpenter I mentioned above. Another one of these Greek terms is Gnosis, which, even moreso than the terms I mentioned, is very difficult to directly translate into English.

The best metaphor for Gnosis in this modern age can be found in the design and function of the computer. In just about any computer built in the past thirty years, you will find a device known as a hard drive, which, in contrast to the short term random access memory (RAM), is designed to store data over long periods of time. The data that is stored on a hard drive is accessed by the operating system and in turn presented and modified by the various pieces of software that the OS launches. However, the operating itself, as well as all of its associated data, are stored on the hard drive. Yet it is only by way of the operating system that the user can interact with the rest of the data. Furthermore, by making changes to the operating system itself, you can alter the means by which you interact with all the rest of the data stored on the hard drive. In this sense, Gnosis is used to describe the mind’s “operating system” type knowledge, or the knowledge which affects how the mind engages with the rest of it’s contents. In other words, knowledge which directly impacts the experience of consciousness.

If all this is unclear, a practical example may be beneficial. Western culture as a whole is much more interested, at least in how we speak, with the cultivation of the more “data oriented” varieties of knowledge, as our school curricula and testing metrics clearly show. We often, implicitly or explicitly, hold to the questionable assumption that as you learn more and more about a particular subject, your ability to put this knowledge into practice will rise of it’s own accord. This is why so many people come out of college with a degree in a particular field, and find that little of what they learned in school applies to their new job. Since the requirements of the different jobs available to a graduate are legion, it makes a certain kind of sense on the school’s end to simply focus on the absorption of the necessary factual material without cultivating any sense of how this knowledge can be used to create a “engineer’s consciousness” or a “botanist’s consciousness”. In other words, a mind that will react to the myriad stimuli with the recollection of the appropriate pieces of knowledge and the critical thinking necessary to channel this knowledge into a workable solution to whatever problem they are facing.

However, there are still a number of places where this “OS level knowledge” makes it’s way into our understanding, and one good example is that is the concept of skepticism. While being a skeptic is often associated with a number of specific beliefs, such as the belief that there is no God, that suddenly stumbling upon a video of Bigfoot on YouTube is not grounds for overturning the phenomenal lack of evidence for such a creature’s existence, or that we should use scientific research rather than anecdotal evidence when deciding whether or not to vaccinate our children. However none of these beliefs, taken individually or as a whole, truly define what it means to be a skeptic. To illustrate this, let’s imagine that I am a scammer, and I have found a technique bilking money from people that is entirely new and undocumented, and does not fit within any known con. Now let’s say I wanted to test this scam on a self described skeptic to find out how effective it is. Assuming I was able to succeed and graft the poor guy out of his cash, what might happen when that person was hanging out with a group of fellow skeptics later that day? What would they say when he described his experience of getting hoodwinked? The victim might be inclined to point out that his being bamboozled was not a result of any deficiency in skepticism on his part, for perhaps that person has the entirety of RationalWiki and even a couple of dedicated scam sites committed to memory. They might be inclined to point out that they possessed all of the core beliefs inherent to being called a skeptic, but would their friends buy the idea that this person was behaving in a skeptical manner when they handed over their money? Likely not, for his friends would probably point out that being a skeptic is not, at it’s core, the acceptance of the aforementioned propositions. Rather it is a mode of engaging in the world that can be applied to any circumstance, familiar or unfamiliar. They might say that skepticism was a “mindset” or a “way of life”, lacking a more precise term, but what they actually mean by this is that being a skeptic is a different state of consciousness than not being one. To put it another way, once the mind has developed certain skills relating to approaching new information with a firm, doubting yet inquisitive mindset, capable of drawing from the required raw information of empirical research and the summaries of said research, there is simply no way they would believe that a person approaching them on the streets or online with some kind of scheme built on promises of future revenue in exchange for a smaller portion of the cash upfront was in any way a sensible possibility. In this sense, skepticism is a variety of Gnosis. Note here that the Gnostic religion was named after the form of knowledge called Gnosis, so this is not to say that skepticism is Gnostic.

