The Gnostic Gospels (11 page)

What this secret tradition reveals is that the one whom most Christians naïvely worship as creator, God, and Father is, in reality, only the image of the true God. According to Valentinus, what Clement and Ignatius mistakenly ascribe to God actually applies only to the
creator
.
⁴²
Valentinus, following Plato, uses the Greek term for “creator” (
demiurgos
),
⁴³
suggesting that he is a lesser divine being who serves as the instrument of the higher powers.
⁴⁴
It is not God, he explains, but the demiurge who reigns as king and lord,
⁴⁵
who acts as a military commander,
⁴⁶
who gives the law and judges those who violate it
⁴⁷
—in short, he is the “God of Israel.”

Through the initiation Valentinus offers, the candidate learns to reject the creator’s authority and all his demands as foolishness. What gnostics know is that the creator makes false claims to power (“I am God, and there is no other”)
⁴⁸
that derive from his own ignorance. Achieving
gnosis
involves coming to recognize the true source of divine power—namely, “the depth” of all being. Whoever has come to know that source simultaneously comes to know himself and discovers his spiritual origin: he has come to know his true Father and Mother.

Whoever comes to this
gnosis
—this insight—is ready to receive the secret sacrament called the redemption (
apolytrosis
; literally, “release”).
⁴⁹
Before gaining
gnosis
, the candidate worshiped the demiurge, mistaking him for the true God: now, through the sacrament of redemption, the candidate indicates that he has been released from the demiurge’s power. In this ritual he addresses the demiurge, declaring his independence, serving notice that he no longer belongs to the demiurge’s sphere of authority and judgment,
⁵⁰
but to what transcends it:

I am a son from the Father—the Father who is preexistent.… I derive being from Him who is preexistent, and I come again to my own place whence I came forth.
⁵¹

What are the practical—even political—implications of this religious theory? Consider how Valentinus or one of his initiates might respond to Clement’s claim that the bishop rules over the community “as God rules in heaven”—as master, king, judge, and lord. Would not an initiate be likely to reply to such a bishop: “You claim to represent God, but, in reality, you represent only the demiurge, whom you blindly serve and obey. I, however, have passed beyond the sphere of his authority—and so, for that matter, beyond yours!”

Irenaeus, as bishop, recognized the danger to clerical authority. The redemption ritual, which dramatically changed the initiate’s relation to the demiurge, changed simultaneously his relationship to the bishop. Before, the believer was taught to submit to the bishop “as to God himself,” since, he was told, the bishop rules, commands, and judges “in God’s place.” But now he sees that such restrictions apply only to naïve believers who still fear and serve the demiurge.
⁵²
Gnosis
offers nothing less than a theological justification for refusing to obey the bishops and priests! The initiate now sees them as the “rulers and powers” who rule on earth in the demiurge’s name. The gnostic admits that the bishop, like the demiurge, exercises legitimate authority over most Christians—those who are uninitiated.
⁵³
But the bishop’s demands, warnings, and threats, like those of the demiurge himself, can no longer touch the one who has been “redeemed.” Irenaeus explains the effect of this ritual:

They maintain that they have attained to a height beyond every power, and that therefore they are free in every respect to act as they please, having no one to fear in anything. For they claim that because of the
redemption
 … they cannot be apprehended, or even perceived, by the judge.
⁵⁴

The candidate receives from his initiation into
gnosis
an entirely new relation to spiritual authority. Now he knows that the clerical hierarchy derives its authority from the demiurge—not from the Father. When a bishop like Clement commands the
believer to “fear God” or to “confess that you have a Lord,” or when Irenaeus warns that “God will judge” the sinner, the gnostic may hear all of these as their attempt to reassert the false claims of the demiurge’s power, and of his earthly representatives, over the believer. In the demiurge’s foolish assertion that “I am God, and there is no other,” the gnostic could hear the bishop’s claim to exercise exclusive power over the community. In his warning, “I am a jealous God,” the gnostic might recognize the bishop’s jealousy for those who are beyond his authority. Bishop Irenaeus, in turn, satirizes their tantalizing and seductive style:

If anyone yields himself to them like a little sheep, and follows out their practice and their
redemption
, such a person becomes so puffed up that … he walks with a strutting gait and a supercilious countenance, possessing all the pompous air of a cock!
⁵⁵

Tertullian traces such arrogance to the example of their teacher Valentinus, who, he says, refused to submit himself to the superior authority of the bishop of Rome. For what reason? Tertullian says that Valentinus wanted to become bishop himself. But when another man was chosen instead, he was filled with envy and frustrated ambition, and cut himself off from the church to found a rival group of his own.
⁵⁶

Few historians believe Tertullian’s story. In the first place, it follows a typical polemic against heresy which maintains that envy and ambition lead heretics to deviate from the true faith. Second, some twenty years after this alleged incident, followers of Valentinus considered themselves to be fully members of the church, and indignantly resisted orthodox attempts to expel them.
⁵⁷
This suggests that the orthodox, rather than those they called heretics, initiated the break.

Yet Tertullian’s story, even—perhaps especially—if untrue, illustrates what many Christians saw as one of the dangers of heresy: it encourages insubordination to clerical authority. And, apparently, the orthodox were right. Bishop Irenaeus tells us that followers of Valentinus “assemble in unauthorized meetings”
⁵⁸
—that
is, in meetings that he himself, as bishop, has not authorized. At these meetings they attempted to raise doubts in the minds of their hearers: Does the church’s teaching really satisfy them, or not?
⁵⁹
Have the sacraments which the church dispenses—baptism and the eucharist—given them a complete initiation into Christian faith, or only the first step?
⁶⁰
Members of the inner circle suggested that what the bishop and priests taught publicly were only
elementary
doctrines. They themselves claimed to offer more—the secret mysteries, the higher teachings.

