Let There Be Gnostics among Us by Gene Ciarlo

The more I look at the history of the beginnings of the church, the more I see its very human, fragile, and questionable side. Guidance by the Holy Spirit has been a touchstone of the Christian church’s character, its claim to holiness and its shining light to truth, righteousness, honesty, and spiritual depth. Yet questions remain.

I am compelled to emphasize and critique the human and mundane aspects of the Christian church and, more specifically, the Catholic Church, when I look at its history in the first two hundred years of its existence. The church as it evolved into the fourth century, when it became the religion of the state under Roman Emperor Constantine, was quite well established in its hierarchical and theological structure. It owes its apparent integrity to such second-century men as Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyon, leading bishops and figures as well as definers of the who, what, when, where, and how of the church in the world. Should there be a hierarchy consisting of bishops, priests, and deacons? Check with Ignatius. Would women serve in prominent leadership roles in the church? Inquire with any third-century bishop who was dutifully following the convictions and canons of his predecessors.

Where did that skeletal structure of the early church come from? What historical factors or divine inspirations decided how things ought to be according to the mind and spirit of Jesus as manifested in the words and actions of Peter, called to be the foundational rock upon whom the church would be built, and his successors?

Elaine Pagels, a knowledgeable, inspired, and well-educated historian of religion, has spent a good deal of her career at Stanford and Harvard working on Gnosticism as presented in the ancient, nonbiblical scrolls uncovered in the sands of the Egyptian dessert at Nag Hammadi in 1945. Gnosticism was the very early Christian belief and conviction that certain followers of Jesus and his message were inspired, called upon to “know,” as the Greek word gnosis is translated, to have inherited a spiritual understanding of what Jesus and his message were all about.

The unearthed scrolls reveal widespread and varied beliefs and practices among the new Christians that are totally out of conformity with what was, in the second century, considered orthodox, and what we know and accept today as the theology, the hierarchical structure, creed, canon, and ritual of the main body of Christian churches. To be a gnostic in the early church was to be a heretic worthy of condemnation and persecution by those who considered themselves orthodox Christians. Hence when the “authorities” of true Christianity came to call, the “heretical” texts were buried and not stumbled upon, quite by accident, until almost two thousand years later.

Pagels, as well as other noteworthy ecclesiastical historians, makes clear that the earliest days of the church witnessed a great diversity in what the first Christians believed and how they manifested their beliefs in words and works. Certain gospels and testimonies were buried intentionally, most likely by the “enlightened,” self-designated leaders of various Christian communities of the first and second centuries, because they contradicted the accepted norms and doctrines that were sanctioned by such sterling church leaders as Ignatius and Ireneus.

Since their discovery in 1945, these buried gems have revealed much about the earliest days of Christianity that were lost. Sometimes they dovetail with the events and conclusions of the present canon of Scripture that we know as the New Testament, and sometimes they reveal new and startling words and events. These gnostic beliefs, teachings, and practices—in many instances praiseworthy and richly Christian—were considered heretical and worthy of condemnation simply because these freethinking and nonconformist Christians defied the accepted teachings of the “orthodox” leaders noted above. A quote from Pagels’s book The Gnostic Gospels expresses well the mindset and belief of these Christians who were so roundly condemned:

The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis. As the Gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for gnosis involved an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny. According to the Gnostic teacher Teodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140–160), the gnostic is one who has come to understand who we were, and what we have become; where we were . . . whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth. Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis.

This brief summary encapsulates the essence of gnosis, even though it was much more heartfelt and profound in the minds of the gnostics. Pagels makes clear the distinction between the seemingly chaotic beliefs upheld by those who “knew” in the gnostic world and what was simply gibberish. No wonder that the early bishops felt compelled to make certain principles and practices standard for Christians. To speak realistically for a moment: if the early church, or any organization for that matter, freely embraced the multitude of beliefs and practices that in time would invariably infiltrate a movement, sociologically it never would survive even a few decades, let alone two thousand years.

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There are two elements in this historical development of the second century that summon me to bring up the subject of Gnosticism in the first place. First of all, due to their obvious distress over the arbitrariness of beliefs and practices in Gnosticism, the church fathers were quick to set up a program as to what was orthodox and what was not. That is to declare under pain of heresy, and therefore ostracization and condemnation, what books would become acceptable in the canon of Scripture as we know it and what ought to be omitted and categorized as unorthodox or not in keeping with the mind and spirit of Jesus. Does this, in fact, hearken back to the Jesus-guaranteed guidance of the Holy Spirit upon the church, as understood from Scripture and tradition since time immemorial?

