GNOSIS: JOURNAL OF GNOSTIC STUDIES The Gospel of Truth as the Gospel of the Saved Saviors Gnosis from daily life to cosmic enlightenment (original) (raw)
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In this article, I present a new reading of the Gospel of Truth, Nag Hammadi Codex I.3. Although Gnostics often have been described as taking part in the Godhead, the consequences are understudied. According to my analysis, the knowers are not subordinated to, but on equal footing with the Savior. Here, I draw the attention to some gradual processes. The Savior understands more and develops in the encounter with the need of others, saved as well as not yet saved. Through mission and deepening insight, the knowers more and more actualize themselves as Saviors, thereby embodying divinity. The consequence of this is a gradual actualization of the godhead itself. As the knowers gradually are enlightened and their divine nature disclosed, the insight of the godhead accordingly evolves. Thus, mutuality is a key concept. The Saviors cannot actualize their own nature without first having been saved and then they need to save others. The godhead, Saviors and saved are interdependent. The godhead evolves into actualized divinity through the evolving enlightenment of all its parts. Thus, the daily-life encountering with others is of fundamental importance on all levels, from the individual to the cosmic.
The Gospel of Truth as the Gospel of the Saved Saviors
Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies
In this article, I present a new reading of the Gospel of Truth, Nag Hammadi Codex I.3. Although Gnostics often have been described as taking part in the Godhead, the consequences are understudied. According to my analysis, the knowers are not subordinated to, but on equal footing with the Savior. Here, I draw the attention to some gradual processes. The Savior understands more and develops in the encounter with the need of others, saved as well as not yet saved. Through mission and deepening insight, the knowers more and more actualize themselves as Saviors, thereby embodying divinity. The consequence of this is a gradual actualization of the godhead itself. As the knowers gradually are enlightened and their divine nature disclosed, the insight of the godhead accordingly evolves. Thus, mutuality is a key concept. The Saviors cannot actualize their own nature without first having been saved and then they need to save others. The godhead, Saviors and saved are interdependent. The god...
The Discourse of Revelation as Source for the Gnostic Process of Individuation
It is necessary, in order to cast light on the object of this chapter and to justify the choice of a particular type of source, to take into account some preliminary considerations. One such general consideration, on which I will not dwell, is the awareness of the importance of a series of criticisms of modern research on Gnosticism made by the deconstructive nouvelle vague that in the last years has reached even this field of study. 1 These criticisms notwithstanding, I believe thatroughly between the second and third centuries-something like Gnosticism existed as a religious phenomenon. 2 In the first part of this chapter, then, while fully aware of the complexity and fragmentary nature of the Gnostic world, I will stress its common features, without distinction of schools and 'families'.
Beware of the Gnostics (a change paper)
Rather than an organized church, Gnosticism or Docetism in antiquity were broad dualistic ways of thinking held as expressions of reality within Greco-Roman society. A codified body of literature did not exist. The Pistis Sophia was a major work and is available here, and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts also constitute literature with gnostic ideas. Carpocrates and Valentinus were gnostic leaders in the second century A.D. Marcion founded celibate churches in Syria where monasticism also developed, and Tatian, also a gnostic, developed the first canon or list of inspired books. Origen in 248 A.D. shows signs of gnostic thinking in his writing, e.g. . “Every soul that is born into flesh is soiled by the filth of wickedness and sin…..” – Homily on Leviticus. Origen was prolific, and one may think he wrote too much. Irenaeus was a second century Christian writer and counsellor who advised Pope Victor.. Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics still hold the view that every human conception is separated from God because of sin inherited from Adam and Eve. The teaching is that Jesus died to save even infants from original sin. By tying the sacrifice of Jesus to original sin, the latter seems validated by the former. Definition: Evangelical Gnosticism is a dualistic world-view that believes salvation from sin is attained only by an unseen spiritual approach, i.e. internal mental assent alone; excluding physicality. In this way, the idea of “spiritual” has been hijacked or claimed by the evangelical gnostics. The insidious nature of gnostic thinking is that one may not realize that their ideas are gnostic.
Gnosticism's Origin, History, and Influence on Christianity
2018
It is a short essay on the origin and development of Gnosticism in and outside Christianity. The essay explores the Gnostic teachings that base the possibility of achieving freedom from the prison of the material universe on the salvific role of knowledge, "gnosis." It is a brief essay, which does not get into details while touching upon any area of Gnosticism and only briefly discusses major aspects and ideas of the quasi-independent Gnostic spiritualism. The essay also hints at the Gnostic characteristics found in Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam.
