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The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity
JONAS, THE GNOSTIC RELIGION. THE MESSAGE OF THE ALIEN GOD AND THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. LONDON, 1992, xx 358 p. Encuadernacion original. Nuevo.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1958
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About the author
Hans Jonas
70 books87 followersHans Jonas was a German-born philosopher who was, from 1955 to 1976, Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
Jonas' writings were very influential in different spheres. For example, The Gnostic Religion, first published in 1958, was for many years the standard work in English on the subject of Gnosticism.
The Imperative of Responsibility (German 1979, English 1984) centers on social and ethical problems created by technology. Jonas insists that human survival depends on our efforts to care for our planet and its future. He formulated a new and distinctive supreme principle of morality: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life".
While The Imperative of Responsibility has been credited with catalyzing the environmental movement in Germany, his work The Phenomenon of Life (1966) forms the philosophical undergirding of one major school of bioethics in America. Murray Bookchin and Leon Kass both referred to Hans Jonas's work as major, or primary, inspiration. Heavily influenced by Heidegger, The Phenomenon of Life attempts to synthesize the philosophy of matter with the philosophy of mind, producing a rich existential understanding of biology, which ultimately argues for a simultaneously material and moral human nature.
His writing on Gnosticism interprets the religion from an existentialist philosophical viewpoint. Jonas was the first author to write a detailed history of ancient Gnosticism. He was also one of the first philosophers to concern himself with ethical questions in biological science.
Jonas's career is generally divided into three periods defined by the three works just mentioned, but in reverse order: studies of gnosticism, studies of philosophical biology, and ethical studies.
Jonas' writings were very influential in different spheres. For example, The Gnostic Religion, first published in 1958, was for many years the standard work in English on the subject of Gnosticism.
The Imperative of Responsibility (German 1979, English 1984) centers on social and ethical problems created by technology. Jonas insists that human survival depends on our efforts to care for our planet and its future. He formulated a new and distinctive supreme principle of morality: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life".
While The Imperative of Responsibility has been credited with catalyzing the environmental movement in Germany, his work The Phenomenon of Life (1966) forms the philosophical undergirding of one major school of bioethics in America. Murray Bookchin and Leon Kass both referred to Hans Jonas's work as major, or primary, inspiration. Heavily influenced by Heidegger, The Phenomenon of Life attempts to synthesize the philosophy of matter with the philosophy of mind, producing a rich existential understanding of biology, which ultimately argues for a simultaneously material and moral human nature.
His writing on Gnosticism interprets the religion from an existentialist philosophical viewpoint. Jonas was the first author to write a detailed history of ancient Gnosticism. He was also one of the first philosophers to concern himself with ethical questions in biological science.
Jonas's career is generally divided into three periods defined by the three works just mentioned, but in reverse order: studies of gnosticism, studies of philosophical biology, and ethical studies.
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November 3, 2023
Living in Hell
Written in 1933 but still the best introduction to this ancient system of belief, The Gnostic Religion is a book of our time. Nominally about religion, Jonas documents the political and cultural conditions which provoked the rapid spread of philosophic dualism throughout the Romano/Hellenic world. Although resisted vigorously by the establishments of Christianity and Judaism, Gnostic influence on European civilisation remained persistent over two millennia. And today during a period of analogous cultural shifts, Gnosticism has emerged from its own ashes as a dominant philosophy and religious culture.
The philosophy of Gnosticism is hard to pin down since it promotes individualism in thought and a vague anti-intellectualism, a sort of neo-liberal free for all of ideas. But Gnosticism’s anthropology and cosmology as recorded in its mythology capture its intellectual position reasonably clearly. There the essential dualisms of God/Creation, Mind/Matter, and Good/Evil are stated rather poetically. We are prisoners in this material world of filth and suffering, held captive by the Archons who prevent our psyches, those lost sparks of light, from returning to their real home beyond the vault of of the sky. The Archons and their commander, the Demiurge, created the world for just this purpose. We are an alien life form suffering from “worldsickness”. That is, we are essentially living in hell:*
The central religious concept of Gnosticism, namely gnosis or knowledge, is one of hope rather than nihilism however. This is the knowledge necessary for the psyche to outsmart the Archons. By being aware of the situation, our psyches will be able to escape through a sort of spiritual muscle memory after our death. Gnosis should not be confused with Pistis, that is Christian faith, or unswerving belief, as invented by St. Paul to distinguish Christianity from Judaism. Gnostic knowledge is not promulgated widely as, for example, in the gospels (although Jesus’s admonition to remain silent about him in Mark 1: 24-25 could well be a Gnostic hint**). Gnosis is secret in the sense that it is only passed on to initiates from one identified as the saviour. Those ‘in the know’ are special and club together for mutual instruction and support.
Despite being attacked as a heresy, Gnosticism shares much with Christianity. Orthodox Christians also consider the world we inhabit to be ‘fallen,’ a ‘vale of tears,’ and functionally evil. They recognise that it is a world rife with temptations that distract us from a reunion with God, that is to say, salvation. Christians put their faith in the word of God, which is at least analogous if not identical to the Gnostic trust in their secret knowledge which is also considered as divine revelation. And Gnostics too also have their Saviour whose efforts on their behalf are necessary for achieving their spiritual goal.
Consequently it has been impossible for church authorities to prevent Gnostic influence. Even the gospels, especially that of John, and the epistles of Paul show significant Gnostic influence. The Church Father, Origen, was anathematised for incorporating Gnostic teachings on unity with God into his preaching. The ex-Gnostic, St. Augustine, retains many Gnostic views in his Confessions. Even the great 20th century Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, echoes ancient Gnostic mistrust of words in his assertion that the gospels are not the Word of God but only the word of man.
Moreover this Gnostic mistrust of words shows up frequently in Christian mysticism as an undermining of official doctrine. The claims by mystics to have direct union with the divine have often been highly suspect as implying such union independently of the church and sometimes even of Christ. Finally the dualistic nature of Christian philosophy - more or less identical to the Gnostic - makes it easy for Gnostic ideas to infect popular spirituality under the radar of church officials. Hence Jonas’s referral to “the hidden Gnosticism in the modern mind.” An early Gnostic hymn, for example would not be out of place in an evangelical congregation today:
It was Harold Bloom who suggested that Gnosticism is the American religion (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). He identified Mormonism as its paradigm but included all religion in the country, Christian or not, in that category. Whether this is due to the country’s invention by Gnostic Deists, the frightening void of the frontier, or the inevitable syncretistic tendencies of an immigrant society is unclear. The several historical American ‘awakenings’ use this explicitly Gnostic term to refer to mass revivals, as do today’s televangelists. In any case this brand of Gnosticism has spread globally with the extension of the American Empire’s military, media, commercial, intellectual, and general cultural presence (the irony that the United States should be promoting a religion of ancient Iran and Iraq can’t be missed).
That Gnosticism literally demonises nature, rejects established norms of behaviour as merely instruments of repression, cultivates the theory of a cosmic conspiracy, promotes an attitude of smug superiority among its adherents, and encourages the emergence of fanatical leaders who promise salvation from current evils is obviously not of merely historical interest. Jonas perceived the rise of National Socialism in German as a Gnostic event. But he also saw it in a broader cultural context. “Something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular,” he writes. I think it is likely Jonas would have judged our current circumstances as a second act in the long-running production of the Gnostic comeback.
*This is all based on empirical science of the time not primitive fantasy. The duality of human nature is something most of us still take for granted as a Cartesian legacy. But Gnosticism goes much further in thinking beyond Homo Sapiens. The world of light above the vault is evident because we can get glimpses of it through the pinpricks in the vault which we call stars but only for convenience. And the Archons (we call them planets) can be observed patrolling continuously in search of sparks attempting to escape. Sparks which are able to avoid the Archons are collected are periodically transferred to their home in the world of light, a phenomenon we erroneously refer to as the waxing and waning of the moon.
**Such hints in the New Testament are numerous. For example in the epistle to the Ephesians 5: 14, an undoubtedly Gnostic insertion reads: “Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”
Written in 1933 but still the best introduction to this ancient system of belief, The Gnostic Religion is a book of our time. Nominally about religion, Jonas documents the political and cultural conditions which provoked the rapid spread of philosophic dualism throughout the Romano/Hellenic world. Although resisted vigorously by the establishments of Christianity and Judaism, Gnostic influence on European civilisation remained persistent over two millennia. And today during a period of analogous cultural shifts, Gnosticism has emerged from its own ashes as a dominant philosophy and religious culture.
The philosophy of Gnosticism is hard to pin down since it promotes individualism in thought and a vague anti-intellectualism, a sort of neo-liberal free for all of ideas. But Gnosticism’s anthropology and cosmology as recorded in its mythology capture its intellectual position reasonably clearly. There the essential dualisms of God/Creation, Mind/Matter, and Good/Evil are stated rather poetically. We are prisoners in this material world of filth and suffering, held captive by the Archons who prevent our psyches, those lost sparks of light, from returning to their real home beyond the vault of of the sky. The Archons and their commander, the Demiurge, created the world for just this purpose. We are an alien life form suffering from “worldsickness”. That is, we are essentially living in hell:*
“The cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and world, and correspondingly that of man and world. The deity is absolutely transmundane, its nature alien to that of the universe, which it neither created nor governs and to which it is the complete antithesis: to the divine realm of light, self-contained and remote, the cosmos is opposed as the realm of darkness. The world is the work of lowly powers which though they may mediately be descended from Him do not know the true God and obstruct the knowledge of Him in the cosmos over which they rule. The genesis of these lower powers, the Archons (rulers), and in general that of all the orders of being outside God… ”
The central religious concept of Gnosticism, namely gnosis or knowledge, is one of hope rather than nihilism however. This is the knowledge necessary for the psyche to outsmart the Archons. By being aware of the situation, our psyches will be able to escape through a sort of spiritual muscle memory after our death. Gnosis should not be confused with Pistis, that is Christian faith, or unswerving belief, as invented by St. Paul to distinguish Christianity from Judaism. Gnostic knowledge is not promulgated widely as, for example, in the gospels (although Jesus’s admonition to remain silent about him in Mark 1: 24-25 could well be a Gnostic hint**). Gnosis is secret in the sense that it is only passed on to initiates from one identified as the saviour. Those ‘in the know’ are special and club together for mutual instruction and support.
Despite being attacked as a heresy, Gnosticism shares much with Christianity. Orthodox Christians also consider the world we inhabit to be ‘fallen,’ a ‘vale of tears,’ and functionally evil. They recognise that it is a world rife with temptations that distract us from a reunion with God, that is to say, salvation. Christians put their faith in the word of God, which is at least analogous if not identical to the Gnostic trust in their secret knowledge which is also considered as divine revelation. And Gnostics too also have their Saviour whose efforts on their behalf are necessary for achieving their spiritual goal.
Consequently it has been impossible for church authorities to prevent Gnostic influence. Even the gospels, especially that of John, and the epistles of Paul show significant Gnostic influence. The Church Father, Origen, was anathematised for incorporating Gnostic teachings on unity with God into his preaching. The ex-Gnostic, St. Augustine, retains many Gnostic views in his Confessions. Even the great 20th century Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, echoes ancient Gnostic mistrust of words in his assertion that the gospels are not the Word of God but only the word of man.
Moreover this Gnostic mistrust of words shows up frequently in Christian mysticism as an undermining of official doctrine. The claims by mystics to have direct union with the divine have often been highly suspect as implying such union independently of the church and sometimes even of Christ. Finally the dualistic nature of Christian philosophy - more or less identical to the Gnostic - makes it easy for Gnostic ideas to infect popular spirituality under the radar of church officials. Hence Jonas’s referral to “the hidden Gnosticism in the modern mind.” An early Gnostic hymn, for example would not be out of place in an evangelical congregation today:
“Having once strayed into the labyrinth of evils,
The wretched [Soul] finds no way out . . .
