 |
Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms |
|
|
|
One of the fundamental questions in all religious systems and the centre of the many religious myths which attempt to answer the question, is the problem of Good and Evil.
Answer for yourself: If there is an all-powerful and perfect Being, the originator of all things, how did error and misfortune enter into the Universe?
Because, as we experience it, there patently is error and misfortune in our universe, the argument is often worked backwards from that fact, and the possible existence of an all-perfect Being is then denied. That, of course solves nothing either. The existence of biological order as against chaos has still to be accounted for, as, in fact, has the existence of anything. It is perhaps more difficult to prove that God is not, than that He is - more difficult to answer the question "how did goodness enter a mechanical world?" than the question "how did evil enter a consciously created one?"
In these first centuries of the Christian era the existence of a beneficent God, known by revelation or, as in the case of the Greek philosophers, of an all-perfect First Principle, discovered through metaphysical speculation, was the starting point of all cosmological systems. These basic assumptions being made, the inevitable questions are:
Here lay the mystery of mysteries, seemingly beyond the scope of human reason, but for which every religion tries to give an explanation.
The knowledge - the "gnosis", which gave the Gnostics their name - was the knowledge of this mystery of mysteries, and the essence of the Gnostic belief was that this knowledge was indeed beyond ordinary human reason. The Gnostics claimed that somebody had this knowledge and would give it to those human minds which could receive it - but only in the form of myth. How much the Gnostic systems of the second century were the result of their own speculative thinking and how much their interpretation of ancient traditions handed down to them, we do not know. But though the complicated myths which the Gnostics used to explain the existence of good and evil appear, at first sight, to be elaborate and fanciful extravagances, even the Church Fathers who attacked them accepted that a meaning lay beneath these elaborations. They treated most Gnostic schools as Christian, but as misguided and therefore harmful.
The greatest of the second-century Gnostic thinkers was Valentinus, who was teaching around the year 137 C.E. He established schools in Egypt and Cyprus - schools which were still flourishing there in the fourth century - and then moved to Rome, where he held his most famous school. He never set up a church and has left no books of his teaching - though it is possible that the Gospel of Truth, discovered in Nag Hammadi, is largely his work. His pupils, the most famous being Ptolamaeus, carried on his school, and it was primarily against them that the Great Church's strongest apologist, Irenaeus, (Bishop of Lyons at the end of the second century), wrote his Adversus Haeresis. Hippolytus, ecclesiastical writer and presbyter of the Church at Rome, also attacked them in his Philosophumenid, written in about 230 AD. From these two, we learn most of what we know about Valentinus' teaching.
Valentinus thought of himself as a Christian. His aim was probably to formulate a Christian philosophy that would make Christian ideas intellectually acceptable to the Hellenized society of Egypt and Rome.
Because of our lack of training and grasp of religions of the first century and their world views, let alone the proper understanding of Ancients' perspectives of God and the emanations from Him, both spirit and matter, the Valentinian myths at first might appear to us to be profane and polytheistic. Yet they were considered even by Irenaeus and Hippolytus to be metaphysical, and used to personify human qualities and abstract ideas. Valentinus struggled with the origin of evil and the presence of good in the world as he saw it.
Attempts to explain how evil entered the world have periodically been given in the form of a myth, representing a Cosmic Fall into error. In the Valentinian myth (and there were similar myths in other Gnostic systems) the Fall - unlike the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis - took place before the Creation of the world. The Old Testament Fall of Lucifer and his rebellious angels might be considered analogous, but there is a difference and this difference was one of the reasons why the Great Church considered the Gnostics to have turned their back on true Christianity. The Gnostic schools broke with the main Church between 100 and 150 C.E.
From Greek philosophy, from Eastern teaching, and from Zoroastrian dualism came the Gnostic conception of matter as hostile to the good. This made yet more acute the problem, not only of how Perfection could bring forth Imperfection, but how it could in any way connect with it.
In Valentinus' system the Pre-beginning was termed Bythos - the Depth, boundless and unqualified, (cf. Genesis I:1-2). Together with Bythos, Thought, the female principle [also called Grace or Silence], produced Mind and Truth; and these four Principles or Powers are the root of all. From these four Principles or Powers came forth further Powers, known as Aeons. These were in pairs, male and female - active and passive principles. The thirtieth of these was called "Sophia", the Desire for Wisdom. It was the error of Sophia that brought about the Fall and made our Universe.
Writings current at the time such as the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament (like Proverbs which was written by Solomon, himself a Pharaoh) and the works of the writer, known as "The Shepherd of Hermas", had accustomed people to the personification of qualities, so that myth was probably more easily acceptable to them than it is to us.
In the Valentinian myth Sophia fails to understand her limits and strives to return to the Father of All. This she cannot do. She is prevented by Horus - the Boundary, the Cross. In the Acts of John, one of the Gnostic Apocryphal gospels, is the phrase, "The real effective Cross is the marking off of all things." In her grief Sophia gives birth to Ildebaoth, the shapeless one, from whom came our material world. The essence of this myth is that, though matter- the material of our world - is based on grief and ignorance, yet from the Mother, Sophia, came sparks of eternal, spiritual light and these are imprisoned within the material world.
