The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (13 page)

Once Catholic Christianity received state backing, Christians formed a canon that included the sanitized editions of certain books and excluding others like the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Mary Magdalene; the Secret Book of James; the Prayer of the Apostle Paul; the Acts of Paul and Thecla; and so forth. The result was a stacked deck intended precisely to give an “official” version of Christian beginnings. Surprising proof of Bauer’s thesis came to light with the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts in Chenoboskion, Egypt. These documents had once formed the library of the monks of St. Pachomius. Once the monks received the Easter letter of Athanasius in 367, mandating the exclusive use of the twenty-seven New Testament books we have today, the monks hastened to stash away the others so as not to have them confiscated or burned. (In the same way, the mysterious absence of any New Testament manuscripts before the third century may imply the systematic destruction of these old texts, which may have looked quite different from the “authorized” versions.) And, armed with state power, the Church took to persecuting heretics and pagans with the same ferocity with which the emperors Decius and Diocletian had once persecuted Christians. This much of Brown’s repulsive sketch of dominant Constantinian Christianity is sadly true.

THE UNDERGROUND CHURCH

But the major reason it was so easy to supplant non-Catholic Christianities is the fact of their organization—or rather their lack of it.

The Marcionite churches (actually “synagogues”) flourished widely and well. Despite their radical belief that celibacy was required for salvation, their appeal was great. Just as in Buddhism, there was a place for those who admired their rigorism but did not feel inclined to embrace it for themselves. “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!” These weaker brethren might delay baptism till the deathbed, but having supported the saints, they would receive a saint’s reward. It was much the same with the Manichean churches. They, too, had public congregations of their own. The Roman Church made war on these and finally destroyed them, but further east, beyond their inquisitorial reach, Marcionites and Manicheans still survived here and there for some centuries thereafter.

With most Gnostics, the situation was very different. The disciples of Valentinus, Basilides, Bardesanes, Satornilus, Simon Magus, and the rest were more like study groups, informal philosophical circles with minimal organization. They were content to exist on the margins of Christian congregations in which they formed a distinct and dubious minority. Many probably met privately during the week without the bishop’s knowledge, silently trying to work like leaven within the loaf—much like Charismatic prayer groups within mainstream congregations today. They viewed themselves as Gnostics or
pneumatics
(“spiritual ones”), “stronger brethren,” “the perfect,” “the mature” in the midst of the merely “natural” or “soulish” churchgoers within the church and the soulless

“woodenheads” without. They learned to be circumspect about their advanced beliefs, not to cast pearls before swine. But they succeeded only in getting themselves into trouble. This is surely the situation that led to the remarkable story in Thomas, saying 13:

Jesus said to his disciples, “Make a comparison: tell me who I am like.”

Simon Peter answered him, “You are like a righteous angel.”

Matthew said to him, “You are like a philosopher with understanding.”

Thomas said to him, “Master, my mouth cannot frame the truth of what you are like!”

Jesus said, “I am not your master, because you have drunk, even become drunk, from the bubbling spring which I have ladeled out.” And he took him away from the rest. He said three things to him.

Now when Thomas rejoined his comrades, they pressed him: “What did Jesus say to you?”

Thomas replied, “If I were to tell you even one of the things he told me, you would pick up stones to throw at me! And then fire would erupt from the stones and consume you!”

So when the storm blew up, they hunkered down and kept quiet. Gnostics must have continued to cherish their astonishing beliefs in secret, but they could no longer dare meet together in social entities. So Gnosticism went so far underground as to vanish. But it never really died, for Gnostic mythemes and doctrines continued to pop up again and again on through the Middle Ages. Either the underground river broke to the surface occasionally, or the human mind would ever so often reinvent the Gnostic wheel.

UPON THIS ROCK SHALL I BUILD MY CHURCH?

Was it wise for Marcionites and Manicheans to organize churches? When any movement is popularized, its distinctiveness gets diluted, accommodated to what the evangelistic market will bear. But the two-track system was a clever way of avoiding this, as in Buddhism. In times of peace, the institutionalism was efficient and kept Gnostic teaching available as a public option. But when persecution arose, this institutionalized existence only made their churches sitting ducks.

So was it wiser for the Gnostics to avoid organizing separate churches of their own? Perhaps so, but not from a worldly, practical standpoint. The Gnostics perhaps realized that
gnosis
, illumination, cannot be catechized, cannot be inherited, cannot be routinized, without losing its very essence. The spirit blows where it listeth, and to trap it in an institution is to clip its wings and to suffocate it. The church building too soon becomes a mausoleum for dead truth. Churches become boats that won’t rock for fear of sinking, while volatile
gnosis
, with its unpredictable revelations, is more like the dangerous hydra that delights in scuttling boats.

If informal, spiritualistic, freethinking conventicles are not built to make it for the long haul, that is their natural destiny. There is minimal organization for two reasons: First, the people in it are too heavenly minded to be much earthly good at such things, and, second, by leaving organization and administration to pretty much take care of themselves, one is refusing to “reify” the organization, refusing to let it take on a life of its own. Because then it becomes a Frankenstein monster that dwarfs and destroys its creator. And that, of course, is exactly the Gnostic myth. The world is the ill-advised creature of the bungling Demiurge, ruled by fallen Powers, invulnerable to human efforts to overthrow or reform them. It becomes a retarding morass, imprisoning the very souls that built it in the first place.

GNOSTIC IDENTITY

Though they sometimes seem not to know what Gnosticism was, Dan Brown and his colleagues seem to think we would be much better off if we somehow returned to the tenets of that ancient, underground faith. Perhaps they are right. But how would such a sea change be navigated? How would one do it? Would it necessarily entail robed and hooded orgies in torch-lit catacombs, such as Brown portrays his modern Templar Gnostics celebrating? Some may rejoice at the prospect. But ultimately such behavior boils down to childish and grotesque role-playing games—like wearing a Klingon costume to a fan convention. And yet there is a modern Western representation of Gnosticism for serious adults. Gnosticism must be, and has been, demythologized for us. It is the Gnosticism of the critical intellectual.