All this is well and good, but we still have not gotten to what the changes to consciousness sought by the Gnostic religious tradition actually were? Owing to the fragmentary nature of the surviving Gnostic texts and the fact that there are no Gnostic traditions that have existed continuously since the movement’s inception, this is a very difficult question, and one that every member of this community will likely have a different answer for. Since this is meant as an overview to both Gnostic thought and how that thought is understood today, it would be impossible to give a concise overview of this matter. So instead I will take as an example a single passage from the Gospel of Thomas, the earliest Gnostic scripture, which I can use to explain how the Gnostic mode of spirituality differs from both ordinary Christianity as well as the religions in the Eastern tradition, which in many ways are closer Gnosticism than the Christianity we are familiar with:

“If your leaders tell you, “Look, the kingdom is in heaven,"

then the birds of heaven will precede you.

If they say to you, “It’s in the sea,”

then the fish will precede you.

But the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.

When you know yourselves, then you will be known,

and you will understand that you are children of the living father.

But if you do not know yourselves,

then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.”

“The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 3; trans. Marvin Meyer

To delve into the nitty gritty of what the author means by “the kingdom” would require a lengthy overview of both the history of Christianity (as opposed to the history put forth by Christians) and the time, place, and culture in which the text was written (likely Judea sometime between 80-110 C.E.). However this essay is long enough as it is and there is a lot of disagreement on the matter, so let us content ourselves by saying that it is “something roughly equivalent to what modern Christians describe interchangeably as ‘heaven’ and ‘the kingdom'”. Right off the bat we see a drastic distinction between Gnostics and the Proto-Orthodox in their understanding of the divine. The Proto-Orthodox and their successors hold that the Kingdom is a physical place that one arrives at after death if one has an acceptable amount of faith and morality, whereas to the Gnostic, Christ’s promised kingdom came to those who undertook the necessary mental and ritual cultivations to place their minds in concord with the Divine. This is not to say that the Gnostics did not believe in an extra-physical Divine kingdom, but they viewed it as being intertwined with the state of a person’s consciousness in a way that is closer to what one finds in Buddhism and the idea of Nirvana with and without residue than the views of the surviving Christians.

But, as interesting as these ideas about the Divine being found entirely through consciousness are, they are not the entirety of the matter. In the next question I will attempt to give a little information on the rather complex Gnostic cosmology, but for now we can note that this passage seems to suggest that it is not just a matter of having a consciousness that is purified of the taints a la Buddhism, but that the process of Gnostic self-refinement directly leads to the discovery that your own mind, by virtue of it’s Divine origin, can be understood as a mirror image of the Highest Divine, or Pleroma, and that understanding the one is fundamentally linked with understanding the other. In other words, if you can arrive at the “Gnostic Gnosis”, then you will be in union with the divine, regardless of whether this occurs here or beyond.

It may be worth giving a brief accounting of this word Pleroma here, which is unfortunate because it is a word that is heavily resistant to this kind of simplification. Because, according to Gnostic thinkers, the very idea of categorizing one thing as a place and another thing as an entity is rooted in both the limitations of human psychology and the characteristics and needs of interacting with our immediate surroundings, they understand this highest good or this ultimate deity to be at once a place and a being. This is because the human idea of a place and the human idea of a thing both falter before absolute divinity. Thus, Gnostic texts will describe the Pleroma as a being similar to the Abrahamic conception of God one moment, and as a place in which the highest Aeons, or secondary divine beings, live in the next. You will also see such confusing expressions as “triple male”, which essentially means “that which is beyond the limitations of either gender”, or “encompassing masculinity, femininity, and a whole bunch of stuff that we can’t even grasp” when reading descriptions of the Pleroma. This is why it is only through Gnosis, and not simply reading these terms in a book that we can break through to some minor fragment of understanding true divinity.

Why are pain and misery an inescapable part of life in this world?

The Buddha, on the night of his enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree, came to a series of interdependent conclusions about life in this world. Chief among these truths was that of Dukkha, often (though not entirely accurately) translated as suffering. Many years later, the monk Malunkyaputta approached the Blessed One with four questions concerning the world’s cosmology and the place within it of both Buddhas and regular humans. The Buddha responded by asking Malunkyaputta to imagine a man shot with an arrow, who rather than seeking immediate medical treatment for his condition, insists upon speculating on the source of this wound, the man who delivered it, and why, illustrating how one’s primary goal should always be the liberation of the mind from suffering. (MN 63: Cūḷamāluṅkya Sutta; I 426-32)

These are very wise words, but those of us born or assimilated into Western culture may find ourselves immersed in a mode of thinking that has placed a great value on asking “why?” to even the most inane matters, and this practice has reaped great boons for us, elevating the Western way of thinking to dominance on a worldwide level. The instruction to ignore everything that does not directly pertain to the dissolution of suffering can seem difficult to a Westerner, if not outright troubling.

