Historical analogies are both tempting and tricky. They are tempting because we like to learn about the present from past examples. They are tricky because the search for instructive examples can distort both past and present. Try hard enough, and any age begins to look like the fall of the Roman Empire.
Despite the danger, I want to suggest just such a historical analogy. My interest is partly historical but mainly moral. I think there is a genuine analogy between the situation of the church today and the challenge Gnosticism presented to the church in the mid-second century. My contention is that in both cases there is a crisis of identity and even of survival. More important, the shape and the resolution of the crisis in the second century have lessons—and a warning—for us today.
I am scarcely the first to note the similarities between ancient Gnosticism and the dynamics of contemporary religious movements. In fact, the January 26, 1927, issue of Commonweal had an editorial titled, “The Newer Gnostics.” That editorial was genially content to skewer aspects of popular religion by contrasting them to the serene stability offered by the simple truths of faith espoused by the Catholic Church. I am less sanguine about the integrity of the church as a witness to those truths.
The powerful controversies about church authority, the relationship between spirit and matter, and other fundamental Christian precepts that swept across Christian communities between A.D. 130 and 190 and created a crisis of identity happened long before Constantine made Christianity the imperial religion. Christians had no great buildings or wealth. Martyrdom was a real possibility for those whose convictions about Jesus were sufficiently powerful or public to irritate ruling authorities.
In the first part of the second century, leaders like Ignatius, Polycarp, and Justin spoke for a movement that had no state support, no cultural approval, and little by the way of central organization. How faith in Jesus Christ made a difference with respect to Judaism or the culture and religious practices of Hellenism was still not clear. Although the letters of Paul, the Gospels, and some other early compositions had been exchanged among Christian communities for some time, and local churches gathered collections of apostolic writings, there was as yet no need for a firm canon. And even though creedal statements existed, they were not yet much elaborated or standardized.
By the end of the second century, though, teachers like Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 130-200) and Tertullian (ca. 160-225) wrote extensive treatises against heretics on the basis of what they called the “Rule of Faith,” argued for a set canon of Scripture, and located the teaching authority of the larger church in the bishops, regarded as the successors of the apostles. In short, the essential structure of Catholic Christianity had emerged.
I have two reasons for noting this remarkable transition. The first is to focus attention on the tendencies within the second-century church that required such a decisive response.
The second is that some of the same tendencies are equally powerful today, but are generating little effective response. Irnaeus’s tripod of creed, canon, and apostolic succession not only shaped Christian orthodoxy, but provided the strategy for Christian self-definition from the second to the twentieth century: whenever there was controversy over doctrine or morals, bishops met in council, debated and discerned the Scripture, and elaborated or defended the creed.
Today, I would argue, a “new Gnosticism” not only threatens the shape of Christian faith, but does so by questioning the reliability and authenticity of this traditional frame of self-understanding.
In order to understand the challenge posed by the new Gnosticism, it is important to grasp something of the earlier version. The first Gnosticism was a complex phenomenon, so complex that some scholars have suggested the term has outlived its usefulness. But some things are clear enough. Toward the middle of the second century, supposedly new revelations from Jesus were circulated in literature associated with well-placed Christian leaders and their followers. The literature claimed an understanding of reality superior to that found in the traditional writings, and an authority based on these new revelations. The Gospel of Thomas is today the best known of those compositions, but there were many others, including the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Philip.
Producing new literature was not itself an issue; the Christian movement had been vigorously literate from the start. But producing literature that claimed to arise from new revelations of Jesus (often to apostles after the Resurrection) served to undermine the authority of the apostolic writings widely used in the churches, particularly since the content of the new revelations also subverted the good news as found in those earliest writings.
Although it is impossible to systematize these revelations—indeed, much of Gnostic literature remains unintelligible to us—they have certain common traits that, when combined, form an alternative version of Christianity. These common traits all arise from a fundamental dualism that privileges the spirit and deprecates the body. For the Gnostics, what is precious and salvageable in humans is the divine spark of spirit within them, the piece of the divine that somehow got lost and trapped in bodies. This material world, indeed, came about through the ignorance or malice of a lesser god.
