Gnosticism and Sexuality

Recently, the issue of Gnosticism and human sexuality has been declared some kind of dividing line between what can be considered authentic, historical Gnosticism and what is derided as some kind of New Age pseudo-Gnosticism. It has been posited on various lists and discussion groups that those who even raise the question about the role of sexuality in Gnostic literature are historical revisionists.

It's no secret that since the publication of Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels in 1979 that many were drawn to Gnosticism in no small part due to Pagels portrayal of Gn as sex-positive and inclusive to women. Repudiating this presentation is the historical fact that some Gnostic texts seem to have the same bronze-age take on homosexuality, procreation, and virginity as one would expect from that cultural and chronological milieu.

Here's what I think we need to keep in mind:

- What do these positions really tell us about anything?

- What's the purpose of the line of inquiry?

- What do we do with contradictory evidence to the predominant reading(s)?

The first issue to be dealt with is the Straw Man. Some suggest that "all modern Gnostics say that Gnostics were sex-positive feminists, therefore this proves you're all a bunch of revisionists and should be ignored." The reality is of course that no credible voice in modern Gnosticism is suggesting that classical Gn texts support a modernist view of sexuality. These statements simply aren't being made. The response to this on the lists is usually "I hear it all the time." This is simply a construction to serve a specific purpose.

It's a set-up. When we look at the secondary and primary source material, we do see indications that Gnostic sexuality may have been out of step with ambient cultures of the period. Aha! say the critics. You've cast the Gnostics in a modernist, sex-positive light, you revisionists! As you can see, this gets pretty silly quite quickly.

The main agenda for portraying Gnosticism as sex-negative is to re-inforce the stereotype that Gnosticism is a kind of dualism. "Gnostics hated the world", goes the usual narrative, "therefore they hated sex because it leads to babies which is imprisonment in evil matter." It's a simplistic logic that relies on an unsupported generalization of the Gnostic world-view and requires ignoring about half of Gnostic scripture.

So the first (Gn as sex-positive) is a trap, and the second (Gn as sex-negative) a dead-end. Philip offers a way out of this mess, but I'll save that for the end.

We have to look at it in context. Is Gnosticism remarkably more or less sex-negative or sex-positive than contemporaneous Christianity, Judaism, and Greek paganism? The take away is a further question, which I realize does take us into the critics' agenda: Is Gnosticism remarkably more dualist than Christianity?

As evidence that Gnostics were sex-negative, it has been pointed out that the Valentinians would pray before sex. Well, Orthodox Jews do this. Does this make them necessarily sex-negative? Even the pagan Greeks did this, and they bathed immediately afterwards to restore themselves to ritual purity. Is this a sex-negative practice? Obviously, we're seeing Gnosticism once again held to a double-standard that has no room in the debate. That's not scholarship, that's propaganda.

Secondary Sources

Clement of Alexandria writes of the Carpocratian Gnostics:

“wander ... into a boundless abyss of the carnal and bodily sins”

and embrace

“blasphemous and carnal doctrine."

They

“overturn the lamps and so remove the light that would uncover the shame of their dissolute ‘righteousness’ and unite with whom they will”

Can someone explain what a bunch of radical dualists who reject the flesh as evil are doing at an orgy?

Iranaeus says we're

“practicing magic arts and incantations, love potions and love feasts”*

*I know. Sounds like fun, right? That was not his point, however.

So, are Clement and Iranaeus to be believed? So much of our investigation into classical Gnosticism depends on the issue of their credibility. Note that Christians were accused of orgiastic practices by Roman authorities; it was a common slander for the time. But is it true in this case? Here are our greatest critics at least temporarily exonerating us from the charges of flesh-rejecting dualism.

Here's the reality: It is most likely that, on most issues, the typical first-to-third century Gnostic had a similar moral take on reproduction, the role of women, homosexuality and virginity to that of their Jewish and Christian neighbours. They weren't modernists, and they weren't feminists. At the same time, they were certainly no more sex-negative (and by extension, obviously no more dualist). We have early Church fathers literally fleeing into the desert so they will not have to endure the touch or sight of women, and we have Paul equating marriage with prostitution. There simply isn't anything within Gnostic scripture that comes close to being that clearly sex-negative.

