Gnosticism Through the Prism of the Third Millennium: Or Between God and the Creator

By Alexander Maistrovoy

In the epoch of the late antiquity, Gnostic schools gave their own exhaustive answers for the eternal questions of humankind: Who are we? Where did we come from, and why do we exist? What gives rise to endless and inescapable evil and suffering? Jorge Borges describes the Gnostic view of lifethat we are a careless or criminal blunder, the fruit of engagement of the flawed deity and crude material. Thus, the Gnostic answers to these questions were radically different from those espoused by traditional religions of the time.
Gnosticism through the Prism of the Third Millennium explores this Gnostic view of life and how they viewed a material world as a distortion of celestial spheresand how in humanity they saw a being doomed to suffering yet carrying inside the spark of the supreme, divine world. Author Alexander Maistrovoy offers a history of Gnosticism and its confrontation with the church, showing how despite the crash of Gnostic schools, its teachings and its questions did not disappear.
Today we can make sense of Gnostic philosophy not through the prism of mysticism or mythology, but from the point of view of rationalism, scientific knowledge, and historical experience. And what we will discover is that Gnostic thought has meaning and relevancy today, shedding light on fundamental questions about the universe, ourselves, and the divine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Apr 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543745917

Alexander Maistrovoy

He is stranger in this country and doomed to be stranger till the end of his life. He is traveler from the past, from Terra incognito, which lay on the other side of the Iron Curtain from Democracy. It was an odious, twilight world isolated and immersed in itself—a world of gray cities, gray streets, gray squares, glum men, and exhausted women; a world of censorship and uniformity, where most natural things were banned and those that were not were subject to strict limitations. He got lucky. He left the Evil Empire forever, and his meeting with the new world dazed and besotted him. But he can't conceal a strange forgotten feeling. What strange reminiscences. Is it chimera, delusion, self-hypnosis, an echo of the past? Maybe. He watched the system collapsing, its foundation eroding, its fastenings cracking, its rods bursting at the joints; he watched the monumental decorative structures fall, burying millions of lives under a cloud of dust. It is not from the history books that he learned how flame leaps up from smoldering conflicts, and ugly, dark hatred erupts, and how long-festering wounds begin to bleed. But how can he explain this instinctive feeling of a deadly threat here, in the realm of freedom, universal contentment, and emancipation? Are there answers to these questions? Any civilization—the Roman Empire, Christianity, communism, or liberal democracy—can be assessed and understood only in its original coordinate system, retrospectively, and through the prism of the initial idea. Alexander suggests joining his exciting and at same time frightening study that he made.

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Copyright © 2018 by Alexander Maistrovoy.

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1     What Are all the Worlds to Me?

Chapter 2     The Creator in the Light of Reason

Chapter 3     Perpetual Motion of the Humankind

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CHAPTER 1

What Are all the Worlds to Me?

We are a careless or criminal blunder, the fruit of engagement of the flawed deity and crude material … The world presented as a primarily pernicious creation, an oblique and perverted reflection of the divine celestial decrees. Creation as a play of chance … Like on a plain at the hour of magnificent sunset: the skies are solemn and burning and the Earth is wretched.

—Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Vindication of the False Basilides’

Descent into Darkness

Two thousand years ago in the Eastern Mediterranean, there appeared a religious movement later known in history as Gnosticism. Its supporters are known as Gnostics (from the Greek word gnosis—’knowledge’).

It was an anxious and painful time, a time of a sinking feeling of parting with a great epoch. To a certain extent, it was even a parting with history, which had survived its splendour, ended, and was passing into nonexistence. This great epoch was not unambiguous; it was full of dramatic and bloody collisions, follies and vices, disappointments and decays, meaningless wars and reckless tyrants. But it was a huge, multi-coloured history full of life and achievements, and it was nearing the end as if falling into hazy, tenuous emptiness that was void of any contours.

