There’s an amazing book about all this, called, The Gnostic Religion, by the philosopher Hans Jonas.
People should be aware that this book is severely out of date.
In 1998 the book Rethinking Gnosticism started a process of self-reflection over past work in scholarship and people started to realize they had their head up their asses with tautological thinking around Gnosticism based on significant propaganda from the church.
Here’s Princeton’s Elaine Paigels (author of The Gnostic Gospels) on the subject from an email debate years after this:
The earliest editors of “Gnostic” texts thought that they were dualistic, escapist, nihilistic, involving “esoteric ideas about aeons and demiurges,” as you yourself write. As my former teacher at Harvard, Krister Stendhal, said to me recently about these texts, “we just thought these were weird.” But can you point to any evidence of such “esoteric ideas” in Thomas? Anything about “aeons and demiurges”? Those first editors, not finding such evidence, assumed that this just goes to show how sneaky heretics are-they do not say what they mean. So when they found no evidence for such nihilism or dualism-on the contrary, the Gospel of Thomas speaks continually of God as the One good “Father of all”-they just read these into the text. Some scholars, usually those not very familiar with these sources, still do. So first let’s talk about “Gnosticism”-and what I used to (but no longer) call “Gnostic Gospels.” I have to take responsibility for part of the misunderstanding. Having been taught that these texts were “Gnostic,” I just accepted it, and even coined the term “Gnostic gospels,” which became the title of my book. I agree with you that we have no evidence for what we call “Gnosticism” from the first century, and have learned from our colleagues that what we thought about “Gnosticism” has virtually nothing to do with a text like the Gospel of Thomas-or, for that matter, with the New Testament Gospel of John which our teachers said also showed “Gnostic influences.”
The history of what was actually going on and how the ideas developed is pretty interesting to follow.
The long and short is you had proto-Gnostic ideas like found in Thomas which introduced duality as a solution to the Epicurean argument that naturalist origins of life meant that there was no afterlife. Essentially, even if the world was the product of Lucretius’s evolution and not intelligent design, as long as eventually that physical world would be recreated in non-physical form, the curse of a soul depending on a body would be broken. It suggests that we already are in that copy.
The problem was that by the second century Epicureanism was falling from favor and there was a resurgence of Platonist ideals, where for Plato the perfect form was an immaterial ‘form’ followed by an imperfect physical version and worst of all a copy of the physical. Through that lens, the original proto-Gnostic concept became that we were in the least worthwhile form of existence.
So in parallel to the rise of Neoplatonism you see things like Valentinian Gnosticism emerge which takes the proto-Gnostic recreator of a naturalist original world and flips it to the corrupter of a perfect world of forms. It goes from agent of salvation saving us from death due to dependence on physical bodies to a being that trapped us in physical form.
This debate and conversation goes all the way back to 1 Corinthians 15 where you can see Paul discussing the difference between a physical body and a spiritual one, and the claim that it’s physical first and spiritual second, not the other way around. (And indeed, that was the early heretical point of view, but where it differed from Paul was the idea that we were already in the second version and he was arguing we were still in the first.)
So you are correct that certain later groups previously lumped together as ‘Gnostics’ believed there was a version of Plato’s demiurge that corrupted pure forms into corrupted physical embodiments, and it’s great you are aware it’s not a monolith - but people should have a heads up if they start following up on your source that views on the subject changed dramatically around the start of the 21st century and are still evolving.
I also said that it’s a broad group of early Christian cults and that not all of them espouse that idea.
Hans Jonas lovingly elucidates the rich meaning and symbolism of these early beliefs, and their origins. He has great respect and dedicated much of his life specifically to the gnostics.
More gnostic texts were discovered since his book, and expanded on our understanding. But it certainly didn’t invalidate his excellent and beautiful work.
If you are into gnosticism I strongly suggest you read that book before (incorrectly) calling it out-of-date and discouraging people from reading it.
I also said that it’s a broad group of early Christian cults and that not all of them espouse that idea.
Yes, and I acknowledged that it was good you had a more modern understanding of Gnosticism.
Hans Jonas lovingly elucidates the rich meaning and symbolism of these early beliefs, and their origins. He has great respect and dedicated much of his life specifically to the gnostics.
That may be the case, but no matter how much love one might have for a subject, context is king and if you are operating within an outdated and obsolete academic context it’s going to impact the accuracy and quality of your information.
Someone in 1905 could have great love for Physics but their treatise on the pudding model of the atom isn’t necessarily going to be something people should look at as authoritative just because of the pure motivations that went into its authorship.
But it certainly didn’t invalidate his excellent and beautiful work.