There are two mitigating elements which would serve to put Gnostics in a slightly (by the standards of the early common centuries) more sex-positive light: antinomianism, and sophiology.

Iranaeus claimed we did "everything ungodly and impious" as a means of rejecting cultural programming. This same kind of antinomianism applies in certain sects of Buddhism. This would let some (we have no idea how widespread this attitude might have been) Gnostics "off the hook" as it were from their cultural sexual taboos, for better or worse.

Because Gnostic sophiology tends, at least on a mythic level, to be more concrete (ie. Sophia is represented by a female character, and not simply a qualitative "wisdom"; and the Holy Spirit is explicitly referred to as a woman), it does create a thematic tone when Gnostic scripture deals with other female characters such as Norea and Eve. I've mentioned repeatedly Valentinus' use of fertility and midwifery metaphors for spiritual maturity. And we do have, if not as historically-verifiable fact, at least the heresiologists' accusation of Gnostics consecrating female bishops. So with regards to historical record and secondary sources, the sexual mores of classical Gnosticism do seem slightly more sex-positive than that of their neighbours. Note that this in no way implies that ancient Gnostics had modernist attitudes towards sexuality, but that they were simply not as anti- on the issue as early Christians.

Now, here's part two;

A religion's theology is not always immediately apparently manifest in that religion's culture (particularly when the religion is not dominant culturally). Gnosticism's body-theology - with its understanding of the pre-existence of the soul - DOES lend itself more easily to an egalitarian world-view between the sexes, and is more accommodating to gays and the transgendered. Your body is not your soul, and "you" were not co-created with your body. This is in stark contrast to the Christian view which states unequivocally that "you" and your body come into existence at the same moment, therefore you "are" your gender, etc.

"Blessed is he who is before he came into being. For he who is, has been and shall be."
- The Gospel of Philip

So Gnostic theology is consistent on the issue and DOES support sex-positivism even though this was by and large not expressed culturally in the early centuries. There is an immediate parallel to slavery: Christian theology can be clearly understood to oppose slavery, even though it took almost two thousand years to express this theology in culture. But that doesn't mean that Christianity is slavery-positive. Of course now we recognize that Christian theology, when given room to express itself, was fundamental in changing society's attitudes on this issue.

Primary sources:

The Gospel of Philip offers perhaps the most explicit (and contradictory) exchange on the subject of human sexuality in Gnosticism. It does seem to conform to its parent cultures on the issue of virginity, but it takes a decidedly "healthier" (more modern) position on marriage than that of Christianity. However, we do see a portrayal of open intimacy between Jesus and Mary Magdalene that would have been scandalous in mainstream Christian settings.

Most significantly, where Christianity fetishized sexual morality, and the later Reformation obsessing about sexual restriction to the point of practically making it a pillar of salvation, Philip has this very sane and balanced advice:

Do not fear the essence of the flesh, nor love it. If thou fear it, it will become thy master; if thou love it, it will devour thee and strangle thee.

He's cautioning against the Christian fetishization of sexuality, either through indulgence or rejection, and offering instead this quiet iconoclasm.

Priest Shortage Forces Vatican To Hire Temps To Deliver Sacred Rites

And while we're reading The Onion;

While a majority of temps said they were happy just to have a job, some, like Greg Purcell, believe the priesthood is simply too demanding.
"There's no fucking way I'm working Sundays," Purcell said. "Not for what they pay."

No, it's not the BAR - The Onion is a religioblogger's best friend.

Scientology Losing Ground To New Fictionology

From The Onion;

"Scientology is rooted in strict scientific principles, such as the measurement of engrams in the brain by the E-Meter," Kurz said. "Scientology uses strictly scientific methodologies to undo the damage done 75 million years ago by the Galactic Confederation's evil warlord Xenu—we offer our preclear followers procedures to erase overts in the reactive mind. Conversely, Fictionology is essentially just a bunch of make-believe nonsense."

The White Lie & The Disciplinary Lie

Jonathan Z. Smith sheds a fascinating light on the subject of bias and deception-for-convenience's-sake in the presentation of ancient (in this instance biblical) texts:

We lie, it seems to me, in a number of ways. We sometimes cheerfully call the lie words like "generalization" or "simplification," but that's not really what we're doing. We're really lying, and lying in a relatively deep fashion, when we consistently disguise, in our introductory courses, what is problematic about our work. [...]

