Christian Gnosticism

A secret Christianity

In the first Christian centuries, alongside the emerging Church, a cluster of teachers offered an esoteric Christianity of saving knowledge. The most brilliant was Valentinus, who nearly became bishop of Rome; beside him stood Basilides of Alexandria and, in his own way, Marcion, who rejected the Hebrew scriptures and their God altogether. They drew on Christian, Jewish, Platonic, and Hermetic sources to build elaborate mythologies of the soul and the cosmos.

The fallen world

Their systems shared a daring vision. The true God — the unknowable Father of light — is utterly beyond this world. The cosmos was made not by him but by a lesser, ignorant or malevolent Demiurge, whom many identified with the God of the Old Testament, through a primordial fall — often the fall of Sophia, divine Wisdom, whose error or longing spilled the divine into matter. In each elect soul a spark of that lost divinity lies imprisoned, asleep in the body, until the Saviour brings the gnosis that awakens it and guides it home through the heavens to the fullness (pleroma) above.

Heresy and rediscovery

The orthodox Fathers, above all Irenaeus, fought these teachings fiercely as heresy, and in the triumph of the Church the Gnostic scriptures were nearly all destroyed — so that for centuries the Gnostics were known only through the words of their enemies, until the discovery in 1945 of a buried library of their gospels at Nag Hammadi in Egypt restored their own voice. They are to be distinguished from the broader Gnostic current and the Hermetic writings; and Plotinus, though himself a mystic of the One, wrote a treatise against their contempt for the beauty and goodness of the world.