Today’s advocacy of Gnosticism by Elaine Pagels, Karen King, and others, plus the avid interest of their readers, certainly does not stem from any attraction to the specific, literal beliefs of the ancient Gnostic cultists.
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No, but the ancient Gnostics
are
proof that there was diversity of belief in the ancient church, that so-called Orthodoxy never had a copyright on the term
Christian
and more importantly
does not now
. One appeals to the Valentinians and Marcosians and Simonians and Phibionites not because one actually covets docetic Christology, sexual libertinism, a multiplicity of Aions in the Pleroma, and so on. In fact, who would not rebel just as strongly if
these
elaborate and bizarre beliefs were imposed by an institutional organization? No, it is the right of dissent, of free thought in religious matters, to redefine Christianity in one’s own terms, that is appealing to many critical intellectuals today. And yet there is a sense in which the specifically Gnostic name tag still applies. That label does belong on the bottle being sold by Pagels and others. The Gnostics, more than anyone else, have bequeathed us a framework that speaks to the situation of the modern intellectual. We may find ourselves to be Gnostics by analogy, admittedly, but it may be a very strict and close analogy!

THE LAW OF THE CREATOR

The ancient Gnostics believed that the laws of the Torah and the doctrines of the conventional Christianity of the Roman Empire were impositions of the Demiurge, a self-aggrandizing god who had created the material earth and imprisoned divine souls within it. Once awakened, Gnostics denied any duty to take seriously the established laws and doctrines. They were not revelations of the true God but only fictions fabricated by the god of this world. So outwardly, Gnostics didn’t mind going through ordinary Catholic rituals. Why not? But they knew better. They secretly smiled, knowing of a higher truth.

And the intellectual, the historical critic, the philosopher is in precisely the same position, whether or not we have ever heard of Gnosticism. We know too well that every religious doctrine and symbol, every ritual and regulation, has human fingerprints all over it. All alike are fictions, woven by our ancestors, ad hoc arrangements to stem social chaos. We know good and well that Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and the others were right. What others deem the iron laws, the eternal verities of God, we know for pretentious human creations. That doesn’t mean we go out of our way to flout them or destroy them.

As students of Freud, Ludwig Feuerbach, and others, we may have arrived at the conclusion that there is no God, that the biblical deity is no more likely to be real than Zeus, Odin, or any other tribal totem. And we say so because we have been enabled to see the true picture from above. We can look down on the quaint beliefs of churchgoers from a superior perch. If so, we are exactly in the position of the ancient Gnostics, who knew themselves superior to the Demiurge, the biblical deity who was a false deity. Of course, they believed the Demiurge did really exist; we do not. But that is almost beside the point. We understand the conventional God to be a false god, with a greater Truth above him. But, as a belief motivating most of the human race, the Demiurgic god does exist as a force to be reckoned with. We may define our higher truth in whatever way seems best to us. But the structure of our beliefs, and of the manner in which we patronize the childlike literalism of others, is the same.

THE SEMBLANCE OF JESUS CHRIST

The ancient Gnostics tended to believe Jesus Christ had not possessed a physical body of organic flesh. To us such a Christ sounds like some
Star Trek
alien. But is not the point much the same when we arrive at the conclusion that we can know little about any historical Jesus, even that we cannot be sure there was one? And yet we find the hero of the gospels compelling. He
appears
as a figure we would like to emulate. And that has become good enough, with or without any historical basis. Aren’t we Docetists?

Do we believe in concentric spheres surrounding the earth, separating it from God? Do we think that the portals of heaven are guarded by evil angels who try to turn back every soul that seeks admittance? That events on earth are caused by these cosmic Powers who rule the world? Unless we are paranoid schizophrenics of an exotic type, we do not. But don’t we believe that much of the evil in the world is the result of super-personal, faceless corporate entities that exploit the creation and oppress mere humans? They are multinational corporations, ethnicities, political parties, social conventions, government agencies, television networks, and so forth. And we see that conventional religion, too, is a creature of these forces; thus it is unable to transcend them. So don’t we after all reckon with the Principalities and Powers?

FROM THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

The Gnostics believed in a set of fantastically elaborate mythic and philosophical cosmologies. This was the higher truth they knew, the very
gnosis
to which they were enlightened. We dismiss it as, in the words of one Gnosticism scholar, “a queer farrago of nonsense.” And yet, do we not share the Olympian conviction that we know the workings of the world as from a superior vantage point? What we have gained from anthropology, psychology, and the sociology of knowledge enables us to penetrate the motives and secret forces of both the individual and society in ways those whom we perceive can never even suspect. “The natural one does not welcome the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they seem foolish to him, nor can he begin to understand them for the simple reason that it takes the Spirit to make sense of them. The spiritual one judges all things but is not susceptible to anyone else’s judgment” (1 Cor. 2:14-15).

Once you have read Freud or Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s
The Social Construction of Reality
or Erving Goffman’s
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
, you will have passed through the portal of godlike knowledge. This world can never seem the same again. One will see the puppet show from backstage, understanding what makes people tick, why they do what they do (though of course it is always more difficult to see clearly into one’s own heart!). You will feel what H. P. Lovecraft’s visionary felt:

He waked that morning as an older man,

And nothing since has looked the same to him,

Objects around float nebulous and dim—

False phantom trifles of some vaster plan.

His folk and friends are now an alien throng,

To which he struggles vainly to belong.
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