Table Of ContentForbidden Faith
The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels
to The Da Vinci Code
Richard Smoley
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Who Were the Gnostics?
2. The Heirs of Egypt
3. The Lost Religion of Light
4. The War against the Cathars
5. Gnosis in the Medieval Church
6. The Sages of the Renaissance
7. Rosicrucianism and the Great Lodges
8. The Gnostic Revival
9. Gnosis and Modernity
10. The Future of Gnosis
Selected Bibliography
Notes
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
Inevitably an enterprise like this one benefits from the contributions of
innumerable people. It would be difficult to list all of those whose written works
and personal insights have made it possible to write this book.
Nonetheless, a few names stand out as worthy of special mention, particularly
my agent, Giles Anderson, whose support and guidance were essential in helping
me navigate the waters of the submissions process, and Eric Brandt, my editor at
Harper San Francisco, whose comments and suggestions have proved invaluable
in revising the manuscript. I am also obliged to Elizabeth Berg for a fine job of
copyediting. In addition, I would like to thank Jay Kinney, John Carey, and John
Connolly, whose comments on specific sections of the manuscript helped me
avoid a number of errors. Any that remain are, of course, my responsibility and
not theirs. And my friend Christopher Bamford has, as usual, been
extraordinarily generous in lending me books from his magnificent personal
library.
JUNE 2005
Introduction
Even the name is strange. Gnosis: glancing at it on the page, you may wonder
how it is pronounced. (In fact the g is silent, and the o is long.) The meaning of
the word is more perplexing still. Some may know that it has to do with the
Gnostics or Gnosticism, and that this was a movement dating from the early days
of Christianity. A person with some background in religion might add that
Gnosticism was a heresy—a teaching that allegedly distorted Christ’s doctrine—
and that it died out in ancient times. Few would be able to say more.
And yet the subject keeps coming up. G. R. S. Mead, a British scholar who
published a study of Gnosticism in 1900, could call his work Fragments of a
Faith Forgotten, but the faith is not quite as forgotten as it was a hundred years
ago. In a world that is restlessly searching for the newest and the fastest and the
easiest of everything, the ancient and cryptic teachings of Gnosticism have
edged their way onto best-seller lists and into television documentaries and
newsmagazines. Recently Time magazine noted, “Thousands of Americans
follow Gnosticism avidly in New Age publications and actually recreate full-
dress spiritual practices from the early texts and other lore.”¹ The literary critic
Harold Bloom has even gone so far as to say that Gnosticism is at its core the
American religion.
Why has this once-forgotten faith regained its allure? Some of it no doubt
stems from the persecution it has suffered in its history. During most of Christian
history, Gnosticism was forgotten because it was forbidden; to orthodox
Christian theologians, it was not only a heresy but the arch-heresy. Such
denunciation by the official church might have served as a deterrent in other
eras, but today, in our age of self-conscious individualism and revolt against
authority, it often has the opposite effect: condemnation endows a movement
with glamour.
But even this explanation doesn’t take us far. You can pick up any history of
Christianity and find pages and pages devoted to Ultramontanists, Pelagians,
Nestorians, Waldenses, and dozens of other sects and schisms that flourished for
a brief time before vanishing into the afterlife of memory. All of them were duly
labeled as heresies and duly condemned. Indeed one of the most impressive
accomplishments of the Christian church has been the astonishing number of
epithets it has devised for groups and individuals who do not see things as the
officials do. Of all these dead branches in the family tree of Christianity, why
should Gnosticism exercise such a peculiar and powerful fascination?
This isn’t an easy question to answer, but the effort is worth making, because
it will tell us a great deal not only about Gnosticism itself, but about ourselves
and our spiritual aspirations. For the Gnostics to have such appeal, they must
offer solutions to problems overlooked by mainstream religion. To see what
these are, it would be useful to step back and look at the religious impulse with a
wider lens.
