The Gnostics

The teaching

As the Secret Book of John with the other books found at Nag Hammadi teaches it.

Knowledge that saves

Gnosis is not the learning of facts. It is acquaintance, the knowing of a person and of oneself, and the Gnostic teachers held that this knowing is itself salvation. A Valentinian teacher, whom Clement of Alexandria preserves, says what it knows: who we were and what we have become, where we were and into what we have been thrown, where we are hastening and from what we are set free, what birth is and what rebirth.

The Gospel of Thomas opens the same way. Whoever finds the meaning of these sayings, it begins, will not taste death; whoever seeks should not stop seeking until he finds, and when he finds he will be troubled, and when troubled astonished, and he will reign over all. The kingdom is within you and outside you. When you know yourselves you will be known, and will see that you are children of the living Father; if you do not, you live in poverty, and you are that poverty.

The One beyond all things

The Secret Book of John, the fullest telling of the myth, begins its teaching above everything. The first principle is the Monad, a monarchy with nothing above it: the invisible Spirit, the Father of all, pure light that no eye can look on. It is neither bodily nor bodiless, neither great nor small, neither a quantity nor a quality; it does not exist among the things that exist but is better than them. It can be spoken of only by saying what it is not, and it lacks nothing.

Barbelo and the realm of light

The Spirit gazes at its own image in the pure water of light that surrounds it, and its thought becomes a living being: Barbelo, the first thought, the image of the invisible, the Mother-Father, the first human. From the Father and Barbelo comes a child of light, the Self-begotten, who is Christ, and the Spirit sets him over all. Around him stand four great lights, Harmozel, Oroiael, Daveithai and Eleleth, each with three aeons, twelve in all, and the whole is the Fullness, the pleroma.

In the first light stands the perfect human, the heavenly Adam; in the second his son Seth; in the third the seed of Seth, the souls of the holy; and in the fourth the souls who did not know the Fullness at once but repented afterwards. Those who know this teaching call themselves the seed of Seth.

Wisdom's fault

The last of the aeons is Sophia, Wisdom. She wished to bring forth a likeness of herself without the consent of the Spirit and without her partner, and her thought came forth imperfect and unlike her: a serpent with a lion's face and eyes of lightning fire. Ashamed, she cast it out of the Fullness, hid it in a bright cloud, and set a throne in the cloud so that none of the immortals should see it. She named it Yaldabaoth.

The craftsman and his rulers

Yaldabaoth, called also Saklas, the fool, and Samael, the blind god, took a great power from his mother and went out to make a world of his own. He made rulers to serve him, twelve authorities and seven kings over the seven heavens, with angels beneath them, and gave them fate to bind what lay below. Seeing nothing above him, he said: I am a jealous God, and there is no other God beside me. In saying so, the book observes, he showed his angels that another God exists, for if there were none, of whom would he be jealous?

The words are the Bible's own, “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God” and “there is no God beside me”, and that is the point: the Secret Book reads the maker of Genesis as this lesser god. Sophia, seeing what her son had done, repented; she moved to and fro, the book says, and not, as Moses said, above the waters. She was raised not back to her own place but above her son, to wait until her fault is mended.

The making of Adam

A voice came from the height, saying Man exists, and the Son of Man, and the image of the perfect human showed in the waters below. The rulers saw it and said to one another, Let us make a man after the image of God and after our likeness. Each gave a part, and they made a body of soul, but it lay still and could not rise. The lights of the Fullness, to win back the power Yaldabaoth had taken, advised him to breathe into its face; he breathed, and his mother's power passed out of him into Adam, who moved, shone and was wiser than all who made him.

The rulers grew jealous, cast him down into the lowest region of matter, and wrapped him in a body of earth, water, fire and wind: the tomb of the body, the book calls it, the fetter of forgetfulness. But the Father sent help, a thought of light called Epinoia, or Life, hidden within Adam, to teach him the way he had come down and the way back up.

The garden reread

The rulers set Adam in their paradise and told him to eat. Their pleasure is bitter, the book says, and the tree of their life is godlessness: its root bitter, its branches death and its fruit the desire that holds souls below. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the Epinoia of light, which they hid from him. Christ says: I appeared in the form of an eagle on the tree of knowledge to teach them and wake them from their deep sleep, and it was I who caused them to eat.

When the rulers drew the light out of Adam to make a woman, Adam saw her and was sobered from the drunkenness of darkness. The books of this family read the garden against its plain sense, and they do not agree about the serpent. In the Secret Book he teaches lust and serves the rulers; in the Reality of the Rulers and the Testimony of Truth the serpent is the instructor who tells the truth, and the creator is the one who grudged them knowledge.

The way home

Every soul is drawn between two spirits: the Spirit of life, sent from above, and the counterfeit spirit the rulers made to lead souls astray. A soul in which the Spirit of life prevails grows strong, leaves evil behind and is taken up at death to rest with the aeons. A soul led by the counterfeit spirit is handed to the rulers after death, bound and cast into another body, again and again, until it wakes and comes to knowledge. Only those who knew and turned away are lost for ever.

The book ends with the saviour's hymn. Three times Providence came down into the darkness, into the prison of the body, and called: whoever hears, rise from the heavy sleep; remember that it is you who heard, follow your root, which is I, and guard yourself against the powers of chaos. Those who rise are sealed in the light of the water with five seals, the baptism of this teaching, and death has no more power over them.

The thirty aeons of Valentinus

The school of Valentinus, as Irenaeus reports the teaching of Ptolemy, tells the fall another way. In the Fullness are thirty aeons in pairs: first the Depth, the unknown Father, with Silence; then Mind, the Only-begotten, with Truth; then Word with Life, and Human with Church; and from these a further ten and twelve. Only Mind can know the Father. Sophia, youngest of the thirty, longed to grasp the Father directly, and her longing would have dissolved her had she not been stopped by the Limit, which is also called the Cross.

Her passion was cut off and cast outside, where it became a lower Wisdom, Achamoth, suffering grief, fear, bewilderment and ignorance. From her suffering came matter, from her turning back to the light came soul, and from her vision of the saviour came spirit. From soul she shaped the craftsman, who made the seven heavens and the world, never knowing his mother. So there are three kinds of human: the material, who perish with matter; the soulful, who may be saved by faith and good works; and the spiritual, who carry the seed of light home.

Truth, and the bridal chamber

The Gospel of Truth teaches the same in a gentler voice. Ignorance of the Father brought anguish and terror, which grew thick like a fog, and Error built its own world in the emptiness. Life without knowledge is like a nightmare in which one flees, is pursued, falls from a height or flies through the air without wings; knowledge is waking, when one sees that it was nothing. Jesus was nailed to a tree and became a fruit of the knowledge of the Father, which did not destroy those who ate it but made them glad in the finding.

The Gospel of Philip names the rites of this school: the Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism, an anointing, a eucharist, a redemption and a bridal chamber. The bridal chamber joins the soul to its angelic partner, as the aeons are joined in pairs. And it warns that those who say they will first die and then rise are mistaken: whoever does not receive the resurrection while living will receive nothing at death.