IN THE 4TH CENTURY, C.E., MONKS IN UPPER EGYPT BURIED DOZENS OF TEXTS. Why? Because a powerful bishop in Alexandria had condemned the use of non-canonical books. We can assume the texts were buried rather than burned because the monks valued the texts and hoped they might be welcomed again at a later date.
Instead, the texts lay hidden for 1,600 years. They were finally uncovered in late 1945 by a local farm boy, and we know the texts now as the Nag Hammadi library. Scholars have categorized most of the texts as belonging to an ancient, mostly Christian, religious movement called Gnosticism.
Gnosticism, however, is a modern, academic construct. No one in the ancient world called themselves “Gnostic.” There never was a coherent movement that used the term to refer to itself. In fact, it’s hard to see much coherence at all among the traditions and texts that scholars have lumped together and labeled “Gnosticism.”
Some of the so-called Gnostics were non-orthodox Christians. Some were Jews. Some were pagans. Nonetheless, these disparate traditions did seem to have two things in common. They tended to see the world as a multi-layered cosmos populated by a multitude of spiritual “powers” (beings), a worldview which was drawn from or akin to the metaphysics of Neoplatonism. They also valued gnosis, which is the Greek word for knowledge gained through inner, often visionary experience.
Neoplatonism was widely popular during the early centuries of the current era, even within the emerging Christian orthodoxy. Visionary knowledge, on the other hand, became highly problematic, because it challenged the institutional authority structure of the early Christian church. If one were to follow a visionary leader and/or one’s own inner visions, the local bishop would lose his authority. Eventually, the institutionalists prevailed and referred to themselves as “orthodox.” The visionary traditions slipped into the shadows to be called “heretical,” “heterodox,” and “esoteric.”
In the early Church, the orthodox fight to eradicate the “so-called gnosis” (see Iranaeus, Against Heresies) was, in fact, but one example of the perennial tension between the institutional and experiential currents in religion. If you put “religion” aside to focus on “spirituality,” you’ll find the same tension existing between the “prophetic” push for social justice and the “mystic” quest for self-realization. Each of these examples, moreover, is a manifestation of the innate tension in the collective human psyche between the inner orientation and the outer, between the introverted and the extraverted attitude.
When someone proclaims, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” the same inner-outer tension is in play. The challenge each of us faces, however, is not to discern which is “right” and reject the other, but to find a way to hold the two together in a creative exchange. That exchange, in turn, just might open, someday, into wholeness.
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