No, the Nag Hammadi collection plus a few decades of reflection pretty much did do that actually. Jonas’s work was the subject of rather extensive discussion in Williams’ work even:
In reaction to this and other
such analyses of “gnosticism” that tended to treat it as merely a heretical
derivative, Hans Jonas attempted to delineate “gnosticism” ’s special identity, the distinct essence that made it “the Gnostic religion” and not merely
a syncretistic mixture of borrowed pieces from other traditions.
Rethinking Gnosticism p. 80
It was in reaction to this sort of “explanation by motif-derivation” that
a generation of scholars rose up in phenomenological revolt. They were
essentially saying: “Enough with this endless business of listing ancient
‘parallels’—this ‘parallelamania’! Enough with this endless atomization
and deriving of this piece from here and that piece from there! Let’s look
at the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts, and talk about what
the essence of that whole, that Gnosticism, is!” The well-known work of
Hans Jonas, in his unfinished Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, much of which
is distilled in the familiar English book The Gnostic Religion, typifies this
phenomenological approach.6 Gnosticism has an “essence,” Jonas argued,
a spirit of its own, something new that is not “derivable” from Judaism or
from anywhere else.
Rethinking Gnosticism p. 215
There is no “Gnostic religion.” There is no central ‘soul’ of it. Later Gnosticism sects are literally presenting the exact opposite cosmology as the earliest, and with it entirely different theology and philosophy to make sense of it.
James Frazier put a lot of effort and love into The Golden Bough but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone outside of Richard Carrier still working from within the unifying perspective it set forth regarding religions due to improved attention to nuances and differences that invalidated the earlier attempt to clump them all together.
Jonas was effectively a microcosm of this same trend, here exclusive to the claimed cluster of ‘Gnosticism’. I’m not faulting him for it or suggesting this was some personal failing on his part - but he’s a product of an era that was misinformed, and people should very much be aware of that if reading it today.
For example, Jonas - not having the earlier works to consider - tried to reason for the origins of some of the ideas that he’s seeing around duality as having come from contemporary experiences of human alienation.
This is poppycock.
The introduction of the themes of dualism were introduced as an answer to Epicureanism - as Rabbi Elizar reportedly said in the first century CE, “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.”
The Epicureans and Sadducees both believed there was nothing after death. The former argued that this was because the soul depended on a physical body.
You can see the earliest text historically associated with Gnosticism by the heresiologists Jonas liberally pulled from plays with these concepts extensively (again, he did not have access to this text):
29. Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
87. Jesus said, “How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.”
The Gospel of Thomas
(The “body that depends on a body” related to Lucretius’s claim that the cosmos itself was like a body that would one day die, an idea the work directly mentions in sayings 56 and 80).
This text introduces ideas from Plato regarding dualism and eikons to argue for the existence of an afterlife by appealing to being a copy of an original.
This argument only makes sense in the context of Epicurean and Sadduceen beliefs where a soul depending on a physical body will die. The group following Thomas later on have even preserved language from Lucretius’s “seeds of things” regarding atomism and survival of the fittest. These were ideas grounded in an esoteric philosophical and theological debate at the time.
So no, it’s not that some people in the second to fourth century start feeling alienated and develop a dualist perspective in answer.
His book may be a good summary of what was known about the Valentinians and Mani in the first half of the 20th century, and it’s noteworthy for having moved the conversation forward for looking at specific beliefs over genealogies of beliefs (how Gnosticism was primarily considered before him).
But it’s not fully accurate and objectively contains a lot of false speculation and interpretations.
There’s the origins of a belief, and then there’s the conditions to make it popular.
His book may be a good summary of what was known about the Valentinians and Mani in the first half of the 20th century, and it’s noteworthy for having moved the conversation forward for looking at specific beliefs over genealogies of beliefs
His book depicts real beliefs that people held, often drawn from primary texts, which resonate with what OP was looking for. You haven’t offered anything in service to OP’s question. Just scattered the conversation with pedantry.
It’s an excellent book, 100% worth reading. If you want to offer some follow-up texts to expand on it, that would be more useful than pretending that it’s a falsehood and out-of-date.
I did offer William’s Rethinking Gnosticism. Another is Karen King’s What is Gnosticism? (which has an entire subchapter addressing Jonas).
And I wasn’t directing any of my comments at OP’s question (largely because the later beliefs around the demiurge were a confused mishmash of trying to make sense of earlier ideas in a new philosophical context). I was cautioning anyone who read your comment and specifically the book recommendation that it reflects an out of date and inaccurate perspective.
