About ten years ago, I received an e-mail from an American teenager who was trying to trace her father. About all she knew about him was his name, which happened to be the same as mine, and she was systematically contacting everyone she could find on the internet with that name to find out whether they were willing to admit to having begotten a child with a specific woman in a specific place in the US some time in 1982. I knew it wasn't me -- I was thousands of miles away at the time, getting very depressed about my PhD research -- but I really admired her determination, and sent a reply encouraging her not to give up until she either found him or exhausted every possibility. She thanked me very nicely, but that was our last contact, and I am sad now that I didn't ask her to let me know how her quest turned out.
Finding and making contact with a parent who's disappeared seems to be an essential part of placing ourselves in the bigger picture, of discovering who we are, what we've inherited, what's coloured our perceptions, and what's unique to us. And I've been struck by just how important a harmonious relationship between Dora and me is to The Bean. When I'm going out and happen to kiss him goodbye first, he often imperiously instructs me to "Kiss Mummy!" too.
The same dynamics seem to operate in the realm of our spiritual parentage. Those of us who find a home within a religious tradition tend at some point to want to find out about things that formed that inheritance and made it distinct from other parts of the same "family", or from other families. My own spiritual home has mostly been within the Church of England, and so it's been important to me to understand something about the Reformation and to evaluate what those who walked away from the Church of Rome gained by doing so, and (more apparent to me these days) what they lost. Others in different branches of the family may have a greater burden of history on their shoulders; I used to regularly pass the meeting place of what I think called itself the "Greater Bibleway Pentecostal Apostolic Church", which sounded as if its members would have had at least four additional schisms to come to terms with.
But the split I want to focus on today is the very earliest one in Christian history: the second-century one that resulted in the two separate streams known today as Gnosticism and Orthodoxy. In a certain sense, these two are the original parents of all today's Christians. Orthodoxy is the mother who's always been there, who we (mostly) love, and who takes care of us; Gnosticism is the father who disappeared so early on that we don't remember him. When mother speaks about father at all, she invariably bad-mouths him; he was dualistic, elitist, world-hating, indulged in "speculations", swung wildly between extreme asceticism and appalling promiscuity, and (the final nail in the coffin) was an irredeemable heretic. Not far below the surface is the message: you, my child, carry his genetic payload, so you'd better make sure you don't turn out like him, or you'll make me (and God) very upset.
After a while, though, the time comes when the child wants to find his or her own place to stand, in order to make a realistic evaluation of both parents. Was mother always right? Could father really have been quite
that bad? Answering those questions is going to be greatly helped by hearing father's side of the story in his own words, if we possibly can. How did it all seem to him? What did he really value, and how did he behave? What were his good and bad points? What did he love about our mother, and what couldn't he stand about her?
In a narrow historical sense, our gnostic father died many centuries ago. Gnostics were already a minority among Christians when, along with the pagans, the adherents of the mystery religions, and everyone else who disagreed with the official line, they were driven to extinction in fourth century after the (orthodox) church formed its unholy alliance with the power of the Roman state. But Gnosticism in the wider sense keeps surfacing to a greater or lesser extent: in the Cathars, in the insights of many of the mystics within the structure of the church, in Theosophy and Anthroposophy, in the thinking of Carl Jung, and today in the whole diverse collection of spiritualities often conveniently labeled (especially by those who don't like them very much) "New Age".
But we don't have to rely on these new expressions alone. Thanks largely to the dramatic discovery of a cache of gnostic writings in a cave at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1946, the original Gnosticism is better able to speak for itself today than it has been at any time since the days of Constantine. Partly because of that find, Gnosticism as a movement that consciously identifies itself with that original is becoming increasingly popular today. Its best-known spokesman is Bishop
Stephan Hoeller, whose writings and audio lectures are well worth giving some attention to.
You will get a very different picture of Gnosticism from Hoeller than the one you will pick up from most academic writings on the subject. Academics tend to focus on Gnostic beliefs, which were many and varied; so varied, in fact, that one influential modern commentator has argued that "Gnosticism" as a category is actually invalid. Gnosticism was, and is, a world view, but it is not primarily that. As Hoeller makes clear, Gnosticism is primarily about gnosis; you could at one time even get a T-shirt on the web with the wonderfully double-edged slogan "Gnosis: it's not what you think". That is, not only is gnosis probably not what you think it is, but more importantly, it isn't a matter of thinking or believing at all. It's an inner knowing or illumination. Gnostic theologies flow out of and support that illumination; gnostic scriptures seem primarily intended to foster it, to bring about and maintain a restructuring of consciousness rather than a change of mind. Without gnosis, nothing in Gnosticism makes sense; it collapses into a two-dimensional mass of wildly implausible and, to most people, not particularly interesting "speculations".
So what is this "knowing"? By its nature, its content not something that can be defined in words, only alluded to. The gnostic "Hymn of the Pearl" tells of the son of royal parents who is sent down to "Egypt" to retrieve a pearl. But when he gets there, he falls into a deep sleep and forgets who he is. He is eventually awakened by "a letter sealed by the king":
"At its voice and the sound of its rustling I awoke and rose from my sleep. I took it, kissed it, broke its seal, and read. And the words written on my heart were in the letter for me to read. I remembered that I was the son of kings and my free soul longed for its own kind. I remembered the pearl for which I was sent down into Egypt...".
The Gospel of Thomas talks about gnosis this way. When Jesus asks his disciples "Compare me to something, and tell me what I am like", Thomas is not satisfied with the other disciples' answers, that Jesus is a just messenger or a wise philosopher. He admits, "Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like". Jesus responds "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you are intoxicated from the bubbling spring I tended." He then takes Thomas aside and speaks three sayings to him, which Thomas refuses to divulge to his friends, otherwise "you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come out of the rocks and consume you".
And Song 11 of the semi-gnostic Odes of Solomon reads like this:
"My heart was cloven and there appeared a flower, and grace sprang up, and fruit from the Lord, for the highest one split me with his holy spirit, exposed my love for him, and filled me with his love. His splitting of my heart was my salvation, and I followed the way of his peace, the way of truth. From the beginning to the end I received his knowledge and sat on the rock of truth where he placed me. Speaking waters came near my lip from the vast fountain of the Lord, and I drank, and was drunk with the living waters that never die, and my drunkenness gave me knowledge."
All of this was forced underground when the non-gnostic group within the church defined itself as orthodox and the gnostics as heretics. Gnosis itself was of course not lost; it breaks out in (and indeed perhaps is responsible for) every religious tradition, and mysticism developed in Christianity even so. But Stephan Hoeller in one of his introductory lectures argues that traditional Christian theology is not supportive of such insights, and that great mystics like St John of the Cross struggled to frame their insights within its categories. As a result, mysticism has always been pushed to the margins of Christianity and regarded with suspicion, whereas if the gnostic view had prevailed, it would have been supported and given a central position.
So was father right, and mother wrong? It's not that simple. Reading the gnostic scriptures and comparing them to the ones that made it into the New Testament, it's very clear that the former concentrate mainly on knowledge and truth, while the latter stress love. Both, surely, are essential to full humanness. Paul, whose writings predate the split and who was respected by the gnostics as much as by the orthodox, shows how the two emphases need not conflict. In Ephesians he (or someone slightly later, but still prior to the split, writing in his name) prays "that you may have power ... to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge -- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God". That vision, of a direct experiential knowing of the truth which is love, has not often been realised over the centuries. Perhaps, after two milennia, we are at last in a position where we can begin in ourselves the reconciliation of our spiritual parents, and move in direction of the reality that Paul prayed we would experience all those years ago.
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