Three cultures defined late antiquity in all its confusion and contrariety: Greek philosophy, Judaic monotheism, and Eastern mysticism. Inconceivably intertwining, interacting, and superimposing on each other, they were colourful and constantly changing, like a kaleidoscope, forming mosaics of philosophical and religious inflorescences. However, on the edge of the new era, two of them—Greek philosophy and Judaic monotheism—hung in deepest crisis.

Far behind remained classical Greek culture with its bloom of Athenian democracy and philosophy. Left behind were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the multitude of ideas; Olympic Games; the search for an ideal political system; the bloom of poleis and Periclean Athenas; and masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. Nearer the time but also becoming things of the past, were Alexander’s military achievements, the triumph of Hellenism, the magnificent bloom of megapolises—Alexandria, Pergamon, and Antiochia—gigantic libraries, medical schools, monumental architectural complexes, and scientific-technical achievements comparable at the time only with the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. From that time on, not Hellenes but Romans would rule the world—the nation of rulers and warriors but not the creators.

However, this was not the limit. No matter how harsh Rome was, that harshness was acceptable while Rome remained the republic while it granted rights to the citizens of the conquered countries and respected virtue. And even when the republic was defied, and monarchy came to power in Rome, there remained hope that, at the very least, Rome would preserve in purity its own unsophisticated ideals. But even this hope was not destined to come true, and the Hellenic world observed with horror and distaste as the monarchy transformed into an ugly despotism—reckless, abominable, and crazy, with caligulas, neros, and nymphomaniacs on the throne, (1) horses as senators, (2) the tyrannical killing of philosophers, (3) and bacchanalias and hosts of slaves whisked away to the Coliseum to meet the needs of the rabble. ‘Unlimited vice combined with unlimited power’ (4) from then on ruled the world.

Those who still believed that the times of Nero and Caligula were a grim aberration and that times of dignity and honour would be restored by the Antonine dynasty were in for a big disappointment. The death of Marcus Aurelius plunged the empire into darkness and finality, and its Hellenic subjects into indifference and jaded consternation.

Before the fatal turning point, the world was not perfect, but it was enriched with ideas and belief in a virtuous order. The universe was perceived as a single, breathing organism filled with light: ‘indeed, a living creature endowed with soul and reason’ of Plato (5), and the ‘harmony of the spheres’ of Pythagoras is full of the harmony of numbers, shapes, and sounds. Undoubtedly, Plato’s demiurge was a fair, virtuous, and imaginative creator.

An individual suffered in this world but felt like a particle of the great and eternal order. Not being free in a material sense, one was endowed with free will, could enjoy apathy—the synonym of wisdom and virtue, according to stoics, or ataraxia—epicurean peace of mind, and equanimity.

Hellenes measured themselves by God, acknowledged their beneficent derivation, and regarded His creation with respect and even piety. Whether stoics, Pythagoreans, or neo-Platonists, people did not feel alien to the world, accepted it in all its fullness, and revelled in the play of its colours and inflorescences as if in a magic garden where even sweetness was fraught with hidden danger. ‘This Universe, too, exists by Him and looks to Him—the Universe as a whole and every God within it—and tells of Him to men, all alike revealing the plan and will of the Supreme,’ wrote Plotinus. (6) ‘God and the world of Nature must be one, and all the life of the world must be contained within the being of God … But man himself was born to contemplate and imitate the world, being in no wise perfect, but, if I may so express myself, a particle of perfection,’ believed M. Tullius Cicero. (7)

However, this world was crumbling from under the people’s feet. Evil was not just present in it as an inevitable ingredient of living and immense life; it was spreading, striking everything around itself, and permeating all pores of existence. It was eclipsing the rest of the world’s colours, impregnating all the spheres of being, depriving people of choice, and overmastering by its inevitability. It was taking possession of the souls, disarming the minds, and paralysing with its might.