As for his accuracy in the actual beliefs of the people in question, I’ll leave you with a passage from Karen King’s aforementioned work on the topic:
The second dominant approach, typology, uses phenomenological
method based on inductive reasoning from a literary analysis of the primary materials. Gnosticism is defined by listing the essential characteristics common to all the phenomena classified as Gnostic. The most accomplished practitioner of this method was Hans Jonas. His greatest
contribution was to shift the discussion of Gnosticism away from genealogy to typology. Rather than define Gnosticism by locating precisely
where and how heretics deviated from true original Christianity, Jonas defined the essence of Gnosticism by listing a discrete set of defining characteristics.
Unfortunately, detailed study of the texts has led scholars to question
every element ofthe standard typologies constructed by Jonas and others.
In particular, specialists have challenged the cliché of Gnosticism as a radically dualistic, anticosmic tradition capable of producing only two extreme ethical possibilities: either an ascetic avoidance of any fleshly and
worldly contamination (often caricatured as hatred of the body and the
world) or a depraved libertinism that mocks any standards of moral
behavior. In fact, the texts show a variety of cosmological positions, not
only the presence of anticosmic dualism, but also milder forms of dualism, transcendentalism, and, most surprisingly, both radical and moderate
forms of monism. The majority of the texts show a tendency toward ascetic values much in line with the broad currents of second- to fifth-century piety, and some argue for the validity of marriage, attack the human vices of greed and sexual immorality, and promote virtues such as
self-control and justice—also ethical themes common in their day. That
no treatises supporting libertinism have been found may of course be simply a matter of chance; it is nonetheless telling.
What is Gnosticism? p. 12-13
You can’t just take the heresiologists at face value, and Jonas was writing at a time where many key texts had no discovered primary sources to contradict what the heresiologists were claiming about them and their traditions. So he erred on the side of taking them at their word. Criticisms about libertinism by ancient Christian authors towards their ideological opponents (present as early as Revelations) were taken for granted and incorporated into the speculation, and yet there’s been no evidence of such attitudes in a trove of primary sources discovered since.
It is obsolete and outdated, even if it was among the better texts in its time and place.
Anyways, this conversation is now going in circles. Take from our exchange what you will. I’m glad you enjoy the book, and I’m not trying to take away from your enjoyment of it.
But if you really care about the topic of Gnosticism, I’d suggest looking a bit more into recent work on the topic, and the two books I mentioned would be a good place to start.
People should be aware that this book is severely out of date.
In 1998 the book Rethinking Gnosticism started a process of self-reflection over past work in scholarship and people started to realize they had their head up their asses with tautological thinking around Gnosticism based on significant propaganda from the church.
Here’s Princeton’s Elaine Paigels (author of The Gnostic Gospels) on the subject from an email debate years after this:
The history of what was actually going on and how the ideas developed is pretty interesting to follow.
The long and short is you had proto-Gnostic ideas like found in Thomas which introduced duality as a solution to the Epicurean argument that naturalist origins of life meant that there was no afterlife. Essentially, even if the world was the product of Lucretius’s evolution and not intelligent design, as long as eventually that physical world would be recreated in non-physical form, the curse of a soul depending on a body would be broken. It suggests that we already are in that copy.
The problem was that by the second century Epicureanism was falling from favor and there was a resurgence of Platonist ideals, where for Plato the perfect form was an immaterial ‘form’ followed by an imperfect physical version and worst of all a copy of the physical. Through that lens, the original proto-Gnostic concept became that we were in the least worthwhile form of existence.
So in parallel to the rise of Neoplatonism you see things like Valentinian Gnosticism emerge which takes the proto-Gnostic recreator of a naturalist original world and flips it to the corrupter of a perfect world of forms. It goes from agent of salvation saving us from death due to dependence on physical bodies to a being that trapped us in physical form.
This debate and conversation goes all the way back to 1 Corinthians 15 where you can see Paul discussing the difference between a physical body and a spiritual one, and the claim that it’s physical first and spiritual second, not the other way around. (And indeed, that was the early heretical point of view, but where it differed from Paul was the idea that we were already in the second version and he was arguing we were still in the first.)
So you are correct that certain later groups previously lumped together as ‘Gnostics’ believed there was a version of Plato’s demiurge that corrupted pure forms into corrupted physical embodiments, and it’s great you are aware it’s not a monolith - but people should have a heads up if they start following up on your source that views on the subject changed dramatically around the start of the 21st century and are still evolving.
I also said that it’s a broad group of early Christian cults and that not all of them espouse that idea.
Hans Jonas lovingly elucidates the rich meaning and symbolism of these early beliefs, and their origins. He has great respect and dedicated much of his life specifically to the gnostics.
More gnostic texts were discovered since his book, and expanded on our understanding. But it certainly didn’t invalidate his excellent and beautiful work.
If you are into gnosticism I strongly suggest you read that book before (incorrectly) calling it out-of-date and discouraging people from reading it.
Yes, and I acknowledged that it was good you had a more modern understanding of Gnosticism.