Thus, in the name of simplification, what we really end up doing is mystifying the objects we teach at the introductory level.

Similarly, still in the name of simplification, we treat theory as if it were fact. We treat difficult, complex, controversial, theoretical entities as if they were self-evident parts of the universe that we inhabit.

Disciplinary lying.—The self-justified white lie is done in the name of our students, in the name of simplifying, of generalizing, of speaking to a wide and a diverse audience. However, one also has to look at the place in which lying becomes built into the structure of things, in which it becomes that which constitutes a discipline as a discipline over and against other disciplines. Here, at least in principle, we lose the excuses that go with the introductory course. [...]

The ideal, often quoted in books on science and education, is the breathless individual who, when Oppenheimer was at the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton, was asked, "What is it like to study with Oppenheimer?" and who responded, "It's wonderful. Everything we knew about physics last week isn't true." Well, this is what it means to be an initiated member of a discipline. The science you learned in elementary school is no good when you get to high school, which is no good when you get to the first year in college, which is no good by the second year of college, and so forth.

"The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines"

UPDATE: The ever-clever Judy Redman responds:

When I look at texts from early Christianity for the purposes of my doctoral studies, I ask different questions of them to those that I ask when I am preparing to preach or lead Bible study.  For my doctoral work which I do primarily as part of the interpretive community of academic scholars of studies in religion, I ask “what does this tell me about early Christian communities – how they lived, what they believed, etc?” If I were working on something different I might also be asking  “what does this tell me about the historical Jesus?”, but whatever I ask, I am using the historical-critical method as an end in itself and if I don’t use it properly, I’m in big trouble.

When I am preparing to preach or lead Bible study,  which I do primarily as part of the interpretive community of  Christian biblical scholars, I ask “what does this tell me about how early Christians related to/understood God?” and “what does this tell me about how I should live as a faithful Christian in the twenty-first century?” I have to be aware of the historical context in order to answer  the preaching/teaching questions or I could come up with some very weird answers, so I still have to use the historical-critical method properly.  Knowing the historical context is not the purpose of my questioning, though, it’s a stepping stone to developing a credible theology.

Many of us are in a similar boat. When I look at the text and context of primary source materials, I'm looking for clues as to what happened and what were the authors thinking - not what I would like to have happened or what I would agree with. But when I do my own reading, with my 21st century Jung-inspired po-mo lens, I look for what is happening, ie my own spiritual and creative response. I do genuinely try to keep the voices in my head civil to one another, but I'm the first to admit they can get rather territorial now and then.

The Oxyrhynchus Hymn

This has been kicking around the web for a bit now. It was composed 200-something CE, and an approximate translation (not my own, I don't have the chops for this sort of thing);

To thee, Father of the Universe, Father of time, let us all sing together all the blessings of the world
That the blessings of God be not killed, neither in the evening nor in the morning.
That the stars, bearers of light, and the springs of the impetuous rivers no longer keep silent.
And while we celebrate in our hymns the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, let all the properties of creation intone this refrain: Amen, Amen. Strength, praise, eternal glory to the only dispenser of all good. Amen, Amen.

Personally I find the similarities between this hymn and ancient Egyptian prayers is quite striking.

Wayfinding

I sipped tea and looked at the forest today, silhouetted against a cold but bright gift of October blue sky.

I thought about my work, and how it's at the same time richly rewarding and impossibly frustrating. I've defined my work as tracing the braid; identifying the strands of the Western mystery tradition as they lace with and opposite to its expression as Judaism, as Christianity, as Paganism, as "the occult" – and specifically as Gnosticism.

If I've brought anything to the table of contemporary Gnostic studies – and I hope that I have – it's been in framing the debate; identifying Gnosticism as a literary genre, and in identifying its core defining characteristic in its soteriology. I've done this work in turn arrogantly, prayerfully, joyfully, shamelessly, inadvertently, deliberately, creatively, bitterly, originally, clumsily and on occasion gracefully.