She seeks to escape from the bitter chaos,
And knows not how she shall get through.
It was Harold Bloom who suggested that Gnosticism is the American religion (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). He identified Mormonism as its paradigm but included all religion in the country, Christian or not, in that category. Whether this is due to the country’s invention by Gnostic Deists, the frightening void of the frontier, or the inevitable syncretistic tendencies of an immigrant society is unclear. The several historical American ‘awakenings’ use this explicitly Gnostic term to refer to mass revivals, as do today’s televangelists. In any case this brand of Gnosticism has spread globally with the extension of the American Empire’s military, media, commercial, intellectual, and general cultural presence (the irony that the United States should be promoting a religion of ancient Iran and Iraq can’t be missed).
That Gnosticism literally demonises nature, rejects established norms of behaviour as merely instruments of repression, cultivates the theory of a cosmic conspiracy, promotes an attitude of smug superiority among its adherents, and encourages the emergence of fanatical leaders who promise salvation from current evils is obviously not of merely historical interest. Jonas perceived the rise of National Socialism in German as a Gnostic event. But he also saw it in a broader cultural context. “Something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular,” he writes. I think it is likely Jonas would have judged our current circumstances as a second act in the long-running production of the Gnostic comeback.
*This is all based on empirical science of the time not primitive fantasy. The duality of human nature is something most of us still take for granted as a Cartesian legacy. But Gnosticism goes much further in thinking beyond Homo Sapiens. The world of light above the vault is evident because we can get glimpses of it through the pinpricks in the vault which we call stars but only for convenience. And the Archons (we call them planets) can be observed patrolling continuously in search of sparks attempting to escape. Sparks which are able to avoid the Archons are collected are periodically transferred to their home in the world of light, a phenomenon we erroneously refer to as the waxing and waning of the moon.
**Such hints in the New Testament are numerous. For example in the epistle to the Ephesians 5: 14, an undoubtedly Gnostic insertion reads: “Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”
November 27, 2013
Although enough information has come to light to cast Martin Heidegger's qualities as a human being in doubt, there is little question but that many of his students—schooled by his powerful mind to explore the subtle immensities of phenomenology, ontology, and metaphysics in the early-to-mid twentieth century—went on to become influential and powerful thinkers themselves. One such éminence was Hans Jonas, who parlayed a fascination with gnosticism—proposing it a distant ancestor to modern existentialism—into the first comprehensive work in English to explore the various avenues of thought, metaphysics, mythology, and theology that went into its dualistic and heretic system that opposed a divinity-bearing man striving for knowledge (gnosis) against a hostile, sometimes evil, universe.
In this powerful, illuminating work, Jonas traces the directions of classical western thought in the centuries prior to the birth of Christ, a period in which Greek-centred Hellenism spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern world, working its way into the cultural and belief systems that had preceded it as Greek itself became the language of choice for serious discourse. The intermingling of Greek rationality and philosophy with the rich mythological tapestries of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia—combined with the massive upheavals and destruction that accompanied the setting up of two colossal, antagonistic empires, Roman and Parthian, as masters of the settled world—produced a ferment of new religious and philosophical notions, an intricately creative cauldron in which roiled many of the ideas that provided the base material with which the road towards the modern world has been paved.
Dividing the multiple streams of Gnostic thought into two principal channels—the Iranian and the Syrian-Egyptian, the former with strong Zoroastrian influences in the division of Good/Light and Evil/Darkness into two eternal, unassimilable realms; the latter with a cosmogony in which Evil/Darkness is created from within the essence of Good/Light itself and can thus be redeemed—Jonas examines the then-existing Gnostic texts and provides an exegesis, comparing them to other Gnostic strains and the orthodox Christian soteriologies that were in direct competition for the minds of the public. Jonas aimed for an even mix of the Iranian and Syrian-Egyptian types in the six principal systems he examines, even including a pagan gnostic belief in the Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus. The most detailed exegesis is performed upon the highest-deemed representatives of the two strands: the Valentinian Speculation for the S-E and Manicheanism for the Iranian. The final chapters compare Gnostic virtues—in libertinism and a more prevalent asceticism— against those of classical Greece and Christianity, explore the minimal amounts of the Nag Hammadi discovery then available (a complete tome of Gnostic writings in Coptic which was only partially translated at the time of the printing of Jonas' revised second edition), and conclude with an epilogue comparing Gnosticism with Existentialism—focussing on Heidegger's early work in Being and Time—that is worth the price of the book alone. Then, as now, the terror and dread that bears down upon the naked soul when belief in the unity of man with nature—a unity that is grounded in the infinite—is shattered by the ever-anew anxieties of the unsettled and unsettling present, a now in which neither guilt nor hope can dampen the flames of an existence that appears alone and isolated, will cause the afflicted to seek answers inward, away from the cold and unfathomable world. In the gnostic dawn, postulating a divinity beyond all comprehension seemed a rational response to the apparent irrationality of a suddenly menacing and hardscrabble environment.
Although every Gnostic system was unique to itself—indeed, within each different strand believers were encouraged to elaborate, expand upon, and revise the existing bases of thought—they all shared certain core tenets: the material universe was a flawed and hostile environment ruled and created by the Demiurge and his Archons who, either through malice or ignorance, had fashioned the cosmos solely to keep man imprisoned and separated from the Alien God; that the latter, the infinite source of Light and Goodness, was unknowable to man whilst so imprisoned and existed beyond the Demiurge's illusionary universe; that man bore within himself the pneuma—a spark of the divine spirit—and that, through gnosis, or knowledge, he could cast off his physical body and soul—artifices of the Archons—and ascend through the universe to return to the source of Divine Light that was the true God; and that ignorance of this Divine Essence was the principal means by which the material world kept mankind in bitter and perpetual thralldom. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the manner in which Jesus Christ is re-invented as an incarnation of the Unknown Divinity's essence, sent to impart to man the gnosis that will reveal the ignorant materiality of the natural world; thus Christ's tribulations were to impede the success of his mission to educate man, whereas in Christian soteriology Christ's tribulations were the very means with which he would redeem the sins of a fallen mankind. In Gnosticism, original sin is non-existent, the God of Eden being the deceiving and jealous Demiurge, the serpent but one of the manifestations of this Jesus incarnate who braves the dangers of the Archons and their darkness in an effort to make man aware of the Alien God; an entity unknown and unknowable despite the fact his divinity, existent in the pneuma of every man and woman, is the path to salvation by way of a post-cosmic reunion of the pneuma with the infinite Divine Light.
As the Demiurge has often been identified with the Old Testament God, the Gnostics were from the start in opposition to Judaism and Christianity; and yet its dualistic structure, rich mythology, and inspired metaphysics and soteriology has had a vast influence upon religious, philosophical, and political thought, and has continued to exert a fascination upon people, from a variety of cultural backgrounds, through to today. Although criticized as being dated due to the subsequent information made available through the completed translations of the Nag Hammadi discoveries, The Gnostic Religion is brilliantly written and clearly explained, and the linkage made between this ancient dualism and modern nihilism provides a unique lens for interpretation. This wonderful book is a keeper, a tome I will be dipping into and refreshing myself with over time—for without embracing their eschatology, I can't but agree with the central Gnostic premise: knowledge is indeed the spark that kindles the flames of a very human passion; the boundless curiosity to explore the world and try to make sense out of all that the senses reveal.
In this powerful, illuminating work, Jonas traces the directions of classical western thought in the centuries prior to the birth of Christ, a period in which Greek-centred Hellenism spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern world, working its way into the cultural and belief systems that had preceded it as Greek itself became the language of choice for serious discourse. The intermingling of Greek rationality and philosophy with the rich mythological tapestries of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia—combined with the massive upheavals and destruction that accompanied the setting up of two colossal, antagonistic empires, Roman and Parthian, as masters of the settled world—produced a ferment of new religious and philosophical notions, an intricately creative cauldron in which roiled many of the ideas that provided the base material with which the road towards the modern world has been paved.
Dividing the multiple streams of Gnostic thought into two principal channels—the Iranian and the Syrian-Egyptian, the former with strong Zoroastrian influences in the division of Good/Light and Evil/Darkness into two eternal, unassimilable realms; the latter with a cosmogony in which Evil/Darkness is created from within the essence of Good/Light itself and can thus be redeemed—Jonas examines the then-existing Gnostic texts and provides an exegesis, comparing them to other Gnostic strains and the orthodox Christian soteriologies that were in direct competition for the minds of the public. Jonas aimed for an even mix of the Iranian and Syrian-Egyptian types in the six principal systems he examines, even including a pagan gnostic belief in the Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus. The most detailed exegesis is performed upon the highest-deemed representatives of the two strands: the Valentinian Speculation for the S-E and Manicheanism for the Iranian. The final chapters compare Gnostic virtues—in libertinism and a more prevalent asceticism— against those of classical Greece and Christianity, explore the minimal amounts of the Nag Hammadi discovery then available (a complete tome of Gnostic writings in Coptic which was only partially translated at the time of the printing of Jonas' revised second edition), and conclude with an epilogue comparing Gnosticism with Existentialism—focussing on Heidegger's early work in Being and Time—that is worth the price of the book alone. Then, as now, the terror and dread that bears down upon the naked soul when belief in the unity of man with nature—a unity that is grounded in the infinite—is shattered by the ever-anew anxieties of the unsettled and unsettling present, a now in which neither guilt nor hope can dampen the flames of an existence that appears alone and isolated, will cause the afflicted to seek answers inward, away from the cold and unfathomable world. In the gnostic dawn, postulating a divinity beyond all comprehension seemed a rational response to the apparent irrationality of a suddenly menacing and hardscrabble environment.
Although every Gnostic system was unique to itself—indeed, within each different strand believers were encouraged to elaborate, expand upon, and revise the existing bases of thought—they all shared certain core tenets: the material universe was a flawed and hostile environment ruled and created by the Demiurge and his Archons who, either through malice or ignorance, had fashioned the cosmos solely to keep man imprisoned and separated from the Alien God; that the latter, the infinite source of Light and Goodness, was unknowable to man whilst so imprisoned and existed beyond the Demiurge's illusionary universe; that man bore within himself the pneuma—a spark of the divine spirit—and that, through gnosis, or knowledge, he could cast off his physical body and soul—artifices of the Archons—and ascend through the universe to return to the source of Divine Light that was the true God; and that ignorance of this Divine Essence was the principal means by which the material world kept mankind in bitter and perpetual thralldom. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the manner in which Jesus Christ is re-invented as an incarnation of the Unknown Divinity's essence, sent to impart to man the gnosis that will reveal the ignorant materiality of the natural world; thus Christ's tribulations were to impede the success of his mission to educate man, whereas in Christian soteriology Christ's tribulations were the very means with which he would redeem the sins of a fallen mankind. In Gnosticism, original sin is non-existent, the God of Eden being the deceiving and jealous Demiurge, the serpent but one of the manifestations of this Jesus incarnate who braves the dangers of the Archons and their darkness in an effort to make man aware of the Alien God; an entity unknown and unknowable despite the fact his divinity, existent in the pneuma of every man and woman, is the path to salvation by way of a post-cosmic reunion of the pneuma with the infinite Divine Light.
