Friday 28 October 2011
Phil Nosis
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Gnosticism
Gnosticism (after gnosis, the Greek word for “knowledge” or “insight”) is the name given to a loosely organized religious and philosophical movement that flourished in the first and second centuries CE. The exact origin(s) of this school of thought cannot be traced, although it is possible to locate influences or sources as far back as the second and first centuries BCE, such as the early treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Jewish Apocalyptic writings, and especially Platonic philosophy and the Hebrew Scriptures themselves.
In spite of the diverse nature of the various Gnostic sects and teachers, certain fundamental elements serve to bind these groups together under the loose heading of “Gnosticism” or “Gnosis.” Chief among these elements is a certain manner of “anti-cosmic world rejection” that has often been mistaken for mere dualism. According to the Gnostics, this world, the material cosmos, is the result of a primordial error on the part of a supra-cosmic, supremely divine being, usually called Sophia (Wisdom) or simply the Logos. This being is described as the final emanation of a divine hierarchy, called the Pleroma or “Fullness,” at the head of which resides the supreme God, the One beyond Being. The error of Sophia, which is usually identified as a reckless desire to know the transcendent God, leads to the hypostatization of her desire in the form of a semi-divine and essentially ignorant creature known as the Demiurge (Greek: dêmiourgos, “craftsman”), or Ialdabaoth, who is responsible for the formation of the material cosmos. This act of craftsmanship is actually an imitation of the realm of the Pleroma, but the Demiurge is ignorant of this, and hubristically declares himself the only existing God. At this point, the Gnostic revisionary critique of the Hebrew Scriptures begins, as well as the general rejection of this world as a product of error and ignorance, and the positing of a higher world, to which the human soul will eventually return. However, when all is said and done, one finds that the error of Sophia and the begetting of the inferior cosmos are occurrences that follow a certain law of necessity, and that the so-called “dualism” of the divine and the earthly is really a reflection and expression of the defining tension that constitutes the being of humanity—the human being.
1. The Philosophical Character of Gnosticism
Gnosticism, as an intellectual product, is grounded firmly in the general human act of reflecting upon existence. The Gnostics were concerned with the basic questions of existence or “being-in-the-world” (Dasein)—that is: who we are (as human beings), where we have come from, and where we are heading, historically and spiritually (cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion 1958, p. 334). These questions lie at the very root of philosophical thinking; but the answers provided by the Gnostics go beyond philosophical speculation toward the realm of religious doctrine and mysticism. However, it is impossible to understand fully the meaning of Gnosticism without beginning at the philosophical level, and orienting oneself accordingly. Since any orientation toward an ancient phenomenon must always proceed by way of contemporary ideas and habits of mind, an interpretative discussion of Gnostic thinking as it applies to Psychology, Existentialism, and Hermeneutics, is not amiss here. Once we have understood, to the extent of our ability, the philosophical import of Gnostic ideas, and how they relate to contemporary philosophical issues, then we may enter into the historical milieu of the Gnostics with some degree of confidence—a confidence devoid, to the extent that this is possible, of tainting exegetical presuppositions.
a. Psychology
Who are we? The answer to this question involves an account (logos) of the nature of the soul (psukhê or psyche); and the attempt to provide an answer has accordingly been dubbed the science or practice of “psychology”—an account of the soul or mind (psukhê, in ancient Greek, denoted both soul, as the principle of life, and mind, as the principle of intellect). Carl Jung, drawing upon Gnostic mythical schemas, identified the objectively oriented consciousness with the material or “fleshly” part of humankind—that is, with the part of the human being that is, according to the Gnostics, bound up in the cosmic cycle of generation and decay, and subject to the bonds of fate and time (cf. Apocryphon of John [Codex II] 28:30). The human being who identifies him/herself with the objectively existing world comes to construct a personality, a sense of self, that is, at base, fully dependent upon the ever-changing structures of temporal existence. The resulting lack of any sense of of permanence, of autonomy, leads such an individual to experience anxieties of all kinds, and eventually to shun the mysterious and collectively meaningful patterns of human existence in favor of a private and stifling subjective context, in the confines of which life plays itself out in the absence of any reference to a greater plan or scheme. Hopelessness, atheism, despair, are the results of such an existence. This is not the natural end of the human being, though; for, according to Jung (and the Gnostics) the temporally constructed self is not the true self. The true self is the supreme consciousness existing and persisting beyond all space and time. Jung calls this the pure consciousness or Self, in contradistinction to the “ego consciousness” which is the temporally constructed and maintained form of a discrete existent (cf. C.G. Jung, “Gnostic Symbols of the Self,” in The Gnostic Jung 1992, pp. 55-92). This latter form of “worldly” consciousness the Gnostics identified with soul (psukhê), while the pure or true Self they identified with spirit (pneuma)—that is, mind relieved of its temporal contacts and context. This distinction had an important career in Gnostic thought, and was adopted by St. Paul, most notably in his doctrine of the spiritual resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:44). The psychological or empirical basis of this view, which soon turns into a metaphysical or onto-theological attitude, is the recognized inability of the human mind to achieve its grandest designs while remaining subject to the rigid law and order of a disinterested and aloof cosmos. The spirit-soul distinction (which of course translates into, or perhaps presupposes, the more fundamental mind-body distinction) marks the beginning of a transcendentalist and soteriological attitude toward the cosmos and temporal existence in general.
b. Existentialism
The basic experience of existence, described by the philosophy that has become known as “Existentialism,” involves a general feeling of loneliness or abandonment (Geworfenheit, “having been thrown”) in/to a world that is not amenable to the primordial desires of the human being (cf. Jonas, p. 336). The recognition that the first or primal desire of the human being is for the actualization or positing of a concrete self or “I” (an autonomous and discrete individual existing and persisting amidst the flux and flow of temporal and external “reality”) leads to the disturbing realization that this world is not akin to the human being; for this world (so it seems) follows it own course, a course already mapped out and set in motion long before the advent of human consciousness. Furthermore, that the essential activity of the human being—that is, to actualize an autonomous self within the world—is carried out in opposition to a power or “will” (the force of nature) that always seems to thwart or subvert this supremely human endeavor, leads to the acknowledgment of an anti-human and therefore anti-intellectual power; and this power, since it seems to act, must also exist. However, the fact that its act does not manifest itself as a communication between humanity and nature (or pure objectivity), but rather as a mechanical process of blind necessity occurring apart from the human endeavor, places the human being in a superior position. For even though the force of nature may arbitrarily wipe out an individual human existent, just as easily as it brings one into existence, this natural force is not conscious of its activity. The human mind, on the other hand, is. And so a gap or fissure—a product of reflection—is set up, by which the human being may come to orient him/herself with and toward the world in which s/he exists and persists, for a brief moment. Martin Heidegger has described this brief moment of orientation with/in (toward) the world as “care” (Sorge), which is always a care or concern for the “moment” (Augenblick) within which all existence occurs; this “care” is understood as the product of humankind’s recognition of their unavoidable being-toward-death. But this orientation is never completed, since the human soul finds that it cannot achieve its purpose or complete actualization within the confines set by nature.
While the thwarting necessity of nature is, for the Existentialist, a simple, unquestioned fact; for the Gnostics it is the result of the malignant designs of an inferior god, the Demiurge, carried out through and by this ignorant deity’s own law. In other words, nature is, for modern Existentialism, merely indifferent, while for the Gnostics it was actively hostile toward the human endeavor. “[C]osmic law, once worshipped as the expression of a reason with which man’s reason can communicate in the act of cognition, is now seen only in its aspect of compulsion which thwarts man’s freedom” (Jonas, p. 328). Time and history come to be understood as the provenance of the human mind, over-against futile idealistic constructions like law and order, nomos and cosmos. Knowledge, at this point, becomes a concrete endeavor—a self-salvific task for the human race.
Becoming aware of itself, the self also discovers that it is not really its own, but is rather the involuntary executor of cosmic designs. Knowledge, gnosis, may liberate man from this servitude; but since the cosmos is contrary to life and to spirit, the saving knowledge cannot aim at integration into the cosmic whole and at compliance with its laws. For the Gnostics … man’s alienation from the world is to be deepened and brought to a head, for the extrication of the inner self which only thus can gain itself (Jonas, p. 329).
The obvious question, then—Where did we come from? – only becomes intelligible alongside and within the more dynamic question of Where are we heading?
c. Hermeneutics
In the context of ancient Greek thinking, hermêneia was usually associated with tekhnê, giving us the tekhnê hermêneutikê or “art of interpretation” discussed by Aristotle in his treatise De Interpretatione [Peri Hermêneias]. Interpretation or hermeneutics, according to Aristotle, does not bring us to a direct knowledge of the meaning of things, but only to an understanding of how things come to appear before us, and thereby to provide us with an avenue toward empirical knowledge, as it were.
Moreover, discourse is hermêneia because a discursive statement is a grasp of the real by meaningful expression, not a selection of so-called impressions coming from the things themselves (Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations 1974, p. 4).
In this sense, we may say that the “art of interpretation” is a distinctly historical method of understanding or coming to terms with reality. In other words, since our “expression” is always an ex-position, a going-out from the given forms or patterns of reality toward a living use of these forms with/in Life, then we, as human beings persisting in a realm of becoming, are responsible, in the last analysis, not for any eternal truths or “things in themselves,” but only for the forms these things take on within the context of a living and thinking existence. Knowledge or understanding, then, is not of immutable and eternal things in themselves, but rather of the process by which things—that is, ideas, objects, events, persons, etc.—become revealed within the existential or ontological process of coming-to-know. The attention to process and the emergence of meaning occurs on the most immediate experiential level of human existence, and therefore contains about it nothing of the metaphysical. However, the birth of metaphysics may be located within this primordial or phenomenal structure of basic “brute” experience; for it is the natural tendency of the human mind to order and arrange its data according to rational principles.
The question will inevitably arise, though, as to whence these rational principles derive: are they a derivative product of the phenomenal realm of experience? or are they somehow endemic to the human mind as such, and hence eternal? If we take the first question as an answer, we are led to phenomenology, which “discovers, in place of an idealist subject locked within [a] system of meanings, a living being which from all time has, as the horizon of all its intentions, a world, the world” (Ricoeur, p. 9). According to the general contemporary or “post-modern” formulation, such a “living being” is directed, intentionally, always and only toward a multiplicitous world or realm in which human activity itself becomes the sole object of knowledge, apart from any “transcendent” metaphysical ideals or schemas. For the Gnostics, on the other hand, who worked within and upon the latter question, giving it a positive, if somewhat mytho-poetical answer, rational principles, which seem to be culled from a mere contact with sensible reality, are held to be reminders of a unified existence that is an eternal possibility, open to anyone capable of transcending and, indeed, transgressing this realm of experience and process —that is, of history. This “transgression” consists in the act of balancing oneself with/in, and orienting oneself toward, history as an interplay of past and present, in which the individual is poised for a decision—either to succumb to the flux and flow of an essentially decentered cosmic existence, or to strive for a re-integration into a godhead that is only barely recollected, and more obscure than the immediate perceptions of reality.
i. Reception and Revelation
Where are we heading? This question is at the very heart of Gnostic exegesis, and indeed colors and directs all attempts at coming to terms, not only with the Hebrew Scriptures, which served as the main text of Gnostic interpretation, but with existence in general.
The standard hermeneutical approach, both in our own era, and in Late Hellenistic times, is the receptive approach—that is, an engagement with texts of the past governed by the belief, on the part of the interpreter, that these texts have something to teach us. Whether we struggle to overcome our own “prejudices” or presuppositions, which are the inevitable result of our belonging to a particular tradition by way of the hermeneutical act (Gadamer), or allow our prejudices to shape our reading of a text, in an act of “creative misprision” (Bloom) we are still acknowledging, in some way, our debt to or dependence upon the text with which we are engaged. The Gnostics, in their reading of Scripture, acknowledged no such debt; for they believed that the Hebrew Bible was the written revelation of an inferior creator god (dêmiourgos), filled with lies intended to cloud the minds and judgment of the spiritual human beings (pneumatikoi) whom this Demiurge was intent on enslaving in his material cosmos.
Indeed, while the receptive hermeneutical method implies that we have something to learn from a text, the method employed by the Gnostics, which we may call the “revelatory” method, was founded upon the idea that they (the Gnostics) had received a supra-cosmic revelation, either in the form of a “call,” or a vision, or even, perhaps, through the exercise of philosophical dialectic. This “revelation” was the knowledge (gnôsis) that humankind is alien to this realm, and possesses a “home on high” within the plêrôma, the “Fullness,” where all the rational desires of the human mind come to full and perfect fruition. On this belief, all knowledge belonged to these Gnostics, and any interpretation of the biblical text would be for the purpose of explaining the true nature of things by elucidating the errors and distortions of the Demiurge. This approach treated the past as something already overcome yet still “present,” insofar as certain members of the human race were still laboring under the old law—that is, were still reading the Scriptures in the receptive manner. The Gnostic, insofar as he still remained within the world, as an existing being, was, on the other hand, both present and future. That is to say, the Gnostic embodied within himself the salvific dynamism of a history that had broken from the constraint of a tyrannical past, and found the freedom to invent itself anew. The Gnostic understood himself to be at once at the center and at the end or culmination of this history, and this idea or ideal was reflected most powerfully in ancient Gnostic exegesis. We must now turn to a discussion of the concrete results of this hermeneutical method.