Saving knowledge is the awareness—available only to the few—that they belong to a higher order of being. Christian Gnostics regard Jesus as the emissary from the light, the teacher-revealer who saves by sharing this knowledge of self-realization. The Resurrection is not a matter of a body being exalted, but of a divine existence realized. Authentic Christian existence, then, is a form of individual mysticism, in which each individual cultivates the spirit and (as literally as possible) eliminates the flesh. Celibacy and fasting are the obvious mechanisms of liberation.
The Gnostic texts from the third to fifth century found in the Nag-Hammadi library in Egypt make no distinction between writings that speak of Jesus and those that do not. Christianity is, therefore, part of a more universal scheme of revelation and salvation. What is true within it is universally available, with or without Jesus, for it is spirit. What is particular about Jesus is false, for the particular is always material. In a very real sense, Gnosticism was an argument for spirituality over religion.
Gnostic teachers like Valentinus and Ptolemy were successful in purveying this vision through a variety of literary works. Perhaps even more significant, they were also adept at interpreting even the writings of the New Testament according to this dualistic code. In their reading of Patti, for example, the war between “flesh” and “spirit” is read as the tension between an individual’s body and soul, not as the conflict between attitudes driven by selfishness and those guided by God’s Holy Spirit. “Opening the canon” to new writings, then, was more than a form of openness to new revelation; it was a strategy for reinterpreting earlier tradition in accord with the ideology found in the new writings.
The brilliance of the Gnostic position lay in its ability to claim a form of Christianity that was more inclusive (it was universal in scope) and at the same time appropriately exclusive—it was obviously superior to the Christianity practiced by the ordinary folk (the hylics) who lacked the divine spark. Those who came to self-realization (gnosis) correspondingly participated in a larger world of spirituality while salvaging what was true in the partial revelation found in the traditional Scriptures. The Gnostics achieved “true” Christianity precisely by transcending it. Logically, then, Christians who insisted on the adequacy and ultimacy of the particular revelation of Christ found in the New Testament, by that very fact automatically showed themselves to be unenlightened. There is a polemic edge in Gnostic writings like the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip against the stupidities of the “apostolic men,” whose literalism appears laughable beside the higher wisdom of the elite.
The second-century struggle over books was really a struggle over the identity of Christianity. For the orthodox party, the issue was which books should be read publicly in the assembly at worship; for the Gnostic party, the issue was whether something so public and physical as an assembly was even important.
The crisis over identity was profound, for Gnostic dualism had a number of corollaries. If only the spirit and not the body counts, then it is the individual and not the assembly that matters. The messiness of life together is a distraction from the serious work of personal transformation.
Gnostics read their revelations in private, or discuss them in small conventicles with those who are similarly enlightened. To participate in meaningless rituals with the great unwashed who mistake those rituals with reality is hard on those who have passed (in their own minds) through the veil of appearances. Certainly there is no point to building the church as a public and political presence in the world, no point to the sharing of possessions—or having and raising children—not even any point to the witness of martyrdom. The spiritual refinement of the individual rather than the moral practice of the group is the point.
If only the spirit counts, then Jesus is important not because he revealed God in his body or died for our sins or showed us the pattern of radical obedience toward God and selfless love toward “the least of the brethren,” but because his words contain timeless truths that assure me that all I need to do is look within to find the only important truth—that I am not like other people.
If this material creation is the work of a mischievous god, and if liberation means detachment from all materiality, then the visible and all-too-material church is clearly a perversion of the genuine good news, is indeed a continuation of that distorted revelation found in the Old Testament and continuing to be propagated by that most particular and physical and resistant of all peoples, the Jews.
And if the apostolic writings advance so particular a view of reality—that the Jews remain within God’s plan, that Jesus became flesh, that resurrection means a future bodily existence, that the sacraments make God present in embodied fashion—then those writings must be either abandoned or dramatically subverted by the higher revelation delivered by Gnostic literature.
The genius of Irenaeus, in turn, was that he saw more clearly than any the need for a threefold strategy of response to the Gnostic challenge. He countered the claim of esoteric teachings with the public rule of faith. He countered the claim of secret gospels with the writings read publicly in the assembly, the canon of Scripture (Old Testament as well as New). He countered the claim of private teacher/revealers with the public tradition of bishops extending from the apostles to his own day.