Secondly, the historical evidence of Gnosticism begs the question of how women fit into the picture according to the gnostic understanding of their role, insofar as the writings of Luke, especially in Acts, called women to be prophets, teachers, deaconesses, and leaders in the gathered Christian communities. This happened long before Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others set the scene and the tone, declaring what was and what was not to be the blueprint for Christianity. Women were intentionally sidelined according to the sociological tenor of the times, and therefore within the minds of church leaders who out of sociological necessity were compelled to be creatures, citizens, and perhaps victims of their time. Was the Holy Spirit at work guiding the church in the way of truth?

Ultimately this redounds upon the events that took place in the historic Synod on Synodality that convened in Rome over the past two years. Who made the rules initially, and what role did women have in the budding structure of the Christian church?

We saw what happened in the second century, and why it happened. What do we do about it now? Is the church still guided by the Holy Spirit, or, bluntly speaking, has the mind of the church’s hierarchy taken precedence?

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The second point that cries out for clarification, perhaps with deeper study, or, better yet, a bringing up to date, is the matter of orthodoxy. What did Jesus think, do, say, and intend to happen among the men (and women) who would continue his work of bringing a new compassionate, loving, all-inclusive spirit to orthodox Judaism of his time and beyond, into our time?  

From my study I find that there is a Christian conviction and spirituality in Gnosticism that, for the most part, one is hard pressed to find today in the organized and yet gradually weakening structure that is the entire body of the Christian churches. In this regard, allow me some references to the Gospel of Thomas and Pagels’s commentary on the texts:

According to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus ridiculed those who thought of the “Kingdom of God” in literal terms, as if it were a specific place: “If those who lead you say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds will arrive there before you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’” then he says, the fish will arrive before you. Instead, it is a state of self-discovery: “Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.” That “Kingdom,” then, symbolizes a state of transformed consciousness.

As the gnostic Gospel of Philip says: “You saw the spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw [the Father, you] shall become Father . . . you see yourself, and what you see you shall [become].”

Pagels understands in her work that “Whoever achieves gnosis becomes ‘no longer a Christian, but a Christ,’” as she quotes the Gospel of Philip. She goes on to say:

Gnosticism also included a religious perspective that implicitly opposed the development of the kind of institution that became the early catholic church. Those who expected to “become Christ” themselves were not likely to recognize the institutional structures of the church—its bishop, priest, creed, canon, or ritual—as bearing ultimate authority.

This conviction—that whoever explores human experience simultaneously discovers divine reality—is one of the elements that marks Gnosticism as a distinctly religious movement.

As idealistic as it may sound, if, in fact, Christianity had remained as flexible, variable, and indecisive as the above citations suggest, there would not be Christianity as we know it today. It would have gradually dissolved in a welter of subjective and indecisive notions and theologies. There would not be a creed, a liturgy, a hierarchy that gives order and substance for the sake of longevity and stability to what we know as Christianity. All of the Christian churches, no matter what their beliefs and practices may be, have a hierarchy, a ritual that manifests their beliefs, and they all profess that there is a Trinity, a Jesus Savior, a Spirit, and a canon of creeds that makes them who they are and gives them an identity. We are all the same in that fundamental regard. Gnosticism, with its spirit of spontaneity and personal experience of the divine, would never have survived. Yet mark these words: in today’s Christian Body of Christ, that is precisely what is needed in order that Christianity as we know it might survive and thrive.

I am saying—and it is obvious to anyone who has ears to hear, eyes to see, and heart to acknowledge—that (and I hate the term) “organized religion” is dying. People need to be awakened and experience God in their lives as the gnostics did. For that reason, I am inclined to appreciate what Gnosticism was all about and what we have tossed away in our sociologically necessary but static, moribund, uninspired, and stilted structures of religion.

And so the Roman Emperor Constantine, at the Council of Nicaea in 325, symbolically poured the waters of baptism on the Nicene Creed in the assembly of bishops and hierarchy, thus carving in stone the decrees, sanctions, creeds, and orders that would go on for centuries without asking nor inquiring whether the Spirit of God had really descended on the assembly. Long live the Gnostics among us. ♦

Gene Ciarlo is a priest no longer active in the ministry. Ordained from the American College, University of Louvain, Belgium, he spent most of his ministry in parish life. After receiving a master’s degree in liturgical studies from Notre Dame University he returned to his alma mater in Louvain as director of liturgy and homiletics. Gene lives in Vermont, where everything is gracefully green when it is not solemnly white.