2. The Gnostic Mytho-Logos
The Gnostic Idea or Notion was not informed by a philosophical world-view or procedure. Rather, the Gnostic vision of the world was based upon the intuition of a radical and seemingly irreparable rupture between the realm of experience (pathos) and the realm of true Being—that is, existence in its positive, creative, or authentic aspect.
The problem faced by the Gnostics was how to explain such a radical, pre-philosophical intuition. This intuition is “pre-philosophical” because the brute experience of existing in a world that is alien to humankind’s aspirations may submit itself to a variety of interpretations. And the attempt at an interpretation may take on the form of either muthos or logos—either a merely descriptive rendering of the experience, or a rationally ordered account of such an experience, including an explanation of its origins. The ancient Greek explanation of this experience was to call it a primal “awe” or “wonder” felt by the human being as he faces the world that stands so radically apart from him, and to posit this experience as the beginning of philosophy (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b 10-25 and Plato, Theaetetus 155d). But the Gnostics recognized this “awe” as the product of a radical disruption of the harmony of a realm persisting beyond becoming—that is, beyond “becoming” in the sense of pathos, or “that which is undergone.” The muthos always corresponds to the “first-hand” account rendered by one who has undergone, immediately, the effect of a certain event. The myth is always an explanation of something already known, and therefore carries its truth-claim along with it, just as the immediacy of an event forbids any doubt or questioning on the part of the one undergoing it. The logos, on the other hand, is the product of a careful reflection (dianoia), and refers, for its truth-value, not to the immediate moment of “grasping” a phenomenon (prolêpsis), but to the moment of reflection during which one attains a conceptual knowledge of the phenomenon, and first comes to “know” it as such—this is gnôsis: insight. The direct result of this gnôsis is the emergence from the sense of existence as pathos, to the actuality of being as aisthêsis—that is, reception and judgment of experience by way of purely rational or divine criteria. Such criteria proceeds directly from the logos, or divine “ordering principle,” to which the Gnostics believed themselves to be related, by way of a divine genealogy. Although Gnostic onto-theology proceeds by way of an elaborate myth, it is a myth informed always by the logos, and is, in this sense, a true mythology—that is, a rendering, in the immediacy of language, of that which is ever-present (to the Gnostic) as a product of privileged reflection.
a. The Myth of Sophia
According to Gnostic mythology (in general) We, humanity, are existing in this realm because a member of the transcendent godhead, Sophia (Wisdom), desired to actualize her innate potential for creativity without the approval of her partner or divine consort. Her hubris, in this regard, stood forth as raw materiality, and her desire, which was for the mysterious ineffable Father, manifested itself as Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge, that renegade principle of generation and corruption which, by its unalterable necessity, brings all beings to life, for a brief moment, and then to death for eternity. However, since even the Pleroma itself is not, according to the Gnostics, exempt from desire or passion, there must come into play a salvific event or savior—that is, Christ, the Logos, the “messenger,” etc.—who descends to the material realm for the purpose of negating all passion, and raising the innocent human “sparks” (which fell from Sophia) back up to the Pleroma (cf. Apocryphon of John [Codex II] 9:25-25:14 ff.).
This process of re-integration with/in the godhead is one of the basic features of the Gnostic myth. The purpose of this re-integration (implicitly) is to establish a series of existents that are ontologically posterior to Sophia, and are the concrete embodiment of her “disruptive” desire—within the unified arena of the Pleroma. Indeed, if the Pleroma is really the Fullness, containing all things, it must contain the manifold principles of Wisdom’s longing. In this sense, we must not view Gnostic salvation as a simply one-sided affair. The divine “sparks” that fell from Sophia, during her “passion,” are un-integrated aspects of the godhead. We may say, then, that in the Hegelian sense the Gnostic Supreme God is seeking, eternally, His own actualization by way of full self-consciousness (cf. G.W.F. Hegel, History of Philosophy vol. 2, pp. 396-399).
But it is not really this simple. The Supreme God of the Gnostics effortlessly generates the Pleroma, and yet (or for this very reason!) this Pleroma comes to act independently of the Father. This is because all members of the Pleroma (known as Aeons) are themselves “roots and springs and fathers” (Tripartite Tractate 68:10) carrying Time within themselves, as a condition of their Being. When the disruption, brought about by the desire of Sophia, disturbed the Pleroma, this was not understood as a disturbance of an already established unity, but rather as the disturbance of an insupportable stasis that had come to be observed as divine. Indeed, when the Greeks first looked to the sky and admired the regularity of the rotations of the stars and planets, what they were admiring, according to the Gnostics, was not the image of divinity, but the image or representation of a “divine” stagnancy, a law and order that stifled freedom, which is the root of desire (cf. Jonas, pp. 260-261). The passion of Sophia—her production of the Demiurge, his enslavement of the human “sparks” in the material cosmos, and the subsequent redemption and restoration—are but one episode in the infinite, unfolding drama of spiritual existence. We, as human beings, just happen to be the unwitting victims of this particular drama. But if, as the Gnostics hold, our salvation consists in our becoming gods (Poimandres 26) or “lord[s] over creation and all corruption” (Valentinus, Fragment F, Layton) then how are we to be confident that, in ages to come, one of us will not give birth to another damned cosmos, just as Sophia had done?
b. Christian Gnosticism
The Christian idea that God has sent his only “Son” (the Logos) to suffer and die for the sins of all humankind, and so make possible the salvation of all, had a deep impact on Gnostic thought. In the extensive and important collection of Gnostic writings discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945, only a handful present the possibility of having originated in a pre-Christian, mostly Hellenistic Jewish milieu. The majority of these texts are Christian Gnostic writings from the early second to late third centuries CE, and perhaps a bit later. When we consider the notion of salvation and its meaning for the early Gnostics, who stressed the creative aspect of our post-salvific existence, we are struck by the bold assertion that our need for salvation arose, in the first place, from an error committed by a divine being, Sophia (Wisdom), during the course of her own creative act (cf. Apocryphon of John [Codex II] 9:25-10:6). Since this is the case, how, we are led to ask, will our post-salvation existence be any less prone to error or ignorance, even evil? The radical message of early Christianity provided the answer to this problematical question; and so the Gnostics took up the Christian idea and transformed it, by the power of their singular mytho-logical technique, into a philosophically and theologically complex speculative schema.
i. Basilides
The Christian philosopher Basilides of Alexandria (fl. 132-135 CE) developed a cosmology and cosmogony quite distinct from the Sophia myth of classical Gnosticism, and also reinterpreted key Christian concepts by way of the popular Stoic philosophy of the era. Basilides began his system with a “primal octet” consisting of the “unengendered parent” or Father; Intellect (nous); the “ordering principle” or “Word” (logos); “prudence” (phronêsis); Wisdom (sophia); Power (dunamis) (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.3, in Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures 1987) and “justice” and “peace” (Basilides, Fragment A, Layton). Through the union of Wisdom and Power, a group of angelic rulers came into existence, and from these rulers a total of 365 heavens or aeons were generated (Irenaeus 1.24.3). Each heaven had its own chief ruler (arkhôn), and numerous lesser angels. The final heaven, which Basilides claimed is the realm of matter in which we all dwell, was said by him to be ruled by “the god of the Jews,” who favored the Jewish nation over all others, and so caused all manner of strife for the nations that came into contact with them—as well as for the Jewish people themselves. This behavior caused the rulers of the other 364 heavens to oppose the god of the Jews, and to send a savior, Jesus Christ, from the highest realm of the Father, to rescue the human beings who are struggling under the yoke of this jealous god (Irenaeus 1.24.4). Since the realm of matter is the sole provenance of this spiteful god, Basilides finds nothing of value in it, and states that “[s]alvation belongs only to the soul; the body is by nature corruptible” (Irenaeus 1.24.5). He even goes so far as to declare, contra Christian orthodoxy, that Christ’s death on the cross was only apparent, and did not actually occur “in the flesh” (Irenaeus 1.24.4)—this doctrine came to be called docetism.
The notion that material existence is the product of a jealous and corrupt creator god, who favors one race over all others, is really the “mythical” expression of a deeply rooted ethical belief that the source of all evil is material or bodily existence. Indeed, Basilides goes so far as to assert that sin is the direct outcome of bodily existence, and that human suffering is the punishment either for actual sins committed, or even just for the general inclination to sin, which arises from the bodily impulses (cf. Fragments F and G). In an adaptation of Stoic ethical categories, Basilides declares that faith (pistis) “is not the rational assent of a soul possessing free will” (Fragment C); rather, faith is the natural mode of existence, and consequently, anyone living in accordance with the “law of nature” (pronoia), which Basilides calls the “kingdom,” will remain free from the bodily impulses, and exist in a state of “salvation” (Fragment C). However, Basilides goes beyond simple Stoic doctrine in his belief that the “elect,” that is, those who exist by faith, “are alien to the world, as if they were transcendent by nature” (Fragment E); for unlike the Stoics, who believed in a single, material cosmos, Basilides held the view, as we have seen, that the cosmos is composed of numerous heavens, with the material realm as the final heaven, and consequently corrupt. Since this final heaven represents the “last gasp” of divine emanation, as it were, and is by no means a perfect image of true divinity, adherence to its laws can lead to no good. Further, since the body is the means by which the ruler of this material cosmos enforces his law, freedom can only be attained by abandoning or “becoming indifferent to” all bodily impulses and desires. This indifference (adiaphoria) to bodily impulses, however, does not lead to a simple stagnant asceticism. Basilides does not call upon his hearers to abandon the material realm only to dissolve into negativity; instead, he offers them a new life, by appealing to the grand hierarchy of rulers persisting above the material realm (cf. Fragment D). When one turns to the greater hierarchy of Being, there results a “creation of good things” (Fragment C, translation modified). Love and personal creation—the begetting of the Good—are the final result of Basilides’ vaguely dialectical system, and for this reason it is one of the most important early expressions of a truly Christian, if not “orthodox,” philosophy.
ii. Marcion
Marcion of Sinope, in Pontus, was a contemporary of Basilides. According to Tertullian, he started his career as an orthodox Christian—whatever that meant at such an early stage of development of Christian doctrine—but soon formulated the remarkable and radical doctrine that was to lead to his excommunication from the Roman Church in July 144 CE, the traditional date of the founding of the Marcionite Church (Tertullian, Against Marcion 1.1; cf. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis 1984, p. 314). The teaching of Marcion is elegantly simple: “the God proclaimed by the law and the prophets is not the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The God (of the Old Testament) is known, but the latter (the Father of Jesus Christ) is unknown. The one is just, but the other is good” (Irenaeus 1.27.1). Marcion believed that this cosmos in which we live bears witness to the existence of an inflexible, legalistic, and sometimes spiteful and vengeful God. This view arose from a quite literal reading of the Old Testament, which does contain several passages describing God in terms not quite conducive to divinity—or at least to the idea of the divine that was current in the Hellenistic era. Marcion then, following Paul (in Romans 1:20) declared that God is knowable through His creation; however, unlike Paul, Marcion did not take this “natural revelation” as evidence of God’s singularity and goodness. Quite the contrary, Marcion believed that he knew the God of this realm all too well, and that He was not worthy of the devotion and obedience that He demanded. Therefore, Marcion rejected the teaching of the orthodox Christian Church of his era, that Yahweh (or Jehovah) is the Father of Christ, and, through a creative excision of what he termed “Judaistic interpolations” in Luke and ten Pauline Epistles, Marcion simultaneously put forth his notion of the “alien God” and His act of salvation, and established the first Canon of Scripture used in a “Christian” Church (Jonas, pp. 145-146).
Marcion was not a philosopher in the sense that term has come to imply. He never developed, as far as we can tell from the surviving evidence, a systematic metaphysical, cosmological, or anthropological theory in the manner of a Basilides or a Valentinus (whom we shall discuss below), nor did he appeal to history as a witness for his doctrines. This latter point is the most important. Unlike the majority of Gnostics, who elaborated some sort of divine genealogy (e.g., the Sophia myth) to account for the presence of corruption and strife in the world, Marcion simply posited two opposed and irreducible Gods: the biblical god, and the unknown or “alien” God, who is the Father of Christ. According to Marcion, the god who controls this realm is a being who is intent on preserving his autonomy and power even at the expense of the (human) beings whom he created. The “alien” God, who is the Supremely Good, is a “god of injection,” for he enters this realm from outside, in order to gratuitously adopt the pitiful human beings who remain under the sway of the inferior god as His own children. This act is the origin of and reason for the Incarnation of Christ, according to Marcion.
In spite of the absence of any solid philosophical or theological foundation for this rather simple formulation, Marcion’s idea nevertheless expresses, in a somewhat crude and immediate form, a basic truth of human existence: that the desires of the Mind are incommensurable with the nature of material existence (cf. Irenaeus 1.27.2-3). Yet, if we follow Marcion’s argument to its logical (or perhaps “anti-logical”) conclusion, we discover an existential expression (not a philosophy) of the primal feeling of “abandonment” (Geworfenheit). This expression plays upon the subtle yet poignant opposition of “love of wisdom” (philosophia) and “complete wisdom” (plêrosophia). We are alone in a world that does not lend itself to our quest for unalterable truth, and so we befriend wisdom, which is the way of or manner in which we attain this intuited truth. According to Marcion, this truth is not to be found in this world—all that is to be found is the desire for this truth, which arises amongst human beings. However, since this desire, on the part of human beings, only produces various philosophies, none of which can hold claim to the absolute truth, Marcion concludes that the noetic beings (humans) of this realm are capable of nothing more than a shadow of wisdom. It is only by way of the guidance and grace of an alien and purely good God that humankind will rise to the level of plêrosophia or complete wisdom (cf. Colossians 2:2 ff.). Moreover, instead of attempting to discover the historical connection between the revelation of Christ and the teachings of the Old Testament, Marcion simply rejected the latter in favor of the former, on the belief that only the Gospel (thoughtfully edited by Marcion himself) points us toward complete wisdom (Irenaeus 1.27.2-3; Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.3).
While other Christian thinkers of the era were busy allegorizing the Old Testament in order to bring it into line with New Testament teaching, Marcion allowed the New Testament (albeit in his own special version) to speak to him as a singular voice of authority—and he formulated his doctrine accordingly. This doctrine emphasized not only humankind’s radical alienation from the realm of their birth, but also their lack of any genealogical relation to the God who sacrificed His own Son to save them—in other words, Marcion painted a picture of humanity as a race displaced, with no true home at all (cf. Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism 1992, p. 164). The hope of searching for a lost home, or of returning to a home from which one has been turned out, was absent in the doctrine of Marcion. Like Pico della Mirandola, Marcion declared the nature of humankind to be that of an eternally intermediate entity, poised precariously between heaven and earth (cp. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 3). However, unlike Pico, Marcion called for a radical displacement of humankind—a “rupture”—in which humanity would awaken to its full (if not innate) possibilities.
iii. Valentinus and the Valentinian School
The great Christian teacher and philosopher Valentinus (ca. 100-175 CE) spent his formative years in Alexandria, where he probably came into contact with Basilides. Valentinus later went to Rome, where he began his public teaching career, which was so successful that he actually had a serious chance of being elected Bishop of Rome. He lost the election, however, and with it Gnosticism lost the chance of becoming synonymous with Christianity, and hence a world religion. This is not to say that Valentinus failed to influence the development of Christian theology—he most certainly did, as we shall see below. It was through Valentinus, perhaps more than any other Christian thinker of his time, that Platonic philosophy, rhetorical elegance, and a deep, interpretive knowledge of scripture became introduced together into the realm of Christian theology. The achievement of Valentinus remained unmatched for nearly a century, until the incomparable Origen came on the scene. Yet even then, it may not be amiss to suggest that Origen never would have “happened” had it not been for the example of Valentinus.
The cosmology of Valentinus began, not with a unity, but with a primal duality, a dyad, composed of two entities called “the Ineffable” and “Silence.” From these initial beings a second dyad of “Parent” and “Truth” was generated. These beings finally engendered a quaternity of “Word” (logos), “Life” (zôê), “Human Being” (anthropos), and “Church” (ekklêsia). Valentinus refers to this divine collectivity as the “first octet” (Irenaeus 1.11.1). This octet produced several other beings, one of which revolted or “turned away,” as Irenaeus tells us, and set in motion the divine drama that would eventually produce the cosmos. According to Irenaeus, who was writing only about five years after the death of Valentinus, and in whose treatise Against Heresies the outline of Valentinus’ cosmology is preserved, the entity responsible for initiating the drama is referred to simply as “the mother,” by which is probably meant Sophia (Wisdom). From this “mother” both matter (hulê) and the savior, Christ, were generated. The realm of matter is described as a “shadow,” produced from the “mother,” and from which Christ distanced himself and “hastened up into the fullness” (Irenaeus 1.11.1; cp. Poimandres 5). At this point the “mother” produced another “child,” the “craftsman” (dêmiourgos) responsible for the creation of the cosmos. In the account preserved by Irenaeus, we are told nothing of any cosmic drama in which “divine sparks” are trapped in fleshly bodies through the designs of the Demiurge. However, it is to be assumed that Valentinus did expound an anthropology similar to that of the classical Sophia myth (as represented, for example, in the Apocryphon of John; cf. also The Hypostasis of the Archons, and the Apocalypse of Adam), especially since his school, as represented most significantly by his star pupil Ptolemy (see below), came to develop a highly complex anthropological myth that must have grown out of a simpler model provided by Valentinus himself. The account preserved in Irenaeus ends with a description of a somewhat confused doctrine of a heavenly and an earthly Christ, and a brief passage on the role of the Holy Spirit (Irenaeus 1.11.1). From this one gets the idea that Valentinus was flirting with a primitive doctrine of the Trinity. Indeed, according to the fourth century theologian Marcellus of Ancyra, Valentinus was “the first to devise the notion of three subsistent entities (hypostases), in a work that he entitled On the Three Natures” (Valentinus, Fragment B, Layton).
Valentinus was certainly the most overtly Christian of the Gnostic philosophers of his era. We have seen how the thought of Basilides was pervaded by a Stoicizing tendency, and how Marcion felt the need to go beyond scripture to posit an “alien” redeemer God. Valentinus, on the other hand, seems to have been informed, in his speculations, primarily by Jewish and Christian scripture and exegesis, and only secondarily by “pagan” philosophy, particularly Platonism. This is most pronounced in his particular version of the familiar theological notion of “election” or “pre-destination,” in which it is declared (following Paul in Romans 8:29) that God chose certain individuals, before the beginning of time, for salvation. Valentinus writes, in what is probably a remnant of a sermon:
From the beginning you [the "elect" or Gnostic Christians] have been immortal, and you are children of eternal life. And you wanted death to be allocated to yourselves so that you might spend it and use it up, and that death might die in you and through you. For when you nullify the world and are not yourselves annihilated, you are lord over creation and all corruption (Valentinus, Fragment F).
This seems to be Valentinus’ response to the dilemma of the permanence of salvation: since Sophia or the divine “mother,” a member of the Pleroma, had fallen into error, how can we be sure that we will not make the same or a similar mistake after we have reached the fullness? By declaring that it is the role and task of the “elect” or Gnostic Christian to use up death and nullify the world, Valentinus is making clear his position that these elite souls are fellow saviors of the world, along with Jesus, who was the first to take on the sin and corruption inherent in the material realm (cf. Irenaeus 1.11.1; and Layton p. 240). Therefore, since “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), any being who is capable of destroying death must be incapable of sin. For Valentinus, then, the individual who is predestined for salvation is also predestined for a sort of divine stewardship that involves an active hand in history, and not a mere repose with God, or even a blissful existence of loving creation, as Basilides held. Like Paul, Valentinus demanded that his hearers recognize their createdness. However, unlike Paul, they recognized their creator as the “Ineffable Parent,” and not as the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. The task of Christian hermeneutics after Valentinus was to prove the continuity of the Old and New Testament. In this regard, as well as in the general spirituality of his teaching—not to mention his primitive trinitarian doctrine—Valentinus had an incalculable impact on the development of Christianity.
1) The System of Ptolemy
Ptolemy (or Ptolemaeus, fl. 140 CE) was described by St. Irenaeus as “the blossom of Valentinus’ school” (Layton, p. 276). We know next to nothing about his life, except the two writings that have come down to us: the elaborate Valentinian philosophical myth preserved in Irenaeus, and Ptolemy’s Epistle to Flora, preserved verbatim by St. Epiphanius. In the former we are met with a grand elaboration, by Ptolemy, of Valentinus’ own system, which contains a complex anthropological myth centering around the passion of Sophia. We also find, in both the myth and the Epistle, Ptolemy making an attempt to bring Hebrew Scripture into line with Gnostic teaching and New Testament allegorization in a manner heretofore unprecedented among the Gnostics.
In the system of Ptolemy we are explicitly told that the cause of Sophia’s fall was her desire to know the ineffable Father. Since the purpose of the Father’s generating of the Aeons (of which Sophia was the last) was to “elevate all of them into thought” (Irenaeus 1.2.1) it was not permitted for any Aeon to attain a full knowledge of the Father. The purpose of the Pleroma was to exist as a living, collective expression of the intellectual magnitude of the Father, and if any single being within the Pleroma were to attain to the Father, all life would cease. This idea is based on an essentially positive attitude toward existence—that is, existence understood in the sense of striving, not for a reposeful end, but for an ever-increasing degree of creative or “constitutive” insight. The goal, on this view, is to produce through wisdom, and not simply to attain wisdom as an object or end in itself. Such an existence is not characterized by desire for an object, but rather by desire for the ability to persist in creative, constitutive engagement with/in one’s own “circumstance” (circumscribed stance or individual arena). When Sophia desired to know the Father, then, what she was desiring was her own dissolution in favor of an envelopment in that which made her existence possible in the first place. This amounted to a rejection of the gift of the Father—that is, of the gift of individual existence and life. It is for this reason that Sophia was not permitted to know the Father, but was turned back by the “boundary” (horos) that separates the Pleroma from the “ineffable magnitude” of the Father (Irenaeus 1.2.2).
The remainder of Ptolemy’s account is concerned with the production of the material cosmos out of the hypostatized “passions” of Sophia, and the activity of the Savior (Jesus Christ) in arranging these initially chaotic passions into a structured hierarchy of existents (Irenaeus 1.4.5 ff., and cp. Colossians 1:16). Three classes of human beings come into existence through this arrangement: the “material” (hulikos), the “animate” (psukhikos), and the “spiritual” (pneumatikos). The “material” humans are those who have not attained to intellectual life, and so place their hopes only upon that which is perishable—for these there is no hope of salvation. The “animate” are those who have only a half-formed conception of the true God, and so must live a life devoted to holy works, and persistence in faith; according to Ptolemy, these are the “ordinary” Christians. Finally, there are the “spiritual” humans, the Gnostics, who need no faith, since they have actual knowledge (gnôsis) of intellectual reality, and are thus saved by nature (Irenaeus 1.6.2, 1.6.4). The Valentinian-Ptolemaic notion of salvation rests on the idea that the cosmos is the concrete manifestation or hypostatization of the desire of Sophia for knowledge of the Father, and the “passions” her failure produced. The history of salvation, then, for human beings, has the character of an external manifestation of the threefold process of Sophia’s own redemption: recognition of her passion; her consequent “turning back” (epistrophê); and finally, her act of spiritual production, whence arose Gnostic humanity (cf. Irenaeus 1.5.1). Salvation, then, in its final form, must imply a sort of spiritual creation on the part of the Gnostics who attain the Pleroma. The “animate” humans, however, who are composed partly of corruptible matter and partly of the spiritual essence, must remain content with a simple restful existence with the craftsman of the cosmos, since no material element can enter the Pleroma (Irenaeus 1.7.1).
In his Epistle to Flora (in Epiphanius 33.3.1-33.7.10), which is an attempt to convert an “ordinary” Christian woman to his brand of Valentinian Christianity, Ptolemy clearly formulates his doctrine of the relation between the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, who is merely “just,” and the Ineffable Father, who is the Supreme Good. Rather than simply declaring these two gods to be unrelated, as did Marcion, Ptolemy develops a complex, allegorical reading of the Hebrew Scriptures in relation to the New Testament in order to establish a genealogy connecting the Pleroma, Sophia and her “passion,” the Demiurge, and the salvific activity of Jesus Christ. The scope and rigor of Ptolemy’s work, and the influence it came to exercise on emerging Christian orthodoxy, qualifies him as one of the most important of the early Christian theologians, both proto-orthodox and “heretical.”
c. Mani and Manichaeism
The world religion founded by Mani (216-276 CE) and known to history as Manichaeism has its roots in the East, borrowing elements from Persian dualistic religion (Zoroastrianism), Jewish Christianity, Buddhism, and even Mithraism. The system developed by Mani was self-consciously syncretistic, which was a natural outgrowth of his desire to see his religion reach the ends of the earth. This desire was fulfilled, and until the late Middle Ages, Manichaeism remained a world religion, stretching from China to Western Europe. It is now completely extinct. The religion began when its founder experienced a series of visions, in which the Holy Spirit supposedly appeared to him, ordering him to preach the revelation of Light to the ends of the earth. Mani came to view himself as the last in a series of great prophets including Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Paul (Rudolph, p. 339). His highly complex myth of the origin of the cosmos and of humankind drew on various elements culled from these several traditions and teachings. The doctrine of Mani is not “philosophical,” in the manner of Basilides, Valentinus or Ptolemy; for Mani’s teaching was not the product of a more or less rational or systematic speculation about the godhead, resulting in Gnosis, but the wholly creative product of what he felt to be a revelation from the divinity itself. It is for this reason that Mani’s followers revered him as the redeemer and holy teacher of humankind (Rudolph, p. 339). Since Manichaeism belongs more to the history of religion than to philosophy proper (or even the fringes of philosophy, as does Western Gnosticism), it will suffice to say only a few words about the system, if for no other reason than that the great Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo had followed the Manichaen religion for several years, before converting to Christianity (cf. Augustine, Confessions III.10).