This descent into darkness could not but resonate in the souls of impressionable and thinking people and provoke questions and doubts. What are the real aims of gods? Should and can human beings gaze at the follies committed around them with a favourable indifference as before? Fully subject to fate, are humans capable of preserving faith in virtue? Without any doubt, individuals of Hellenistic culture, no matter where they lived—in Rome, Alexandria, Pergamon, or Antiochia—had to try to explain to themselves the reason for universal madness and exasperation. This meant rethinking a divine and human nature.

Paradoxically, Jews also experienced the same condition of emptiness and hopelessness, although the starting point of their path was the opposite of that of the Greeks. With perplexity, and later with undisguised horror, a pious Jews observed the crumbling of the firmament created by the descendants of Zerubbabel, Esdras, and Nehemiah, (8) pride pushing aside religious outburst, and the name of the Creator being defiled and trodden into mud. The Torah’s zealots turned into a closed sacerdotal body. Temple aristocracy (the Sadducees) was extremely spoiled and possessed by yearning for luxury, and their sworn enemies—the Perushim (the Pharisees)—were immersed in dogmatism and conceit. Religious cult, the supreme value of a God-fearing Jews found itself the hostage of petty passions, political ambitions, and unfounded discords. The Torah’s wonderful world fell to the cold pieces of formal rites.

The fear of divine wrath, which was approaching inexorably, burned out the hearts of believers. ‘The skies locked up,’ and God’s country pined like an abandoned bride. (9)

People turned away from their God; the court was held by ‘hypocrites and scribes’; child killers acceded to the throne; zealots, blind in their madness, succeeded the descendants of the Maccabees, murdering their congeners. What the true believers had been afraid of since the fall of the First Temple became real. The Second Temple fell, and the Promised Land dripped with blood and was full of the stench of rotting corpses. Horror and confusion filled the heart of the ones for whom the Torah was both the light and the lamp. Benevolent Creator, like in the Hellenes’ culture, was leaving this world, and conventional answers could not satisfy either the thinkers or the believers.

The shadow of the doldrums descended on the civilization, dithering its contours and corroding its foundations. The mosaics of brilliant achievements, teachings, and ideas dissolved in the blood and dirt of the ‘new order.’ The lives of humankind more and more concentrated around the two poles: the unbridled pagan, self-destructive hedonism on the one hand and religious fanaticism on the other.

Hell seemed unavoidable, and questions about the origin of evil and salvation required new, brand-new answers.

1. The name of Caligula’s wife, Messalina, went down in history as the synonym of debauchery and vice.

2. Caligula made his horse a citizen of Rome and later a senator. He planned to appoint him a consul. Only his own death stopped him from realizing his plan.

3. Seneca, a philosopher-Stoic, was murdered by his disciple, Nero.

4. Seneca wrote about Caligula: ‘Gaius Caesar, whom in my opinion Nature produced in order to show what unlimited vice would be capable of when combined with unlimited power, dined one day at a cost of ten millions of sesterces: and though in this he had the assistance of the intelligence of all his subjects, yet he could hardly find how to make one dinner out of the tribute-money of three provinces.’

5. ‘Thus, then, in accordance with the likely account, we must declare that this Cosmos has verily come into existence as a Living Creature endowed with soul and reason owing to the providence of God’ (Plato, ‘Timaeus’).

6. Plotinus wrote ‘Against the Gnostics. Against Those that Affirm the Creator of the Cosmos and the Cosmos Itself to Be Evil.’

7. M. Tullius Cicero, ‘The Nature of the Gods’ (‘De Natura Deorum’).

8. Zerubbabel, who restored the temple altar; the clergyman Esdras; and the Jewish ethnarch of Judaea in the Persian empire, Nehemiah, laid the basis for the social, religious, economic, and state lives of the restored Judaea.

9. Deuteronomy 11:17: ‘And the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and He shut up the heaven, so that there shall be no rain, and the ground shall not yield her fruit; and ye perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you.’

