Jay Johnston, The Gnostic World
Carole CusackSLAMMag, 14, Spring 2018, pp. 18-19.
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Abstract
Emerging into physical form this October was The Gnostic World (Routledge). This hefty tome - of sixty-seven chapters - was artfully and bravely developed by Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Professor Garry Trompf, with the assistance of section editors Gunner Mikkelsen, Macquarie University (Ancient World) and Jay Johnston (Modern). Many chapters were authored by Studies in Religion and SLAM staff, honoraries, research associates and former graduate students, ensuring a strong Sydney presence in what is a major international reference work. University contributors (past and present) included Iain Gardner, Carole Cusack, William Christie, Majella Franzmann, Al Boag, David W. Kim, Brikha H.S. Nasoraia, Doru Costache and Milad Milani.
Key takeaways
- The remainder of the day was filled with responses by local scholars to the issues of children in religions.
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The Gnostic World
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).
Review of Gnosticism and the History of Religions by David G. Robertson
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2022
American Academy of Religion 89:4) presented a roundtable on "Theosophy and the Study of Religion" that shed light on the extensive intermingling of scholarship with Theosophy as the study of religion coalesced into an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such archaeological work is essential to the functioning of our field as a self-reflexive, critical discipline, because it provides opportunities to reassess too-long-settled consensus, change theoretical boilerplates that have outlived their utility, and-most urgently-expose the hidden complicity of our field in projects of (ideological and physical) domination of subjugated peoples and cultures. David G. Robertson's Gnosticism and the History of Religions joins in on this disciplinary digging, focusing upon the travels of the concepts of gnosis and Gnosticism. Robertson seeks to present a narrative history of religious studies that connects the category critiques of Michael Williams and Karen King with the intellectual histories of mid-century European historians of religions, such as those by Steven Wasserstrom and Benjamin Lazier (6). Over the course of the story, Robertson argues that an ancient religious tradition that never existed (Gnosticism) became essentialized into an ahistorical universal current (gnosis) that persists today as an inherently problematic, theoretically vacuous category of analysis. "Gnosticism is sui generis religion par excellence" (3). The book covers a lot of ground at high altitude and high speed. Chapter 1 surveys the polemical deployment of "Gnostic" in early Christian heresiography before pivoting to a brief history of early scholarship on "Gnosticism" from the term's first emergence in the seventeenth century. Chapter 2 traces discourses of Gnosticism in nineteenth-century Theosophist and occultist movements, highlighting G. R. S. Mead's Theosophist scholarship on Pistis Sophia and other ancient "gnostic" sources. Chapters 3-7 form a continuous intellectual history of mid-twentieth century Europe, focusing in turn on Hans Jonas's emergence from the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; Carl Jung's intellectual formation and the eventual coalescence of the Eranos circle; the scholarly milieu (overlapping with Eranos) in which the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC) were first announced and interpreted; shifting valuations of Gnosticism, among Jonas and others, in the aftermath of Nag Hammadi (but, more pertinently, in the aftermath of Auschwitz); and, finally, the formation of the International Society for the History of Religions, leading up to the 1966 Messina colloquium on "The Origins of Gnosticism. " Chapter 8 then takes a hard turn into contemporary Gnostic groups, drawing on
A Gnostic History of Religions
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 32, 75-88, 2020
April DeConick's The Gnostic New Age demonstrates that scholarship of Gnosticism is still entrenched in an Eliadian phenomenological paradigm which essentializes an ahistorical sui generis "Gnosis". This approach is traceable to the Eranos Circle, particularly Carl G. Jung and Gilles Quispel, and builds certain philosophical and psychoana-lytical affinities into an ahistorical religious current. DeConick' comparison with New Age is tenuous, and misses the important fact that Gnosticism and New Age share specific genealogical antecedents. Interdisciplinary work needs to pay more attention to the theological and colonial implications of categories, or such problematic categories will continue to take root in the gaps between academic specialisms. Keywords gnosticism-New Age-spirituality-sui generis-phenomenology-Gilles Quispel 1 I would like to thank Carole Cusack and Jonathan Tuckett for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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.
Review - The Gnostic New Age by April DeConick (Columbia Univ. Press, 2016)
Book Review: The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today by April D. Deconick (Columbia University Press, 2016) Reviewed by Lance S. Owens
Gnosticism
John J. Collins & Daniel C. Harlow, eds., The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 678-681, 2010
THE CLEAR-SIGHTEDNESS THAT BLINDED METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF GNOSTICISM
THE CLEAR-SIGHTEDNESS THAT BLINDED METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF GNOSTICISM, 2021
To be published in ARAM Periodical vol. 33 2021. Sixty years ago, the study of Gnosticism adhered to the field of comparative religion. But over the last 30 years, a strong trend of analyzing Gnosticism in the light of orthodox Christianity has emerged. This approach has established boundaries between the fields of Christian Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Manichaeism, and Mandaeism. I assert that this development is detrimental to all of these traditions as well as to the study of orthodox Christianity. In this article, I discuss the problems facing scholars who justly challenge the stereotypes of heresy and orthodoxy. Some of these scholars have been more successful in dispelling the prejudices projected onto Gnosticism than in understanding the different ways in which Gnostic myth may function—surprising the present author and, perhaps, others as well. I conclude that the clear-sightedness we have gained by dismantling different stereotypes has led to an approach to interpreting Gnostic texts that, yet again, conceals Gnostics’ different traits. They have escaped the cage of heresy only to be buried under the umbrella term “Christianity,” thereby losing their links to other Gnostics as well as non-Gnostic ancient traditions.