The move of classifying Gnosticism as a genre is a risky one; it absolutely puts me outside the accepted heresiological paradigm of the academic world. And I have to accept that, although I did spend several years coming to terms with it. The payoff, however, is worth it, because it states plainly that Gnosticism, far from being an extinct antique heresy, is in fact Open Source. Any author in any era can pick up a pen and work within the symbolic language and peculiar strata of Gnostic aesthetic and create a genuinely, validly Gnostic text. The difficulty then lies in the task of determining whether or not the author is merely paying lip service to the surface trappings of Gnosticism, or delving deep into the rich mines of Gnostic theme and conveying and authentic Gnostic message. This process of reasoned, prayerful discernment is unlikely to win you many friends.

Understanding Gnosticism as a literary genre does resolve a number of what appear at first glance to be contrasts: the absolute monism of Hermeticism vs. the qualified monism of Plato. The "lodge" wisdom literature of Greece vs. the "temple" wisdom literature of Judaism. This genre is at once as elastic and exclusive as Beat poetry: something either belongs or it does not, but within that restriction is a broad textual continuum. I sincerely hope that the discussion and exploration of Gnosticism as a phenomenon, both within academia and for the individual seeker, moves in this direction.

The other point that I've made, again in the face of much resistance, is to politely insist on the make-or-break soteriology of gnosis in Gnosticism. While this should be a no-brainer, systems which did not or do not place gnosis at the center of human experience and responsibility are often lumped in with Gnosticism. And when I speak here of gnosis ("insight") I mean specifically insight into one's own existence in the context of an radiating, real reality, which became broken, and which we can and have to fix. Without emanations-monism, we're not talking about Gnosticism. Without the "problem" of the experience of the disconnect in emanation, of this alienation, we're not talking about Gnosticism. And without the candle in the darkness of our own insight, we're not talking about Gnosticism.

This "disconnect" cannot be rationally called a dualism – although it is so mislabelled all the time. As I've said on this blog many times, dualism posits two equal and opposing deities and a tug-of-war for humanity in the middle. This true dualism exists nowhere in Gn literature. But the paradigm of Gnostic study is so deeply entrenched in this misunderstanding that it's almost impossible to contradict it. In Gnosticism, matter is the product and aspect of energy. Flesh is the child of spirit. Certainly flesh and spirit are not the same thing; our animal instincts are not our higher selves or our true purpose. But neither is the fruit of the tree the root of the tree. These distinctions get mischaracterized as dualism, and I get tired of correcting them. Truly, physically tired.

The biggest issue I have with the dualism label is of course that it's used to discredit Gnosticism. It's meant as a slander. That, and it's simply not helpful. It does not serve to actually tell us anything about early Gnostic thought. The distinction made between the base and the precious occurs in every religious system; between the initiated and the uninitiated; holy ground and pedestrian space; the miraculous and the ordinary. Judaism, Christianity, and Paganism are not categorized as dualist for having very similar (and occasionally identical) distinctions. Creating a special kind of "Gnostic Dualism" just to tack on to Gnosticism and its Middle Platonist "interruption in emanation" out of heresiological nostalgia seems... unproductive.

If we're going to have a conversation about Gnostic thought, let it be in the same kind of context as other world religions. Let us not condemn later expressions of the phenomenon for being different from the earlier one any more than we would say that modern Christians aren't Christian or that modern Jews aren't Jews. Worlds change. Minds change. Thinkers influence thought. Social pressures, cultural adaptation, forces sometimes radical revision within the envelope of religious movements. Otherwise, Reform Jews aren't Jews. Anglicans aren't Christians. Again, we're left with an unhelpful and uninformative conclusion. Instead we are all invited to ask deeper questions. To search for meaning, for relevance, for insight.

Let us trace the thread of Gnosticism as weaves from Orphic cult through Jewish inquiry, from early Christian spontaneous gospels through the athanor of debate, from Cathars through Alchemists to the Restoration. It's a dance. It's an orchestra with myriad instruments, and it reaches a crescendo within the sacred, yearning heart. My religion doesn't end somewhere; not in a Council, not in bonfire, not in a textbook. It endures because gnosis endures, because Wisdom abides, because the kosmos is still in need of healing, and we are called to the the task.

