The Gnostic Gospels (27 page)

I
T IS THE WINNERS
who write history—their way. No wonder, then, that the viewpoint of the successful majority has dominated all traditional accounts of the origin of Christianity. Ecclesiastical Christians first defined the terms (naming themselves “orthodox” and their opponents “heretics”); then they proceeded to demonstrate—at least to their own satisfaction—that their triumph was historically inevitable, or, in religious terms, “guided by the Holy Spirit.”

But the discoveries at Nag Hammadi reopen fundamental questions. They suggest that Christianity might have developed in very different directions—or that Christianity as we know it might not have survived at all. Had Christianity remained multiform, it might well have disappeared from history, along with dozens of rival religious cults of antiquity. I believe that we owe the survival of Christian tradition to the organizational and theological structure that the emerging church developed. Anyone as powerfully attracted to Christianity as I am will regard that as a major achievement. We need not be surprised, then,
that the religious ideas enshrined in the creed (from “I believe in one God,” who is “Father Almighty,” and Christ’s incarnation, death, and bodily resurrection “on the third day,” to faith in the “holy, catholic, and apostolic church”) coincide with social and political issues in the formation of orthodox Christianity.

Furthermore, since historians themselves tend to be intellectuals, it is, again, no surprise that most have interpreted the controversy between orthodox and gnostic Christians in terms of the “history of ideas,” as if ideas, themselves assumed to be the essential mainspring of human action, battled (presumably in some disembodied state) for supremacy. So Tertullian, himself a highly intelligent man, fond of abstract thought, complained that “heretics and philosophers” concerned themselves with the same questions. The “questions that make people heretics”
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are, he says, the following: Where does humanity come from, and how? Where does evil come from, and why? Tertullian insists (at least before his own violent break with the church) that the catholic church prevailed because it offered “truer” answers to these questions.

Yet the majority of Christians, gnostic and orthodox, like religious people of every tradition, concerned themselves with ideas primarily as expressions or symbols of religious experience. Such experience remains the source and testing ground of all religious ideas (as, for example, a man and a woman are likely to experience differently the idea that God is masculine). Gnosticism and orthodoxy, then, articulated very different kinds of human experience; I suspect that they appealed to different types of persons.

For when gnostic Christians inquired about the origin of evil they did not interpret the term, as we do, primarily in terms of moral evil. The Greek term
kakía
(like the English term “ill-ness”) originally meant “what is bad”—what one desires to avoid, such as physical pain, sickness, suffering, misfortune, every kind of harm. When followers of Valentinus asked about the source of
kakía
, they referred especially to emotional harm—fear,
confusion, grief. According to the
Gospel of Truth
, the process of self-discovery begins as a person experiences the “anguish and terror”
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of the human condition, as if lost in a fog or haunted in sleep by terrifying nightmares. Valentinus’ myth of humanity’s origin, as we have seen, describes the anticipation of death and destruction as the experiential beginning of the gnostic’s search. “They say that all materiality was formed from three experiences [or: sufferings]: terror, pain, and confusion [
aporia
; literally, “roadlessness,” not knowing where to go].”
³

Since such experiences, especially the fear of death and dissolution, are located, in the first place, in the body, the gnostic tended to mistrust the body, regarding it as the saboteur that inevitably engaged him in suffering. Nor did the gnostic trust the blind forces that prevail in the universe; after all, these are the forces that constitute the body. What can bring release? Gnostics came to the conviction that the only way out of suffering was to realize the truth about humanity’s place and destiny in the universe. Convinced that the only answers were to be found within, the gnostic engaged on an intensely private interior journey.

Whoever comes to experience his own nature—human nature—as itself the “source of all things,” the primary reality, will receive enlightenment. Realizing the essential Self, the divine within, the gnostic laughed in joy at being released from external constraints to celebrate his identification with the divine being:

The gospel of truth is a joy for those who have received from the Father of truth the grace of knowing him … For he discovered them in himself, and they discovered him in themselves, the incomprehensible, inconceivable one, the Father, the perfect one, the one who made all things.
⁴

In the process, gnostics celebrated—their opponents said they overwhelmingly exaggerated—the greatness of human nature. Humanity itself, in its primordial being, was disclosed to be the “God over all.” The philosopher Plotinus, who agreed with his
master, Plato, that the universe was divinely created and that nonhuman intelligences, including the stars, share in immortal soul,
⁵
castigated the gnostics for “thinking very well of themselves, and very ill of the universe.”
⁶

Although, as the great British scholar Arthur Darby Nock has stated, gnosticism “involves no recoil from society, but a desire to concentrate on inner well being,”
⁷
the gnostic pursued an essentially solitary path. According to the
Gospel of Thomas
, Jesus praises this solitude: “Blessed are the solitary and the chosen, for you will find the Kingdom. For you are from it, and to it you will return.”
⁸

This solitude derives from the gnostics’ insistence on the primacy of immediate experience. No one else can tell another which way to go, what to do, how to act. The gnostic could not accept on faith what others said, except as a provisional measure, until one found one’s own path, “for,” as the gnostic teacher Heracleon says, “people at first are led to believe in the Savior through others,” but when they become mature “they no longer rely on mere human testimony,” but discover instead their own immediate relationship with “the truth itself.”
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Whoever follows secondhand testimony—even testimony of the apostles and the Scriptures—could earn the rebuke Jesus delivered to his disciples when they quoted the prophets to him: “You have ignored the one living in your presence and have spoken (only) of the dead.”
¹⁰
Only on the basis of immediate experience could one create the poems, vision accounts, myths, and hymns that gnostics prized as proof that one actually has attained
gnosis.

