The Gnostic Gospels (22 page)

Tertullian presented an even more dramatic case. As long as he identified himself as a “catholic Christian,” Tertullian defined the church as Irenaeus had. Writing his
Preemptive Objection against Heretics
, Tertullian proclaimed that his church alone bore the apostolic rule of faith, revered the canon of Scriptures, and bore through its ecclesiastical hierarchy the sanction of apostolic succession. Like Irenaeus, Tertullian indicted the heretics for violating each of these boundaries. He complains that they refused simply to accept and believe the rule of faith as others did: instead, they challenged others to raise theological questions, when they themselves claimed no answers,

being ready to say, and sincerely, of certain points of their belief, “This is not so,” and “I take this in a different sense,” and “I do not admit that.”
³¹

Tertullian warns that such questioning leads to heresy: “This rule … was taught by Christ, and raises among ourselves no other questions than those which the heresies introduce and which make men heretics!”
³²
He also charges that the heretics did not restrict themselves to the Scriptures of the New Testament: either they added other writings or they challenged the orthodox interpretation of key texts.
³³
Further, as noted already, he condemns the heretics for being “a camp of rebels” who refused to submit to the authority of the bishop. Arguing for a strict order of obedience and submission, he concludes that “evidence of a stricter discipline existing among us is an additional proof of truth.”
³⁴

So speaks Tertullian the catholic. But at the end of his life, when his own intense fervor impelled him to break with the orthodox community, he rejected and branded it as the church
of mere “psychic” Christians. He joined instead the Montanist movement, whose adherents called it the “new prophecy,” claiming to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. At this time Tertullian began to distinguish sharply between the empirical church and another, spiritual vision of the church. Now he no longer identified the church in terms of its ecclesiastical organization, but only with the spirit that sanctified individual members. He scorns the catholic community as “the church of a number of bishops”:

For the church itself, properly and principally, is spirit, in which there is the trinity of one divinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.… The church congregates where the Lord plans it—a spiritual church for spiritual people—
not
the church of a number of bishops!
³⁵

What impelled dissidents from catholic Christianity to maintain or develop such visionary descriptions of the church? Were their visions “up in the air” because they were interested in theoretical speculation? On the contrary, their motives were sometimes traditional and polemical, but also sometimes political. They were convinced that the “visible church”—the actual network of catholic communities—either had been wrong from the beginning or had gone wrong. The true church, by contrast, was “invisible”: only its members perceived who belonged to it and who did not. Dissidents intended their idea of an invisible church to oppose the claims of those who said they represented the universal church. Martin Luther made the same move 1,300 years later. When his devotion to the Catholic Church changed to criticism, then rejection, he began to insist, with other protestant reformers, that the true church was “invisible”—that is, not identical with Catholicism.

The gnostic author of the
Testimony of Truth
would have agreed with Luther and gone much further. He rejects as fallacious all the marks of ecclesiastical Christianity. Obedience to the clerical hierarchy requires believers to submit themselves to “blind guides” whose authority comes from the malevolent
creator. Conformity to the rule of faith attempts to limit all Christians to an inferior ideology: “They say, ‘[Even if] an [angel] comes from heaven, and preaches to you beyond what we preach to you, let him be accursed!’ ”
³⁶
Faith in the sacraments shows naïve and magical thinking: catholic Christians practice baptism as an initiation rite which guarantees them “a hope of salvation,”
³⁷
believing that only those who receive baptism are “headed for life.”
³⁸

Against such “lies” the gnostic declares that “this, therefore, is the
true
testimony: when man knows himself, and God who is over the truth, he will be saved.”
³⁹
Only those who come to recognize that they have been living in ignorance, and learn to release themselves by discovering who they are, experience enlightenment as a new life, as “the resurrection.” Physical rituals like baptism become irrelevant, for “the baptism of truth is something else; it is by renunciation of [the] world that it is found.”
⁴⁰

Against those who claimed exclusive access to truth, those who followed law and authority, and who placed their faith in ritual, this author sets his own vision: “Whoever is able to renounce them [money and sexual intercourse] shows [that] he is [from] the generation of the [Son of Man], and that he has power to accuse [them].”
⁴¹
Like Hippolytus and Tertullian, but more radical than either, this teacher praises sexual abstinence and economic renunciation as the marks of the true Christian.

The
Authoritative Teaching
, another text discovered at Nag Hammadi, also offers vehement attack on catholic Christianity. The author tells the story of the soul, who originally came from heaven, from the “fullness of being,”
⁴²
but when she “was cast into the body”
⁴³
she experienced sensual desire, passions, hatred, and envy. Clearly the allegory refers to the individual soul’s struggle against passions and sin; yet the language of the account suggests a wider, social referent as well. It relates the struggle of those who are spiritual, akin to the soul (with whom the author identifies), against those who are essentially alien to her. The author explains that some who were called “our brothers,”
who claimed to be Christians, actually were outsiders. Although “the word has been preached”
⁴⁴
to them, and they heard “the call”
⁴⁵
and performed acts of worship, these self-professed Christians were “worse than … the pagans,”
⁴⁶
who had an excuse for their ignorance.