Broadly speaking, religion fulfills two main functions in human life. In the
first place, it’s meant to foster religious experience, to enable the individual soul
to commune with the divine. In the second place, it serves to cement the
structure of society, upholding values and ideals that preserve the common good.
The word religion derives from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind back” or
“bind together.” Religion’s function is to bind individuals both to God and to
one another.
There is no real contradiction between these two purposes; ideally they
should work together in perfect harmony. But this rarely happens. More often
than not, these two functions conflict in various ways, just as individual needs
frequently clash with collective ones. One problem arises when an individual has
some kind of spiritual experience that doesn’t fit with accepted theology. This
person poses an apparent threat to the established order, which regards him with
suspicion and at times with hostility. He becomes a heretic and an outcast. If he
has some personal charisma—and spiritual experience can endow a person with
precisely this sort of charisma—he may start a church or a movement of his
own. Thus are new religions born.
Whether or not this happens, someone with access to an inner source of
spiritual insight does not need the church—or does not need it as ordinary people
do. Furthermore, such a person often has an inner authority lacking in many
leaders of established religions. This was precisely the response Jesus evoked
when he began to preach: “And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he
taught them as one that had authority and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22).
Naturally, the “scribes”—those with a purely external knowledge of religion—
are bound to regard this person as a threat to their own power.
Of course the scribes see things differently. They view themselves as
guardians of the social order. They say that society needs to have consistent
patterns of belief and practice as a way of reinforcing common values. A person
with an individual and independent experience of the divine threatens (or is
believed to threaten) these values. If the religious authorities have some measure
of secular power—as they did in Christ’s time and in the Middle Ages—the
mystic will be persecuted or put to death. If the authorities have little secular
power—as they do today—they will have to content themselves with
condemning or at least criticizing him.
It’s probably unwise to indulge in too much tongue-clicking over this
situation; as usually happens, people end up acting mostly as the logic of their
circumstances dictates. The spiritual visionary may say, with Luther, “Here I
stand: I can do no other,” but the authorities on the other side of the bench could
no doubt say much the same thing. They have the task of supporting and
strengthening the faith of the majority, of helping them pass through the ordeals
of births and deaths and marriages. They can see that most people are not
interested in the subtleties of religious experience and would rather ignore them.
Besides, as the clergy have long since learned, many supposedly mystical
revelations are little more than symptoms of mental disorder.
Consequently, religious authorities tend to downplay or discourage such
experiences; they are too troublesome and unmanageable. Take, for example, the
numerous apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Many of these—at Lourdes, Fatima,
Medjugorje, for example—were greeted with hostility by the local clergy, who
doubted the good faith of the visionaries and also feared the challenge to their
own authority. After all, people are apt to say, if the priests are so holy, why
didn’t the Virgin appear to them? Only later, if at all, did the church grudgingly
accept the legitimacy of these visions.
As a result, the powers that be tend to discourage spiritual experience beyond
a certain safe and harmless minimum. Unfortunately for them, religion exists
partly because of the human need for direct communion with the divine, so they
turn out to be sacrificing one part of their job to another. Thus it happens that the
history of religion follows a predictable cycle: the initial vision of a charismatic
founder (himself usually persecuted by the clerics of his time) degenerates, as
time goes on, into a collection of secondhand dogmas. At this point, anyone who
goes to the religion thirsting for spiritual experience is likely to be told she is
looking for the wrong thing, or simply to be turned away.
Such is Christianity today. A modern priest or minister might be well
schooled in the theology of Bultmann, Tillich, and Karl Barth and may be
intimately familiar with the question of the Q document and its strata of
composition, and yet find himself at a total loss when a parishioner tells him she
has seen an angel. And people do see angels—or what they experience as angels.
After over twenty-five years of spiritual exploration from both personal and
professional points of view, I’m constantly amazed by how many apparently
ordinary people have had profound and often dazzling spiritual experiences.