Fortunately for us, these ideas go all the way back to the earliest extent Greek thinkers. There have been many attempts by Western thinkers well versed in the dialectic of “why?” to provide in answer for how one might cultivate a superior form of consciousness. In fact, the early stages of Western intellectual development feature many practices that rival what was going on in the East. Leaving aside the contentious issue what transpired in the Greek Mysteries and when, there were many other early Greek thinkers that placed a great emphasis on mystical practice. What we have of Pythagorianism hints that they were very interested in looking inward, while Plato, in his Symposium, lays out a detailed mode of practice for progressing in stages from contemplating a beautiful body to a deep, mystical engagement of the highest Divinity, and Stoic practitioners sought to attain a state of consciousness that was absolutely resilient to the effects of external influences. The Platonic ideas of mysticism proved to be particularly virile as they were spread and modified over the centuries, until they reached a kind of fruition with Plotinus and his colleagues in the city of Alexandria.

Alexandria was the main base of operations for the Neoplatonists, but it was also home to the Hermetics, a group practicing an extremely mystical form of Egyptian devotion which fused the Greek God Hermes with the Egyptian God Thoth. Finally, Alexandria was home to a large diaspora of Jewish settlers, especially after the collapse of the second temple in 66 C.E. These Jews, who had witnessed the Roman destruction of what was supposed to be their God’s home on earth, began to engage with this Alexandrian mysticism and came to a number of drastic conclusions, which, to say the least, radically departed from those of traditional Judaism.

The most important of these ideas was their unique interpretation of the Demiurge. The term “Demiurge” is used in the Platonic tradition to indicate a kind of craftsman god who, while not omnipotent, was basically good, and served as an intermediary between this realm and the abstract and purely good realm of the forms. However, the Alexandrian Jews, no doubt experiencing a deep sense of cynicism and despair over events in Judea, began to fuse this Platonic idea with a vision of the Old Testament God not as the absolute omnipotent being Judaism and Proto-Orthodox Christianity envisioned, but as a wicked, proud, and even foolish lesser being who ruled over his deeply flawed creation with a despot’s sense of warped justice. They began using passages from the Torah to demonstrate the fallibility of this supposedly supreme being, as can be seen in The Apocryphon of John, which most scholars agree descended in some manner from a pre-Christian source:

“When [the Demiurge] saw creation surrounding him, and the throng of angels around him who had come forth from him, he said to them, I am a jealous god and there is no other god beside me. But by announcing this, he suggested to the angels with him that there is another god. For if there were no other god, of whom would he be jealous?”

“The Apocryphon of John” trans. Marvin Meyer

Thus when early Christian ideas began to filter into the Alexandrian melting pot, this bleak, despairing take on the Old Testament God put forth by the Proto-Gnostics found an excellent counterweight in the message of Jesus of Nazareth, who was taken to be not the son of this Jewish deity, but the “child” of Plato’s Highest Good brought into this realm to remedy the deeply flawed works and acts of the Old Testament Demiurge. This struggle is not quite the strict dualism of Zoroastrianism or later Manichaeism, where both the forces of Good and Evil are close to an even match, but rather the human struggle between good and evil was understood to be a slow process of reclaiming the lost sparks of Divinity that the Old Testament God had taken from the highest Pleroma.

The effect Christianity had on this early Proto-Gnosticism cannot be understated, for by casting Jesus in opposition to the cruel deity responsible for making all of this suffering, it turned Christ’s message into a program of spiritual liberation which, when undertaken, could bring the consciousness of the practitioner into accord with the Pleroma during their time on Earth, not in a promised future kingdom. Thus the spiritual process shifts from gritting ones teeth and enduring the slings and arrows of this world so that one can be reborn in a better one to cultivating an affinity towards those elements of the highest Good that, despite the Demiurge’s best efforts, have filtered into his wicked realm from above, while training the mind away from those elements of creation that bind one in cycles of misery and ultimately keep us trapped here. Once our minds have been purged of the influence of this evil, it is almost of secondary importance whether we happen to be inhabiting a higher kingdom, since we will have already honed ourselves into a state of consciousness that is immune to the evils of material existence We humans possess a certain amount of the Divine sparks of the Pleroma, and a certain amount of the base materiality and cruelty of the Demiurge, and if we cultivate the former and reject the later, then eventually our consciousness will rise towards divinity of it’s own accord.