Compared with that achievement, all others fall away. If “the many”—unenlightened people—believed that they would find fulfillment in family life, sexual relationships, business, politics, ordinary employment or leisure, the gnostic rejected this belief as illusion. Some radicals rejected all transactions involving sexuality or money: they claimed that whoever rejects sexual intercourse and Mammon “shows [that] he is [from] the generation of the [Son of Man].”
¹¹
Others, like the Valentinians,
married, raised children, worked at ordinary employment, but like devout Buddhists, regarded all these as secondary to the solitary, interior path of
gnosis.

Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, articulated a different kind of experience. Orthodox Christians were concerned—far more than gnostics—with their relationships with other people. If gnostics insisted that humanity’s original experience of evil involved internal emotional distress, the orthodox dissented. Recalling the story of Adam and Eve, they explained that humanity discovered evil in human violation of the natural order, itself essentially “good.” The orthodox interpreted evil (
kakía
) primarily in terms of violence against others (thus giving the moral connotation of the term). They revised the Mosaic code, which prohibits physical violation of others—murder, stealing, adultery—in terms of Jesus’ prohibition against even mental and emotional violence—anger, lust, hatred.

Agreeing that human suffering derives from human fault, orthodox Christians affirmed the natural order. Earth’s plains, deserts, seas, mountains, stars, and trees form an appropriate home for humanity. As part of that “good” creation, the orthodox recognized the processes of human biology: they tended to trust and affirm sexuality (at least in marriage), procreation, and human development. The orthodox Christian saw Christ not as one who leads souls out of this world into enlightenment, but as “fullness of God” come down into human experience—into
bodily
experience—to sacralize it. Irenaeus declares that Christ

did not despise or evade any condition of humanity, nor set aside for himself the law which he had appointed for the human race, but sanctified every age … He therefore passes through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children, thus sanctifying those who are at this age … a youth for youths … and … because he was an old man for old people … sanctifying at the same time the aged also … then, at last, he came onto death itself.
¹²

To maintain the consistency of his theory, Irenaeus revised the common tradition that Jesus died in his thirties: lest old age be left unsanctified by Christ’s participation, Irenaeus argued that Jesus was more than fifty years old when he died.
¹³

But it is not only the story of Christ that makes ordinary life sacred. The orthodox church gradually developed rituals to sanction major events of biological existence: the sharing of food, in the eucharist; sexuality, in marriage; childbirth, in baptism; sickness, in anointment; and death, in funerals. The social arrangements that these events celebrated, in communities, in the family, and in social life, all bore, for the orthodox believer, vitally important ethical responsibilities. The believer heard church leaders constantly warning against incurring sin in the most practical affairs of life: cheating in business, lying to a spouse, tyrannizing children or slaves, ignoring the poor. Even their pagan critics noticed that Christians appealed to the destitute by alleviating two of their major anxieties: Christians provided food for the poor, and they buried the dead.

While the gnostic saw himself as “one out of a thousand, two out of ten thousand,”
¹⁴
the orthodox experienced himself as one member of the common human family, and as one member of a universal church. According to Professor Helmut Koester, “the test of orthodoxy is whether it is able to build a
church
rather than a club or school or a sect, or merely a series of concerned religious individuals.”
¹⁵
Origen, the most brilliant theologian of the third century, expressed, although he was himself brought under suspicion of heresy, the orthodox viewpoint when he declared that God would not have offered a way of salvation accessible only to an intellectual or spiritual elite. What the church teaches, he agreed, must be simple, unanimous, accessible to all. Irenaeus declares that

as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shines everywhere, and enlightens all people who are willing … Nor will any one of the rulers in the churches, however highly gifted he may be in matters of eloquence, teach doctrines different from these.
¹⁶

Irenaeus encouraged his community to enjoy the security of believing that their faith rested upon absolute authority: the canonically approved Scriptures, the creed, church ritual, and the clerical hierarchy.

If we go back to the earliest known sources of Christian tradition—the sayings of Jesus (although scholars disagree on the question of
which
sayings are genuinely authentic), we can see how both gnostic and orthodox forms of Christianity could emerge as variant interpretations of the teaching and significance of Christ. Those attracted to solitude would note that even the New Testament gospel of Luke includes Jesus’ saying that whoever “does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
¹⁷
He demanded that those who followed him must give up everything—family, home, children, ordinary work, wealth—to join him. And he himself, as prototype, was a homeless man who rejected his own family, avoided marriage and family life, a mysterious wanderer who insisted on truth at all costs, even the cost of his own life. Mark relates that Jesus concealed his teaching from the masses, and entrusted it only to the few he considered worthy to receive it.
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