God and Creator: Spirit and Matter

This trumpery body, the prison and fetter of the spirit; … but the spirit itself is holy and eternal.

That greatest proof that the spirit of man is divine be true, the theory, namely, that some parts and as it were sparks of the stars have fallen down upon earth and stuck there in a foreign substance. Our thought bursts through the battlements of heaven, and is not satisfied with knowing only what is shown to us.

—Seneca, ‘Consolatio ad Helviam’, ‘De Otio’

Gnosticism answered these questions. A loving, just, omnipotent, and virtuous God—such is the Jew’s Creator. ‘Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. … I am the Lord, and besides me there is no savior,’ Isaiah proclaimed. ‘Behold, God is great, and we know him not!’ Job humbly agreed. Plato’s demiurge comes across as a just and righteous creator.

Gnostics overthrew the demiurge from the pedestal. Yes, he was the creator of the cosmos, the material world, although not all-seeing, compassionate, merciful, and caretaker of a man, but ignorant and conceited. He was not God; he was just a pitiful shadow of God, that of the light of inconceivable depth. Even the antipode of God, according to pure dualists, was avaricious and cunning. He was not the master, but just a craftsman, pompous and vain, an absurd caricature of an inconceivable spirituality—’miscarriage’ which presented itself to the world as a result of dramatic collisions in higher spheres at best, and the ruler of the world of war and darkness at worst.

The cosmos, matter, and flesh were seen as evil, incompatible with divine spirit, a substance which it found alien and repugnant. This entire world resembling more of a torture chamber in which demons dominate was no more that vicious, abominable parody for ultra-mundane higher spheres where light, peace, and harmony ruled and only cowards, prudes, and boors could claim that the life of the flesh was directly relevant to the infinite and eternal—the unknowable God.

But humankind, an absurd and suffering creation that doomed and was a fruit of the Creator’s madness or ruses, at the same time carried a particle of divine light. And this particle (in stoic thought, pneuma) made humans connected to a genuinely divine knowledge that helped them grasp the essence of the world and their own place in it. This knowledge was gnosis. People who had knowledge would never allow themselves to be caught in a trap prepared by the creator-demiurge. They would be indifferent to the temptations of this world—the enticements of flesh, spirit, and intellect, and to vanity, power, greed, lust, and narcissism. They were above the vanities of this world, above passions and quarrelsome prejudices that imbued their lives, above idols, figures of worship, zealous devotion, and worshipping whomever and whatever. They were calm in their knowledge and turned to the ultra-mundane God no matter what their lives were like and how they spent them in their dismissal of the material world.

Such was the quintessence of Gnosticism. It was in the opposition of God and Creator, spirit and matter; and at the same time, it was in the presence of the particle of spirit in the material dungeon. All the rest was a shiny wrapper, inflorescences of endless hues, overflowing with religious, mystical, astrological, and philosophical systems.

In its covers, Gnosticism was so diverse and multifaceted that at times it seemed it represented multiple completely different approaches and perceptions of the world. Even the most authoritative researchers of this movement, such as Hans Jonas, admitted that they were unable to reflect all the intricate and interwoven, like the branches of an overgrown tree, compositions of all of its authors. But the idea, with all its variations and turns, remains unchanged: the world was an obvious evil, the creation of the forces of darkness, according to the dualistic Persian school, or a sorrowful result of the fatal disruption of harmony of the divine world, according to the monodualistic** Egyptian-Syrian school. Sorrowful both for the Creator of matter Himself and for the people in whose image and likeness they were moulded.

**Monodualism – polar worlds originating from one source.

In the Clutches of Heimarmene

Creation as a Random Incident

The second direction included an incalculable number of movements, sects, and groups, but the leading and the brightest philosophical school, fundamental and justified, was presented by Cerinthus, Basilides, and Valentinus. Aside from them, there is the teaching of Marcion of Sinope.