An important corollary of this is that most Gnostics held to a qualified belief in reincarnation. That is to say, the worst the Demiurge can do is keep the sparks of light imprisoned within his realm by continuing to keep them enthralled with greed, delusion, and hatred. Since the Demiurge’s main desire is to maintain these sparks of light for himself, he will continue to cycle them into new bodies that are equally enthralled by evil desires until they eventually cultivate themselves and break free. The Gnostics do posit that a handful of human beings completely lack this divine spark, and will thus be doomed to wander the Demiurge’s existence long after the rest of humanity have freed themselves, and that without the deeds of the benevolent ones, this realm will essentially become a kind of hell, but these people are the exception, not the rule.

All of this lines up with the idea of viewing human consciousness as a microcosm that reflects the broader structure of Divine Reality in interesting ways. Whether you choose to view these teachings as a metaphorical representation of how we might break free from sin and suffering, as absolute literal truth, as something in between, or indeed as nothing of any value whatsoever, is of course entirely up to you.

How exactly can a modern person liberate their consciousness using Gnosticism?

It is on this point that you’ll likely find the most disagreement both within this community and among the wider population of Gnostic enthusiasts. Again we’re forced to contend with the fact that the cache of Gnostic texts that have survived long enough to get into our hands, particularly the collection found in the Egyptian caves at Nag Hammadi, are just not detailed enough to give anything like the comprehensive models one finds in mystical traditions that have unbroken lineages. Some people, often those that come from more traditional Christian backgrounds that are seeking new ways of understanding Jesus and his message, will find a lot of value in an approach that draws heavily from surviving Christian traditions, but without the years of baggage or doctrinal confusion. An excellent example of someone in this camp is Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller, Bishop of the Ecclesia Gnostica in LA. Dr. Hoeller came from a Catholic background, but grew disenchanted with the beliefs, values, and priorities he saw there. Hoeller was able to come into formal ordination in the same Christian lineage system that is used by the Catholic Church, and if you watch any of his videos on YouTube you can see the influence of Catholic icons and attire on his Gnostic services.

On the other hand, you have people like myself, who come from either non-Christian or non-theistic backgrounds, or who had such a miserable experience with modern Christianity that they find the very trappings of the faith repulsive on some level. This group seeks to draw from surviving spiritual traditions outside Christianity to bolster our lack of information on Gnostic practice. This second group is also the one more likely to view Gnosticism in a Perennialist fashion, seeing it as another vein of the same sacred wisdom that can be found, to greater and lesser degrees, in all the worlds religious traditions. This group is more inclined to see Gnosticism as a mode of liberation that, owing to it’s origins in the Roman world, has the ability to speak to the Western mind in ways that established spiritual traditions from other cultures often cannot, and to regard the limited teachings we possess more as tools for guidance than a complete religion that can be taken up in full.

The way that one engages with the Gnostic spiritual material depends to a large extent on where you are coming from, but regardless of what ignited your interest in Gnosticism (at least enough to read this far), the surviving Gnostic documents are what they are, and now is as good a time as any to touch on a few of the key practices they offer.

We’ve already touched on the Gospel of Thomas, but we can now take a closer look at the broader shape of the text. Unlike the canonical gospels, which all tell a more or less complete story about the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Thomas is a sayings gospel: a collection of 114 brief stand alone quotations aimed at lifting the consciousness of the reader. These sayings range from being relatively easy to understand to being cryptic and difficult to penetrate. An example of a saying that is fairly easy to grasp (though not to practice) is “You see the speck in your brother’s eye but not the beam in your own eye. When you take the beam out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” (Saying 26, trans. Meyer) This of course is remarkably similar to the passage found in Matthew 7:3-5, and there is a fairly pronounced trend for the more easily understood sayings in Thomas to also be used by the authors of the canonical Gospels.