Finally let us move Gnosticism outward, and forward. Let it be understood as a philosophy, as a love of Wisdom, rooted in a simple, indelible γνῶθι σεαυτόν; Tenet Noscere. Know Thyself. Everything flows from there. Challenge it, champion it, change it. But trust it.

Fox News Reports R. Crumb Gnostic

Not an atheist like his father, Crumb describes himself as a Gnostic, a member of that ancient movement searching for spiritual enlightenment.

"I've spent a lot of time studying different religious traditions and I meditate," he says. "I think that all humans have that need for some spiritual meaning.

Now, it is Fox News, so who the hell knows if it's true? But if it is, awesome.

How To Read Gnostic Texts

1) Read the primary source material. This sounds simple enough, but you'd be surprised how much of the "reading" that goes on is actually just looking at the summary in Wikipedia.

2) Read more than one translation. There are substantial and meaningful differences between, say, Robinson and Meyer and Grant.

3) Try the interlinear, and translate for yourself. This is not as tricky as you might think. Here is a word by word, Coptic to English translation of Thomas, and you can look up words in the various Coptic lexicons online to see for yourself. It's dorky fun. I had a great epiphany in a text crit class as we read Mark in Greek, and discovered that here:

But they going out, fled from the sepulchre. For a trembling and fear had seized them: and they said nothing to any man; for they were afraid. (Douay-Rheims Bible)

...the phrase "fear had seized them" (sometimes "amazement" or "bewilderment") is really "ecstasy"*.

4) Milieu. Learn about the world view of the cultures in which the authors were raised. Understand the politics, the blurred lines, the burning questions of the time. One of the biggest reasons that "matter" and "redemption" are such hot topics in Gn texts is because there was a huge debate raging in the Jewish world about literal vs. figurative rising of the dead, and if the risen flesh was of the same nature as the flesh which perished. This was a huge, huge deal at the time. Part of that discussion was a hangover from the origins of Judaism, trying to make it distinct by rejecting the theology of its neighbours, particularly Egyptian religion, which had a clearly defined theology of the body. Jewish body theology was hotly contested. When you add Plato in there, and emanationist cosmogeny, you're in for a pretty lively debate. If you miss that bit of history you're likely to think that Gnostic texts are bringing up the subject because it was among the most important things for them specifically, whereas at the time it would have been weird if they didn't address it.

4b) Milieu Part Deux. Gnostic texts weren't created in a vacuum. There are buckets of Gnostic references to and paraphrasing of Plato, the Bible (the "Old Testament"), the New Testament, and even Syrian demonology. The Naj Hammadi works are part of a continuum that includes Timaeus, Poimandres, Enoch and the Torah, and can't be understood accurately outside this context.

5) While I'm not suggesting that Gnostic authors were psychologists (WARNING: I am not suggesting that Gnostic authors were psychologists. We clear? Just covering my butt here) they clearly DID understand the impact of myth and symbol, and used symbolic language to impart both MEANING and PERCEPTUAL CHANGE IN THE READER. The use of numbers, colours, and animals is never random, but speak to traditional layers of interpretation. So you need to learn about this guy: Philo of Alexandria, who is as Gnostic as anybody: A Jewish scholar from Alexandria, educated in Greek, with a keen sense of multiple-layers-of meaning. In fact Philo's whole schtick was about multiple layers of meaning; a surface interpretation for the kids in the cheap seats, a symbolic interpretation for the educated, and then a kind of experiential space entered by the initiates. The bottom line is that the literal, surface interpretation is never the end of the conversation.

6) Hermeneutic is not tautology. The academic interpretation of the day is not a monolithic, unarguable reality. In fact it changes every twenty years or so. Also YOUR understanding of these texts will evolve with your experience. So don't get too attached.

6b) Be mindful of Gloss. Even though scholars evolve their understanding of these texts, often they continue to use the same gloss ("spin") which resulted in earlier, temporarily-out-of-date scholarly readings. That gloss can be paradigmatic and awfully persuasive as it's rarely challenged.

7) Lectio Divina. I've written a lot about this practice before, and really, the best way I've found to navigate the contradictory, challenging, and outright weirdness of many Gn texts is just to hang out with them in a mindful, contemplative way that becomes part of your spiritual practice. Just don't be afraid to disagree with them.