That may be the case, but no matter how much love one might have for a subject, context is king and if you are operating within an outdated and obsolete academic context it’s going to impact the accuracy and quality of your information.
Someone in 1905 could have great love for Physics but their treatise on the pudding model of the atom isn’t necessarily going to be something people should look at as authoritative just because of the pure motivations that went into its authorship.
No, the Nag Hammadi collection plus a few decades of reflection pretty much did do that actually. Jonas’s work was the subject of rather extensive discussion in Williams’ work even:
There is no “Gnostic religion.” There is no central ‘soul’ of it. Later Gnosticism sects are literally presenting the exact opposite cosmology as the earliest, and with it entirely different theology and philosophy to make sense of it.
James Frazier put a lot of effort and love into The Golden Bough but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone outside of Richard Carrier still working from within the unifying perspective it set forth regarding religions due to improved attention to nuances and differences that invalidated the earlier attempt to clump them all together.
Jonas was effectively a microcosm of this same trend, here exclusive to the claimed cluster of ‘Gnosticism’. I’m not faulting him for it or suggesting this was some personal failing on his part - but he’s a product of an era that was misinformed, and people should very much be aware of that if reading it today.
It wasn’t based on made-up nonsense. His explorations of these early Christian cults remain legit and rewarding to read.
Again, read the actual book.
And to everybody else reading, please don’t be discouraged from reading such a beautiful and powerful depiction of early Christian thought.
It is based on made up nonsense dude.
For example, Jonas - not having the earlier works to consider - tried to reason for the origins of some of the ideas that he’s seeing around duality as having come from contemporary experiences of human alienation.
This is poppycock.
The introduction of the themes of dualism were introduced as an answer to Epicureanism - as Rabbi Elizar reportedly said in the first century CE, “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.”
The Epicureans and Sadducees both believed there was nothing after death. The former argued that this was because the soul depended on a physical body.
You can see the earliest text historically associated with Gnosticism by the heresiologists Jonas liberally pulled from plays with these concepts extensively (again, he did not have access to this text):
(The “body that depends on a body” related to Lucretius’s claim that the cosmos itself was like a body that would one day die, an idea the work directly mentions in sayings 56 and 80).
This text introduces ideas from Plato regarding dualism and eikons to argue for the existence of an afterlife by appealing to being a copy of an original.
This argument only makes sense in the context of Epicurean and Sadduceen beliefs where a soul depending on a physical body will die. The group following Thomas later on have even preserved language from Lucretius’s “seeds of things” regarding atomism and survival of the fittest. These were ideas grounded in an esoteric philosophical and theological debate at the time.
So no, it’s not that some people in the second to fourth century start feeling alienated and develop a dualist perspective in answer.
His book may be a good summary of what was known about the Valentinians and Mani in the first half of the 20th century, and it’s noteworthy for having moved the conversation forward for looking at specific beliefs over genealogies of beliefs (how Gnosticism was primarily considered before him).
But it’s not fully accurate and objectively contains a lot of false speculation and interpretations.
There’s the origins of a belief, and then there’s the conditions to make it popular.
His book depicts real beliefs that people held, often drawn from primary texts, which resonate with what OP was looking for. You haven’t offered anything in service to OP’s question. Just scattered the conversation with pedantry.
It’s an excellent book, 100% worth reading. If you want to offer some follow-up texts to expand on it, that would be more useful than pretending that it’s a falsehood and out-of-date.
I did offer William’s Rethinking Gnosticism. Another is Karen King’s What is Gnosticism? (which has an entire subchapter addressing Jonas).
And I wasn’t directing any of my comments at OP’s question (largely because the later beliefs around the demiurge were a confused mishmash of trying to make sense of earlier ideas in a new philosophical context). I was cautioning anyone who read your comment and specifically the book recommendation that it reflects an out of date and inaccurate perspective.
As for his accuracy in the actual beliefs of the people in question, I’ll leave you with a passage from Karen King’s aforementioned work on the topic:
You can’t just take the heresiologists at face value, and Jonas was writing at a time where many key texts had no discovered primary sources to contradict what the heresiologists were claiming about them and their traditions. So he erred on the side of taking them at their word. Criticisms about libertinism by ancient Christian authors towards their ideological opponents (present as early as Revelations) were taken for granted and incorporated into the speculation, and yet there’s been no evidence of such attitudes in a trove of primary sources discovered since.
It is obsolete and outdated, even if it was among the better texts in its time and place.
Anyways, this conversation is now going in circles. Take from our exchange what you will. I’m glad you enjoy the book, and I’m not trying to take away from your enjoyment of it.
But if you really care about the topic of Gnosticism, I’d suggest looking a bit more into recent work on the topic, and the two books I mentioned would be a good place to start.