Xognosis EsotericaArcane Publishing StudioFor roughly thirty years, a running argument in the study of early Christianity has held that the field's favorite word should be retired. The word is "Gnosticism". Since 1996 a line of reasoning running from Michael Allen Williams through Karen King to David Brakke has held that the term distorts the very thing it claims to describe: a…
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For roughly thirty years, a running argument in the study of early Christianity has held that the field's favorite word should be retired. The word is "Gnosticism". Since 1996 a line of reasoning running from Michael Allen Williams through Karen King to David Brakke has held that the term distorts the very thing it claims to describe: a supposed ancient religion that, on closer inspection, may never have existed as a single thing at all. The interesting part is what these three propose to do about it. One wants a new category, one wants a corrected history, and one wants to keep a smaller version of the word and spend it more carefully.
Start with a fact that surprises careful readers. The English noun "Gnosticism" first appears in print in 1669, in Henry More's treatise An Antidote against Idolatry. More was a Cambridge Platonist, and he was not describing an ancient religion. He was insulting one of his own contemporaries, attacking a relativist willingness, as he put it in his preface, to "comply with any Religion, and make a fair tolerable sense of all". Anyone who could swallow every creed, More complained, had "a spice of the old abhorred Gnosticism" in him.
So the word enters English as polemic, roughly fifteen centuries after the people it superficially describes. Ancient heresiologists like Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180 CE, called certain opponents "gnostikos", but that was an accusation, applied from outside, while building a catalog of error. No ancient text uses "Gnosticism" as the name of a religion. The category as modern readers know it, a unified ancient church defined by an evil demiurge, a divine spark trapped in matter, and a hatred of the world, was assembled much later, partly from heresiological catalogs and partly from twentieth-century philosophy. What we inherited is a modern construction wearing an ancient mask.
The case for demolition was argued in full by Michael Allen Williams in Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (1996). Williams's objection cuts in two directions. The word fails as an ancient self-designation, because the people so labeled did not use it of themselves: "we apparently do not have direct evidence of a single so-called gnostic writer using the self-designation gnostikos!" he writes. And it fails as a modern scholarly construct, because no trait list holds across the texts. Some of the writings classified as "gnostic" reject the material world; some celebrate it. Some posit an evil creator; some do not. A category that fits everything in the box by fitting nothing precisely is, in Williams's judgment, doing no work.
His verdict on the heresiological foundation is blunt. Scholars have quietly proceeded, he says, as if "the implicit approach has been to treat the constellation of positions in Irenaeus's catalog as the fundamental basis for the category 'Gnosticism'", meaning they built a neutral-sounding religion out of a polemicist's list of heresies.
Williams's counter-proposal is a replacement term: "biblical demiurgical traditions", meaning all the ancient movements that told stories about a creator deity below the supreme God while working with, against, or around Jewish scripture. It is a deliberately wide and flat category, defined by a shared narrative ingredient rather than doctrine or attitude.
Karen L. King's What Is Gnosticism? (2003) shifts the ground from taxonomy to genealogy. Her question is less "is the category accurate?" than "what work has the word been doing, and for whom?" Her answer: the term is a modern reification of the ancient discourse of orthodoxy and heresy, polished and re-inscribed by twentieth-century scholarship. As she states her project, "My purpose in this book is to show how twentieth-century scholarship on Gnosticism has simultaneously reinscribed, elaborated, and deviated from this discourse."
On King's read, the definitional puzzle was never really a puzzle. "The problem of defining Gnosticism has been and continues to be primarily an aspect of the ongoing project of defining and maintaining a normative Christianity," she argues. Call these texts "gnostic" and you have already cast them as the deviation from a main line; the main line then looks natural rather than constructed. Her memorable image of the trap: "the problem with variety is not variety itself; the problem is trying to force multiform, irregularly shaped objects into square essentialist definitional holes."
King does not call for a ban. "It is important not so much to eliminate the term per se," she writes, "but to recognize and correct the ways in which reinscribing the discourses of orthodoxy and heresy distort our reading and reconstruction of ancient religion." The two books were written in dialogue, each author acknowledging the other; the difference is emphasis, not opposition.
David Brakke's The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (2010) takes what he calls a "middle position", and it is the most concrete counter-proposal of the three. Gnosticism as a grand category fails, Brakke agrees. But that does not mean nothing was there. A specific social group, identifiable by a shared myth and shared ritual rather than a checklist of doctrines, really existed. Brakke concedes that Irenaeus never explicitly says its members called themselves Gnostics, "but it seems almost certain that they did." In practice this is the group modern scholars call Sethian.
Irenaeus refers to a "gnostic school" of thought, and around 250 CE the pagan philosopher Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus, independently complains about a Gnostic circle in Rome and its books, naming titles such as Zostrianos and Allogenes that later turned up among the Nag Hammadi codices. A hostile Christian and an irritated Platonist, decades apart, pointing at the same people: that is evidence of a social reality rather than a heresiologist's fantasy.
He is careful, though, about what the category can bear. "Scholarly anxiety about reification of categories and the rigidity of boundaries is justified," Brakke concedes, while insisting that it "need not cripple efforts to describe real social and religious distinctions among ancient Christians." Of Williams's replacement he is respectful but firm: "biblical demiurgical traditions" works as a heuristic, a way of sorting texts, but it does not identify an actual community of people, which for Brakke is the point. The aim, as he frames it, is to see "how multiple Christian identities and communities were continually created and transformed", neither a single Christianity expressing itself in varied accents nor a simple story of winners and losers.
One caution belongs here, because the evidence itself is contested. Whether any ancient group self-identified as "Gnostic" is disputed, and the dispute runs through the same passages. Williams holds there is no direct evidence that a so-called gnostic writer ever used "gnostikos" of himself. Irenaeus does report that certain groups, including the followers of a teacher named Marcellina, called themselves gnostics, but Brakke discounts those reports as claims to knowledge rather than the name of a sect, resting his case on Irenaeus's "gnostic school" instead. These are interpretations of the same evidence, and honest writing should present them as such.
The word "Gnosticism" was coined in 1669 as an insult, assembled by modern scholars into a fake ancient church, and has been quietly doing polemical work ever since. Williams would retire it, King would correct it, and Brakke would shrink it to the one school that may actually have borne the name.
Where does this leave the general reader? Somewhere sensible. Use "Gnosticism" as a loose shelf label for a family of second- and third-century movements, the way you might use "Enlightenment" for thinkers who disagreed bitterly with one another. Refuse the stereotype of a unified world-hating church, because the sources do not support it. And when precision matters, follow the scholars: name the tradition (Valentinian, Sethian), name the text, and let the particular case speak.
For a wider tour of these movements, the Nag Hammadi finds, and the definitional questions raised here, our edition of Gnosticism Explained gathers the material in one place.
The word will survive its critics; words generally do. But the lesson of these three books is bigger than any term: the categories we study the past with are themselves historical artifacts, carrying the arguments of the people who made them. Read the label, then read the label's biography.
Read the book
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