*[Thanks to blog reader Michael D. who quite rightly pointed out that I was referring to the wrong half of this phrase in the original post. This inadvertently proves my point that you should do your own research and not immediately defer to third parties - especially me.]

Confessions of a Spiritual Dilettante: H is for Heretic

I've thought of myself as a heretic for about thirty years now. It's an idea that has started many conversations from a very safe place: I can approach people who subscribe to various orthodoxies, identify myself as a heretic, and I'm safely behind some kind of line for them. They'll either (rarely) write me off and decide that I'm not worth talking to, or more likely explain their perspective without assumptions of definition. It's been said before that the arguments don't come from people using different words, they come from people using the same words and arguing over nuances of meaning (check out Spiral Inward or The Palm Tree Garden for how this plays out in Gnosticism). This heresy label says I'm not about to invade your territory or redefine your orthodoxy for you.

Heresy is about choice, about free will. Coming from the Greek αἵρεσις, hairesis, it means "to choose, to select". Looking at the tree and saying "yes, please, that apple, there." It wasn't originally a negative term: you had choices of philosophical schools of thought (aireseis), between sects of Judaism (Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes). There were choices to be made, and both the choice and the chooser were heresies. It's not until Aquinas that the term is coloured as choices away from the One True Choice, and therefore problematic.

You might be familiar with the phrase "cafeteria Catholics" - those who take some of this and some of that to suit their palette, and leaving the unsavory behind. This is used a pejorative, and I understand why; it's not a path that I would universally advocate.

Traditions have, for the most part, survived for good reason. Some of those less-than-pleasant things on the menu have nutritional value, spiritually. Some build immunities against fuzzy thinking, laziness, or self-centredness. But some traditions and ideas survive simply because they have a fierce self-preservation instinct, and what can be nutrition for one can be an allergen to another. To flog this metaphor one step further, it is in my mind completely fair for the restaurant to ask you to leave if you don't clear your plate. It is, after all, their place.

(It's also important to not that heresy is not the same as apostasy. There's a difference between being asked to leave because you're unwelcome, and deciding to eat somewhere else entirely.)

I'm content to brown-bag it on the sidewalk. That's the price of being a heretic. There are others.

Heresies quickly become orthodoxies – to protest against an abuse of authority is the first step, but to define oneself as "one who protests", surrounding oneself with the echo-chamber of other protestors, and then expelling those Protestants who don't conform to the new regime, tend to be the further steps. Best I think to be a heretic alone, at least from time to time.

So, what's the source of my choosing? To be fair, it has entailed laziness, fuzzy thinking, selfishness. I didn't want to bend to the yoke because I thought I knew better, because it was too limiting, too restrictive, because it chafed me to subordinate. And I rationalized that "dogma" and "orthodoxy" and "stuffy patriarchies" had nothing to offer me. I was wrong on all these things – I did have things to learn, experiences to undergo, and some of those opportunities for listening and learning were lost forever.

Another cause: I was born in the Age of the Heretic. Grown up to think of myself as special, as unique, as child of the Aquarian Age of unrestricted experimentation and inquiry, where I could differentiate myself from the herd by consuming the right merchandise. Specifically, the orthodoxy available to me was spiritualism and reincarnation. Even in the midst of this permissiveness, my curiosity and difficult questions put me inevitably outside; a heretic among the heresies.

This isn't to say that I never learned the value of tradition, of liturgy, of committing and surrendering to something larger than myself; I just had to figure out how to make that work without being extinguished. And it's a constant negotiation. I've known both the heartbreak of being accepted, only to have my heart say "no" to a critical point, and the heartbreak of feeling completely at home in an environment but being rejected due to some (to me) trivial semantic distinction.

Heresy is a very popular idea, but I do wonder how many people are heretics because they think they're supposed to be. When am I rejecting an idea because it makes me uncomfortable or challenges my assumptions? When am I buying into something because it's easy, even when it doesn't "click"? The hardest part of is to discern between self-delusion and integrity. But of course, that's the hardest part of anything. Choosing. Free will.

"My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light"
– Carl Jung