An example of a quote that is not as easy to understand on the first pass is “The students said to Yeshua [Aramaic rendering of the Latin Jesus], ‘Tell us how our end will be.’ Yeshua said, ‘Have you discovered the beginning and now are seeking the end? Where the beginning is, the end will be. Blessings on you who stand at the beginning. You will know the end and not taste death.'” These more complex quotations, in my opinion, bear a certain resemblance to the Zen practices of Koan and Mondo, where a brief statement or exchange of questions and answers is presented, whose meaning is deliberately obscure or irrational. I believe in both cases that much of the purpose is to break the mind from it’s existing patterns of thinking and understanding by forcing it to integrate phrases and ideas that are in direct contradiction to what it is used to, thereby allowing new and perhaps more psychologically beneficial modes of thinking to emerge. Thus the close study of Thomas and other similar Gnostic texts can be used to bring about changes in consciousness.

Another Gnostic mode of mysticism is through the practice of Gnostic ritual. This is an area that is of particular interest to me, as my first contact with any real spirituality came as a self professed atheist at the conclusion of my pledge period at the “stoner fraternity” of my university. It was a fraternal organization that dated back to the masonic-influenced period of early college fraternities, and because my Brothers were not a bunch of brainless meatheads, they were able to perform the ritual with what I then and now view as a surprising amount of care and competence Despite the wholly secular environment in which I underwent initiation, I had what perceived as a spiritual experience that evening. Of course, I take my vows seriously, so I cannot discuss exactly what went on in that room or why it so moved me.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this is just a useless personal digression in what was supposed to be a brief overview of Gnosticism. However, the situation that I am in now regarding having to write about a college fraternal initiation that I was sworn to secrecy about is remarkably similar to what confronted the author of the Gospel of Philip. He or she, like myself, had undergone an initiation ritual, or in the author’s case, presumably all five sacramental ceremonies: Baptism, Chrism, Eucharist, Redemption, and the Bridal Chamber. However, owing to the necessary secrecy of these rituals, they were forbidden from going into detail about the specifics of what each one entailed. Thus the author of Philip is forced to pepper his collection of aphorisms, parables, and dialogues with rather oblique references that hint at the purpose, design, and power of Gnostic ritual.

While there are certain similarities between this approach and that of the Gospel of Thomas, Philip comes from a later strain of Gnosticism with different beliefs, customs, and priorities than the Thomas Gnostics. The modern scholars’ best guess is that the Gospel of Philip emerged from the Valentinian sect of Gnosticism, which, according to Iraneus of Lyon, a Gnostic persecutor, was a mediation between the Sethian Gnostics I described above and Proto-Orthodox Christianity. The Valentinians imagined the Demiurge/Old Testament God as something more akin to how Plato saw him: a flawed but benevolent figure, and the misery and suffering of this world is merely a byproduct of its fallibility rather than a deliberate design. Because the Valentinians came from a time when Christianity was better established, they had a detailed program of ceremonial practice far more extensive than the simple Baptism of earlier groups.

For instance, regarding the ceremony of Chrism, “anointing” in Greek, a ceremonial practice where (flammable) oil is spread upon the brow of the Messiah, or in this case the Gnostic initiate, Philip says the following: “Through water [Baptism] and fire this wide realm is purified, and the visible cleaned by the visible, and the hidden by the hidden, but there are elements concealed in the visible. There is water within water and fire in the oil of chrism.”, and “Chrism is superior to baptism. From the word chrism we have been called Christians, and surely not from the word baptism. And because of the chrism Christ has his name. The father anointed the son, and the son anointed the messengers, and the messengers anointed us. Who has been anointed possesses everything: resurrection, light, cross, holy spirit. The father gave him this in the bridal chamber. He merely accepted the gift. The father was in the son and the son in the father. This is the kingdom of heaven.” (trans. Barnstone)

Now it is impossible to construct a workable Chrism ritual just from the five or six references to it made in this fashion in Philip. Rather, they are tantalizing clues to a mode of spiritual practice different from any that has been seen before or since. This is a mirror of the broader issues of modern Gnostic practice: we’ve inherited many interesting tidbits regarding how the Gnostics operated, but no direct or complete guide to how we might do the same ourselves. This, however, is not entirely a drawback. The modern world has drastically changed the nature of the spiritual quest, and many of the problems of modern Christianity stem from a failure to adapt to these difficulties. By forcing us to start from only a little guidance from the Gnostic practitioners of antiquity, we have an opportunity to experiment with modes of spiritual practice that better align with our current cultural milieu. Many of us are hard at work at the task of devising modes of worship and practice that better fit within this strange an alienating modern world, whether we find any success in our labors will only be determined with time. Meanwhile, all I can do is wholeheartedly invite you listen in as the process develops, and, if you are so inclined, to add your own voice to the dialogue.