Hostility between Matter and Spirit is a form of dualism, based on contradiction, which enters into many religious systems. This type of dualism had no part in Irenaeus' teaching. Much of his repudiation of Gnosticism is centered on the Christian principle, developed from the Old Testament, that God, the Creator, made a world that is good. "And God saw everything that He had made and, behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). From that it follows that our bodies are also good.
It is in how they understood the conception of a Creator-God that the Gnostics departed most clearly from what will later be termed "orthodoxy". Nevertheless their conception would have been more intelligible to their Greek hearers than the one based on the Judaic Scriptures.
The Gnostics often equated the God of the Old Testament with the creator of our material world - for them a lesser Power than the Father of All. This Old Testament God of the Jews was not perfect since from Him came a world of suffering, pain, cruelty, and death. This surely is not the work of an all perfect God; therefore a more perfect God had to exist above this imperfect God. In Valentinusµ system the Creator-God was limited by ignorance; in many other Gnostic systems He was actively malicious. But all the systems made a distinction between the Unknown and Unknowable Beginning and the lesser Power, who was responsible for the material world.
According to Valentinus, the Eternal Being, Originator of all, did not create a Universe from nothing, but contained all within Himself. He produced emanations, who in their turn produced emanations, spreading ever further from their source. Their ignorance of their source increased continuously as their distance from their Eternal Origin increased, so that error inevitably entered in and finally caused our world. The myth of Sophia's Fall was used to elaborate this teaching. In the Gospel of Truth there is the saying, "Ignorance of the Father brought terror and fear, so came error and made forgetfulness."
The idea of an ever increasing number of intermediaries between the Perfect, Changeless One and the multifarious world of material things bridged, for the Gnostic, the "unbridgeable gulf" between Pure Spirit and Matter. And the conception of multiplying "emanations", proceeding further and further from their origin, was the Gnostic answer to the question of how error entered the Universe.
Basilides, another Gnostic teacher, with a school in Alexandria, also taught the doctrine of "Emanation" - the transmission of Life through intermediary beings to man. This never became Church teaching, but a descending hierarchy of Heavenly Powers was described by Dionysius the Areopagite, a mystic writer of the fifth century, and through him the idea entered into the spiritual writings of the Middle Ages. The origin of Basilides' system was connected with Zoroastrianism and not Christianity. He is said to have written, "In the beginning there were Light and Darkness, which existed separately and were not made"; and that, in our world there is mainly Darkness, irradiated with some glimmer of Light. But in his description of the possible rescue of man from this Darkness there are traces of Christian teaching and Christian expressions are used.
Like the teaching of Basilides, the Valentinian system of cosmology was important only in its relation to the spiritual growth of Man. With the Fall of Sophia some seed of her divine origin - a spark of Light - was planted in Gnostic man. Therefore, his soul "cried to God for deliverance" from the prison of the inferior cosmos. The aim of "those who know" was for this spark to return to its source, and the aim of Gnostic teaching was to show how to achieve this. This was their "salvation."
The Valentinian definition of Gnosis is "The redemption of the inner spiritual man". The Gnostics "know" that originally they were spiritual beings, but have now come to live in souls and bodies. Let me say it another way: at one time that part we call our "spirits" and our "souls" was part of God and have not come to reside in matter (body). Their aim is to be reborn into the spiritual world. They held the same concept as we do today; namely, they desired to go to Heaven after they die. Self-knowledge is the key. "He is a Gnostic because he knows by revelation who his true self is", (says a Gnostic writer in R.M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity). In his Philosophumania, Hippolytus quotes advice given by a certain Gnostic, Monoimus: "Abandon the search for God and the Creation... Look for him by taking yourself as the startingpoint. Learn who it is who, within you, makes everything his own, and says 'My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.' Learn the source of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, becomes angry without willing, rests without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters (the search for God), you will find him in yourself." This is the essence of "salvation;" the knowledge of "the Christ" of God in you...the hope of glory" as Paul spoke. You have come from God and go to God when you die.
In the teaching of Valentinus and in most Gnostic systems, a Redeemer had come from the heavenly realm to enlighten and deliver the immortal part of man, and to save him from being cast back into the sinful world after bodily death; because, from what we know of their writings, the Gnostics seem to have believed in cycles of rebirth. Salvation through a Redeemer, who came to earth with a message of self-discovery in order to show the way for mankind to God and who found his way back to the Father of All was the centre of Valentinus' Gnosticism. "He became a Way, a Gnosis, a Discovery and a Confirmation," (Gospel of Truth).