They’re often unwilling to talk about them, because they don’t know whom to
ask. They may be afraid—with some reason—of seeming strange or mad. If they
go to their clergyman, usually he will give them some meaningless reassurance
(if they are comparatively lucky) or (if they are not) he will tell them their
experience was a visitation by the devil.
Over and against this indifference or hostility from mainstream Christianity,
spiritual seekers have encountered a flood of teachings that have come to the
West from Asia during the last century. These teachings have spread in mass
culture to such a degree that words like Zen, karma, and yang and yin are now
part of our standard vocabulary. And one thing Eastern teachings have stressed
is precisely the need for spiritual experience—the need for a genuinely religious
person to verify within herself the truths she has heard or read about. Indeed this
is probably the main reason Hindu and Buddhist teachings have found such a
huge audience in Europe and America. The idea that inner illumination is not an
aberration or an embarrassment has proved to be a godsend for many.
Here is where Gnosticism comes in. It is based on gnosis, a Greek word that
means “knowledge” but knowledge of a very specific kind—a direct inner
experience of the divine. The closest equivalent in common parlance is probably
enlightenment as described in a Hindu or Buddhist context. Many people today
are excited to hear that the quest for enlightenment is not an exotic import but
deeply rooted in Christianity, and may actually have been the original impetus
for it. The fact that Gnosticism has been despised or ignored by the official
hierarchy is not a drawback; for many, it no doubt mirrors the dismissal of their
own experience by the same hierarchy.
Another reason for Gnosticism’s appeal has to do with its attitude toward the
world we see. The Gnostics of antiquity generally regarded the visible world as a
defective creation, the handiwork of a second-rate deity called the demiurge
(from a Greek word meaning “craftsman”). While this is at odds with the glaring
artificial sunshine of American mass culture, the appeal of the Gnostic vision is
understandable if we look a bit beneath the surface.
The great sociologist Émile Durkheim said that religion is essentially a
collection of internalized social forces: “Society in general, simply by its effect
on men’s minds, undoubtedly has all that is required to arouse the sensation of
the divine. A society is to its members what its god is to its faithful…. The
ordinary observer cannot see where the influence of society comes from. It
moves along channels that are too obscure and circuitous, and uses psychic
mechanisms that are too complex, to be easily traced to the source. So long as
scientific analysis has not yet taught him, man is well aware that he is acted upon
but not by whom. Thus he had to build out of nothing the idea of those powers
with which he feels connected.”² Those powers are, of course, the gods.
It is both natural and somewhat comical for a sociologist to try to reduce all
religious experience to mere internalizations of social forces. Even so,
Durkheim’s insight has much truth to it. The religious mindset tends to view the
divine order in terms of the society it knows. To take an obvious example,
medieval theologians portrayed the cosmos as a kind of feudal state, with the
Lord at the top, the angels as the equivalents of the clergy and nobility, and
humanity as the commoners.
Another example can be found among the Gnostics themselves. The classic
Gnostic systems arose in the second century A.D. At this time the Roman
Empire was at its zenith. For most of its subjects, the empire was the world: the
Greek word oikoumene, literally meaning the “inhabited world,” was more or
less synonymous with the Roman Empire. The only parts of the known earth that
were not under its sway, such as present-day Ireland, Germany, and Iran, were
remote, forbidding, and for most people all but unreachable.
The Roman citizen of the time thus lived in an all-encompassing social order
that had reached an extremely high level of material culture and intellectual
sophistication. On the other hand, its very size and complexity dwarfed the
individual. Rome, the center of political power, was not only omnipotent but
also distant and frequently capricious in behavior.
In such a milieu, it’s easy to see how the intellectual systems of the Gnostics
sprang up. They taught that we live in a realm of delusion, ruled by inferior gods
called the “archons.” The true, good God was far above these dimensions, and
would not even be knowable at all had he not sent divine messengers, including
