Gnosticism and the divine spark
Explanation
Gnosticism was a broad religious and philosophical movement developed in the early centuries of Christianity (first-fourth centuries CE), with roots in Hellenistic Judaism, Platonism, Zoroastrianism and the mystery religions. Traditionally known only through the writings of the Church Fathers who fought it as heresy, its study was revolutionised by the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi library (Egypt), with more than fifty Gnostic texts.
The Gnostic worldview proposes that the material world was not created by the true God, but by an inferior and ignorant demiurge (sometimes identified with the Yahweh of the Old Testament), who has trapped sparks of divine light in matter. The human being contains within a spark (spinther) or pneuma of the original spiritual world (pleroma), but has forgotten it. Salvation consists in gnosis: direct, experiential knowledge of this inner divine nature.
The main Gnostic systems were elaborated by teachers such as Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion and the Sethians. Each developed complex cosmogonies with multiple aeons, archons, syzygies and other mythical figures. But beyond the variations, they share the threefold distinction between supreme God (inaccessible), demiurge creator of the material world (fallible) and divine spark trapped in the human (our true identity).
For the theory of consciousness, Gnosticism offers a radical perspective: ordinary, embodied consciousness is a state of forgetting and captivity; authentic consciousness is recognising one's own original divine nature. There are notable parallels with Hinduism (ātman-Brahman), with certain forms of Buddhism (buddha-nature), with Platonism (anamnesis) and with Christian mysticism (scintilla animae in Eckhart).
Gnostic texts such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Pistis Sophia, the Apocryphon of John or the Gospel of Truth offer alternative perspectives on Jesus as a teacher of gnosis rather than a redeeming saviour. The treatment of female figures (Sophia, Mary Magdalene) was especially novel. It was condemned by the emerging orthodox Church and practically disappeared after the fourth century.
Gnosticism has had periodic revivals: medieval Cathars and Bogomils, some Renaissance and modern currents (William Blake, Jacob Böhme), up to the contemporary interest of Carl Jung (who saw in Gnostic myths psychological archetypes), Harold Bloom, Eric Voegelin, Hans Jonas, and science-fiction authors such as Philip K. Dick. As a proposal about consciousness, it continues to fascinate by its vision of the authentic self as divine and of awakening as transformative knowledge, rather than faith or ritual. Its metaphor of the trapped spark that must remember its origin is one of the most powerful in all of Western spirituality.
Strengths
- Powerful articulation of the ambivalent human condition.
- Emphasis on experiential consciousness (gnosis) over dogmatic faith.
- Influence on depth psychology (Jung).
- Rich and stimulating mythologies.
Main critiques
- Philosophically problematic matter/spirit dualism.
- Elitist tendencies (gnosis only for the few).
- Tension with shared worlds with other religious systems.