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Cerinthus is considered to have been the contemporary of John the Evangelist and his main ideological opponent. The church saw in him the main heresiarch, the founding father of the Gnostic school. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, disciple of John the Apostle, told how John, who came to the public baths and saw Cerinthus there, dashed off in horror and confusion, screaming out curses addressed to his opponent, ‘Let us flee, lest the building fall down; for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside!’ (1)

The first Christian authors clung to the conviction that the First and the Second Epistles of John the Evangelist were aimed directly against Cerinthus.

It is known about Basilides that he lived in the first half of the second century in Alexandria, and the most productive period of his activity occurred during the years of Emperor Adrian’s rule. According to one of the versions, he called himself the disciple of Apostle Matthew; according to another one, the disciple of Menander Antioch who called himself the disciple of Apostle Peter. His most famous work is ‘Exegetica’.

Valentinus, the main teacher of the Gnostic school and the author of ‘The Gospel of Truth’, (2) by an assumption of religions historian Philip Schaff, was an Egyptian Jew who received his education in Alexandria. Tertullian maintained that, at one time, he was close to the Orthodox Church, unsuccessfully laid claim to the bishop’s post, and having reacted vehemently to being rejected, began speaking out against its doctrine. Whether this really happened or not cannot be verified. It is known that Valentinus preached in Rome in the late thirties of the second century and died in Cyprus.

Marcion, the bishop’s son from Pontus on the Black Sea, was cursed by the bishops and his own father, went to preach in Rome, despised any authority, defied canons, and was anathematised by the Church. The Gnosticism’s critic Irenaeus of Lions tells about the meeting in Rome of previously mentioned God-fearing Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, with Marcion: ‘Marcion met him on one occasion, and said: ‘Dost thou know me?’ Polycarp replied: ‘I do know thee, the first-born of Satan.’’ (3) Anathematised, Marcion returned from Rome to Asia Minor and created his own gospel, but according to Tertullian, at the end of his life, he repented and even asked for ‘churching.’ Whether it is true or not, nobody will ever know.

The Gnosticism of the Syrian-Alexandrian School was a monodualistic religion: evil exists in it not as an independent substance and power but as part of the divine world, the result of ‘system error’ that took place in celestial confines. Matter is infinitely far from the world of spirit, and still it is its involuntary emanation. ‘Cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels,’ Borges sums up this perception of the world. (4)

Each philosopher had a unique way of describing divine drama that has doomed to suffer both the human and the spirit. One way or another, this is not about anthropomorphic characters as it is in monotheistic religions, but about images—poetic and at the same time inconceivable.

According to Cerinthus, the Creator was an intermediate instance that was higher and more virtuous than the angels who appeared as a result of falling apart from Him—the real creators of the cosmos and public laws. Cerinthus, according to Irenaeus, gave rise to the idea that ‘[the]world was not made by the primary God, but by a certain Power far separated from him, and at a distance from that Principality who is supreme over the universe, and ignorant of him who is above all.’ (5)

Basilides’ God, unimaginable and transcendent, held the potential of any spiritual and material phenomenons, just as pollen, invisible to the eye, initially carries the forms of countless flowers. The divinity emanates the mind (nous), and the mind, in its turn, the word (logos), which, via the emanations (virtue, wisdom, and power), gives rise to two archons (demiurges). One of them created an ethereal world; in other words, a higher sphere. The second created the lower, material world—the cosmos. These worlds, which include 365 spheres were called by Basilides Abraxas (Abraxas later repeatedly used in Christian and Jewish mysticism). They moved away from their creator and acquired their own lives, distorted and devoid of divine balance. They were full of contradictions: evil and virtue, truth and falsehood, the sacred and the vile, pain and joy, birth and death—all intertwine inextricably in an amazing way. This is Abraxas—our world, and therefore it is so frightening in its inconceivability. ‘But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time. Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil,