Talk:Gnosticism
This is a first-rate entry! Thanks a lot for shaping up what was a pretty bare beginning. --MichaelTinkler
I still feel it could be a lot better... e.g. talking about the variety of different Gnostic systems in more clarity -- but its the best I can do at the moment. Thankyou for the encouragement. -- Simon J Kissane
well, it's not like we have any real idea about them - after all, it was a Secret. It's kind of like trying to write about the Mystery Religions - they're remarkably elusive! I've been reading French structuralist takes on the Eleusinian mysteries all summer and I have a headache. My only quibble (and I'm not about to do anything about it) is the "scholars think...equally valid." That's what always gets Christianity off track, listening to scholars. Every really good schism starts with someone writing a commentary on the book of Romans.... --MichaelTinkler
Oh, the sacred mind. I was raised in Catholic grammar school in the sixties and never knew there was this whole other stream of interpretation about what the man called Jesus by the Greeks was trying to tell us, and what sort of religion should emerge from his being here. Only recently, when I read Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Gospels (St Elaine I call her) and got a hold of Nag Hammadhi Library in English, Robinson, editor, did it really open my mind to what these people, second and third century, Hellenistic Egypt thereabouts, were trying to get going. Since this is an encyclopedia entry, anyone reading this should understand something important:
The gnostics were a diverse group that came up with a
wildly imaginitive body of myth from both Hellenic and Jewish sources, and the thing is NOT to take this or that myth literally and stick to it like a cult member or something. Whats important for us in the post rennaissance - post reformation post enlightment and now post twentieth century to understand is the way they did what they did. The vocabulary, the quality of writing, the intelligence level, the depth of imagination. The quote from Homer. The pagelong excerpt from Plato's Republic. The prayer of thanksgiving (nag hammadhi codex 6 page 63, page 329 in the Robinson translation) where we give thanks
to You, undisturbed name, honored with the name
"God" and praised with the name "Father"..... ...for giving us mind, speech and knowledge:mind, so
we may understand you....
I sound like I'm preaching here, but I just to inform anyone looking up info in this index that this religious community in late antiquity held the promise of a religion that truly held the mind of every human being to be a sacred gift, not just a machine or a tool. A promise of course not yet delivered to humanity. Another text is titled The Book of Thomas the Contender. At's right, coulda been a contenda. But hope proves a man deathless, said Melville. John Joyce
There are Gnostic themes in the Truman Show and the Matrix? I think it's important to distinguish between actual gnostic ideas and dimestore Buddhism in the cultural wake of Jack Kerouac.JFQ