Christian Gnosis

Christian Religious Philosophy in Its Historical Development

Ferdinand Christian Baur, Peter C. Hodgson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532677410
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Baur published Die christliche Gnosis in 1835. It was his first great religio-historical study and the most important book on Gnosticism published in the nineteenth century. It is now recognized as having a pivotal status in Baur studies. In it Baur offers a unique thesis about a link between ancient and modern religious philosophy. Gnosis is a type of religious philosophy that contains ideas about the relationship between God, world, and human beings, as expressed in concrete religious traditions and practices. As such, it makes an important contribution to Christian theology. In the first part, Baur develops a concept of gnosis in dialogue with his predecessors and contemporaries. He classifies the gnostic systems in terms of how they conceive the relationship of Christianity to Judaism and paganism, and then describes them in detail (Valentinus, Ophites, Bardesanes, Saturninus, Basilides, Marcion, Pseudo-Clementines). Following transitional sections on the criticism of and reaction to gnosis in church history, the book ends with modern religious philosophy (Boehme, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel--Baur's first discussion of these major thinkers). This book was written over a hundred years before the manuscript discovery at Nag Hammadi, which awakened a lively interest in Gnosticism that continues to the present day.

Part One

The Concept and Origin of Gnosis,
the Division of Gnosis as to
Its Various Principal Forms,
and Their General Determination

1

The Concept of Gnosis

The Lack of Specificity in the Most Recent Determinations
of the Concept and Essence of Gnosis: Neander and Matter

In surveying the previous investigations into Gnosis and the various Gnostic systems, it is in fact not easy to form a clear concept of how the essence of Gnosis originated.

Mosheim and his immediate successors have been criticized and found wanting for having no better way to characterize the essence of Gnosis than by employing the general and indefinite idea of an Oriental philosophy. With our present knowledge of the Orient, it is in any event quite possible to differentiate the various Oriental religious systems that have influenced Gnosis. As a result of more recent investigations we now know what in fact is to be added to Mosheim’s description and conceptual determination when it comes to the essence of Gnosis as a whole, and to gaining as clear and definitive a concept of it as it is possible to have. So, might the more correct and more well-grounded approach, the more advantageous one—as Neander for instance prefers—be to speak not of an “Oriental philosophy,” but instead of an “Oriental theosophy”?

The consensus is that the Gnostic systems inherently have a predominantly Oriental character. Yet as soon as we ask for a more specific feature that is recognizable as Oriental, no one feature can be pointed to that fits all the Gnostic systems, that can be viewed as a general and essential feature or indicator of Gnosticism. If the doctrine of emanation is said to preeminently express the Oriental character of Gnosticism, then right away comes the significant reservation that the very Gnostic whom Neander considers to be the main representative of a distinctive class of Gnostics, namely Marcion, completely excluded from his system the doctrine of emanation and the doctrine of Aeons that depends on it. Equally so, one cannot take the dualism of Gnostic systems, the antithesis of a good principle and an evil principle, to be a basic Oriental element common to all Gnosticism. That is because not all Gnostic systems are comparably dualistic in nature, and also because the simple antithesis of spirit and matter, something on which all Gnostic systems agree, has nothing about it that is essentially Oriental. Finally, the docetism that one thinks of here is in any case not common to all the Gnostic systems, and in those where it is undeniably recognizable it appears with very different modifications. Docetism presents only a single and rather subordinate aspect of Gnosticism. When it is supposedly traced back to a specific Oriental religious doctrine where it seems to be ultimately rooted, namely Indian religion, there is largely disagreement as to how far one might go in accepting its influence on Gnosticism’s origins and configuration.

From this we indeed see how the general designation as “Oriental” is hardly suited for providing an appropriate and specific concept of the essence of Gnosticism. Nevertheless we want to give somewhat closer consideration to the interpretations of Gnosticism made by more recent researchers.

In explaining how the most prominent Gnostic systems originally developed, Neander has placed the most weight on Philo, by locating him at the head of the series of Gnostics.1 Philo is the one who provides the most material for seeking out the elements of Gnosis in the Alexandrian religious philosophy.2 For this purpose the following principal theses exemplify the way Neander explains the connection between the Gnostic systems and the teaching of Philo:

1. Philo’s distinction between the spirit and the letter, in other words, between certain higher truths and the shell or husk in which they are contained or expressed in the scriptures and formal religious practices of the Old Testament, involves the beginning of a polemic, not against Judaism as such, as divinely instituted, but instead against a misunderstanding of Judaism by a multitude attuned to matters of the flesh.

2. Philo distinguishes a sublime essence of the deity, which is hidden, self-enclosed, incomprehensible, beyond every description and depiction, from God’s revelation as the initial crossing over to the creation as the basis for the unfolding of all life. Revelation is most closely connected with Philo’s doctrine of the divine powers that go forth like rays from the transcendent deity as the original source of all light.