But his genius lay also in his ability to construct a coherent understanding of the creed, canon, and apostolic succession that was intellectually convincing and spiritually powerful. He elaborated a story of human existence from creation to resurrection as a continuous and progressive revelation of the one God who sought throughout to elevate humans to a share in his own life. Within that narrative, the church as a public body is not an inhibition to the spirit, but rather the essential vehicle for the Holy Spirit. Irenaeus’s vision was sufficiently capacious to embrace the renewing movements of popular religious experience, the ardent quests of mystics and the adventurous speculations of theologians, within a visible, sacramental, institutional church.
What I call the new Gnosticism does not resemble the old Gnosticism in every respect. We find today little explicit rejection of the body, for example, and few claims to new and authoritative revelations from Jesus. But the new version does have real connections with the original, and, more important, it poses the same sort of challenge to the identity of the church.
The five features of the new Gnosticism that I describe—mostly on the basis of my own observation and reading—are generally well known and recognized, so I will be brief. What is most remarkable about this contemporary version, though, is that it is found among some members of virtually every Christian congregation in the United States (Protestant as well as Catholic), that it is found often among the most educated and committed members of these congregations, and that such members sense no incompatibility between these tendencies and classic Christian identity.
The saving knowledge that gives present-day Gnostics their sense of superiority derives not from experiences of divine revelation but from initiation into the historical consciousness provided by higher education. By historical consciousness I don’t mean the knowledge of historical events.
I mean rather a set of perceptions about human life that are common among modern intellectuals. One of these perceptions is that there can be no special revelation to one people, or one special history, that excludes others; instead, every culture and people has its own, equally special story.
Unenlightened people (the contemporary hylics) know only their own story and think it unique. The enlightened understand that all traditions are but variations on a theme, and they rise above exclusive allegiance to a single version.
To know and live by only one tradition is, by that very fact, to be exposed as hylic. A vision that embraces the truth of all traditions is the mark of the Gnostic. It follows that traditional Christianity is false insofar as it is exclusive, and is improved to the degree that it is elevated to a more universal view.
Another shared perception of the educated is that all transcendent claims can be reduced to politics. There is no arena of activity free from human self-interest, even religion. The “hermeneutics of suspicion,” so prevalent in the academy, detects whose interest is at work in any historical development, and the demand for the “recovery of other voices” is thought necessary for a more liberating politics in the present. “Liberating” often means shedding the bonds of the material and the particular: women are “liberated” when they are not defined by biological or patriarchal imperatives but are free to develop as they choose.
These “enlightened” views come together to form the contemporary Christian Gnosis. Not new divine revelations, but the recent recovery of the original Gnostic compositions, has provided the wedge to challenge the traditional canon, and with it, the traditional construction of Christian identity. Scholars calling themselves Christian write books that enjoy enormous popularity among the (educated) laity, not to defend or interpret the tradition, but to attack its foundations on the basis of the higher historical knowledge: the canon was the political work of patriarchal bishops; they excluded all the good writings that taught an inward spirituality (the larger view) in favor of those that focused on public behavior; they suppressed the female in favor of the male (suppressed the spiritual in favor of the institutional).
No one has been more successful at popularizing this view than Princeton University’s Elaine Pagels, whose books are regularly reviewed by the New York Times and just as regularly—no surprise—appear on the bestseller list. How popular? A recent novel by Jim Harrison (True North) involves a guilt-ridden heir to an ill-gotten fortune whose theological education at Seabury-Western Seminary failed to provide relief or understanding. His only real spiritual help comes from hisvdefrocked, randy, and alcoholic uncle who dabbles in world spiritualities. The uncle recommends Pagels’s Gnostic Gospels, and in that book, the hero discovers a beautiful spirituality available in Christian clothing that the institutional church had kept from him (echoes of The Da Vinci Code here as well).
