The Greek word gnosis means "knowledge". In the first centuries of the Christian era several religious groups used it to mean not just any intellectual knowledge, but saving knowledge: a human being's discovery of their own divine origin. For a long time these groups were known almost exclusively through the works of their opponents. A chance discovery in Egypt in 1945 changed the picture radically.
Known through their opponents
Until the twentieth century the main sources on the Gnostics were treatises by the Christian writers who fought them. Irenaeus of Lyon, around 180, wrote a large work known as Against Heresies, in which he describes and refutes many doctrines. After him Hippolytus of Rome and Epiphanius of Salamis continued this work.
These works are valuable, but must be read with caution: they present opponents' ideas in order to demolish them, often simplifying them or grouping them polemically. A few Coptic manuscripts were also held in Europe, such as the Askew Codex, which contains the Pistis Sophia, and the Bruce Codex, but they were few.
The 1945 discovery
In December 1945, near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, some farmers found a jar containing papyrus codices bound in leather. After a complicated story of sales and changes of hands, most of the codices reached the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
There are twelve codices, plus some leaves of a thirteenth, written in Coptic and datable to the fourth century, but translated from older Greek originals. They contain around fifty texts, including:
- the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus;
- the Gospel of Truth, a meditation from a Valentinian milieu;
- the Apocryphon of John, one of the great Gnostic mythic narratives;
- the Gospel of Philip, with reflections on the sacraments;
- Hermetic texts and even a fragment of Plato's Republic.
For the first time scholars could read these movements in their own words.
The great themes of the Gnostic myth
Gnostic doctrines were highly varied, but many texts share a narrative structure:
- above everything stands an unknown and perfect God, surrounded by the Pleroma, the "fullness" of divine beings called Aeons;
- one of the Aeons, often Sophia, Wisdom, performs an act that causes a rupture;
- from this rupture comes the Demiurge, a lower craftsman, sometimes called Ialdabaoth, who creates the material world believing himself the only god;
- yet a spark of the higher light has remained within human beings;
- a revealer descends to awaken this spark and lead it back to its origin.
Salvation, from this perspective, depends less on faith or works than on the awakening of awareness.
Teachers and schools
Among the best-documented figures are Basilides, active in Alexandria in the first half of the second century, and Valentinus, an Egyptian trained in Alexandria who taught in Rome around the middle of the century. The Valentinian school was especially sophisticated and divided into eastern and western branches, with teachers such as Ptolemy and Heracleon.
Other groups, which scholars call "Sethian", gave a central role to Seth, Adam's third son, as the ancestor of a spiritual lineage. Marcion, often associated with the Gnostics, held a distinct doctrine centred on the separation between the God of the Old Testament and the Father proclaimed by Jesus.
What "Gnosticism" means
The term "Gnosticism" is modern, and scholars have debated its use for decades. In 1966 an international colloquium on the origins of Gnosticism was held in Messina, which proposed distinguishing between gnosis as a general attitude, knowledge of divine mysteries reserved for an elite, and Gnosticism as a set of historical systems of the second century. More recently some researchers have suggested dropping the category altogether, finding it too broad.
For Studio Esoterico Cornelio this debate is instructive: behind a single label lie very different religious experiences, which must be studied text by text.
The legacy
After the fourth century Gnostic groups disappeared or changed. Manichaeism, founded by Mani in the third century, shared some dualistic ideas with them, and in the Middle Ages movements such as the Cathars were sometimes read as their heirs, though a direct historical link is debated. In the twentieth century gnosis attracted philosophers, psychologists and writers, and the Nag Hammadi texts are now translated into many languages.
In short
- Gnosis was saving knowledge of humanity's divine origin, shared by various groups in the early centuries.
- Until 1945 the Gnostics were known mostly through their opponents, such as Irenaeus of Lyon.
- The Coptic Nag Hammadi codices have restored around fifty original texts.
- The Gnostic myth distinguishes an unknown God from a Demiurge who creates the material world.
- The very category of "Gnosticism" is now debated among scholars.