The Gnostics: The First Christian Heretics

Description

The term ‘Gnostic’ has traditionally referred to the various groups which flourished in the early centuries of the Common Era and
which stressed the importance of gnosis – direct inner knowledge of God – above dogma.The early Church Fathers condemned them as heretics, and until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices, it was largely through their tirades against Gnosticism that the various Gnostic teachers and schools were known.

The word ‘Gnostic’ comes from the Greek word gnosis, ‘to know’. The Greeks, however, differentiated between two types of knowing: one was an intellectual knowing, such as ‘I know there is an Oracle at Delphi’, where knowledge is garnered from sources outside oneself (for example, reading books or talking to other people and, in our era, watching television or using the Internet); the other type of knowing is of a direct, personal, intuitive kind, through which one could say ‘I know what the Oracle at Delphi said to me’, because you had actually gone to Delphi and had a direct encounter with the mysteries of the Oracle. It is this second type of knowing that is the hallmark of Gnosticism. The psychologist Carl Jung, who, as we shall see, was something of a Gnostic himself, put the Gnostic view very simply when interviewed for a BBC television programme in 1959, when he had had a lifetime’s experience of studying Gnostic thought and texts.When asked whether he still believed in God, Jung replied, ‘I could not say I believe. I know.’




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