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The Countercultural Gnostic: Turning the World Upside Down and Inside Out
Because the gnostic heresy is a social construction imposed by the early Catholics on religious people they identified as transgressors of Christianity, scholars are entertaining the idea that ancient gnostics were actually alternative Christians. While gnostics may have been made into heretics by the early Catholics, this does not erase the fact that gnostics were operating in the margins of the conventional religions with a coun-tercultural perspective that upset and overturned everything from traditional theology , cosmogony, cosmology, anthropology, hermeneutics, scripture, religious practices, and lifestyle choices. Making the gnostic into a Christian only imposes another grand narrative on the early Christians, one which domesticates gnostic movements. Granted, the textual evidence for the interface of the gnostic and the Christian is present , but so is the interface of the gnostic and the Greek, the gnostic and the Jew, the gnostic and the Persian, and the gnostic and the Egyptian. And the interface looks to have all the signs of transgression, not conformity. Understanding the gnostic as a spiritual orientation toward a transcendent God beyond the biblical God helps us handle this kind of diversity and transgression. As such, it survives in the artifacts that gnos-tics and their opponents have left behind, artifacts that help orient religious seekers to make sense of their own moments of ecstasy and revelation.
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A discussion of how G.R.S. Mead shaped 20th-century Anglophone discourse about Gnosticism decades prior to the Nag Hammadi discovery, through his interpretation of the Askew and Bruce Codices, and his popularization of the work of Berlin Coptologist Carl Schmidt. Thanks in part to Mead, the reception-history of the Askew and Bruce Codices goes straight through histories of esotericism, occultism, and magic in the twentieth century.
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Chapter 4 (pp. 55–71) in Religion: Secret Religion. Edited by April DeConick. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religion series. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2016.
A popularizing account on what is so-called Gnosticism, what the Nag Hammadi library and Irenaeus' heresy catalog contain, and how these two collections relate to each other.
A Historical Overview of Gnosticism
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Gnosticism Disputed: Major Debates in the Field
Secret Religion: Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism. Edited by April D. DeConick. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Studies: Religion series. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Macmillan Reference, 2016
Lively, sometimes heated, discussion is part of what makes gnostic studies so engrossing. These discussions and debates occur especially whenever gnostic texts are discovered and published, such as the huge discovery of the thirteen Nag Hammadi codices (i.e., ancient books), published in 1977, and the far smaller, but also incredible, discovery of the Codex Tchacos with its copy of the lost Gospel of Judas, published in 2006. The debates happen at academic conferences and on the printed pages of scholarship as well as on webpages such as blogs and online news sources. Understanding the debates is key to understanding the scholarship and situating the work of one expert with respect to that of another, as some specialists may reframe perennial research questions and even seek to replace them with different questions they consider more pressing. Major debates include the issue of how gnosticism is to be defined, and the question of where it came from. They also include the issue of whether its ancient opponents are reliable, and the question of who produced, collected, and owned the Nag Hammadi codices and other gnostic texts surviving in Coptic, the final form of the ancient Egyptian language. Another debate concerns what should be done when the next manuscript is found.
Gnostic Imagery from the Beginning of our Era to Today
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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.
None of Them Knew Me or My Brothers: Gnostic Antitraditionalism and Gnosticism as a Cultural Phenomenon
The Journal of Religion 94 (2014): 49-73
Over against the all-encompassing traditionalism of the Greco-Roman world of the first centuries CE, many gnostic texts evince a radical and maverick approach: far from trying to base ideas and notions on ancient writings, these writings vehemently reject traditional authorities. While early proto-orthodox Christians did their best to demonstrate their religion should not be considered an innovation, these early gnostics took pride in their originality and claimed that traditional authorities were actually obstacles in the way of the true believer. I exemplify and describe this remarkable attitude in a few important gnostic texts, including the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Thomas and Zostrianos, as well as in writings written against these Gnostics by people as different as Irenaeus of Lyon and the Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus. These gnostic texts are studied over against a wide range of contemporary sources including pagan, Jewish, and early (proto-orthodox) Christian authors, in order to underscore the fact that this “modernist” stance was no less than a full-fledged denial of a cultural premise of the times. In conclusion, I suggest that this stance can and should be considered as a defining element of the Gnosticism as a whole and thus an attempt of a cultural definition of Gnosticism may help to solve the recurrent problem of defining and understanding ancient Gnosticism.
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