According to Gnosticism this deliverer, who was part of the vast Gnostic myth explaining the origin of the world and of Man, was named Jesus, "the first mystery through whom all emanations flowed forth." But this was not a "human Jesus." This "aeon", Jesus, the summary of all the perfections of the God-head, descended into the womb of the Virgin and so entered into the body of the earthly Christos (Christ). Jesus thus had two persons:
"Material men were alien to Him and did not discover His appearance or recognize Him... The beloved Son, the embodied Word, came to reveal to the aeons the gnosis of the living Book - to teach, to suffer and to die. He taught in a school. False sages tested Him, but little children came to Him. At death, He divested Himself of these perishable rags, He clothed Himself in imperishability." (Gospel of Truth)
The Roman Christians at first accepted Valentinus as a legitimate teacher and he himself, it seems, did not want to break with the main body of the Church. But to the Church leaders his teaching was dangerous, chiefly because of his Gnostic conception of the being of Christ, which was similar to the Docetic doctrine that Jesus was not a man with a human body, but an "appearance", a spiritual presence only; or, as Valentinus probably taught, his body was ethereal, of heavenly substance, totally different from our impure material bodies. The Gnostic idea of an ethereal Redeemer, descending from among the aeons through the spheres of the Universe, would turn the account of Christ's life into a mythological story. And if, as the Gnostics held, Matter were impure, God becoming man was an impossibility.
The Docetic tendency has appeared in different heresies throughout the ages; it even entered into the controversies between "orthodox" Christian writers. The mystery of who Christ was has led to emphasis being laid sometimes on the divine character of Christ, sometimes on the human. In the Gospels, he himself asks, "Whom do men say that I am?" (Mark 8:27). Many schools of Gnostics believed that the Heavenly Christ entered the man, Jesus, at the moment of his baptism by John and left him at the Crucifixion, when he returned to the Heavens from whence he came; or that at the Crucifixion, it was only a heavenly phantom who appeared to suffer and to die.
It is these two principles:
which caused Gnosticism to be considered by the Church to be heretical, and dangerously so. But despite the fact that "heretical" principles were attacked, the "orthodox" teaching has never been completely clear on either point.
For many centuries the problem of reconciling the human and the divine nature of Christ caused bitter antagonism among Christians, from the scholarly to the humble. Catholic Church councils will for hundreds of years struggle with this tension between the human and divine nature of Christ. The very searchings and speculations of the Gnostic schools, judged heretical by the Great Church, became the main impetus in that Church's struggle to reach an exact definition of the relationship between the human and the Divine. In combating the Gnostic systems questions were raised that had to be answered. The fourth-century Bishop, Hilary, wrote in De Trinitate, "The error of others caused us to err in daring to embody in human terms truths which ought to be hidden in the silent veneration of the heart."
Perhaps the attempt to "express the inexpressable" leads inevitably to conflict and so to "heresy".
The attempt to combat Gnosticism with definitions was to give rise to further definitions, and then to further arguments about these definitions, and so to accusations and counter-accusations of heresy. Irenaeus, himself, said that there are questions that are unanswerable and must be left in the hand of God. But once the questions were raised and other "heretics" gave their response, it seemed that an official answer had to be given. It may have been necessary to have definitions, but it is possible that the very act of defining distorts the understanding of that which lies beyond logic.
That Matter, and so the material world, is of its nature evil is not Christian doctrine; but in Christian doctrine the conception of the evil of Matter has often become confused with the war against "the flesh". The conflict between "flesh" and "spirit" might appear in a less dualistic light if "flesh" were understood, not just as "the body", but as including everything that is not part of the search for God. But it was not generally seen in this light, and the old idea of the hostility of Matter has pervaded Christianity throughout the ages. It is connected with various forms of asceticism and has led to some exaggerated ascetic doctrines. On occasion, it has even turned what had been described as a religion of joy - the Good News - into one of grim severity.
This view of Matter is seen also in the ambivalent attitude of the Church towards sex and marriage. In many Gnostic sects, marriage, or the consummation of marriage, was forbidden, or forbidden to those of the greatest spiritual commitment. This was because of the Gnostic conception of the body as intrinsically evil. The Catholic Church did not hold this doctrine, and marriage became a sacrament. But though it was not until the late twelfth century that celibacy for the priesthood became a definite rule of the Catholic Church, the state of celibacy had long been considered to be of a higher order than that of marriage, and the ancient influence of Dualism has for many centuries caused the Church to look on sex with suspicion and even hostility.
The problem of Spirit's relation to Matter was interwoven with the problem of how evil entered into the world. This also remains one of the unanswered mysteries and, whatever myths are used to explain it, is a cause of conflict for many people. The complicated Gnostic myths were rejected by the Church and the myth of Adam's Fall accepted. The story of Adam came from the Old Testament, the original Scripture of the first Christians - the Scripture used to foretell the coming of Christ. But the Gnostic myth, describing emanations from the Godhead, multiplying and proceeding ever further from Him and therefore ever further into mechanicalness and ignorance, avoided the two great contradictions - an all-powerful perfect Being who consciously introduced evil into the Universe; or a first originator who let evil in by mistake, and therefore was not all-powerful.
Both myths - the Old Testament and the Gnostic - implied the need for a Redeemer to rescue mankind from its fallen state. But the Gnostic myth, when popularized and taken literally, led to futile and incomprehensible elaborations; while the myth from Genesis, even when popularized and taken literally, was able to give some meaning to the Christian story. Nevertheless, the question of how evil and error entered a world created by a perfect, omniscient God is still a stumbling-block for many and, for many, has never been satisfactorily explained.