On what counts does the gnostic accuse these believers? First, that they “do not seek after God.”
⁴⁷
The gnostic understands Christ’s message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching: “seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as good as this.”
⁴⁸
The rational soul longs to

see with her mind, and perceive her kinsmen, and learn about her root … in order that she might receive what is hers …
⁴⁹

What is the result? The author declares that she attains fulfillment:

 … the rational soul who wearied herself in seeking—she learned about God. She labored with inquiring, enduring distress in the body, wearing out her feet after the evangelists, learning about the Inscrutable One.… She came to rest in him who is at rest. She reclined in the bride-chamber. She ate of the banquet for which she had hungered.… She found what she had sought.
⁵⁰

Those who are gnostics follow her path. But non-gnostic Christians “do not seek”:

 … these—the ones who are ignorant—do not seek after God.… they do not inquire about God … the senseless man hears the call, but he is ignorant of the place to which he has been called. And he did not ask, during the preaching, “Where is the temple into which I should go and worship?”
⁵¹

Those who merely believe the preaching they hear, without asking questions, and who accept the worship set before them, not only remain ignorant themselves, but “if they find someone
else who asks about his salvation,”
⁵²
they act immediately to censor and silence him.

Second, these “enemies” assert that they themselves are the soul’s “shepherd”:

 … They did not realize that she has an invisible, spiritual body; they think “We are her shepherd, who feeds her.” But they did not realize that she knows another way which is hidden from them. This her true shepherd taught her in
gnosis
.
⁵³

Using the common term for bishop (
poimen
, “shepherd”), the author refers, apparently, to members of the clergy: they did not know that the gnostic Christian had direct access to Christ himself, the soul’s true shepherd, and did not need their guidance. Nor did these would-be shepherds realize that the true church was not the visible one (the community over which they preside), but that “she has an invisible, spiritual body”
⁵⁴
—that is, she included only those who were spiritual. Only Christ, and they themselves, knew who they were. Furthermore, these “outsiders” indulged themselves in drinking wine, in sexual activity, and they worked at ordinary business, like pagans. To justify their conduct, they oppressed and slandered those who had attained
gnosis
, and who practiced total renunciation. The gnostic declares:

 … we take no interest in them when they [malign] us. And we ignore them when they curse us. When they cast shame in our face, we look at them, and do not speak. For they work at their business, but we go around in hunger and thirst …
⁵⁵

These “enemies,” I submit, were following the kind of advice that orthodox leaders like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus prescribed for dealing with heretics. In the first place, they refused to question the rule of faith and common doctrine. Tertullian warns that “the heretics and the philosophers” both ask the same questions, and urges believers to dismiss them all:

Away with all attempts to produce a mixed Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, or dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquiring after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief.
⁵⁶

He complains that heretics welcome anyone to join with them, “for they do not care how differently they treat topics,” so long as they meet together to approach “the city of the one sole truth.”
⁵⁷
Yet their metaphor indicates that the gnostics were neither relativists nor skeptics. Like the orthodox, they sought the “one sole truth.” But gnostics tended to regard all doctrines, speculations, and myths—their own as well as others’—only as approaches to truth. The orthodox, by contrast, were coming to identify their own doctrine as itself the truth—the sole legitimate form of Christian faith. Tertullian admits that the heretics claimed to follow Jesus’ counsel (“Seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you”).
⁵⁸
But this means, he says, that Christ taught “one definite thing”—what the rule of faith contains. Once having found and believed this, the Christian has nothing further to seek:

Away with the person who is seeking where he never finds; for he seeks where nothing can be found. Away with him who is always knocking; because it will never be opened to him, for he knocks where there is no one to open. Away with the one who is always asking, because he will never be heard, for he asks of one who does not hear.
⁵⁹

Irenaeus agrees: “According to this course of procedure, one would be always inquiring, but never finding, because he has rejected the very method of discovery.”
⁶⁰
The only safe and accurate course, he says, is to accept in faith what the church teaches, recognizing the limits of human understanding.

As we have seen, these “enemies” of the gnostics followed the church fathers’ advice in asserting the claims of the clergy over gnostic Christians. Also, they treated “unrepentant” gnostics as outsiders to Christian faith; and finally, they affirmed the value
of ordinary employment and family life over the demands of radical asceticism.

While catholic Christians and radical gnostics took opposite stands, each claiming to represent the church, and each denouncing the others as heretics, the Valentinians took a mediating position. Resisting the orthodox attempt to label them as outsiders, they identified themselves as fully members of the church. But the Valentinians engaged in vehement debate among themselves over the opposite question—the status of
catholic
Christians. So serious was their disagreement over this question that the crisis finally split the followers of Valentinus into two different factions.

Were catholic Christians included in the church, the “body of Christ”? The Eastern branch of Valentinians said
no.
They maintained that Christ’s body, the church, was “purely spiritual,” consisting only of those who were spiritual, who had received
gnosis.
Theodotus, the great teacher of the Eastern school, defined the church as “the chosen race,”
⁶¹
those “chosen before the foundation of the world.”
⁶²
Their salvation was certain, predestined—and exclusive. Like Tertullian in his later years, Theodotus taught that only those who received direct spiritual inspiration belonged to the “spiritual church.”
⁶³