The only implausible element in this. story is that the hero could have gotten through seminary without one of his professors recommending Pagels’s work. The implicit argument embedded in much scholarly and popular work is that historic orthodox Christianity is little more than a power-hungry conspiracy. That prejudice is reinforced by a widespread preference, among many well-educated Christians, for the universal over the particular, for the spiritual over the religious. With only the most rudimentary knowledge of history and theology (or religion), even otherwise well-educated Christians become the perfect target for the ersatz spirituality and scholarship hawked at Borders or Barnes & Noble.
These Gnostic tendencies among the educated elite dovetail powerfully with the intense individualism that has affected even the most traditional and conservative Christians. For Christians across the ideological spectrum, religion is increasingly thought of in terms of personal salvation and individual satisfaction rather than communal commitment and shared practice. Retreats and workshops and small-group discussions with the like-minded are preferred to the messiness and confusion (and yes, small-mindedness) of the local parish.
The four characteristics of contemporary Christian thinking I have enumerated—superior knowledge given by historical consciousness, individualism, preference for the universal over the particular, and for spirituality over religion—amount to a new form of dualism, one that corresponds roughly to the ancient Gnostic dislike of the body.
This contemporary dualism has little more than contempt for the embodiedness of institutions. The structures that make up tradition are not considered a gift from the past, but a burden on the present and a shackle holding back the future.
The pervasive prejudice against ecclesiastical institutions is exacerbated when bishops and priests are regularly exposed as less well read than the laity and, alas, not markedly more moral. In recent years, the same anti-institutional bias has strengthened an antipathy toward canon and creed. For many of the educated elite calling themselves Christian, it is now axiomatic that the New Testament canon is a political tool and inadequate to a fully mature spirituality. For some Christians, especially those for whom history has become the criterion of all truth and who have embraced the various versions of the historical Jesus, the Nicene Creed is increasingly unintelligible and alien, easily regarded as another instrument by which the ancient episcopate distorted Christianity.
Many of these tendencies have been around for some time, but because of the convergence of two factors, the challenge they pose now to the future of the church as a visible and coherent witness to the good news of God in Jesus Christ is real and severe.
The first factor is the already reduced significance of the institutional church in the lives of most Christians. Already, the church is not the exclusive or the most trusted source of religious truth. Already, laity are better and more widely educated than the clergy—in Protestantism as well as Catholicism —and are more open to the learning available from other sources than they are to the (often ill-formed) preaching they hear from pulpits. Already, many Christians regard the church, not as the essential community by which their lives are defined, but as one among other voluntary associations that provide certain services in a competitive market.
The second factor is the doubtful capacity of present church leadership to respond in the manner of Irenaeus and Tertullian, by making an argument for the sacramental church with its creed and canon and visible leadership that is intellectually coherent and morally convincing. The hierarchy appears to be so obsessed with its own power especially with regard to women—that the feminist suspicion concerning the sexism and self-interest of ancient bishops seems all too warranted. Needless to say, the craven behavior of the hierarchy in response to the sexual-abuse scandals of recent years has further eroded confidence in official leadership.
Even worse for those who love the richness of the orthodox tradition is the obvious lack of intellectual breadth or depth among the church’s official teachers—and for that matter, among contemporary theologians. Where are the successors to the creative and faithful theologians and scholars—many of them priests, some even bishops—of the Second Vatican Council? Perhaps there are a few. But do they have successors? The Catechism of the Catholic Church is useful. Papal encyclicals have their place. But they are spasms of activity that scarcely elevate the widespread intellectual mediocrity.
Irenaeus became bishop of Lyons because his predecessor was martyred. Being Christian was still a dangerous occupation. When Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies, he thoroughly understood his opponents’ views—indeed, he made more sense of them than they deserved. In rebutting those erroneous views, Irenaeus exhibited a deep sense of loyalty to the tradition he had received, an ability to support that tradition from an exhaustive grasp of Scripture, an outstanding dialectical ability, and even humor. Above all, he responded with a vision of the world as God’s place of self-revelation, and of the church as witness to that revelation, that made the pretensions of the Gnostics appear as puny and unattractive alternatives to that tradition.
Is it possible, in the present situation, to hope for champions of the tradition with such courage and passion, with such intelligence and imagination? If not, then neither is there much human reason to hope for a future of the church that is continuous with the church of the apostles.