As the Demiurge has often been identified with the Old Testament God, the Gnostics were from the start in opposition to Judaism and Christianity; and yet its dualistic structure, rich mythology, and inspired metaphysics and soteriology has had a vast influence upon religious, philosophical, and political thought, and has continued to exert a fascination upon people, from a variety of cultural backgrounds, through to today. Although criticized as being dated due to the subsequent information made available through the completed translations of the Nag Hammadi discoveries, The Gnostic Religion is brilliantly written and clearly explained, and the linkage made between this ancient dualism and modern nihilism provides a unique lens for interpretation. This wonderful book is a keeper, a tome I will be dipping into and refreshing myself with over time—for without embracing their eschatology, I can't but agree with the central Gnostic premise: knowledge is indeed the spark that kindles the flames of a very human passion; the boundless curiosity to explore the world and try to make sense out of all that the senses reveal.
December 24, 2021
Gnostic religion is not commonplace nor a mediocre subject in which to delve for anything termed as casual reading. The etymon of γνωστικός or gnostikos means “having knowledge.” Such is a set of archaic systems and intimations harmonized in the first century. Gnosticism is likened to seeing a divine on the right and on the left a blind demiurge.
Hans Jonas (student of Martin Heidegger/Rudolf Bultmann) taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem giving “ostendo” via texts, students and literary offspring in his “The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity.” Movement and flow heralds “the one” and thus lack of such announces loudly necrosis.
“Having once strayed into the labyrinth of evils, the wretched [Soul] finds no way out...You see, O child, through how many bodies [elements?], ...ranks of demons, ... concatenations and revolutions of stars, we must work our way in order the hasten to the one and only God. What Marcion...called haec cellula creatoris---into or out of is how life may move.”
---Hans Jonas
Donning an un-occluded lens, we may compare Gnosticism as a war between the red vs. blue pill depicted in “The Matrix” and its versions (perspectives). Red pill equates reality and the blue pill is the ever-fleeting placebo (myth of Sisyphus). Hans Jonas is brilliant in his methodology to engage the reader and cause erudition in modern terminology, ideas and examples. Why was Sisyphys doomed?
Plentiful and symphonic in its use of locutions to indulge the senses of a presumed forgotten religion. Authoritative and detailed account of the vast spatial anomalies between the “rot und blau” theories of Gnosticism. Jonas congeals the doctrines of the East and West---thus giving us sarkic, hylic and pneumatic examples of the soul. Read.
Hans Jonas (student of Martin Heidegger/Rudolf Bultmann) taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem giving “ostendo” via texts, students and literary offspring in his “The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity.” Movement and flow heralds “the one” and thus lack of such announces loudly necrosis.
“Having once strayed into the labyrinth of evils, the wretched [Soul] finds no way out...You see, O child, through how many bodies [elements?], ...ranks of demons, ... concatenations and revolutions of stars, we must work our way in order the hasten to the one and only God. What Marcion...called haec cellula creatoris---into or out of is how life may move.”
---Hans Jonas
Donning an un-occluded lens, we may compare Gnosticism as a war between the red vs. blue pill depicted in “The Matrix” and its versions (perspectives). Red pill equates reality and the blue pill is the ever-fleeting placebo (myth of Sisyphus). Hans Jonas is brilliant in his methodology to engage the reader and cause erudition in modern terminology, ideas and examples. Why was Sisyphys doomed?
Plentiful and symphonic in its use of locutions to indulge the senses of a presumed forgotten religion. Authoritative and detailed account of the vast spatial anomalies between the “rot und blau” theories of Gnosticism. Jonas congeals the doctrines of the East and West---thus giving us sarkic, hylic and pneumatic examples of the soul. Read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 15, 2009
This book caught my attention at some point in the past. Then it was mentioned again recently in another book I'm reading, so I thought to look it up in the school library, and behold it was there. So I read it. Fascinating genesis story about my coming to read this book aside, I'm going to add another one, because this is about all these different Gnostic views of the world, and they are not a real group of views, but competing attempts at mythologizing the Judeo-Christian, or monotheistic religions at the time. So this second genesis story is that Dan Mother Fucking Brown is coming out with his new piece of conspiracy swill this week and I got such a hard on thinking that once again we will discover the truth in Mr. Browns books that I ran out early and picked up a book on secret religions and read it like a maniac while jacking off with my free hand at the excitement Mr. Brown brings to me. Also if I waited a week later every other douchebag I mean serious reader, will also be once again engrossed in Gnostic-esque books and I'd look like a bandwagon jumper.
If the bible can have two genesis accounts than so can I.
I found this book pretty interesting, but since I was reading it casually (not taking notes, or any of that shit), there were parts of the book that are just a mess in my head. Joas likes jumping different 'religions' (sects? none of these words work right. manifestations? Nope. do you know what i'm trying to say?) in order to illuminate that the rise of Gnosticism in the early century of the catholic church had more to do with the Hellenist Cosmopolitanism of the post Alexander conquest of the near East than with the church per se. This is kind of interesting stuff to me, the difference the view of the individual in Greek thought, the shift from the Polis to Cosmopolitanism and it's ramifications on what is thought of as the individual, the public and the private spheres, and how all of this goes to differences in shaping mytho-centric metaphysical views of creation and the cosmos. This book goes to show how certain Greek ideas run through all of the different attempts at metaphysics of the time (on metaphysics, couldn't New Age people have not picked up this word and tried to make it their own. Couldn't they have just called their stuff Dopey Shit, and left metaphysics to philosophy. Philosophy does have the fucking squatter rights on the term since it's the name of one of Aristotle's books from 2600 years ago and all. So from now on I decree all New Age publishers have to put on the back of their books the subjects that read Mind, Body, Spirit / Metaphysics, as Mind, Body, Spirit / Dopey Shit I have spoken as the lead of New Age. The keeper of the morons and haters of books. The overseerer of believers of Dopey Shit, so it will be done).
I don't know what I was talking about. Oh something about different views of the world, metaphysically. Yeah. It's interesting shit at trying to grapple with obvious problems in the simplistic and kind of contradictory Moses explanation of the beginning of the world. Why are there two stories? Well some of the sects talked about in this book have a good reason for it, most of them though just tack on lots and lots of stuff before whatever it is that makes the person known as Adam occur. There are battles between light and darkness, fucked up attempts and creation, a God who doesn't give a shit about what happens, the blind crazy god one normally thinks of as the creator of our world when one thinks of gnostic world creation, a poor female named Sophia who just creates everything out of a fucked up attempt at emulating the original creator, a God thrown into the darkness and trapped in our world now covered in all of the muck and filth of non-pure being, and lots more little tales (some of these are from the same story, some from different ones, there are lots of them).
What I like about these stories are they are serious attempts at trying to give some kind of meaning to the darkness of the world. Instead of just shrugging while making a silly face to the question of why there is evil in the world if God is all good, and saying "He works in mysterious ways!" like some fucking retard running around the kitchen of McDonald's yelling "Special Sauce, Special Sauce!" because it's one of the only things he fucking knows; these are attempts to come to grips with the idea that the world might not be good, or perfect, or even here by choice, but maybe we are all just a big deity abortion, the unwanted ginger kid in the second grade, or something worse, so much worse than the ginger kid.
I'm growing tired of writing this review. Maybe I will return to it. The book is interesting. It's interesting especially in light of my pop-knowledge of the subject, and realizing that the stuff that Mr. Brown has popularized is kind of a watered down version of what Gnostic thought actually was (or maybe not, as I hadn't read much about this prior to this book, and knew most of what I knew from the back of books and from other reputable sources, my knowledge of Mr. Brown and his books is also derived from similar means. I haven't read any of them. I haven't seen the movies. I read a few pages of the book Mr. Brown wrote about some painting and the church and it hurt me by how simplistically the page I read was written. So I take it back. I read one page of Mr. Brown's work), and that the real nuances and differences between these different views of the world are pretty interesting. Will I go out and buy a book with all of the works mentioned in here in translation? Probably not. Maybe I'll read a bit more on Google Books from some Victorian translations of Pre-Dead Sea Scroll stuff, but that is because it's free and I get bored sometimes.
If you have read this far I thank you, sorry this didn't turn out to be informative. I hope you at least got a chuckle out of the dick and retard jokes.
If the bible can have two genesis accounts than so can I.
I found this book pretty interesting, but since I was reading it casually (not taking notes, or any of that shit), there were parts of the book that are just a mess in my head. Joas likes jumping different 'religions' (sects? none of these words work right. manifestations? Nope. do you know what i'm trying to say?) in order to illuminate that the rise of Gnosticism in the early century of the catholic church had more to do with the Hellenist Cosmopolitanism of the post Alexander conquest of the near East than with the church per se. This is kind of interesting stuff to me, the difference the view of the individual in Greek thought, the shift from the Polis to Cosmopolitanism and it's ramifications on what is thought of as the individual, the public and the private spheres, and how all of this goes to differences in shaping mytho-centric metaphysical views of creation and the cosmos. This book goes to show how certain Greek ideas run through all of the different attempts at metaphysics of the time (on metaphysics, couldn't New Age people have not picked up this word and tried to make it their own. Couldn't they have just called their stuff Dopey Shit, and left metaphysics to philosophy. Philosophy does have the fucking squatter rights on the term since it's the name of one of Aristotle's books from 2600 years ago and all. So from now on I decree all New Age publishers have to put on the back of their books the subjects that read Mind, Body, Spirit / Metaphysics, as Mind, Body, Spirit / Dopey Shit I have spoken as the lead of New Age. The keeper of the morons and haters of books. The overseerer of believers of Dopey Shit, so it will be done).
I don't know what I was talking about. Oh something about different views of the world, metaphysically. Yeah. It's interesting shit at trying to grapple with obvious problems in the simplistic and kind of contradictory Moses explanation of the beginning of the world. Why are there two stories? Well some of the sects talked about in this book have a good reason for it, most of them though just tack on lots and lots of stuff before whatever it is that makes the person known as Adam occur. There are battles between light and darkness, fucked up attempts and creation, a God who doesn't give a shit about what happens, the blind crazy god one normally thinks of as the creator of our world when one thinks of gnostic world creation, a poor female named Sophia who just creates everything out of a fucked up attempt at emulating the original creator, a God thrown into the darkness and trapped in our world now covered in all of the muck and filth of non-pure being, and lots more little tales (some of these are from the same story, some from different ones, there are lots of them).
What I like about these stories are they are serious attempts at trying to give some kind of meaning to the darkness of the world. Instead of just shrugging while making a silly face to the question of why there is evil in the world if God is all good, and saying "He works in mysterious ways!" like some fucking retard running around the kitchen of McDonald's yelling "Special Sauce, Special Sauce!" because it's one of the only things he fucking knows; these are attempts to come to grips with the idea that the world might not be good, or perfect, or even here by choice, but maybe we are all just a big deity abortion, the unwanted ginger kid in the second grade, or something worse, so much worse than the ginger kid.
I'm growing tired of writing this review. Maybe I will return to it. The book is interesting. It's interesting especially in light of my pop-knowledge of the subject, and realizing that the stuff that Mr. Brown has popularized is kind of a watered down version of what Gnostic thought actually was (or maybe not, as I hadn't read much about this prior to this book, and knew most of what I knew from the back of books and from other reputable sources, my knowledge of Mr. Brown and his books is also derived from similar means. I haven't read any of them. I haven't seen the movies. I read a few pages of the book Mr. Brown wrote about some painting and the church and it hurt me by how simplistically the page I read was written. So I take it back. I read one page of Mr. Brown's work), and that the real nuances and differences between these different views of the world are pretty interesting. Will I go out and buy a book with all of the works mentioned in here in translation? Probably not. Maybe I'll read a bit more on Google Books from some Victorian translations of Pre-Dead Sea Scroll stuff, but that is because it's free and I get bored sometimes.
If you have read this far I thank you, sorry this didn't turn out to be informative. I hope you at least got a chuckle out of the dick and retard jokes.