This controversy occurred at the very time when earlier, diversified forms of church leadership were giving way to a unified hierarchy of church office.
⁶¹
For the first time, certain Christian communities were organizing into a strict order of subordinate “ranks” of bishops, priests, deacons, laity. In many churches the bishop was emerging, for the first time, as a “monarch” (literally, “sole ruler”). Increasingly, he claimed the power to act as disciplinarian and judge over those he called “the laity.” Could certain gnostic movements represent resistance to this process? Could gnostics stand among the critics who opposed the development of church hierarchy? Evidence from Nag Hammadi suggests that they did. We have noted before how the author of the
Apocalypse of Peter
ridicules the claims of church officials:

Others … outside our number … call themselves bishops and also deacons, as if they had received their authority from God.… Those people are waterless canals.
⁶²

The
Tripartite Tractate
, written by a follower of Valentinus, contrasts those who are gnostics, “children of the Father,” with those who are uninitiates, offspring of the demiurge.
⁶³
The Father’s children, he says, join together as equals, enjoying mutual love, spontaneously helping one another. But the demiurge’s offspring—the ordinary Christians—“wanted to command one another, outrivalling one another in their empty
ambition”; they are inflated with “lust for power,” “each one imagining that he is superior to the others.”
⁶⁴

If gnostic Christians criticized the development of church hierarchy, how could they themselves form a social organization? If they rejected the principle of rank, insisting that all are equal, how could they even hold a meeting? Irenaeus tells us about the practice of one group that he knows from his own congregation in Lyons—the group led by Marcus, a disciple of Valentinus’.
⁶⁵
Every member of the group had been initiated: this meant that every one had been “released” from the demiurge’s power. For this reason, they dared to meet without the authority of the bishop, whom they regarded as the demiurge’s spokesman—Irenaeus himself! Second, every initiate was assumed to have received, through the initiation ritual, the charismatic gift of direct inspiration through the Holy Spirit.
⁶⁶

How did members of this circle of “pneumatics” (literally, “those who are spiritual”) conduct their meetings? Irenaeus tells us that when they met, all the members first participated in drawing lots.
⁶⁷
Whoever received a certain lot apparently was designated to take the role of
priest
; another was to offer the sacrament, as
bishop
; another would read the Scriptures for worship, and others would address the group as a
prophet
, offering extemporaneous spiritual instruction. The next time the group met, they would throw lots again so that the persons taking each role changed continually.

This practice effectively created a very different structure of authority. At a time when the orthodox Christians increasingly discriminated between clergy and laity, this group of gnostic Christians demonstrated that, among themselves, they refused to acknowledge such distinctions. Instead of ranking their members into superior and inferior “orders” within a hierarchy, they followed the principle of strict equality. All initiates, men and women alike, participated equally in the drawing; anyone might be selected to serve as
priest, bishop
, or
prophet.
Furthermore, because they cast lots at each meeting, even the distinctions
established by lot could never become permanent “ranks.” Finally—most important—they intended, through this practice, to remove the element of human choice. A twentieth-century observer might assume that the gnostics left these matters to random chance, but the gnostics saw it differently. They believed that since God directs everything in the universe, the way the lots fell expressed his choice.

Such practices prompted Tertullian to attack “the behavior of the heretics”:

How frivolous, how worldly, how merely
human
it is, without seriousness, without authority, without discipline, as fits their faith! To begin with, it is uncertain who is a catechumen, and who a believer: they all have access equally, they listen equally, they pray equally—even pagans, if any happen to come.… They also share the kiss of peace with all who come, for they do not care how differently they treat topics, if they meet together to storm the citadel of the one only truth.…
All
of them are arrogant … 
all
offer you
gnosis!
⁶⁸

The principle of equal access, equal participation, and equal claims to knowledge certainly impressed Tertullian. But he took this as evidence that the heretics “overthrow discipline”: proper discipline, in his view, required certain degrees of distinction between community members. Tertullian protests especially the participation of “those women among the heretics” who shared with men positions of authority: “They teach, they engage in discussion; they exorcise; they cure”
⁶⁹
—he suspects that they might even baptize, which meant that they also acted as bishops!

Tertullian also objected to the fact that

their ordinations are carelessly administered, capricious, and changeable. At one time they put novices in office; at another, persons bound by secular employment.… Nowhere is promotion easier than in the camp of rebels, where even the mere fact of being there is a foremost service. So today one man is bishop and tomorrow another; the person who is a deacon today, tomorrow is a reader; the one who is a priest today is a layman tomorrow; for even on the laity they impose the functions of priesthood!
⁷⁰

This remarkable passage reveals what distinctions Tertullian considered essential to church order—distinctions between newcomers and experienced Christians; between women and men; between a professional clergy and people occupied with secular employment; between readers, deacons, priests, and bishops—and above all, between the clergy and the laity. Valentinian Christians, on the other hand, followed a practice which insured the equality of all participants. Their system allowed no hierarchy to form, and no fixed “orders” of clergy. Since each person’s role changed every day, occasions for envy against prominent persons were minimized.