The Gnostic World
H ow history is conceived in Gnostic strains of thought is enigmatic. Setting down a narrative order of human events is rarely a key concern of those seeking a deep knowledge of celestial arrangements and the path to the eternally non-contingent. Gnostics' treatments of what are normally recognizable as historical materials are typically extensions of cosmogonic unfoldings and cosmological outworkings rather than matters of detailed interest and narratological expression for their own sake. The literary and semantic quality of Gnostic approaches to human temporal change, then, almost always enshrouds the past in some mythos or in a cosmically significant, patterned frame in which all ephemerides (the myriad of mere happenings) get bundled and explained within "overarching visions." This chapter analyzes this general tendency, although it also shows that, over centuries, attention to "received, known history" increases in this trajectory of thought. Despite this slow and special historicizing process, though, the mythic element remains pronounced: it is just that matters of historicity become more addressed and accommodated. Macrohistory, as a heuristic concept, captures the adventurous visioning of the human past as a whole, in god-like panoramic regard or "the mind's eye," often including a sense of where humanity is heading (to an imminent End or Transformation, for example, or an "open future," whether of progress, regress or recurrence) (Trompf 1979a: 71). Macrohistory is the term that can best cover how human affairs are synoptically conceived by relevant parties, from Antiquity's Gnostic myths-otherwise called cosmo-or myth-histories, or mythical narrations (Heehs 1994; Perkins 1993: 14-15)-to the time when a modern Gnostical thinker, such as Rudolf Steiner, can be rated among macrohistorians, or exponents of "big history" like Gibbon, Spengler, and Toynbee (Scharmer 1997: 90-7). "Gnostic," for its part, is accepted as a generic term used today (yet with roots in ancient appellations) that covers a persisting temper of thought and "ways to immortality" introduced in the previous chapters. Already incipient as far back as the Upanishads and pre-Socratic Orphism, it has received modern rehabilitations, most strikingly through The Theosophical Society (cf. Casadio 1993; Quispel 1996).
Gnosticism from Thought to Religion
Religious Inquiries- University of Religions and Denominations (URD), 2021
The origin of Gnostic thought and its evolution is a controversial topic. By critically examining Gnostic sects and analyzing the opinions of experts, this article will answer the following questions: What are the components of Gnostic thought? What are the sources of Gnostic thought? Were there any sects known as Gnostics before Christ? This research shows that most of our knowledge of Gnosticism is based on controversial Christian works and the Qumran manuscripts. According to these works, no group or sect was called Gnostic before Christ. Although some of the components of Gnostic thought, such as the originality of knowledge and the exile of the soul, date back to the pre-Christ era, and especially to Plato, some other components, such as the distinction between the Christian and Jewish gods, belief in the multiplicity of the eternal Christ, the primacy of knowledge over faith, are products of the period of the formation of Gnostic sects and their conflict with the Church Fathers in the first centuries of the common era.
F rom the perspective of the sociology of world religions developed by Max Weber (1963), figures such as Nietzsche, Emerson, Jung, Heidegger, and Maslow-in their overlapping attempts at a broadly "naturalistic" understanding of spirituality-are exemplars of a contemporary "innerworldly" mysticism. It is "inner" or "this-worldly" in terms of their attempts to understand an experiential core of spirituality as a specifically human capacity. Inner-worldly mysticisms are directly cultivated while living within the everyday social world, in contrast to the ashrams, monasteries, or caves of the classical "other-worldly" mysticisms. Weber's colleague Ernst Troeltsch (1960) anticipated that naturalistically understood inner-worldly mysticisms would emerge as the "secret religion of the educated classes," consequent on the continuing secularization of the more prophetically based, mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. This development is well illustrated in both "New Age" spiritualities and in the emergence of transpersonal psychology itself (Hunt, 2003). To paraphrase Weber on the Protestant Reformation as one source of the "spirit of capitalism,"we could now say that just as historical capitalism needed the ethical attitude to one's vocation as sacred, so our current society of individuals, autonomous and separate to the point of isolation, may not be fully liveable without the sense of presence, felt reality, or Being cultivated by the more contemplative spiritual traditions. However inevitable and needed this development, such a direct consciousness of the immediacy of Being seems especially vulnerable to the emotional trauma and frustration attendant on any radical personal openness in the midst of a less than supportive utilitarian society-and especially where vulnerabilities in sense of self and self esteem are so widespread. Weber, for instance, spoke of the attitude of "broken humility" associated with inner-worldly spirituality, while Jung saw dangers of a defensive, compensatory "inflation" in modern self-realization. It may not be an accident that recent transpersonal psychology has been increasingly exploring the close interrelationship between spiritual experience and character "metapathologies" related to narcissistic grandiosity, schizoid withdrawal, and despair (