January 31, 2016
This is a very academic treatment of Gnosticism, but one that has endured through three editions. Such a lifespan is exceedingly rare for an academic book, and surprising for a book so technical in its treatment of such an arcane topic. Interest in the Gnostic religion transcends academia.
Jonas sketches a narrative of this interest in his introductions to successive editions of the book. Introducing the first edition, in 1957, Jonas tells very much an academic story, grounded in scholarly research about the myths and symbolisms of human origins - especially about the competition between those Christian myths and symbols which had become dominant, and the Gnostic myths and symbols which once competed with those of Christian orthodoxy. In this competition, Jonas from the start marks Gnosticism as the "aggressor -- it was an embattled cause from the beginning and thus came under the scrutiny of those whose cause it threatened to subvert." The academic story, then, was of recovering the origins of an ancient - and heretical - faith that had been rooted out and erased from memory.
Though Jonas presents himself as seeking not the origins, but the "essence" of Gnosticism, his volume found renewed interest following the 1946 discovery of the Nag Hamadi manuscripts. Research on these manuscripts progressed slowly, and in 1962 Jonas published a second edition which added a chapter incorporating some insights from the find. By 1970 study of Gnosticism had shifted even more significantly, as Jonas reported, "It is now difficult to define which field, which particular section of scholarship, is the true home of research in Gnosticism." (Indeed, by 1976 Gnosticism had made a prominent appearance in popular culture, with Tom Wolfe marking as Gnostic many of the New Age religious sects that had sprung up in the 1960s and 1970s during the first of many subsequent American "Me" generations in his landmark essay of that name.)
Given the prominence of Gnostic studies - a field which Jonas had done much to advance - Jonas took the opportunity in his Third Edition to tell of the connections between his own intellectual history and his interest in Gnosticism. In this way, Jonas effectively re-framed his original work. His first edition analyzed the main tenets of Gnostic literature, catalogued the systems of thought developed by several Gnostic speculators, and discussed the conflict between Gnosticism and "the Classical Mind"; the second edition added a chapter discussing the Nag Hamadi scripts and, more importantly, the chapter "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism". With that latter chapter now ending the book, and Jonas's own narrative (anchored in his encounter with Heidegger) beginning it, the book now begins to point more broadly to appeal that the essence or spirit of Gnosticism has held out to those of us shaped by the problems of the modern world.
Jonas sees both ancient Gnosticism and modern Existentialism as responses to the experience of not feeling at home in the world. Ancient Gnosticism is portrayed in opposition to the classical view of the cosmos as an "order" (which is the translation of the Greek "cosmos"). In the original text, Jonas expounds on this contrast at length, drawing from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Cicero to draw out the connections in their work between their awe for the cosmos, home to man and gods, organized around an intelligible (even if unknown) order, and calling for man to shape his soul and intellect in ways (namely through the cultivation of virtue and through the pursuit of wisdom and truth) reflective of the order of the cosmos.
Gnostics, on the other hand, though they accepted the notion of order, rejected its fundamental goodness. Having transcended the classical belief in an order inhabited by the gods, with a belief in a "transmundane deity" - a God who lived outside the universe of men - Gnostics saw the order of their existence as "rigid and inimical order, tyrannical and evil law, devoid of meaning and goodness, alien to the purposes of man and to his inner essence...." (p. 250) Jonas concludes, "Greek thought had been a grand expression of man's belonging to the world...; gnostic thought it inspired by the anguished discovery of man's cosmic solitude, of the utter otherness of his being to that of the universe at large."
In his essay on Existentialism, Jonas pinpoints the modern history of that philosophic mood to Pascal who expressed that feeling of man's "cosmic solitude" in this way: "Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened." For this student of Heidegger, Pascal's verb "cast" prefigures Heidegger's experience of "having been thrown" into existence; Jonas concludes that Heidegger's term, "as far as I can see, is originally gnostic." But responding to the anger and rebelliousness that is at the core of Gnosticism ancient and modern, Jonas challenges, "The phrase of having been flung into indifferent nature is a remnant from a dualistic metaphysics, to whose use the non-metaphysical standpoint has no right. What is the throw without the thrower, and without a beyond whence it started?" (p. 339)
Jonas sketches a narrative of this interest in his introductions to successive editions of the book. Introducing the first edition, in 1957, Jonas tells very much an academic story, grounded in scholarly research about the myths and symbolisms of human origins - especially about the competition between those Christian myths and symbols which had become dominant, and the Gnostic myths and symbols which once competed with those of Christian orthodoxy. In this competition, Jonas from the start marks Gnosticism as the "aggressor -- it was an embattled cause from the beginning and thus came under the scrutiny of those whose cause it threatened to subvert." The academic story, then, was of recovering the origins of an ancient - and heretical - faith that had been rooted out and erased from memory.
Though Jonas presents himself as seeking not the origins, but the "essence" of Gnosticism, his volume found renewed interest following the 1946 discovery of the Nag Hamadi manuscripts. Research on these manuscripts progressed slowly, and in 1962 Jonas published a second edition which added a chapter incorporating some insights from the find. By 1970 study of Gnosticism had shifted even more significantly, as Jonas reported, "It is now difficult to define which field, which particular section of scholarship, is the true home of research in Gnosticism." (Indeed, by 1976 Gnosticism had made a prominent appearance in popular culture, with Tom Wolfe marking as Gnostic many of the New Age religious sects that had sprung up in the 1960s and 1970s during the first of many subsequent American "Me" generations in his landmark essay of that name.)
Given the prominence of Gnostic studies - a field which Jonas had done much to advance - Jonas took the opportunity in his Third Edition to tell of the connections between his own intellectual history and his interest in Gnosticism. In this way, Jonas effectively re-framed his original work. His first edition analyzed the main tenets of Gnostic literature, catalogued the systems of thought developed by several Gnostic speculators, and discussed the conflict between Gnosticism and "the Classical Mind"; the second edition added a chapter discussing the Nag Hamadi scripts and, more importantly, the chapter "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism". With that latter chapter now ending the book, and Jonas's own narrative (anchored in his encounter with Heidegger) beginning it, the book now begins to point more broadly to appeal that the essence or spirit of Gnosticism has held out to those of us shaped by the problems of the modern world.
Jonas sees both ancient Gnosticism and modern Existentialism as responses to the experience of not feeling at home in the world. Ancient Gnosticism is portrayed in opposition to the classical view of the cosmos as an "order" (which is the translation of the Greek "cosmos"). In the original text, Jonas expounds on this contrast at length, drawing from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Cicero to draw out the connections in their work between their awe for the cosmos, home to man and gods, organized around an intelligible (even if unknown) order, and calling for man to shape his soul and intellect in ways (namely through the cultivation of virtue and through the pursuit of wisdom and truth) reflective of the order of the cosmos.
Gnostics, on the other hand, though they accepted the notion of order, rejected its fundamental goodness. Having transcended the classical belief in an order inhabited by the gods, with a belief in a "transmundane deity" - a God who lived outside the universe of men - Gnostics saw the order of their existence as "rigid and inimical order, tyrannical and evil law, devoid of meaning and goodness, alien to the purposes of man and to his inner essence...." (p. 250) Jonas concludes, "Greek thought had been a grand expression of man's belonging to the world...; gnostic thought it inspired by the anguished discovery of man's cosmic solitude, of the utter otherness of his being to that of the universe at large."
In his essay on Existentialism, Jonas pinpoints the modern history of that philosophic mood to Pascal who expressed that feeling of man's "cosmic solitude" in this way: "Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened." For this student of Heidegger, Pascal's verb "cast" prefigures Heidegger's experience of "having been thrown" into existence; Jonas concludes that Heidegger's term, "as far as I can see, is originally gnostic." But responding to the anger and rebelliousness that is at the core of Gnosticism ancient and modern, Jonas challenges, "The phrase of having been flung into indifferent nature is a remnant from a dualistic metaphysics, to whose use the non-metaphysical standpoint has no right. What is the throw without the thrower, and without a beyond whence it started?" (p. 339)
July 8, 2023
Wow, this was a lot to take in, certainly much more than I can summarize, but as a primer (and more) to the gnostic religion it was excellent. Hans Jonas takes the reader on an extensive tour of the world and mindset that gave rise to what is perhaps (certainly to my mind) one of the strangest religious edifices ever built by human ingenuity. We are introduced to the world of the post-classical era. It was a world living in the wake of the Hellenistic culture of Alexander the Great’s empire, an empire which forged a unified and syncretic political and intellectual world encompassing both west and east. Jonas notes the way in which Hellenism Initially subsumed ‘oriental’ culture and modes of expression, which eventually re-emerged, primarily in a religious context, and flavoured the ideologies of the day with their character. The meeting point of these two key elements brought about the birth of Gnosticism, a ‘new’ and unifying element of the wave of Eastern revival that came to overlay and penetrate Western Hellenic culture.
Jonas’ coverage of the various gnostic sects and their ideologies and key texts was somewhat overwhelming and initially I think I was mostly taken with how Byzantine everything appeared. I couldn’t help but ask myself how anyone could think that such an obtuse and intricate system, with no obvious grounds in the visible world, could be thought to lie behind the spiritual fabric of reality. It struck me how intellectual, how man-made, and in a sense ‘artificial’ the concepts of Gnosticism appeared. Once the reactionary nature of it was outlined by Jonas, especially against the Classical Greek notions of the perfection of the cosmos, and typified as an almost existential reaction it started to make much more sense: let’s face it, the sheer suck-itude of reality, once one accepts a less than sanguine view of the universe, easily leads one to the conclusion that we’re not in the best of all possible worlds, that the cosmos is not some great Order in which our participation will lead to our perfection and that we are, in fact, perhaps actually trapped in an idiot god’s torture chamber with the wool pulled over our eyes. It is this contention, that Gnosticism could be considered a precursor to the modern intellectual movements of existentialism and nihilism that Jonas makes explicit in his final chapter, that I found most compelling and fascinating. Was this movement in fact the first existential crisis of the western world?
The parallels are not exact, and the crises that led to the modern mode of thought, as well as the details and implications of its conclusions, have significant differences from that of the ancient world. Despite this, however, the analogy seems fitting. It’s fascinating stuff, but definitely a lot to take in.
Jonas’ coverage of the various gnostic sects and their ideologies and key texts was somewhat overwhelming and initially I think I was mostly taken with how Byzantine everything appeared. I couldn’t help but ask myself how anyone could think that such an obtuse and intricate system, with no obvious grounds in the visible world, could be thought to lie behind the spiritual fabric of reality. It struck me how intellectual, how man-made, and in a sense ‘artificial’ the concepts of Gnosticism appeared. Once the reactionary nature of it was outlined by Jonas, especially against the Classical Greek notions of the perfection of the cosmos, and typified as an almost existential reaction it started to make much more sense: let’s face it, the sheer suck-itude of reality, once one accepts a less than sanguine view of the universe, easily leads one to the conclusion that we’re not in the best of all possible worlds, that the cosmos is not some great Order in which our participation will lead to our perfection and that we are, in fact, perhaps actually trapped in an idiot god’s torture chamber with the wool pulled over our eyes. It is this contention, that Gnosticism could be considered a precursor to the modern intellectual movements of existentialism and nihilism that Jonas makes explicit in his final chapter, that I found most compelling and fascinating. Was this movement in fact the first existential crisis of the western world?
The parallels are not exact, and the crises that led to the modern mode of thought, as well as the details and implications of its conclusions, have significant differences from that of the ancient world. Despite this, however, the analogy seems fitting. It’s fascinating stuff, but definitely a lot to take in.