3. The human spirit, which is itself the image and likeness of the heavenly and eternal revealer of the hidden deity, of the eternal Logos, of the highest, divine reason, also has this same character of revealing God, of receiving divine life within itself and disseminating it from itself.

4. Philo’s perspective on religious knowledge is twofold. There is perfect knowledge, which God himself reveals through himself, and there is imperfect knowledge, coming to human souls via spirits or angels as God’s representatives, knowledge that guides and saves them.

5. According to Philo, the individual peoples and individual human beings in the sacred history are, as such, only appearing as symbols and visible representatives of universal spiritual forms of humanity, as certain eternal qualities or characteristics. Thus the people Israel is the symbol by which to contemplate the most highly dedicated spirit. While the other peoples only have higher spirits, God’s angels, for their overseers, the Jewish people is the lineage directly overseen by God.

6. With Philo we already find the seeds of the view, based on the occurrence of theophanies and angelic appearances in the Old Testament, that God and higher spirits reveal themselves concretely to our human senses in apparently sensible forms that have no real existence.

Thus it is hardly deniable that all these ideas recur in the Gnostic systems and are to be viewed as a not-inessential foundation of Gnosticism as such. On the other hand, we can hardly overlook the fact that we find these ideas in a very different form in the case of the Gnostics, and that is why they cannot fully suffice for a comprehensive explanation of the essence of Gnosticism. What a great distance there is between the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, by rejecting reliance on the letter of the text, and the manifest polemic that so many Gnostics present in opposition to the entirety of Judaism. What a great distance one has come from drawing a distinction between the absolute God and the Logos mediating God’s revelation, to the idea of a supreme God who is utterly foreign even to the Demiurge [world creator or artisan] that hostilely strives against him, a Demiurge who gets identified with the God of the Jews simply in order to demote both Demiurge and Jewish God to the lowest level. While all that we behold in the Gnostic systems and in Philo’s religious doctrines is of course definitely related, at the same time these are two quite different phenomena. So that weighs against any sufficiently satisfactory derivation of the one from the other. If we wish to understand the very broad domain of Gnostic systems and ideas as being based on the limited standpoint of Philo, taken simply in its own terms, then we will forever encounter too large a gap between them, one that is unbridgeable, a striking mismatch between cause and effect.

As another discerning researcher in this domain has maintained, a full understanding of Gnosis comes from considering it to be a new development of Philonic Platonism via its combining with the Christianity that, in Syria, had been modified by Persian dualism.3 Thus the essence of Philonic Platonism had, first of all, to be reduced to its pure form and reiterated from a general perspective, in order to gain the true concept of how Gnosticism arose from this Platonism by being a new development of it. However, in concert with singling out Philo, Neander reminded us that, in pursuing this investigation, we always have to consider the fact that Platonism was the foremost thing in Philo’s mind, and that he often treated the received doctrines of Jewish theology as just allegorical versions of Platonic ideas; whereas for the Gnostics, in contrast, their predominant interest was in Oriental theosophy. Neander says that they used this theosophy to shed light on Platonic philosophy and to fill in its gaps; that they sought to give this philosophy greater impetus and vitality, for they contended that Plato did not have an in-depth understanding of the spirit world. Accordingly, this would simply be to dismiss the general and indeterminate concept of Oriental theosophy, so as to fill out completely the sought-for principle of explanation that one still failed to find in Philo. This is the very same Oriental Gnosis that Neander sets forth for us in his new presentation of Gnosis and Gnostic systems in his church history,4 a presentation comprehensive in many respects and one in which Philo now moves into the background.

Neander reminds us of the remarkable era of fermentation from which the Gnostic systems emerged, and the lively and extraordinary exchange of ideas that took place between the peoples of East and West. He reminds us of the ardent desire with which the unsatisfied spirit mixed many different religious elements together by drawing upon Greek mythology and the answers provided by the Greeks’ philosophical systems, and sought to reassemble from all this the fragments of a lost truth. Hence in the Gnostic systems, with their elements of ancient Oriental religious systems (in particular, Persian, but also surely East Indian ones), Jewish theology, and Platonic philosophy, all blended together, one can at the same time detect a distinctively animating principle that invigorates the majority of these components. Not only has the time at which they emerged given them a stamp all their own, the basic tenor of an unsatisfied longing they would fulfill, but also the idea of salvation or deliverance, which forms the distinctive essence of Christianity, has been attuned to this basic tenor or longing. What we get from this depiction [by Neander] of the character of the Gnostic systems is the concept of a religious syncretism linked to Christian ideas.

Matter’s characterization of Gnosis5 does not go any further than this. Matter explains that, in j...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART FOUR