September 15, 2014
Despite the facts that I read it in translation, that the text is now out-of-date & that Hans Jonas isn't even a specialist in the field, his Gnostic Religion served me as the best introduction to the field that I encountered while formulating plans for an undergraduate thesis. Having just had a friend, a reader totally unschooled in early church history, read it and like it, I confidently recommend it to anyone even mildly interested in religion in the ancient world as it pertains to modern Christianity and philosophy.
In another review, I recommend GRS Mead's much older Fragments of a Faith Forgotten similarly. Like Mead, Jonas takes the worldview of the "gnostics" seriously, though he relates them to his intellectual generation and existentialism rather than to Mead and his generation's theosophy.
In another review, I recommend GRS Mead's much older Fragments of a Faith Forgotten similarly. Like Mead, Jonas takes the worldview of the "gnostics" seriously, though he relates them to his intellectual generation and existentialism rather than to Mead and his generation's theosophy.
May 16, 2024
كتاب أكاديمي رائع بلغة سلسلة وأسلوب واضح على عكس طبيعة الفلاسفة في الكتابة يعرض للديانات الغنوصية عبر التاريخ منذ بزوغها وحتى يومنا هذا مع التركيز على أهم ما جاءت به هذه الديانات وأكثر ما أعجبني هو عرض أسطورة كل نسخة من هذه الديانات وتخيل فكرة خلق كوزموس والذي لا يتساوى مع العالم فلسفيا وثنائية النور والظلام على وجه الخصوص كما أسعدني عرض المزيد عن الديانة المانوية وتحديد نقط الخلاف مع المسيحية ثم عرض وضع الغنوصية في العصر الكلاسيكي والتحدث بعمق عن الغنوصية في عالمنا الحديث
كتاب دسم ومهم جدا وموضوعي ويقدم بالأدلة التاريخية كل ما تحتاج لمعرفته عن لفلسفة الديانة الغنوصية كما أن المترجم ساهم في جعل القراءة عملية ممتعة جدا بلغة عربية جميلة في المتن والحواشي على حد سواء
لكل المهتمين بعلم الأديان ينبغي قراءة هذا الكتاب
كتاب دسم ومهم جدا وموضوعي ويقدم بالأدلة التاريخية كل ما تحتاج لمعرفته عن لفلسفة الديانة الغنوصية كما أن المترجم ساهم في جعل القراءة عملية ممتعة جدا بلغة عربية جميلة في المتن والحواشي على حد سواء
لكل المهتمين بعلم الأديان ينبغي قراءة هذا الكتاب
December 27, 2016
Jonas provides the clearest and shortest understanding of gnosticism that I've ever read. It is so well done that you could read only the first two chapters and still have an immensely better appreciation for the contents of and rationale for gnoticism, in its pagan and Christian contexts. The first three chapters provide the historical context and survey of the contents for gnostic writings. The rest of the book provides a more in-depth look at the various systems of gnostic thought, as well as specific writers, and specific questions. Jonas concludes by noting that the beginning and end gnosticism's paradox n is the unknown God himself who is unknowable on principle because the other is totally unknown and is other to everything that is know, and yet is somehow the object of a knowledge and asks to be know. The knowledge of him itself is the knowledge of his unknowability; the predication upon him is thus known by negation and is a negative theology. He is truly an alien god.
December 23, 2021
An absolute prerequisite
An absolute prerequisite for both the study of both Gnosticism and Existentialism. What Jonás shows, in flashes of dark insights, is that we, the women and men of Late Modernity, are in fact going through the same existential crisis that led to the creation of Gnosticism. He embarks on a journey of using Heidegger’s system of hermeneutics to interpret Gnostic beliefs, and comes back understanding how it was Heidegger himself who was - if not a true Gnostic - in the same “Gnostic predicament” as those rootless world-citizens of the Late Hellenistic Age.
An absolute prerequisite for both the study of both Gnosticism and Existentialism. What Jonás shows, in flashes of dark insights, is that we, the women and men of Late Modernity, are in fact going through the same existential crisis that led to the creation of Gnosticism. He embarks on a journey of using Heidegger’s system of hermeneutics to interpret Gnostic beliefs, and comes back understanding how it was Heidegger himself who was - if not a true Gnostic - in the same “Gnostic predicament” as those rootless world-citizens of the Late Hellenistic Age.
November 9, 2007
It's the book about Gnosticism.
June 29, 2018
الغنوص هو المعرفة أو العرفان، وهو يعنى معرفة الله أو الحقيقة بالاتصال المباشر، وذلك فى مقابل الإيمان الذى يعنى معرفة الله باتصال غير مباشر، فالإيمان قائم على التسليم بشىء هو فى الأساس مجهول وغير ملموس مباشرة. والحركة الغنوصية التى قامت ونشطت فى القرون الأولى بعد الميلاد، كانت متنوعة ومنقسمة لمدارس بينها اختلافات كثيرة، ولكن نقطة الاتفاق بينها، والتى جعلتنا نضمها جميعا معا، هى اعتقادها بالاتصال المباشر، المعرفة والغنوص، باعتبارهم طريق للخلاص. 1
ونقطة الاتفاق هذه، فكرتهم عن الغنوص والمعرفة الحدسية المباشرة، مرتبطة بحدس ميثولوجى يتفقون جميعا عليه، فجميع مدارس الغنوصية على الاختلافات الموجودة بينها، تتفق على أن الله الحقيقى غريب عن العالم ومتجاوز عنه، وأن العالم ليس من خلقه، وإنما هو من خلق انعكاس مشوه عنه تم بغير إرادته. هو الديمورج، إله العهد القديم. وقى تصورهم الميثولوجى، أن الديمورج نتج من خطأ ما، كجنين مجهض وغير مكتمل، وكان يتسم بالجهل، جهله بالإله الحقيقى فوقه، فاغتر وقال إنه هو الإله الأعلى، فخلق هذا العالم الذى نعرفه، ولكن بشكل ما تسلل عنصر إلهى فى الروح البشرية وظل حبيس فى الجسد، ومهمة خلاص هذا العنصر تتمثل فى المعرفة، استبطان هذه الأحداث التاريخية الأسطورية ليعرف الإنسان من هو، وماذا يفعل هنا. 2
يقسم "هانس يوناس" الحركة الغنوصية، من حيث التصور الكوزموجونى، أى تصور نشأة الكون، إلى اتجاهين: اتجاه سورى، واتجاه إيرانى. الاتجاه السورى قائم على تصور كيان واحد للألوهة، إله واحد بفعل ربكة داخلية، من داخل الألوهة لا من خارجها، انعكس أو تدلى منه، عالم مادى مشوه بفعل الجذب والهوى. حيث انجذبت إحدى أيوناته "صوفيا" للعشق، فأنتجت جنينا بدون عشيقها من فرط الهوى. ونشأ هذا الجنين ناقصا، جاهلا بالإله الحقيقى، وخلق العالم. وخلاص الإنسان فى هذا العالم الذى بكامله، بكل شرائعه وأنظمته، من خلق الديمورج، الشيطان، يتمثل فى معرفة هذا الحدث الميثولوجى واستبطانه بالحدس المباشر. وهنا، الخطيئة إلهية، والخلاص هو خلاص إلهى معتمد على خلاص الإنسان. الاتجاه الآخر الإيرانى قائم على تصور كوزموجونى مختلف ولكنه ينتهى لنفس النتيجة، فهو قائم على تصور ثنوى للألوهة، هناك النور والظلام موجودان من الأزل.الظلام انجذب للنور وخدعه، وسرق منه بعضه وحبسه بداخله، فى عالم من صنعه. وتتمثل مهمة الخلاص فى تصفيه هذه الأجزاء المسروقة من النور من قلب عالم الظلام، عالمنا الذى نعيش فيه. 3
إن كل شرور هذا العالم، وشرور خالقه نابعة من الجهل، الانعكاس الناقص عن الإله الحقيقى. والخلاص بالتالى متوقف على المعرفة، معرفة الله بالحدس المباشر، باستبطان أسطورة سقوطه. لا بالمعرفة الغير مباشرة القائمة على قواعد ومنطق هذا العالم، لأن قواعد هذا العالم وشرائعه من الأساس من صنع إله جاهل وناقص. 4
وبالتالى بإن النقطة الأصيلة التى تجمع كل هذه الحركات الغنوصية المتزامنة، هى الإحساس الوجودى بالرعب، والصغر مقارنة بحجم العالم، إحساس الغرابة، الغيرية المطلقة بين الإنسان والعالم، فكرة أن الإنسان فى غير مكانه، إنه "ملقى به". وهو نفس الحدس الذى أنتج فى العصر الحديث، فى رأى الكاتب، الفكر الوجودى بداية من باسكال حتى سارتر. هذا الحدس الوجودى ربما يرتبط بالظروف السياسية وبناء الإمبراطوريات الكبرى التى فقد الفرد فيها إحساسه بقيمته ودوره السياسى. فجاء الفكر الغنوصى فى مقابل الفكر اليونانى الكلاسيكى. نشأ الفكر اليونانى فى دولة المدينة، حيث كانت فكرة الجزء والكل واضحة، والإحساس بانسجام الكل ومساهمة الفرد فى هذا الانسجام الكلى تكاد تكون ملموسة. وبالتالى احترم الفكر اليونانى العالم ووجد فى ساحته العريضة مجلى لروحه، ووجد فى انسجام حركة الكواكب والنجوم مثلا أعلى لما يجب أن تكون عليه الروح البشرية. وفى ذروة الفكر اليونانى، الذى امتد زمنيا بعد زوال الظروف التى أنشأته، يرى أفلوطين أن هذا العالم هو تجسد لله، هو الله، وأن انعكاس الله وفيض أفكاره المتمثل فى بناء العالم، هو فعل ضرورى وفعالية إيجابية وإلهية تماما، وليس بفعل خطأ، أو هفوة أو نسيان. أما الغنوصية التى مثلت روح عصر الإمبراطوريات الكبرى، فترى إن العالم غريب، وأن مدارات الكواكب وحركة النجوم البعيدة تبعث على الرعب والغربة لا على الإحساس بالانسجام، وأن هذا الكمال الذى يتبدى فيه نظام العالم هو كلّابة شيطانية لروح الإنسان وضباب متقن يحجب الحقيقة، خدعة مكتملة من ديمورج ناقص ووضيع، وبالتالى فالخلاص مرتبط بتعميق الإحساس بالغربة والغيرية، فى تجاهل اكتمال الطبيعة وتنمية اللامبالاة تجاهها. نفس اللامبالاة تجاه الطبيعة التى لاحظها الكاتب فى الفلسفة الوجودية الحديثة. 5
ونقطة الاتفاق هذه، فكرتهم عن الغنوص والمعرفة الحدسية المباشرة، مرتبطة بحدس ميثولوجى يتفقون جميعا عليه، فجميع مدارس الغنوصية على الاختلافات الموجودة بينها، تتفق على أن الله الحقيقى غريب عن العالم ومتجاوز عنه، وأن العالم ليس من خلقه، وإنما هو من خلق انعكاس مشوه عنه تم بغير إرادته. هو الديمورج، إله العهد القديم. وقى تصورهم الميثولوجى، أن الديمورج نتج من خطأ ما، كجنين مجهض وغير مكتمل، وكان يتسم بالجهل، جهله بالإله الحقيقى فوقه، فاغتر وقال إنه هو الإله الأعلى، فخلق هذا العالم الذى نعرفه، ولكن بشكل ما تسلل عنصر إلهى فى الروح البشرية وظل حبيس فى الجسد، ومهمة خلاص هذا العنصر تتمثل فى المعرفة، استبطان هذه الأحداث التاريخية الأسطورية ليعرف الإنسان من هو، وماذا يفعل هنا. 2
يقسم "هانس يوناس" الحركة الغنوصية، من حيث التصور الكوزموجونى، أى تصور نشأة الكون، إلى اتجاهين: اتجاه سورى، واتجاه إيرانى. الاتجاه السورى قائم على تصور كيان واحد للألوهة، إله واحد بفعل ربكة داخلية، من داخل الألوهة لا من خارجها، انعكس أو تدلى منه، عالم مادى مشوه بفعل الجذب والهوى. حيث انجذبت إحدى أيوناته "صوفيا" للعشق، فأنتجت جنينا بدون عشيقها من فرط الهوى. ونشأ هذا الجنين ناقصا، جاهلا بالإله الحقيقى، وخلق العالم. وخلاص الإنسان فى هذا العالم الذى بكامله، بكل شرائعه وأنظمته، من خلق الديمورج، الشيطان، يتمثل فى معرفة هذا الحدث الميثولوجى واستبطانه بالحدس المباشر. وهنا، الخطيئة إلهية، والخلاص هو خلاص إلهى معتمد على خلاص الإنسان. الاتجاه الآخر الإيرانى قائم على تصور كوزموجونى مختلف ولكنه ينتهى لنفس النتيجة، فهو قائم على تصور ثنوى للألوهة، هناك النور والظلام موجودان من الأزل.الظلام انجذب للنور وخدعه، وسرق منه بعضه وحبسه بداخله، فى عالم من صنعه. وتتمثل مهمة الخلاص فى تصفيه هذه الأجزاء المسروقة من النور من قلب عالم الظلام، عالمنا الذى نعيش فيه. 3
إن كل شرور هذا العالم، وشرور خالقه نابعة من الجهل، الانعكاس الناقص عن الإله الحقيقى. والخلاص بالتالى متوقف على المعرفة، معرفة الله بالحدس المباشر، باستبطان أسطورة سقوطه. لا بالمعرفة الغير مباشرة القائمة على قواعد ومنطق هذا العالم، لأن قواعد هذا العالم وشرائعه من الأساس من صنع إله جاهل وناقص. 4
وبالتالى بإن النقطة الأصيلة التى تجمع كل هذه الحركات الغنوصية المتزامنة، هى الإحساس الوجودى بالرعب، والصغر مقارنة بحجم العالم، إحساس الغرابة، الغيرية المطلقة بين الإنسان والعالم، فكرة أن الإنسان فى غير مكانه، إنه "ملقى به". وهو نفس الحدس الذى أنتج فى العصر الحديث، فى رأى الكاتب، الفكر الوجودى بداية من باسكال حتى سارتر. هذا الحدس الوجودى ربما يرتبط بالظروف السياسية وبناء الإمبراطوريات الكبرى التى فقد الفرد فيها إحساسه بقيمته ودوره السياسى. فجاء الفكر الغنوصى فى مقابل الفكر اليونانى الكلاسيكى. نشأ الفكر اليونانى فى دولة المدينة، حيث كانت فكرة الجزء والكل واضحة، والإحساس بانسجام الكل ومساهمة الفرد فى هذا الانسجام الكلى تكاد تكون ملموسة. وبالتالى احترم الفكر اليونانى العالم ووجد فى ساحته العريضة مجلى لروحه، ووجد فى انسجام حركة الكواكب والنجوم مثلا أعلى لما يجب أن تكون عليه الروح البشرية. وفى ذروة الفكر اليونانى، الذى امتد زمنيا بعد زوال الظروف التى أنشأته، يرى أفلوطين أن هذا العالم هو تجسد لله، هو الله، وأن انعكاس الله وفيض أفكاره المتمثل فى بناء العالم، هو فعل ضرورى وفعالية إيجابية وإلهية تماما، وليس بفعل خطأ، أو هفوة أو نسيان. أما الغنوصية التى مثلت روح عصر الإمبراطوريات الكبرى، فترى إن العالم غريب، وأن مدارات الكواكب وحركة النجوم البعيدة تبعث على الرعب والغربة لا على الإحساس بالانسجام، وأن هذا الكمال الذى يتبدى فيه نظام العالم هو كلّابة شيطانية لروح الإنسان وضباب متقن يحجب الحقيقة، خدعة مكتملة من ديمورج ناقص ووضيع، وبالتالى فالخلاص مرتبط بتعميق الإحساس بالغربة والغيرية، فى تجاهل اكتمال الطبيعة وتنمية اللامبالاة تجاهها. نفس اللامبالاة تجاه الطبيعة التى لاحظها الكاتب فى الفلسفة الوجودية الحديثة. 5
February 26, 2012
A masterwork on Gnosticism by one of the great German philosophers of the twentieth century. Jonas devoted decades to the study of this fascinating phenomenon, and he presents his key findings here in a more accessible style than in his early, two-volume study, "Gnosis und spaetantiker Geist". His academic studies under Heidegger had sharpened Jonas's perception for the thought-world of Late Antiquity, which Jonas presents as one marked by a deep rift between self and world, world and God, and God and self. What could overcome this schism, according to the elect, was gnosis, a Greek word meaning "knowledge". For the Gnostics, unlike for earlier philosophers, humans could not hope for any reliable normative or ethical guidance from the structure of the cosmos. The cosmos was instead corrupt and evil, the product of a tyrannical demiurge, and only by defying this baleful order (either through asceticism or libertinism) could humans break through it to achieve union with a transmundane, wholly other God. In an epilogue, Jonas draws interesting parallels between the spiritual situation he discusses in his book and the nihilism which haunted European thought in his own lifetime. Indeed, one reason to read this book is that Gnosticism is still very much a part of our own thought-world: it thrives today in New Age religions, esoteric cults, Dan Brown-style potboilers and even in science fiction - "2001: A Space Odyssey", for instance, is recognisably a neo-Gnostic text. Although Jonas's study has since been superseded in some of its details, its synthetic approach provides a welcome corrective to the plethora of specialist studies on this topic, which all too often leave the reader wishing for greater clarity and perspective.
April 4, 2016
Jonas explores and unravels the intricate fabric of Gnostic religious thought that developed concurrently with early Christianity. The two faiths competed, responding to some of the same pressures rising within Judaism, the Greek cults, and other Middle Eastern religions. Where Jonas’ book is particularly thought-provoking is that he spends almost no time at all placing these beliefs within a socio-political context, instead exploring their philosophical origins, the basic tenets of their faith, and including examples (where they exist) of liturgy and theological writing from the Gnostics themselves.
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March 28, 2021
Ein Klassiker der Gnosis-Forschung. Im Detail schon länger nicht mehr aktuell, da, wie bereits im Text betont wird, der Jahrhundertfund von Nag-Hammadi nicht berücksichtigt werden konnte. Letztlich muss man Jonas hier aber insbesondere wegen seiner existential-philosophischen Interpretation am Ende oder vielleicht noch aufgrund seiner kleinen Topologie am Anfang lesen. Dazwischen gibts einen informativen ersten Einblick in verschiedene antike gnostische Strömungen. Der Forscher wird da sicherlich zum zweibändigen Original greifen wollen, der interessierte Leser als solcher kann sich sicherlich mit dieser kürzeren Fassung zufriedengeben und wird sehr unterhaltsam bedient, zumal sich der Text in keiner Weise trocken liest.
January 18, 2016
A lot of books about the Gnostics talk about how they were suppressed by the mainstream Christian church, were an influence on church beliefs, acted as a catalyst to force the church to define its beliefs when it rejected the Gnostic beliefs or goes over the history of the discovery of hidden texts. They do all that but don't really cover what the Gnostics believed. This book covers the beliefs and the differences between the beliefs of various sects. I highly recommend it if you want to know the Gnostics instead of knowing ABOUT the Gnostics.
August 9, 2012
Jonas’ book is one of the classics in Gnostic scholarship. Predating the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, Jonas interprets the Gnostic religion in Twentieth Century philosophic terms. Trained under Martin Heidegger, Jonas draws parallels between Gnosticism and existentialism. Though slightly outdated, Jonas’ book is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in Gnosticism.
April 14, 2021
Una panoramica completa, dotta e appassionata del labirintico universo delle sette gnostiche. Bibliografia ricchissima, assolutamente consigliato per chiunque desideri intraprendere un viaggio all'interno dell'affascinante e fantasioso immaginario gnostico.
December 13, 2007
This is the definitive work about Gnosticism. Readable, eminently understandable, which is the real miracle, considering the baroque nature of some of the source material.
February 1, 2022
This was thrilling. Gnosticism is fascinating anyway but this deep dive into its origins, its types, its meaning, and its resonance with modern existentialism, brings out all the vivid spectacle and philosophical richness of these ancient visionary ideas.
Jonas is eloquent and deeply researched. He clearly respects the thinkers and is personally intrigued by the cultural upheavals they were dealing with. This works great as a cultural history lesson in itself, but the real glory is the mythological detail. Any fan of Joseph Campbell will appreciate the lore and its analysis.
But what really brings this to another level is Jonas' existentialist background. His ultimate critique of the world-denial within gnosticism is the same as his critique of existentialist nihilism. As a student of Heidegger he's in a good position to show what is missing in his former mentor's system, and its resonace with gnostic beliefs is what compelled him to this study in the first place. That's what gives him the perspective to draw out all the meaning in these mythologies.
While reading this I ordered two of his other books. This is his analysis of other thinkers' ideas, but it's enough to compel me to read his other books which elaborate more on his own ideas. Very much looking forward to reading his essays on life and technology.
Jonas is eloquent and deeply researched. He clearly respects the thinkers and is personally intrigued by the cultural upheavals they were dealing with. This works great as a cultural history lesson in itself, but the real glory is the mythological detail. Any fan of Joseph Campbell will appreciate the lore and its analysis.
But what really brings this to another level is Jonas' existentialist background. His ultimate critique of the world-denial within gnosticism is the same as his critique of existentialist nihilism. As a student of Heidegger he's in a good position to show what is missing in his former mentor's system, and its resonace with gnostic beliefs is what compelled him to this study in the first place. That's what gives him the perspective to draw out all the meaning in these mythologies.
While reading this I ordered two of his other books. This is his analysis of other thinkers' ideas, but it's enough to compel me to read his other books which elaborate more on his own ideas. Very much looking forward to reading his essays on life and technology.
April 3, 2025
While this book certainly does a good job at drawing a typology of the various gnostic movements, it also provides much more by showing its ties to the religious, political and philosophical landscape of the time. Gnosticism as a revolt.
But the most insightful part comes in form of an essay showing the parallels in sensibility between the gnostic phenomenon and existentialist philosophy, from Pascal to Heidegger. The essay ends on a call to reevaluate the ethical relationship between man and the world, a theme rightfully important to Jonas who became particularly aware of the shortcomings of modern ideologies through his study of gnosticism.
But the most insightful part comes in form of an essay showing the parallels in sensibility between the gnostic phenomenon and existentialist philosophy, from Pascal to Heidegger. The essay ends on a call to reevaluate the ethical relationship between man and the world, a theme rightfully important to Jonas who became particularly aware of the shortcomings of modern ideologies through his study of gnosticism.
December 19, 2022
It’s a commonplace, and a true one, that a lot of the tropes we assign to villains in fiction coincide with stereotypes that Christians often hold of Jews: sneaky, treacherous, cunning, possessed of a combination of physical weakness and ugliness with danger and a certain allure. I’d add another set of villainy-tropes that map onto an essentially religious divide, and these are associated with Gnosticism, or anyway, European culture’s memory of Gnosticism. Secret cults, underground in both social and geological senses, dedicated to esoteric (but not overly complicated, so as to overwhelm the reader!) belief systems at odds with orthodoxy, intimations of weird sex and other lifestyle practices, convinced something is essentially wrong with the world and, moreover, that maybe we ought to act accordingly… we see plenty of all that in bad guys in fiction, film, comic books, etc.
We don’t know that much about Gnosticism because its opponents, the Christian Church (this was before it split off into Catholic and Orthodox branches and well before the Reformation), eradicated pretty much all Gnostic groups from the face of the Earth. For centuries, most of what we “knew” about them came from whatever inquisitors chose to jot down about their victims before destroying them. About a decade before philosopher Hans Jonas began writing this book, the Nag Hammadi corpus, discovered by archaeologists in Egypt, had started filtering out, providing us with almost all of the direct primary sources on Gnosticism we have. Seeing as Nag Hammadi was just one respectable cache of documents, it was a huge find but not comprehensive. We’re still missing a lot, texts but also, crucially, context to a lot of what we do have about Gnosticism.
Arguably, the whole category of “Gnosticism” is more of an artifact of orthodox Christian persecution, the ideas and practices they lumped together as they proscribed them, than of anything having to do with the beliefs of those they persecuted. Indeed, the literature these days seems to be in a place where they almost regard the term “Gnostic” as more trouble than it’s worth, a lump where there ought to be splits (admittedly, I get this impression mostly from one (1) podcast, but hey, I’m a modernist).
Well… I gotta admit… there is a part of me that thinks that the “reception history” of the Gnostics is almost more important than whether or not they were truly a unitary group. Note, I do think it’s important to try to understand what they actually believed. But… they’re gone. Gone, gone, gone. All those sects with all those odd and vaguely sinister-sounding names – Valentinians, Basilideans, Sethites, Marcionites, Manicheans, on and on – are gone, and even if some internet weirdos say they’re going to adopt their beliefs, get the band back together again, it’s not the same. In most respects, Gnosticism is more important as a shadow of Christianity than it is in its own right.
Hans Jonas was a student of Heidegger’s in pre-WWII Germany, one of a group of Jewish students of the loathsome dwarf master and who went on to big careers, including Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse (I read a book by a skillful but pedantic intellectual historian yelping about how they were illiberal, illiberal all, tainted by the master! “Well, duh! Who cares?” It was the nineties, or anyway the eternal nineties of the liberal mind…). He left when the Nazis took power, swore he’d only come back to Germany as part of an army to defeat them- and lived up to his promise as part of the Jewish Brigade in the British army. He may have denounced Heidegger, but he didn’t denounce all of the dimensions of the philosophical explorations Heidegger called for, encouraged his students towards.
Practically speaking, this means that Jonas makes much broader analyses than is common in ancient history today, and one gets the idea was becoming common back then, too. Thank god! Yes, there’s a need for the cautious, carefully source-bound histories that are now de rigeur, the more so the further you get from the presence. But there are readability and relevance questions involved, and history that’s too tightly tied to primary sources — especially when there’s not a lot of them in a given area, and some of them of indirect relevance — risks turning into pointless antiquarianism.
In my mind, that impassioned but rigorous — really, more impassioned and rigorous, in the best of this sort of work, the two don’t detract from each other — multidimensional analysis that characterizes the best German (and German-inspired) historical thought is probably the best approach we moderns can take to the history of Gnosticism (outside of straight up fiction approaches, maybe). Jonas begins with a discussion of the Greek Mediterranean in which Gnosticism arises, a meeting place of cultures from India to Spain and which participants reached well beyond. Among other things, the Greek Mediterranean became the cockpit where competing ideas not just about religious content, but what religious form — what religion constitutes, how it regulates action and thought — would look like for vast swathes of the human planet going forward.
Christianity was one product of this setting. So too was its shadow, Gnosticism (Gnosticism deserves to be seen as Christianity’s shadow, much more than the bad joke of Satanism, half of which is just misappropriated, garbled Gnostic ideas and tropes anyway), even as Gnostic movements would become important in places well away from the Mediterranean. Beyond whatever errors antiquarians might ding him for, Jonas comes closest to intellectual traps when he ascribes ideas as uniquely belonging to given cultures- this a Greek idea, this Persian, that Babylonian, etc. But by and large, he avoids essentializing, which you’d fucking well better in the insane stewpot of peoples and cultures that was the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East at the time. Rather, better to think of these ideas as forms, structures of thought molded in given environments that came into contact with each other, combined, re-formed.
Then we get that favorite German intellectual pastime: classification. We go through the various Gnostic subgroups based on their attitudes towards where their central concern — error, imperfection, evil — comes from. Persian-inflected Gnosticism, like Manichaeism, which understands evil as primordial, a darkness always coexisting with good, what Jonas sees as Syriac Gnosticisms which hold that a germ of imperfection comes from iterative layers of creation by increasingly imperfect spiritual creators, Marcion’s Christian-ish Gnosticism, etc etc.
Jonas doesn’t stint from showing off what primary sources were available, giving us bits of Gnostic poetry, scripture, and lore from Nag Hammadi or from Christian polemicist accounts. And what lore it is! Alongside the questions the Gnostics asked — pretty fundamental ones that Christian apologists, to my mind, really don’t answer that well — it’s the lore that has attracted such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, whose essay on Basilides the False probably helped launch more interest in Gnosticism than any other document of the twentieth century. What Jonas calls “Syriac Gnosticism” especially had colorful, strange, uncanny stories attached, made all the more dreamlike by how fragmentary they, and our knowledge of their contexts, are and is. Multiple layers of creation guarded by the spawn of a blind idiot god, where you needed to memorize thousands of passwords to let your soul ascend to its true home beyond anything like the ken of this world; the incarnation of Wisdom as a woman tempted into creating a fallen material world out of a desire to imitate her impossibly remote, perfect father, only to fall further and further into the world’s degradation (including incarnations as Helen of Troy and as a Tyrian sex worker) who must be rescued and restored to free humanity from this false, wicked world…
Because, let’s face it- how the Gnostics fit in to the world of late antiquity, what happened to them, all the ins and outs and specifics… they’re important, no doubt, and we should encourage work that is more granular than what Jonas does, attentive to material culture, linguistic analysis, etc etc, stuff that Jonas either didn’t have access to or care to do in his broad analysis of Gnosticism. But unless we’re gonna invent time travel any time soon, those gritty details are less important for the general historical writer than the things the Gnostics represent. There’s the aspect where they represent the dark, the shadowy, the other, the villainous, all those tropes we talked about earlier… but there’s also a way in which they articulate, arguably more than any other cultural force in western, maybe in human, history something important. Common to all Gnostic faiths is the idea that this world is not our home- that there is something essentially wrong not (just) with people, but with Creation. Christianity puts original sin on a lady, an apple, and a snake- Gnostics ask the obvious question: why ladies, snakes, apples, etc., if an all-powerful all-good being had a say in the matter? Why any of this? Something stinks.
To me, this suspicion is an ineradicable part of the human inheritance. We can imagine other worlds, and we can reflect on this world, and we can see gaps between the two, for better and for worse. Gnosticism is, whatever else it is as a specific phenomenon of Mediterranean antiquity, the expression of that gap… and you can argue that Christianity was the channeling of the thoughts that result from the gap into a set of channels that various people understood as theologically and, dare I say it, socially and politically acceptable, shutting off dangerous lines of enquiry. It’s way too much of a stretch to attribute real revolutionary potential to Gnosticism. As it existed, it seemed to oscillate between ascetic withdrawal and hedonistic excess. Google contemporary Gnostics and you’re in the world of new age nonsense, a notch or two away from QAnon, complete with online grifters- and there was always a carnival barker element to Gnosticism, as seen in the career of Simon Magus.
Amusingly, one major right-wing thinker of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin, did try to attribute the rise of more or less every ideology to the left of, say, Alexis de Tocqueville, to a sub rosa embrace of Gnosticism! But pay any sustained attention to what actually successful revolutionaries are like, and you don’t see much Gnosticism there- which, indeed, seems to disappoint some of my more… aesthetically-inclined friends. For the revolutionary, like it or not, we’re stuck with this world. And part of this world are the feelings and thoughts Gnosticism expressed, and a truly ruthless criticism of all existing has to take it into account. You’ll find few better ways to take it on board, in my opinion, than reading Jonas. *****
We don’t know that much about Gnosticism because its opponents, the Christian Church (this was before it split off into Catholic and Orthodox branches and well before the Reformation), eradicated pretty much all Gnostic groups from the face of the Earth. For centuries, most of what we “knew” about them came from whatever inquisitors chose to jot down about their victims before destroying them. About a decade before philosopher Hans Jonas began writing this book, the Nag Hammadi corpus, discovered by archaeologists in Egypt, had started filtering out, providing us with almost all of the direct primary sources on Gnosticism we have. Seeing as Nag Hammadi was just one respectable cache of documents, it was a huge find but not comprehensive. We’re still missing a lot, texts but also, crucially, context to a lot of what we do have about Gnosticism.
Arguably, the whole category of “Gnosticism” is more of an artifact of orthodox Christian persecution, the ideas and practices they lumped together as they proscribed them, than of anything having to do with the beliefs of those they persecuted. Indeed, the literature these days seems to be in a place where they almost regard the term “Gnostic” as more trouble than it’s worth, a lump where there ought to be splits (admittedly, I get this impression mostly from one (1) podcast, but hey, I’m a modernist).
Well… I gotta admit… there is a part of me that thinks that the “reception history” of the Gnostics is almost more important than whether or not they were truly a unitary group. Note, I do think it’s important to try to understand what they actually believed. But… they’re gone. Gone, gone, gone. All those sects with all those odd and vaguely sinister-sounding names – Valentinians, Basilideans, Sethites, Marcionites, Manicheans, on and on – are gone, and even if some internet weirdos say they’re going to adopt their beliefs, get the band back together again, it’s not the same. In most respects, Gnosticism is more important as a shadow of Christianity than it is in its own right.
Hans Jonas was a student of Heidegger’s in pre-WWII Germany, one of a group of Jewish students of the loathsome dwarf master and who went on to big careers, including Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse (I read a book by a skillful but pedantic intellectual historian yelping about how they were illiberal, illiberal all, tainted by the master! “Well, duh! Who cares?” It was the nineties, or anyway the eternal nineties of the liberal mind…). He left when the Nazis took power, swore he’d only come back to Germany as part of an army to defeat them- and lived up to his promise as part of the Jewish Brigade in the British army. He may have denounced Heidegger, but he didn’t denounce all of the dimensions of the philosophical explorations Heidegger called for, encouraged his students towards.
Practically speaking, this means that Jonas makes much broader analyses than is common in ancient history today, and one gets the idea was becoming common back then, too. Thank god! Yes, there’s a need for the cautious, carefully source-bound histories that are now de rigeur, the more so the further you get from the presence. But there are readability and relevance questions involved, and history that’s too tightly tied to primary sources — especially when there’s not a lot of them in a given area, and some of them of indirect relevance — risks turning into pointless antiquarianism.
In my mind, that impassioned but rigorous — really, more impassioned and rigorous, in the best of this sort of work, the two don’t detract from each other — multidimensional analysis that characterizes the best German (and German-inspired) historical thought is probably the best approach we moderns can take to the history of Gnosticism (outside of straight up fiction approaches, maybe). Jonas begins with a discussion of the Greek Mediterranean in which Gnosticism arises, a meeting place of cultures from India to Spain and which participants reached well beyond. Among other things, the Greek Mediterranean became the cockpit where competing ideas not just about religious content, but what religious form — what religion constitutes, how it regulates action and thought — would look like for vast swathes of the human planet going forward.
Christianity was one product of this setting. So too was its shadow, Gnosticism (Gnosticism deserves to be seen as Christianity’s shadow, much more than the bad joke of Satanism, half of which is just misappropriated, garbled Gnostic ideas and tropes anyway), even as Gnostic movements would become important in places well away from the Mediterranean. Beyond whatever errors antiquarians might ding him for, Jonas comes closest to intellectual traps when he ascribes ideas as uniquely belonging to given cultures- this a Greek idea, this Persian, that Babylonian, etc. But by and large, he avoids essentializing, which you’d fucking well better in the insane stewpot of peoples and cultures that was the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East at the time. Rather, better to think of these ideas as forms, structures of thought molded in given environments that came into contact with each other, combined, re-formed.
Then we get that favorite German intellectual pastime: classification. We go through the various Gnostic subgroups based on their attitudes towards where their central concern — error, imperfection, evil — comes from. Persian-inflected Gnosticism, like Manichaeism, which understands evil as primordial, a darkness always coexisting with good, what Jonas sees as Syriac Gnosticisms which hold that a germ of imperfection comes from iterative layers of creation by increasingly imperfect spiritual creators, Marcion’s Christian-ish Gnosticism, etc etc.
Jonas doesn’t stint from showing off what primary sources were available, giving us bits of Gnostic poetry, scripture, and lore from Nag Hammadi or from Christian polemicist accounts. And what lore it is! Alongside the questions the Gnostics asked — pretty fundamental ones that Christian apologists, to my mind, really don’t answer that well — it’s the lore that has attracted such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, whose essay on Basilides the False probably helped launch more interest in Gnosticism than any other document of the twentieth century. What Jonas calls “Syriac Gnosticism” especially had colorful, strange, uncanny stories attached, made all the more dreamlike by how fragmentary they, and our knowledge of their contexts, are and is. Multiple layers of creation guarded by the spawn of a blind idiot god, where you needed to memorize thousands of passwords to let your soul ascend to its true home beyond anything like the ken of this world; the incarnation of Wisdom as a woman tempted into creating a fallen material world out of a desire to imitate her impossibly remote, perfect father, only to fall further and further into the world’s degradation (including incarnations as Helen of Troy and as a Tyrian sex worker) who must be rescued and restored to free humanity from this false, wicked world…
Because, let’s face it- how the Gnostics fit in to the world of late antiquity, what happened to them, all the ins and outs and specifics… they’re important, no doubt, and we should encourage work that is more granular than what Jonas does, attentive to material culture, linguistic analysis, etc etc, stuff that Jonas either didn’t have access to or care to do in his broad analysis of Gnosticism. But unless we’re gonna invent time travel any time soon, those gritty details are less important for the general historical writer than the things the Gnostics represent. There’s the aspect where they represent the dark, the shadowy, the other, the villainous, all those tropes we talked about earlier… but there’s also a way in which they articulate, arguably more than any other cultural force in western, maybe in human, history something important. Common to all Gnostic faiths is the idea that this world is not our home- that there is something essentially wrong not (just) with people, but with Creation. Christianity puts original sin on a lady, an apple, and a snake- Gnostics ask the obvious question: why ladies, snakes, apples, etc., if an all-powerful all-good being had a say in the matter? Why any of this? Something stinks.
To me, this suspicion is an ineradicable part of the human inheritance. We can imagine other worlds, and we can reflect on this world, and we can see gaps between the two, for better and for worse. Gnosticism is, whatever else it is as a specific phenomenon of Mediterranean antiquity, the expression of that gap… and you can argue that Christianity was the channeling of the thoughts that result from the gap into a set of channels that various people understood as theologically and, dare I say it, socially and politically acceptable, shutting off dangerous lines of enquiry. It’s way too much of a stretch to attribute real revolutionary potential to Gnosticism. As it existed, it seemed to oscillate between ascetic withdrawal and hedonistic excess. Google contemporary Gnostics and you’re in the world of new age nonsense, a notch or two away from QAnon, complete with online grifters- and there was always a carnival barker element to Gnosticism, as seen in the career of Simon Magus.
Amusingly, one major right-wing thinker of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin, did try to attribute the rise of more or less every ideology to the left of, say, Alexis de Tocqueville, to a sub rosa embrace of Gnosticism! But pay any sustained attention to what actually successful revolutionaries are like, and you don’t see much Gnosticism there- which, indeed, seems to disappoint some of my more… aesthetically-inclined friends. For the revolutionary, like it or not, we’re stuck with this world. And part of this world are the feelings and thoughts Gnosticism expressed, and a truly ruthless criticism of all existing has to take it into account. You’ll find few better ways to take it on board, in my opinion, than reading Jonas. *****
June 30, 2023
ببطء شديد وصعوبة بالغة تمكنت من الانتهاء من قراءة هذا الكتاب، الذي لم أرَ منه أي نفعٍ في فهمي "للغنوصية" إذ زاد الغموض غموضاً والتشويش تشويشاً. أعزو هذا وألوم بشكل رئيسي مؤلف الكتاب هانس يوناس الذي، رغم اسمه الكبير في هذا المجال من الأبحاث، فشل في إيصال أفكاره بوضوح وسهولة وقام بالخلط بين الاسطورة والفلسفة والمعتقد الديني والخرافة، مع أسلوب سردي يظنه مشوقاً تراءى لي منفراً مشوشاً، ووضعه نداً لند مع أفكار الديانات التوحيدية (اليهودية والمسيحية) النيّرة والمعتقدات الهلنستية اليونانية الراقية، من جهة، فأساء لها. ومن جهة ثانية، اعتبر التيارات والأيديولوجيات الغنوصية المختلفة التي سادت آنذاك "ديانة غنوصية واحدة" تندرج كلها ضمن سياق واحد، فأساء بذلك لكل من المندائية والمانوية والتي لكل منها خصوصيتها التي تتفرد بها لكنه ارتأى إلحاقها بالغنوصية كإحدى تياراتها الفكرية اللاهوتية، وجعلها جزءاً منها، مع ارجاع بعض أصولها إلى الزرادشتية.
وأما عن ترجمة وتدقيق الدكتور صباح خليل الدهيسي، الذي أقرّ بأنه "لم يكن سهلاُ البتة ترجمة هذا الكتاب"، فلا يسعني إلى تقديم الشكر الجزيل والاحترام والتقدير للجهد الكبير الذي بذله في نقله النص إلى العربية بنجاح باهر.
هذا هو انطباعي، ووجهة نظري، وفهمي المحدود لهذا الكتاب، الذي ربما كان قصوراً مني أمام أولئك الذين هم أكثر مني ضلوعاً واطلاعاً وخبرة وفهماً لهذا النوع من المفاهيم والتيارات والمواضيع الفكرية. فالعذر منكم جميعاً
وأما عن ترجمة وتدقيق الدكتور صباح خليل الدهيسي، الذي أقرّ بأنه "لم يكن سهلاُ البتة ترجمة هذا الكتاب"، فلا يسعني إلى تقديم الشكر الجزيل والاحترام والتقدير للجهد الكبير الذي بذله في نقله النص إلى العربية بنجاح باهر.
هذا هو انطباعي، ووجهة نظري، وفهمي المحدود لهذا الكتاب، الذي ربما كان قصوراً مني أمام أولئك الذين هم أكثر مني ضلوعاً واطلاعاً وخبرة وفهماً لهذا النوع من المفاهيم والتيارات والمواضيع الفكرية. فالعذر منكم جميعاً
January 28, 2023
While not a page turner by any means, Jonas' investigation of the ancient religious phenomenon that is Gnosticism (specifically the Egyptian-Syrian or Valentinian type in which inadvertent divine 'oversight' sets in motion the whole drama of creation and redemption) culminates in an insightful historical thesis on the identity of Existentialism and Gnosticism. That is, Gnosticism is how the ancients responded to the dissolution of the Hellenic whole-parts relation between Man and World (cosmos). Students of Heidegger and existentialism will benefit from reading the epilogue. There are also brief remarks on 'Gnostic Libertinism' that would seem to corroborate Klossowski's thesis that the integral atheists of Sade's literary universe are actually closet Gnostics.
January 29, 2009
Good general vision and introduction to Gnositicism.
Buona visione generale e introduzione sullo Gnosticismo.
Buona visione generale e introduzione sullo Gnosticismo.
Read
November 21, 2009None
April 29, 2024
کتاب علارغم اینکه تا پیش از فصل آخر ویژگی روایتگونهی منسجمش را حفظ میکند، از شیوهی برخوردش با موضوع و آوردن واگویههای نویسنده با خودش در متن پیش چشم خواننده، زیرلایهی عمیقن فلسفیای که به نظر میآید از رویکرد و نگاه هانس یوناس آمده باشد را همه جای متن با خودش حمل میکند. ابهام و معمای اصلی برای من نه در موضوع و نه در محتوای کتاب یا بصیرتهای درخشانِ پژوهشگری که علارغم باز نگه داشتن چشمانش در نقش دانشمندش فرو نمیرود، که در معماری اثر بود و گوشهی ذهنم را پیوسته قلقلک میداد. آیا این کتاب میخواهد ما را با گنوسیس و مکتبهای گنوسی آشنا کند؟ یا اینکه در هر فصل دارد دست به نوعی پدیدارشناسی هرمنوتیکی میزند تا گنوسیس خود در شکل و لباسهای گوناگونی که در تاریخ به تن کرده است، خود با ما سخن بگوید؟ اگر نویسنده دست به شقّ دوم زده باشد، آن را با چنان ظرافتی صورت داده است که نتوان گامهایش را با پشت سر متن دویدن دنبال کرد و نیاز به پیشی گرفتن از متن در خود متن به شکل ضمنی از خوانندهی دقیق خواسته شده است.
September 23, 2024
گنوسیسم در فارسی منابع به درد بخور زیاد ندارد تا جایی که بنده خبر دارم. کتاب مهمی مثل کتاب هانس یوناس که دیگر جای خود دارد. ترجمهی مقبولی هم دارد. کهندائی مترجم قابل اطمینان کتابهای بهدردبخور گنوسیسم به فارسیست. از مقدمهی کتاب خیلی یاد گرفتم. یوناس توضیح میدهد چی شد که به گنوسیسم علاقهمند شد، چه شد که هایدگر و بولتمان تشویقش کردند چه کند، چطور شروع کرد، دوستی با هانا آرنت چه اثر داشت، جنگ شد، بعد چی شد و الی آخر.
مترجم به نظرم درست جاهایی را اشاره کرده که جانبدارانه در مورد نسبت شرق (خاصّ بینالنهرین و ایران) و یونان حرف میزند چون میخواهد جهانرواییِ اسکندر را و از آن طریق اثر یونان+یهودیت بر گنوسیسم را تمهید کند.
فصول مربوط به باورها و نظم گفتار گنوسی بسیار مفید است و گاهی برمیگردم تکههایی را دوباره میخوانم.
مترجم به نظرم درست جاهایی را اشاره کرده که جانبدارانه در مورد نسبت شرق (خاصّ بینالنهرین و ایران) و یونان حرف میزند چون میخواهد جهانرواییِ اسکندر را و از آن طریق اثر یونان+یهودیت بر گنوسیسم را تمهید کند.
فصول مربوط به باورها و نظم گفتار گنوسی بسیار مفید است و گاهی برمیگردم تکههایی را دوباره میخوانم.
June 28, 2022
Leaping off, as it were, from its past, existence projects itself into its future; faces its ultimate limit, death; returns from this eschatological glimpse of nothingness to its sheer factness... I repeat, there is no present to dwell in, only the crisis between past and future, the pointed moment between, balanced on the razor's edge of decision which thrusts ahead.
December 26, 2024
The best book on Gnosticism I have read so far! It provides excellent descriptions and explanations, with the cosmo-soteriological systems being as clear as they can be. The author covers everything from Simon Magus and Hermes Trismegistus to Manichean cosmology and more. I highly recommend it to any heretic out there!
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