The main point of distinction between the doctrine of Mani and the Western branch of Gnosticism (Basilides, Valentinus, etc.), is that in Manichaeism the “cosmology is subservient to the soteriology” (Rudolph, p. 336). This means, essentially, that Mani began with a fundamental belief about the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos, and concocted a myth to explain the situation of humankind, and the dynamics of humanity’s eventual salvation. The details of the cosmology were apparently not important, their sole purpose being to illustrate, poetically, the dangers facing the souls dwelling in this “realm of darkness” as well as the manner of their redemption from this place. The Manichaean cosmology began with two opposed first principles, as in Zoroastrianism: the God of Light, and the Ruler of Darkness. This Darkness, being of a chaotic nature, assails the “Kingdom of Light” in an attempt to overthrow or perhaps assimilate it. The “King of the Paradise of Light,” then, goes on the defensive, as it were, and brings forth Wisdom, who in her turn gives birth to the Primal Man, also called Ohrmazd (or Ahura-Mazda). This Primal Man possesses a pentadic soul, consisting of fire, water, wind, light, and ether. Armored with this soul, the Primal Man descends into the Realm of Darkness to battle with its Ruler. Surprisingly, the Primal Man is defeated, and his soul scattered throughout the Realm of Darkness. However, the Manichaeans understood this as a plan on the part of the Ruler of Light to sow the seeds of resistance within the Darkness, making possible the eventual overthrow of the chaotic realm. To this end, a second “Living Spirit” is brought forth, who was also called Mithra. This being, and his partner, “Light-Adamas,” set in motion the history of salvation by putting forth the “call” within the realm of darkness, which recalls the scattered particles of light (from the vanquished soul of Ohrmazd). These scattered particles “answer” Mithra, and the result is the formation of the heavens and earth, the stars and planets, and finally, the establishment of the twelve signs of the zodiac and the ordered revolution of the cosmic sphere, through which, by a gradual process, the scattered particles of light will eventually be returned to the Realm of Light. The Manichaeans believed that these particles ascend to the moon, and that when the moon is full, it empties these particles into the sun, from whence they ascend to the “new Aeon,” also identified with Mithra, the “Living Spirit” (Rudolph, pp. 336-337). This process will continue throughout the ages of the world, until all the particles eventually reach their proper home and the salvation of the godhead is complete.
It should be clear from this brief exposition that humanity as such does not hold the prime place in the salvific drama of Manichaeism, but rather a part of the godhead itself—that is, the scattered soul of Ohrmazd. The purpose of humanity in this scheme is to aid the particles of light in their ascent to the godhead. Of course, these particles dwell within every living thing, and so the salvation of these particles is the salvation of humanity, but only by default, as it were; humanity does not hold a privileged position in Manichaeism, as it does in the Western or strictly Christian Gnostic schools. This belief led the Manichaeans to establish strict dietary and purity laws, and even to require selected members of their church to provide meals for the “Elect,” so that the latter would not become defiled by harming anything containing light particles. All of this, however, is a long way from philosophy. Hans Jonas was right to describe Manichaeism as representing “a more archaic level of gnostic thought” (Jonas, p. 206). Now that we have examined one of the non-philosophical directions taken by Gnostic thought, let us proceed to discuss its role in the philosophical development of the era.
3. Platonism and Gnosticism
Long before the advent of Gnosticism, Plato had posited two contrary World Souls: one “which does good” and one “which has the opposite capacity” (Plato, Laws X. 896e, tr. Saunders). For Plato, this did not imply that the cosmos is under the control of a corrupt or ignorant god, as it did for the Gnostics, but simply that this cosmos, like the human soul, possesses a rational and an irrational part, and that it is the task of the rational part to govern the irrational. The question arose, however, among Platonists, regarding Plato’s true position on this matter. Was he declaring that a part of the cosmos is evil? or that the divine Demiurge (who, in the highly influential Timaeus account, is said to have crafted the cosmos) actually produced an evil soul? Both of these conjectures flew in the face of everything that the ancient thinkers believed about the cosmos—that is, that it was divine, orderly, and perfect. A common solution, among both Platonists and Pythagoreans, was to interpret the second or “evil” Soul as Matter, that is, the material or generative principle, which is the opposite of the truly divine and unchanging Forms. The purpose of the Intellectual principle, or the “good” Soul, is to bring this disorderly principle under the control of reason, and thereby maintain an everlasting but not eternal cosmos (cf. Timaeus 37d). Since the cosmos, according to Plato in the Timaeus, cannot be as perfect as the eternal image upon which it is founded, a generative principle is necessary to maintain the “living creature” (which is precisely how the cosmos is described), and therefore not really “evil,” even though it possesses the “opposite capacity” (generation, and hence, corruption) from that of the Good or Rational Soul.
a. Numenius of Apamea and Neo-Platonism
Several centuries after Plato, around the time when the great Gnostic thinkers like Valentinus and Ptolemy were developing their systems, we encounter the Platonic philosopher Numenius of Apamea (fl. 150 CE). The main ideas of Numenius’ philosophy, preserved in the fragments of his writings that survive, bear clear traces of Gnostic influence. His cosmology describes, in language strikingly similar to that of the Gnostics, the degradation of the divine dêmiourgos upon his contact with pre-existent Matter (hulê, or the “indefinite” principle):
[I]n the process of coming into contact with Matter, which is the Dyad, [the Demiurge] gives unity to it, but is Himself divided by it, since Matter has a character prone to desire [epithumêtikon êthos] and is in flux. So in virtue of not being in contact with the Intelligible (which would mean being turned in upon Himself), by reason of looking towards Matter and taking thought for it, He becomes unregarding (aperioptos) of Himself. And he seizes upon the sense realm and ministers to it and yet draws it up to His own character, as a result of this yearning towards Matter [eporexamenos tês hulês] (Numenius, Fragment 11, in Dillon 1977, The Middle Platonists, pp. 367-368).
In this fragment, Numenius is transferring a basic Gnostic anthropological idea into the realm of cosmology. It is a common feature of Gnostic systems to describe the individual human soul’s contact with the material realm as resulting in a forgetting of the soul’s true origin. Platonism, also, warned against the soul’s becoming too attached to the realm of the senses, since this realm is changing and illusory, and does not accurately reflect the divinity. However, neither Platonism nor Gnosticism described such a danger as affecting, in any way, the Demiurge; for the Gnostics declared the Demiurge to be just as much a part of the cosmos as he was its ruler, and the orthodox Platonists located the Demiurge outside the cosmos, declaring the cosmos to be self-sufficient (following Timaeus 34b). Numenius, however, went further and bridged the gap between the sensible cosmos and the Intelligible Realm by linking the Demiurge to the latter by way of contemplation, and to the former by way of his “desire” (orexis) for matter. In Fragment 18, Numenius tells us that the Demiurge derives his “critical faculty” (kritikon) from his contemplation of the Good, and his “impulsive faculty” (hormêtikon) from his attachment to Matter (Dillon, p. 370). This idea seems to foreshadow Plotinus’ doctrine that the individual soul will always take on certain characteristics of Matter, and that these characteristics manifest themselves in the form of sense perceptions that must be brought under the controlling influence of rational judgment (cf. Enneads I.8.9 and I.1.7). Unlike Plotinus, however, who leaves the World-Soul or active part of the Demiurge safely beyond the affective cosmic realm, Numenius posits a Demiurge that is both transcendent and immanent, and arrives at a doctrine of a cosmos that, even on the highest level—the level of the celestial bodies—is not devoid of evil influence, since even the Demiurge, the highest cosmic deity, is infected by the tainting influence of Matter. “This importation of evil into the celestial realm is surely more Gnostic than Platonist, and did not comment itself to such successors as Plotinus or Porphyry, though it does seem to be accepted by Iamblichus” (Dillon, p. 374).
Plotinus, during the height of his teaching career at Rome (ca. 255 CE), composed a treatise “Against Those Who Declare the Creator of This World, and the World Itself, to be Evil,” also known, simply, as “Against the Gnostics” (Ennead II.9) in which he argues for the divinity and goodness of the cosmos, and upholds the ancient Greek belief in the divinity of the stars and planets, declaring them to be our “noble brethren,” and responsible only for the good things that befall humankind. Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus, tells us that Plotinus commissioned him, along with his fellow student Amelius, to write more treatises attacking the Gnostics on points that Plotinus skipped over (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 16). Porphyry also mentions by name two Gnostic treatises that were discovered in Egypt in 1945, and are now readily available to scholars: Zostrianos, and Allogenes, in the Nag Hammadi Collection of Codices. These texts, as well as the Tripartite Tractate (also in the Nag Hammadi Collection) show how tightly Platonism and Gnosticism were intertwined in the early centuries of our era.
4. Concluding Summary
Gnosticism began with the same basic, pre-philosophical intuition that guided the development of Greek philosophy—that there is a dichotomy between the realm of true, unchanging Being, and ever-changing Becoming. However, unlike the Greeks, who strived to find the connection between and overall unity of these two “realms,” the Gnostics amplified the differences, and developed a mytho-logical doctrine of humankind’s origin in the realm of Being, and eventual fall into the realm of darkness or matter, that is, Becoming. This general Gnostic myth came to exercise an influence on emerging Christianity, as well as upon Platonic philosophy, and even, in the East, developed into a world religion (Manichaeism) that spread across the known world, surviving until the late Middle Ages. In the twentieth century, there began a renewed interest in Gnostic ideas, particularly in the pioneering work of Hans Jonas, the Existentialist philosopher and student of Martin Heidegger. The psychologist Carl Jung, as well, drew upon Gnostic motifs in his theoretical work, and the increasing emphasis on Hermeneutics in late twentieth century thought owes something to the analyses of Gnostic myth and exegesis done by Harold Bloom, Paul Ricoeur, and others.
More than any of these accomplishments, however, it was the discovery in 1945, in Egypt, of a large collection of Coptic Gnostic codices, now known as the Nag Hammadi Collection, or the Nag Hammadi Library. This collection contains works of the Valentinian School, as well as of many earlier and contemporaneous sects, and sheds much needed light on the nature and structure of what to this day is still called, with some reservations, the Gnostic Religion. The study of this library has led certain scholars to question the existence of any unified movement called “Gnosticism” or the “Gnostic Religion.” Michael Allen Williams, in 1996, published a book entitled Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument For Dismantling A Dubious Category (Princeton University Press 1996). Through a detailed study of numerous texts of the Nag Hammadi Collection, Williams attempts to show that the extreme diversity underlying the texts that many scholars have lumped together under the catch-all phrase of “Gnosticism,” casts doubt on the existence of anything like a Gnostic religion. Moreover, he argues, such a wholesale consignment of these texts to what is, in fact, a modern designation, blinds us to the deeper meaning of these diverse intellectual monuments. It should be noted, however, that the early Church Fathers, like Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Origen, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, and even “pagan” philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry, who have preserved for us accounts and occasionally some original documents of philosophers and theologians whom they term “Gnostic,” were also contemporaries or near contemporaries of many of the figures and schools that they criticize and interpret. The insights of these writers, then, who were living and working side by side, and almost always in conflict with, members of the Gnostic sects, should be given priority over any modern attempts to revise our understanding of what Gnosticism is.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/gnostic/
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Gnosticism
Gnosticism (after gnosis, the Greek word for “knowledge” or “insight”) is the name given to a loosely organized religious and philosophical movement that flourished in the first and second centuries CE. The exact origin(s) of this school of thought cannot be traced, although it is possible to locate influences or sources as far back as the second and first centuries BCE, such as the early treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Jewish Apocalyptic writings, and especially Platonic philosophy and the Hebrew Scriptures themselves.
In spite of the diverse nature of the various Gnostic sects and teachers, certain fundamental elements serve to bind these groups together under the loose heading of “Gnosticism” or “Gnosis.” Chief among these elements is a certain manner of “anti-cosmic world rejection” that has often been mistaken for mere dualism. According to the Gnostics, this world, the material cosmos, is the result of a primordial error on the part of a supra-cosmic, supremely divine being, usually called Sophia (Wisdom) or simply the Logos. This being is described as the final emanation of a divine hierarchy, called the Pleroma or “Fullness,” at the head of which resides the supreme God, the One beyond Being. The error of Sophia, which is usually identified as a reckless desire to know the transcendent God, leads to the hypostatization of her desire in the form of a semi-divine and essentially ignorant creature known as the Demiurge (Greek: dêmiourgos, “craftsman”), or Ialdabaoth, who is responsible for the formation of the material cosmos. This act of craftsmanship is actually an imitation of the realm of the Pleroma, but the Demiurge is ignorant of this, and hubristically declares himself the only existing God. At this point, the Gnostic revisionary critique of the Hebrew Scriptures begins, as well as the general rejection of this world as a product of error and ignorance, and the positing of a higher world, to which the human soul will eventually return. However, when all is said and done, one finds that the error of Sophia and the begetting of the inferior cosmos are occurrences that follow a certain law of necessity, and that the so-called “dualism” of the divine and the earthly is really a reflection and expression of the defining tension that constitutes the being of humanity—the human being.
1. The Philosophical Character of Gnosticism
Gnosticism, as an intellectual product, is grounded firmly in the general human act of reflecting upon existence. The Gnostics were concerned with the basic questions of existence or “being-in-the-world” (Dasein)—that is: who we are (as human beings), where we have come from, and where we are heading, historically and spiritually (cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion 1958, p. 334). These questions lie at the very root of philosophical thinking; but the answers provided by the Gnostics go beyond philosophical speculation toward the realm of religious doctrine and mysticism. However, it is impossible to understand fully the meaning of Gnosticism without beginning at the philosophical level, and orienting oneself accordingly. Since any orientation toward an ancient phenomenon must always proceed by way of contemporary ideas and habits of mind, an interpretative discussion of Gnostic thinking as it applies to Psychology, Existentialism, and Hermeneutics, is not amiss here. Once we have understood, to the extent of our ability, the philosophical import of Gnostic ideas, and how they relate to contemporary philosophical issues, then we may enter into the historical milieu of the Gnostics with some degree of confidence—a confidence devoid, to the extent that this is possible, of tainting exegetical presuppositions.
a. Psychology
Who are we? The answer to this question involves an account (logos) of the nature of the soul (psukhê or psyche); and the attempt to provide an answer has accordingly been dubbed the science or practice of “psychology”—an account of the soul or mind (psukhê, in ancient Greek, denoted both soul, as the principle of life, and mind, as the principle of intellect). Carl Jung, drawing upon Gnostic mythical schemas, identified the objectively oriented consciousness with the material or “fleshly” part of humankind—that is, with the part of the human being that is, according to the Gnostics, bound up in the cosmic cycle of generation and decay, and subject to the bonds of fate and time (cf. Apocryphon of John [Codex II] 28:30). The human being who identifies him/herself with the objectively existing world comes to construct a personality, a sense of self, that is, at base, fully dependent upon the ever-changing structures of temporal existence. The resulting lack of any sense of of permanence, of autonomy, leads such an individual to experience anxieties of all kinds, and eventually to shun the mysterious and collectively meaningful patterns of human existence in favor of a private and stifling subjective context, in the confines of which life plays itself out in the absence of any reference to a greater plan or scheme. Hopelessness, atheism, despair, are the results of such an existence. This is not the natural end of the human being, though; for, according to Jung (and the Gnostics) the temporally constructed self is not the true self. The true self is the supreme consciousness existing and persisting beyond all space and time. Jung calls this the pure consciousness or Self, in contradistinction to the “ego consciousness” which is the temporally constructed and maintained form of a discrete existent (cf. C.G. Jung, “Gnostic Symbols of the Self,” in The Gnostic Jung 1992, pp. 55-92). This latter form of “worldly” consciousness the Gnostics identified with soul (psukhê), while the pure or true Self they identified with spirit (pneuma)—that is, mind relieved of its temporal contacts and context. This distinction had an important career in Gnostic thought, and was adopted by St. Paul, most notably in his doctrine of the spiritual resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:44). The psychological or empirical basis of this view, which soon turns into a metaphysical or onto-theological attitude, is the recognized inability of the human mind to achieve its grandest designs while remaining subject to the rigid law and order of a disinterested and aloof cosmos. The spirit-soul distinction (which of course translates into, or perhaps presupposes, the more fundamental mind-body distinction) marks the beginning of a transcendentalist and soteriological attitude toward the cosmos and temporal existence in general.
b. Existentialism
The basic experience of existence, described by the philosophy that has become known as “Existentialism,” involves a general feeling of loneliness or abandonment (Geworfenheit, “having been thrown”) in/to a world that is not amenable to the primordial desires of the human being (cf. Jonas, p. 336). The recognition that the first or primal desire of the human being is for the actualization or positing of a concrete self or “I” (an autonomous and discrete individual existing and persisting amidst the flux and flow of temporal and external “reality”) leads to the disturbing realization that this world is not akin to the human being; for this world (so it seems) follows it own course, a course already mapped out and set in motion long before the advent of human consciousness. Furthermore, that the essential activity of the human being—that is, to actualize an autonomous self within the world—is carried out in opposition to a power or “will” (the force of nature) that always seems to thwart or subvert this supremely human endeavor, leads to the acknowledgment of an anti-human and therefore anti-intellectual power; and this power, since it seems to act, must also exist. However, the fact that its act does not manifest itself as a communication between humanity and nature (or pure objectivity), but rather as a mechanical process of blind necessity occurring apart from the human endeavor, places the human being in a superior position. For even though the force of nature may arbitrarily wipe out an individual human existent, just as easily as it brings one into existence, this natural force is not conscious of its activity. The human mind, on the other hand, is. And so a gap or fissure—a product of reflection—is set up, by which the human being may come to orient him/herself with and toward the world in which s/he exists and persists, for a brief moment. Martin Heidegger has described this brief moment of orientation with/in (toward) the world as “care” (Sorge), which is always a care or concern for the “moment” (Augenblick) within which all existence occurs; this “care” is understood as the product of humankind’s recognition of their unavoidable being-toward-death. But this orientation is never completed, since the human soul finds that it cannot achieve its purpose or complete actualization within the confines set by nature.
While the thwarting necessity of nature is, for the Existentialist, a simple, unquestioned fact; for the Gnostics it is the result of the malignant designs of an inferior god, the Demiurge, carried out through and by this ignorant deity’s own law. In other words, nature is, for modern Existentialism, merely indifferent, while for the Gnostics it was actively hostile toward the human endeavor. “[C]osmic law, once worshipped as the expression of a reason with which man’s reason can communicate in the act of cognition, is now seen only in its aspect of compulsion which thwarts man’s freedom” (Jonas, p. 328). Time and history come to be understood as the provenance of the human mind, over-against futile idealistic constructions like law and order, nomos and cosmos. Knowledge, at this point, becomes a concrete endeavor—a self-salvific task for the human race.
Becoming aware of itself, the self also discovers that it is not really its own, but is rather the involuntary executor of cosmic designs. Knowledge, gnosis, may liberate man from this servitude; but since the cosmos is contrary to life and to spirit, the saving knowledge cannot aim at integration into the cosmic whole and at compliance with its laws. For the Gnostics … man’s alienation from the world is to be deepened and brought to a head, for the extrication of the inner self which only thus can gain itself (Jonas, p. 329).
The obvious question, then—Where did we come from? – only becomes intelligible alongside and within the more dynamic question of Where are we heading?
c. Hermeneutics
In the context of ancient Greek thinking, hermêneia was usually associated with tekhnê, giving us the tekhnê hermêneutikê or “art of interpretation” discussed by Aristotle in his treatise De Interpretatione [Peri Hermêneias]. Interpretation or hermeneutics, according to Aristotle, does not bring us to a direct knowledge of the meaning of things, but only to an understanding of how things come to appear before us, and thereby to provide us with an avenue toward empirical knowledge, as it were.
Moreover, discourse is hermêneia because a discursive statement is a grasp of the real by meaningful expression, not a selection of so-called impressions coming from the things themselves (Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations 1974, p. 4).
In this sense, we may say that the “art of interpretation” is a distinctly historical method of understanding or coming to terms with reality. In other words, since our “expression” is always an ex-position, a going-out from the given forms or patterns of reality toward a living use of these forms with/in Life, then we, as human beings persisting in a realm of becoming, are responsible, in the last analysis, not for any eternal truths or “things in themselves,” but only for the forms these things take on within the context of a living and thinking existence. Knowledge or understanding, then, is not of immutable and eternal things in themselves, but rather of the process by which things—that is, ideas, objects, events, persons, etc.—become revealed within the existential or ontological process of coming-to-know. The attention to process and the emergence of meaning occurs on the most immediate experiential level of human existence, and therefore contains about it nothing of the metaphysical. However, the birth of metaphysics may be located within this primordial or phenomenal structure of basic “brute” experience; for it is the natural tendency of the human mind to order and arrange its data according to rational principles.
The question will inevitably arise, though, as to whence these rational principles derive: are they a derivative product of the phenomenal realm of experience? or are they somehow endemic to the human mind as such, and hence eternal? If we take the first question as an answer, we are led to phenomenology, which “discovers, in place of an idealist subject locked within [a] system of meanings, a living being which from all time has, as the horizon of all its intentions, a world, the world” (Ricoeur, p. 9). According to the general contemporary or “post-modern” formulation, such a “living being” is directed, intentionally, always and only toward a multiplicitous world or realm in which human activity itself becomes the sole object of knowledge, apart from any “transcendent” metaphysical ideals or schemas. For the Gnostics, on the other hand, who worked within and upon the latter question, giving it a positive, if somewhat mytho-poetical answer, rational principles, which seem to be culled from a mere contact with sensible reality, are held to be reminders of a unified existence that is an eternal possibility, open to anyone capable of transcending and, indeed, transgressing this realm of experience and process —that is, of history. This “transgression” consists in the act of balancing oneself with/in, and orienting oneself toward, history as an interplay of past and present, in which the individual is poised for a decision—either to succumb to the flux and flow of an essentially decentered cosmic existence, or to strive for a re-integration into a godhead that is only barely recollected, and more obscure than the immediate perceptions of reality.
i. Reception and Revelation
Where are we heading? This question is at the very heart of Gnostic exegesis, and indeed colors and directs all attempts at coming to terms, not only with the Hebrew Scriptures, which served as the main text of Gnostic interpretation, but with existence in general.
The standard hermeneutical approach, both in our own era, and in Late Hellenistic times, is the receptive approach—that is, an engagement with texts of the past governed by the belief, on the part of the interpreter, that these texts have something to teach us. Whether we struggle to overcome our own “prejudices” or presuppositions, which are the inevitable result of our belonging to a particular tradition by way of the hermeneutical act (Gadamer), or allow our prejudices to shape our reading of a text, in an act of “creative misprision” (Bloom) we are still acknowledging, in some way, our debt to or dependence upon the text with which we are engaged. The Gnostics, in their reading of Scripture, acknowledged no such debt; for they believed that the Hebrew Bible was the written revelation of an inferior creator god (dêmiourgos), filled with lies intended to cloud the minds and judgment of the spiritual human beings (pneumatikoi) whom this Demiurge was intent on enslaving in his material cosmos.
Indeed, while the receptive hermeneutical method implies that we have something to learn from a text, the method employed by the Gnostics, which we may call the “revelatory” method, was founded upon the idea that they (the Gnostics) had received a supra-cosmic revelation, either in the form of a “call,” or a vision, or even, perhaps, through the exercise of philosophical dialectic. This “revelation” was the knowledge (gnôsis) that humankind is alien to this realm, and possesses a “home on high” within the plêrôma, the “Fullness,” where all the rational desires of the human mind come to full and perfect fruition. On this belief, all knowledge belonged to these Gnostics, and any interpretation of the biblical text would be for the purpose of explaining the true nature of things by elucidating the errors and distortions of the Demiurge. This approach treated the past as something already overcome yet still “present,” insofar as certain members of the human race were still laboring under the old law—that is, were still reading the Scriptures in the receptive manner. The Gnostic, insofar as he still remained within the world, as an existing being, was, on the other hand, both present and future. That is to say, the Gnostic embodied within himself the salvific dynamism of a history that had broken from the constraint of a tyrannical past, and found the freedom to invent itself anew. The Gnostic understood himself to be at once at the center and at the end or culmination of this history, and this idea or ideal was reflected most powerfully in ancient Gnostic exegesis. We must now turn to a discussion of the concrete results of this hermeneutical method.
2. The Gnostic Mytho-Logos
The Gnostic Idea or Notion was not informed by a philosophical world-view or procedure. Rather, the Gnostic vision of the world was based upon the intuition of a radical and seemingly irreparable rupture between the realm of experience (pathos) and the realm of true Being—that is, existence in its positive, creative, or authentic aspect.
The problem faced by the Gnostics was how to explain such a radical, pre-philosophical intuition. This intuition is “pre-philosophical” because the brute experience of existing in a world that is alien to humankind’s aspirations may submit itself to a variety of interpretations. And the attempt at an interpretation may take on the form of either muthos or logos—either a merely descriptive rendering of the experience, or a rationally ordered account of such an experience, including an explanation of its origins. The ancient Greek explanation of this experience was to call it a primal “awe” or “wonder” felt by the human being as he faces the world that stands so radically apart from him, and to posit this experience as the beginning of philosophy (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b 10-25 and Plato, Theaetetus 155d). But the Gnostics recognized this “awe” as the product of a radical disruption of the harmony of a realm persisting beyond becoming—that is, beyond “becoming” in the sense of pathos, or “that which is undergone.” The muthos always corresponds to the “first-hand” account rendered by one who has undergone, immediately, the effect of a certain event. The myth is always an explanation of something already known, and therefore carries its truth-claim along with it, just as the immediacy of an event forbids any doubt or questioning on the part of the one undergoing it. The logos, on the other hand, is the product of a careful reflection (dianoia), and refers, for its truth-value, not to the immediate moment of “grasping” a phenomenon (prolêpsis), but to the moment of reflection during which one attains a conceptual knowledge of the phenomenon, and first comes to “know” it as such—this is gnôsis: insight. The direct result of this gnôsis is the emergence from the sense of existence as pathos, to the actuality of being as aisthêsis—that is, reception and judgment of experience by way of purely rational or divine criteria. Such criteria proceeds directly from the logos, or divine “ordering principle,” to which the Gnostics believed themselves to be related, by way of a divine genealogy. Although Gnostic onto-theology proceeds by way of an elaborate myth, it is a myth informed always by the logos, and is, in this sense, a true mythology—that is, a rendering, in the immediacy of language, of that which is ever-present (to the Gnostic) as a product of privileged reflection.
a. The Myth of Sophia
According to Gnostic mythology (in general) We, humanity, are existing in this realm because a member of the transcendent godhead, Sophia (Wisdom), desired to actualize her innate potential for creativity without the approval of her partner or divine consort. Her hubris, in this regard, stood forth as raw materiality, and her desire, which was for the mysterious ineffable Father, manifested itself as Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge, that renegade principle of generation and corruption which, by its unalterable necessity, brings all beings to life, for a brief moment, and then to death for eternity. However, since even the Pleroma itself is not, according to the Gnostics, exempt from desire or passion, there must come into play a salvific event or savior—that is, Christ, the Logos, the “messenger,” etc.—who descends to the material realm for the purpose of negating all passion, and raising the innocent human “sparks” (which fell from Sophia) back up to the Pleroma (cf. Apocryphon of John [Codex II] 9:25-25:14 ff.).
This process of re-integration with/in the godhead is one of the basic features of the Gnostic myth. The purpose of this re-integration (implicitly) is to establish a series of existents that are ontologically posterior to Sophia, and are the concrete embodiment of her “disruptive” desire—within the unified arena of the Pleroma. Indeed, if the Pleroma is really the Fullness, containing all things, it must contain the manifold principles of Wisdom’s longing. In this sense, we must not view Gnostic salvation as a simply one-sided affair. The divine “sparks” that fell from Sophia, during her “passion,” are un-integrated aspects of the godhead. We may say, then, that in the Hegelian sense the Gnostic Supreme God is seeking, eternally, His own actualization by way of full self-consciousness (cf. G.W.F. Hegel, History of Philosophy vol. 2, pp. 396-399).
But it is not really this simple. The Supreme God of the Gnostics effortlessly generates the Pleroma, and yet (or for this very reason!) this Pleroma comes to act independently of the Father. This is because all members of the Pleroma (known as Aeons) are themselves “roots and springs and fathers” (Tripartite Tractate 68:10) carrying Time within themselves, as a condition of their Being. When the disruption, brought about by the desire of Sophia, disturbed the Pleroma, this was not understood as a disturbance of an already established unity, but rather as the disturbance of an insupportable stasis that had come to be observed as divine. Indeed, when the Greeks first looked to the sky and admired the regularity of the rotations of the stars and planets, what they were admiring, according to the Gnostics, was not the image of divinity, but the image or representation of a “divine” stagnancy, a law and order that stifled freedom, which is the root of desire (cf. Jonas, pp. 260-261). The passion of Sophia—her production of the Demiurge, his enslavement of the human “sparks” in the material cosmos, and the subsequent redemption and restoration—are but one episode in the infinite, unfolding drama of spiritual existence. We, as human beings, just happen to be the unwitting victims of this particular drama. But if, as the Gnostics hold, our salvation consists in our becoming gods (Poimandres 26) or “lord[s] over creation and all corruption” (Valentinus, Fragment F, Layton) then how are we to be confident that, in ages to come, one of us will not give birth to another damned cosmos, just as Sophia had done?
b. Christian Gnosticism
The Christian idea that God has sent his only “Son” (the Logos) to suffer and die for the sins of all humankind, and so make possible the salvation of all, had a deep impact on Gnostic thought. In the extensive and important collection of Gnostic writings discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945, only a handful present the possibility of having originated in a pre-Christian, mostly Hellenistic Jewish milieu. The majority of these texts are Christian Gnostic writings from the early second to late third centuries CE, and perhaps a bit later. When we consider the notion of salvation and its meaning for the early Gnostics, who stressed the creative aspect of our post-salvific existence, we are struck by the bold assertion that our need for salvation arose, in the first place, from an error committed by a divine being, Sophia (Wisdom), during the course of her own creative act (cf. Apocryphon of John [Codex II] 9:25-10:6). Since this is the case, how, we are led to ask, will our post-salvation existence be any less prone to error or ignorance, even evil? The radical message of early Christianity provided the answer to this problematical question; and so the Gnostics took up the Christian idea and transformed it, by the power of their singular mytho-logical technique, into a philosophically and theologically complex speculative schema.
i. Basilides
The Christian philosopher Basilides of Alexandria (fl. 132-135 CE) developed a cosmology and cosmogony quite distinct from the Sophia myth of classical Gnosticism, and also reinterpreted key Christian concepts by way of the popular Stoic philosophy of the era. Basilides began his system with a “primal octet” consisting of the “unengendered parent” or Father; Intellect (nous); the “ordering principle” or “Word” (logos); “prudence” (phronêsis); Wisdom (sophia); Power (dunamis) (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.3, in Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures 1987) and “justice” and “peace” (Basilides, Fragment A, Layton). Through the union of Wisdom and Power, a group of angelic rulers came into existence, and from these rulers a total of 365 heavens or aeons were generated (Irenaeus 1.24.3). Each heaven had its own chief ruler (arkhôn), and numerous lesser angels. The final heaven, which Basilides claimed is the realm of matter in which we all dwell, was said by him to be ruled by “the god of the Jews,” who favored the Jewish nation over all others, and so caused all manner of strife for the nations that came into contact with them—as well as for the Jewish people themselves. This behavior caused the rulers of the other 364 heavens to oppose the god of the Jews, and to send a savior, Jesus Christ, from the highest realm of the Father, to rescue the human beings who are struggling under the yoke of this jealous god (Irenaeus 1.24.4). Since the realm of matter is the sole provenance of this spiteful god, Basilides finds nothing of value in it, and states that “[s]alvation belongs only to the soul; the body is by nature corruptible” (Irenaeus 1.24.5). He even goes so far as to declare, contra Christian orthodoxy, that Christ’s death on the cross was only apparent, and did not actually occur “in the flesh” (Irenaeus 1.24.4)—this doctrine came to be called docetism.
The notion that material existence is the product of a jealous and corrupt creator god, who favors one race over all others, is really the “mythical” expression of a deeply rooted ethical belief that the source of all evil is material or bodily existence. Indeed, Basilides goes so far as to assert that sin is the direct outcome of bodily existence, and that human suffering is the punishment either for actual sins committed, or even just for the general inclination to sin, which arises from the bodily impulses (cf. Fragments F and G). In an adaptation of Stoic ethical categories, Basilides declares that faith (pistis) “is not the rational assent of a soul possessing free will” (Fragment C); rather, faith is the natural mode of existence, and consequently, anyone living in accordance with the “law of nature” (pronoia), which Basilides calls the “kingdom,” will remain free from the bodily impulses, and exist in a state of “salvation” (Fragment C). However, Basilides goes beyond simple Stoic doctrine in his belief that the “elect,” that is, those who exist by faith, “are alien to the world, as if they were transcendent by nature” (Fragment E); for unlike the Stoics, who believed in a single, material cosmos, Basilides held the view, as we have seen, that the cosmos is composed of numerous heavens, with the material realm as the final heaven, and consequently corrupt. Since this final heaven represents the “last gasp” of divine emanation, as it were, and is by no means a perfect image of true divinity, adherence to its laws can lead to no good. Further, since the body is the means by which the ruler of this material cosmos enforces his law, freedom can only be attained by abandoning or “becoming indifferent to” all bodily impulses and desires. This indifference (adiaphoria) to bodily impulses, however, does not lead to a simple stagnant asceticism. Basilides does not call upon his hearers to abandon the material realm only to dissolve into negativity; instead, he offers them a new life, by appealing to the grand hierarchy of rulers persisting above the material realm (cf. Fragment D). When one turns to the greater hierarchy of Being, there results a “creation of good things” (Fragment C, translation modified). Love and personal creation—the begetting of the Good—are the final result of Basilides’ vaguely dialectical system, and for this reason it is one of the most important early expressions of a truly Christian, if not “orthodox,” philosophy.
ii. Marcion
Marcion of Sinope, in Pontus, was a contemporary of Basilides. According to Tertullian, he started his career as an orthodox Christian—whatever that meant at such an early stage of development of Christian doctrine—but soon formulated the remarkable and radical doctrine that was to lead to his excommunication from the Roman Church in July 144 CE, the traditional date of the founding of the Marcionite Church (Tertullian, Against Marcion 1.1; cf. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis 1984, p. 314). The teaching of Marcion is elegantly simple: “the God proclaimed by the law and the prophets is not the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The God (of the Old Testament) is known, but the latter (the Father of Jesus Christ) is unknown. The one is just, but the other is good” (Irenaeus 1.27.1). Marcion believed that this cosmos in which we live bears witness to the existence of an inflexible, legalistic, and sometimes spiteful and vengeful God. This view arose from a quite literal reading of the Old Testament, which does contain several passages describing God in terms not quite conducive to divinity—or at least to the idea of the divine that was current in the Hellenistic era. Marcion then, following Paul (in Romans 1:20) declared that God is knowable through His creation; however, unlike Paul, Marcion did not take this “natural revelation” as evidence of God’s singularity and goodness. Quite the contrary, Marcion believed that he knew the God of this realm all too well, and that He was not worthy of the devotion and obedience that He demanded. Therefore, Marcion rejected the teaching of the orthodox Christian Church of his era, that Yahweh (or Jehovah) is the Father of Christ, and, through a creative excision of what he termed “Judaistic interpolations” in Luke and ten Pauline Epistles, Marcion simultaneously put forth his notion of the “alien God” and His act of salvation, and established the first Canon of Scripture used in a “Christian” Church (Jonas, pp. 145-146).
Marcion was not a philosopher in the sense that term has come to imply. He never developed, as far as we can tell from the surviving evidence, a systematic metaphysical, cosmological, or anthropological theory in the manner of a Basilides or a Valentinus (whom we shall discuss below), nor did he appeal to history as a witness for his doctrines. This latter point is the most important. Unlike the majority of Gnostics, who elaborated some sort of divine genealogy (e.g., the Sophia myth) to account for the presence of corruption and strife in the world, Marcion simply posited two opposed and irreducible Gods: the biblical god, and the unknown or “alien” God, who is the Father of Christ. According to Marcion, the god who controls this realm is a being who is intent on preserving his autonomy and power even at the expense of the (human) beings whom he created. The “alien” God, who is the Supremely Good, is a “god of injection,” for he enters this realm from outside, in order to gratuitously adopt the pitiful human beings who remain under the sway of the inferior god as His own children. This act is the origin of and reason for the Incarnation of Christ, according to Marcion.
In spite of the absence of any solid philosophical or theological foundation for this rather simple formulation, Marcion’s idea nevertheless expresses, in a somewhat crude and immediate form, a basic truth of human existence: that the desires of the Mind are incommensurable with the nature of material existence (cf. Irenaeus 1.27.2-3). Yet, if we follow Marcion’s argument to its logical (or perhaps “anti-logical”) conclusion, we discover an existential expression (not a philosophy) of the primal feeling of “abandonment” (Geworfenheit). This expression plays upon the subtle yet poignant opposition of “love of wisdom” (philosophia) and “complete wisdom” (plêrosophia). We are alone in a world that does not lend itself to our quest for unalterable truth, and so we befriend wisdom, which is the way of or manner in which we attain this intuited truth. According to Marcion, this truth is not to be found in this world—all that is to be found is the desire for this truth, which arises amongst human beings. However, since this desire, on the part of human beings, only produces various philosophies, none of which can hold claim to the absolute truth, Marcion concludes that the noetic beings (humans) of this realm are capable of nothing more than a shadow of wisdom. It is only by way of the guidance and grace of an alien and purely good God that humankind will rise to the level of plêrosophia or complete wisdom (cf. Colossians 2:2 ff.). Moreover, instead of attempting to discover the historical connection between the revelation of Christ and the teachings of the Old Testament, Marcion simply rejected the latter in favor of the former, on the belief that only the Gospel (thoughtfully edited by Marcion himself) points us toward complete wisdom (Irenaeus 1.27.2-3; Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.3).
While other Christian thinkers of the era were busy allegorizing the Old Testament in order to bring it into line with New Testament teaching, Marcion allowed the New Testament (albeit in his own special version) to speak to him as a singular voice of authority—and he formulated his doctrine accordingly. This doctrine emphasized not only humankind’s radical alienation from the realm of their birth, but also their lack of any genealogical relation to the God who sacrificed His own Son to save them—in other words, Marcion painted a picture of humanity as a race displaced, with no true home at all (cf. Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism 1992, p. 164). The hope of searching for a lost home, or of returning to a home from which one has been turned out, was absent in the doctrine of Marcion. Like Pico della Mirandola, Marcion declared the nature of humankind to be that of an eternally intermediate entity, poised precariously between heaven and earth (cp. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 3). However, unlike Pico, Marcion called for a radical displacement of humankind—a “rupture”—in which humanity would awaken to its full (if not innate) possibilities.
iii. Valentinus and the Valentinian School
The great Christian teacher and philosopher Valentinus (ca. 100-175 CE) spent his formative years in Alexandria, where he probably came into contact with Basilides. Valentinus later went to Rome, where he began his public teaching career, which was so successful that he actually had a serious chance of being elected Bishop of Rome. He lost the election, however, and with it Gnosticism lost the chance of becoming synonymous with Christianity, and hence a world religion. This is not to say that Valentinus failed to influence the development of Christian theology—he most certainly did, as we shall see below. It was through Valentinus, perhaps more than any other Christian thinker of his time, that Platonic philosophy, rhetorical elegance, and a deep, interpretive knowledge of scripture became introduced together into the realm of Christian theology. The achievement of Valentinus remained unmatched for nearly a century, until the incomparable Origen came on the scene. Yet even then, it may not be amiss to suggest that Origen never would have “happened” had it not been for the example of Valentinus.
The cosmology of Valentinus began, not with a unity, but with a primal duality, a dyad, composed of two entities called “the Ineffable” and “Silence.” From these initial beings a second dyad of “Parent” and “Truth” was generated. These beings finally engendered a quaternity of “Word” (logos), “Life” (zôê), “Human Being” (anthropos), and “Church” (ekklêsia). Valentinus refers to this divine collectivity as the “first octet” (Irenaeus 1.11.1). This octet produced several other beings, one of which revolted or “turned away,” as Irenaeus tells us, and set in motion the divine drama that would eventually produce the cosmos. According to Irenaeus, who was writing only about five years after the death of Valentinus, and in whose treatise Against Heresies the outline of Valentinus’ cosmology is preserved, the entity responsible for initiating the drama is referred to simply as “the mother,” by which is probably meant Sophia (Wisdom). From this “mother” both matter (hulê) and the savior, Christ, were generated. The realm of matter is described as a “shadow,” produced from the “mother,” and from which Christ distanced himself and “hastened up into the fullness” (Irenaeus 1.11.1; cp. Poimandres 5). At this point the “mother” produced another “child,” the “craftsman” (dêmiourgos) responsible for the creation of the cosmos. In the account preserved by Irenaeus, we are told nothing of any cosmic drama in which “divine sparks” are trapped in fleshly bodies through the designs of the Demiurge. However, it is to be assumed that Valentinus did expound an anthropology similar to that of the classical Sophia myth (as represented, for example, in the Apocryphon of John; cf. also The Hypostasis of the Archons, and the Apocalypse of Adam), especially since his school, as represented most significantly by his star pupil Ptolemy (see below), came to develop a highly complex anthropological myth that must have grown out of a simpler model provided by Valentinus himself. The account preserved in Irenaeus ends with a description of a somewhat confused doctrine of a heavenly and an earthly Christ, and a brief passage on the role of the Holy Spirit (Irenaeus 1.11.1). From this one gets the idea that Valentinus was flirting with a primitive doctrine of the Trinity. Indeed, according to the fourth century theologian Marcellus of Ancyra, Valentinus was “the first to devise the notion of three subsistent entities (hypostases), in a work that he entitled On the Three Natures” (Valentinus, Fragment B, Layton).
Valentinus was certainly the most overtly Christian of the Gnostic philosophers of his era. We have seen how the thought of Basilides was pervaded by a Stoicizing tendency, and how Marcion felt the need to go beyond scripture to posit an “alien” redeemer God. Valentinus, on the other hand, seems to have been informed, in his speculations, primarily by Jewish and Christian scripture and exegesis, and only secondarily by “pagan” philosophy, particularly Platonism. This is most pronounced in his particular version of the familiar theological notion of “election” or “pre-destination,” in which it is declared (following Paul in Romans 8:29) that God chose certain individuals, before the beginning of time, for salvation. Valentinus writes, in what is probably a remnant of a sermon:
From the beginning you [the "elect" or Gnostic Christians] have been immortal, and you are children of eternal life. And you wanted death to be allocated to yourselves so that you might spend it and use it up, and that death might die in you and through you. For when you nullify the world and are not yourselves annihilated, you are lord over creation and all corruption (Valentinus, Fragment F).
This seems to be Valentinus’ response to the dilemma of the permanence of salvation: since Sophia or the divine “mother,” a member of the Pleroma, had fallen into error, how can we be sure that we will not make the same or a similar mistake after we have reached the fullness? By declaring that it is the role and task of the “elect” or Gnostic Christian to use up death and nullify the world, Valentinus is making clear his position that these elite souls are fellow saviors of the world, along with Jesus, who was the first to take on the sin and corruption inherent in the material realm (cf. Irenaeus 1.11.1; and Layton p. 240). Therefore, since “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), any being who is capable of destroying death must be incapable of sin. For Valentinus, then, the individual who is predestined for salvation is also predestined for a sort of divine stewardship that involves an active hand in history, and not a mere repose with God, or even a blissful existence of loving creation, as Basilides held. Like Paul, Valentinus demanded that his hearers recognize their createdness. However, unlike Paul, they recognized their creator as the “Ineffable Parent,” and not as the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. The task of Christian hermeneutics after Valentinus was to prove the continuity of the Old and New Testament. In this regard, as well as in the general spirituality of his teaching—not to mention his primitive trinitarian doctrine—Valentinus had an incalculable impact on the development of Christianity.
1) The System of Ptolemy
Ptolemy (or Ptolemaeus, fl. 140 CE) was described by St. Irenaeus as “the blossom of Valentinus’ school” (Layton, p. 276). We know next to nothing about his life, except the two writings that have come down to us: the elaborate Valentinian philosophical myth preserved in Irenaeus, and Ptolemy’s Epistle to Flora, preserved verbatim by St. Epiphanius. In the former we are met with a grand elaboration, by Ptolemy, of Valentinus’ own system, which contains a complex anthropological myth centering around the passion of Sophia. We also find, in both the myth and the Epistle, Ptolemy making an attempt to bring Hebrew Scripture into line with Gnostic teaching and New Testament allegorization in a manner heretofore unprecedented among the Gnostics.
In the system of Ptolemy we are explicitly told that the cause of Sophia’s fall was her desire to know the ineffable Father. Since the purpose of the Father’s generating of the Aeons (of which Sophia was the last) was to “elevate all of them into thought” (Irenaeus 1.2.1) it was not permitted for any Aeon to attain a full knowledge of the Father. The purpose of the Pleroma was to exist as a living, collective expression of the intellectual magnitude of the Father, and if any single being within the Pleroma were to attain to the Father, all life would cease. This idea is based on an essentially positive attitude toward existence—that is, existence understood in the sense of striving, not for a reposeful end, but for an ever-increasing degree of creative or “constitutive” insight. The goal, on this view, is to produce through wisdom, and not simply to attain wisdom as an object or end in itself. Such an existence is not characterized by desire for an object, but rather by desire for the ability to persist in creative, constitutive engagement with/in one’s own “circumstance” (circumscribed stance or individual arena). When Sophia desired to know the Father, then, what she was desiring was her own dissolution in favor of an envelopment in that which made her existence possible in the first place. This amounted to a rejection of the gift of the Father—that is, of the gift of individual existence and life. It is for this reason that Sophia was not permitted to know the Father, but was turned back by the “boundary” (horos) that separates the Pleroma from the “ineffable magnitude” of the Father (Irenaeus 1.2.2).
The remainder of Ptolemy’s account is concerned with the production of the material cosmos out of the hypostatized “passions” of Sophia, and the activity of the Savior (Jesus Christ) in arranging these initially chaotic passions into a structured hierarchy of existents (Irenaeus 1.4.5 ff., and cp. Colossians 1:16). Three classes of human beings come into existence through this arrangement: the “material” (hulikos), the “animate” (psukhikos), and the “spiritual” (pneumatikos). The “material” humans are those who have not attained to intellectual life, and so place their hopes only upon that which is perishable—for these there is no hope of salvation. The “animate” are those who have only a half-formed conception of the true God, and so must live a life devoted to holy works, and persistence in faith; according to Ptolemy, these are the “ordinary” Christians. Finally, there are the “spiritual” humans, the Gnostics, who need no faith, since they have actual knowledge (gnôsis) of intellectual reality, and are thus saved by nature (Irenaeus 1.6.2, 1.6.4). The Valentinian-Ptolemaic notion of salvation rests on the idea that the cosmos is the concrete manifestation or hypostatization of the desire of Sophia for knowledge of the Father, and the “passions” her failure produced. The history of salvation, then, for human beings, has the character of an external manifestation of the threefold process of Sophia’s own redemption: recognition of her passion; her consequent “turning back” (epistrophê); and finally, her act of spiritual production, whence arose Gnostic humanity (cf. Irenaeus 1.5.1). Salvation, then, in its final form, must imply a sort of spiritual creation on the part of the Gnostics who attain the Pleroma. The “animate” humans, however, who are composed partly of corruptible matter and partly of the spiritual essence, must remain content with a simple restful existence with the craftsman of the cosmos, since no material element can enter the Pleroma (Irenaeus 1.7.1).
In his Epistle to Flora (in Epiphanius 33.3.1-33.7.10), which is an attempt to convert an “ordinary” Christian woman to his brand of Valentinian Christianity, Ptolemy clearly formulates his doctrine of the relation between the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, who is merely “just,” and the Ineffable Father, who is the Supreme Good. Rather than simply declaring these two gods to be unrelated, as did Marcion, Ptolemy develops a complex, allegorical reading of the Hebrew Scriptures in relation to the New Testament in order to establish a genealogy connecting the Pleroma, Sophia and her “passion,” the Demiurge, and the salvific activity of Jesus Christ. The scope and rigor of Ptolemy’s work, and the influence it came to exercise on emerging Christian orthodoxy, qualifies him as one of the most important of the early Christian theologians, both proto-orthodox and “heretical.”
c. Mani and Manichaeism
The world religion founded by Mani (216-276 CE) and known to history as Manichaeism has its roots in the East, borrowing elements from Persian dualistic religion (Zoroastrianism), Jewish Christianity, Buddhism, and even Mithraism. The system developed by Mani was self-consciously syncretistic, which was a natural outgrowth of his desire to see his religion reach the ends of the earth. This desire was fulfilled, and until the late Middle Ages, Manichaeism remained a world religion, stretching from China to Western Europe. It is now completely extinct. The religion began when its founder experienced a series of visions, in which the Holy Spirit supposedly appeared to him, ordering him to preach the revelation of Light to the ends of the earth. Mani came to view himself as the last in a series of great prophets including Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Paul (Rudolph, p. 339). His highly complex myth of the origin of the cosmos and of humankind drew on various elements culled from these several traditions and teachings. The doctrine of Mani is not “philosophical,” in the manner of Basilides, Valentinus or Ptolemy; for Mani’s teaching was not the product of a more or less rational or systematic speculation about the godhead, resulting in Gnosis, but the wholly creative product of what he felt to be a revelation from the divinity itself. It is for this reason that Mani’s followers revered him as the redeemer and holy teacher of humankind (Rudolph, p. 339). Since Manichaeism belongs more to the history of religion than to philosophy proper (or even the fringes of philosophy, as does Western Gnosticism), it will suffice to say only a few words about the system, if for no other reason than that the great Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo had followed the Manichaen religion for several years, before converting to Christianity (cf. Augustine, Confessions III.10).
The main point of distinction between the doctrine of Mani and the Western branch of Gnosticism (Basilides, Valentinus, etc.), is that in Manichaeism the “cosmology is subservient to the soteriology” (Rudolph, p. 336). This means, essentially, that Mani began with a fundamental belief about the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos, and concocted a myth to explain the situation of humankind, and the dynamics of humanity’s eventual salvation. The details of the cosmology were apparently not important, their sole purpose being to illustrate, poetically, the dangers facing the souls dwelling in this “realm of darkness” as well as the manner of their redemption from this place. The Manichaean cosmology began with two opposed first principles, as in Zoroastrianism: the God of Light, and the Ruler of Darkness. This Darkness, being of a chaotic nature, assails the “Kingdom of Light” in an attempt to overthrow or perhaps assimilate it. The “King of the Paradise of Light,” then, goes on the defensive, as it were, and brings forth Wisdom, who in her turn gives birth to the Primal Man, also called Ohrmazd (or Ahura-Mazda). This Primal Man possesses a pentadic soul, consisting of fire, water, wind, light, and ether. Armored with this soul, the Primal Man descends into the Realm of Darkness to battle with its Ruler. Surprisingly, the Primal Man is defeated, and his soul scattered throughout the Realm of Darkness. However, the Manichaeans understood this as a plan on the part of the Ruler of Light to sow the seeds of resistance within the Darkness, making possible the eventual overthrow of the chaotic realm. To this end, a second “Living Spirit” is brought forth, who was also called Mithra. This being, and his partner, “Light-Adamas,” set in motion the history of salvation by putting forth the “call” within the realm of darkness, which recalls the scattered particles of light (from the vanquished soul of Ohrmazd). These scattered particles “answer” Mithra, and the result is the formation of the heavens and earth, the stars and planets, and finally, the establishment of the twelve signs of the zodiac and the ordered revolution of the cosmic sphere, through which, by a gradual process, the scattered particles of light will eventually be returned to the Realm of Light. The Manichaeans believed that these particles ascend to the moon, and that when the moon is full, it empties these particles into the sun, from whence they ascend to the “new Aeon,” also identified with Mithra, the “Living Spirit” (Rudolph, pp. 336-337). This process will continue throughout the ages of the world, until all the particles eventually reach their proper home and the salvation of the godhead is complete.
It should be clear from this brief exposition that humanity as such does not hold the prime place in the salvific drama of Manichaeism, but rather a part of the godhead itself—that is, the scattered soul of Ohrmazd. The purpose of humanity in this scheme is to aid the particles of light in their ascent to the godhead. Of course, these particles dwell within every living thing, and so the salvation of these particles is the salvation of humanity, but only by default, as it were; humanity does not hold a privileged position in Manichaeism, as it does in the Western or strictly Christian Gnostic schools. This belief led the Manichaeans to establish strict dietary and purity laws, and even to require selected members of their church to provide meals for the “Elect,” so that the latter would not become defiled by harming anything containing light particles. All of this, however, is a long way from philosophy. Hans Jonas was right to describe Manichaeism as representing “a more archaic level of gnostic thought” (Jonas, p. 206). Now that we have examined one of the non-philosophical directions taken by Gnostic thought, let us proceed to discuss its role in the philosophical development of the era.
3. Platonism and Gnosticism
Long before the advent of Gnosticism, Plato had posited two contrary World Souls: one “which does good” and one “which has the opposite capacity” (Plato, Laws X. 896e, tr. Saunders). For Plato, this did not imply that the cosmos is under the control of a corrupt or ignorant god, as it did for the Gnostics, but simply that this cosmos, like the human soul, possesses a rational and an irrational part, and that it is the task of the rational part to govern the irrational. The question arose, however, among Platonists, regarding Plato’s true position on this matter. Was he declaring that a part of the cosmos is evil? or that the divine Demiurge (who, in the highly influential Timaeus account, is said to have crafted the cosmos) actually produced an evil soul? Both of these conjectures flew in the face of everything that the ancient thinkers believed about the cosmos—that is, that it was divine, orderly, and perfect. A common solution, among both Platonists and Pythagoreans, was to interpret the second or “evil” Soul as Matter, that is, the material or generative principle, which is the opposite of the truly divine and unchanging Forms. The purpose of the Intellectual principle, or the “good” Soul, is to bring this disorderly principle under the control of reason, and thereby maintain an everlasting but not eternal cosmos (cf. Timaeus 37d). Since the cosmos, according to Plato in the Timaeus, cannot be as perfect as the eternal image upon which it is founded, a generative principle is necessary to maintain the “living creature” (which is precisely how the cosmos is described), and therefore not really “evil,” even though it possesses the “opposite capacity” (generation, and hence, corruption) from that of the Good or Rational Soul.
a. Numenius of Apamea and Neo-Platonism
Several centuries after Plato, around the time when the great Gnostic thinkers like Valentinus and Ptolemy were developing their systems, we encounter the Platonic philosopher Numenius of Apamea (fl. 150 CE). The main ideas of Numenius’ philosophy, preserved in the fragments of his writings that survive, bear clear traces of Gnostic influence. His cosmology describes, in language strikingly similar to that of the Gnostics, the degradation of the divine dêmiourgos upon his contact with pre-existent Matter (hulê, or the “indefinite” principle):
[I]n the process of coming into contact with Matter, which is the Dyad, [the Demiurge] gives unity to it, but is Himself divided by it, since Matter has a character prone to desire [epithumêtikon êthos] and is in flux. So in virtue of not being in contact with the Intelligible (which would mean being turned in upon Himself), by reason of looking towards Matter and taking thought for it, He becomes unregarding (aperioptos) of Himself. And he seizes upon the sense realm and ministers to it and yet draws it up to His own character, as a result of this yearning towards Matter [eporexamenos tês hulês] (Numenius, Fragment 11, in Dillon 1977, The Middle Platonists, pp. 367-368).
In this fragment, Numenius is transferring a basic Gnostic anthropological idea into the realm of cosmology. It is a common feature of Gnostic systems to describe the individual human soul’s contact with the material realm as resulting in a forgetting of the soul’s true origin. Platonism, also, warned against the soul’s becoming too attached to the realm of the senses, since this realm is changing and illusory, and does not accurately reflect the divinity. However, neither Platonism nor Gnosticism described such a danger as affecting, in any way, the Demiurge; for the Gnostics declared the Demiurge to be just as much a part of the cosmos as he was its ruler, and the orthodox Platonists located the Demiurge outside the cosmos, declaring the cosmos to be self-sufficient (following Timaeus 34b). Numenius, however, went further and bridged the gap between the sensible cosmos and the Intelligible Realm by linking the Demiurge to the latter by way of contemplation, and to the former by way of his “desire” (orexis) for matter. In Fragment 18, Numenius tells us that the Demiurge derives his “critical faculty” (kritikon) from his contemplation of the Good, and his “impulsive faculty” (hormêtikon) from his attachment to Matter (Dillon, p. 370). This idea seems to foreshadow Plotinus’ doctrine that the individual soul will always take on certain characteristics of Matter, and that these characteristics manifest themselves in the form of sense perceptions that must be brought under the controlling influence of rational judgment (cf. Enneads I.8.9 and I.1.7). Unlike Plotinus, however, who leaves the World-Soul or active part of the Demiurge safely beyond the affective cosmic realm, Numenius posits a Demiurge that is both transcendent and immanent, and arrives at a doctrine of a cosmos that, even on the highest level—the level of the celestial bodies—is not devoid of evil influence, since even the Demiurge, the highest cosmic deity, is infected by the tainting influence of Matter. “This importation of evil into the celestial realm is surely more Gnostic than Platonist, and did not comment itself to such successors as Plotinus or Porphyry, though it does seem to be accepted by Iamblichus” (Dillon, p. 374).
Plotinus, during the height of his teaching career at Rome (ca. 255 CE), composed a treatise “Against Those Who Declare the Creator of This World, and the World Itself, to be Evil,” also known, simply, as “Against the Gnostics” (Ennead II.9) in which he argues for the divinity and goodness of the cosmos, and upholds the ancient Greek belief in the divinity of the stars and planets, declaring them to be our “noble brethren,” and responsible only for the good things that befall humankind. Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus, tells us that Plotinus commissioned him, along with his fellow student Amelius, to write more treatises attacking the Gnostics on points that Plotinus skipped over (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 16). Porphyry also mentions by name two Gnostic treatises that were discovered in Egypt in 1945, and are now readily available to scholars: Zostrianos, and Allogenes, in the Nag Hammadi Collection of Codices. These texts, as well as the Tripartite Tractate (also in the Nag Hammadi Collection) show how tightly Platonism and Gnosticism were intertwined in the early centuries of our era.
4. Concluding Summary
Gnosticism began with the same basic, pre-philosophical intuition that guided the development of Greek philosophy—that there is a dichotomy between the realm of true, unchanging Being, and ever-changing Becoming. However, unlike the Greeks, who strived to find the connection between and overall unity of these two “realms,” the Gnostics amplified the differences, and developed a mytho-logical doctrine of humankind’s origin in the realm of Being, and eventual fall into the realm of darkness or matter, that is, Becoming. This general Gnostic myth came to exercise an influence on emerging Christianity, as well as upon Platonic philosophy, and even, in the East, developed into a world religion (Manichaeism) that spread across the known world, surviving until the late Middle Ages. In the twentieth century, there began a renewed interest in Gnostic ideas, particularly in the pioneering work of Hans Jonas, the Existentialist philosopher and student of Martin Heidegger. The psychologist Carl Jung, as well, drew upon Gnostic motifs in his theoretical work, and the increasing emphasis on Hermeneutics in late twentieth century thought owes something to the analyses of Gnostic myth and exegesis done by Harold Bloom, Paul Ricoeur, and others.
More than any of these accomplishments, however, it was the discovery in 1945, in Egypt, of a large collection of Coptic Gnostic codices, now known as the Nag Hammadi Collection, or the Nag Hammadi Library. This collection contains works of the Valentinian School, as well as of many earlier and contemporaneous sects, and sheds much needed light on the nature and structure of what to this day is still called, with some reservations, the Gnostic Religion. The study of this library has led certain scholars to question the existence of any unified movement called “Gnosticism” or the “Gnostic Religion.” Michael Allen Williams, in 1996, published a book entitled Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument For Dismantling A Dubious Category (Princeton University Press 1996). Through a detailed study of numerous texts of the Nag Hammadi Collection, Williams attempts to show that the extreme diversity underlying the texts that many scholars have lumped together under the catch-all phrase of “Gnosticism,” casts doubt on the existence of anything like a Gnostic religion. Moreover, he argues, such a wholesale consignment of these texts to what is, in fact, a modern designation, blinds us to the deeper meaning of these diverse intellectual monuments. It should be noted, however, that the early Church Fathers, like Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Origen, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, and even “pagan” philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry, who have preserved for us accounts and occasionally some original documents of philosophers and theologians whom they term “Gnostic,” were also contemporaries or near contemporaries of many of the figures and schools that they criticize and interpret. The insights of these writers, then, who were living and working side by side, and almost always in conflict with, members of the Gnostic sects, should be given priority over any modern attempts to revise our understanding of what Gnosticism is.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/gnostic/
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Inner Circle
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# Haghani Circle
Haghani school (also Haqqani) is a Shia school of thought in Iran by a group of hardliner right-wing clerics based in the holy city of Qom and headed by Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, an influential theologian. The Haghani Circle has its origin in the Haghani seminary, founded in 1964, which previously had been called Muntashiriya. After two of the leading members of the circle were assassinated (Ayatollahs Qodousi and Beheshti), the hawza changed its name to Shahidayn Seminary (Martyr Seminary).
The Haghani Seminary was founded by Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Ayatollah Beheshti, Ayatollah Sadoughi, and Ayatollah Taleghani. It was originally conceived in a reform effort to strengthen the weight of philosophy in the hawza curriculum. To this effect, Allameh Tabatabai was commissioned to write two introductory works, which he completed in 1970 (Bidayat al-Hikmah) and 1975 (Nikhayat al-Hikmah). Today, the school trains clerics with both a traditional and modern curriculum, including a secular education in science, medicine, politics, and Western/non-Islamic philosophy.
The Haghani Seminary has been described as "a kind of Ecole Nationale d'Administration for the Islamic Republic" whose alumni "form the backbone of the clerical management class that runs Iran's key political and security institutions." During Iran's elections it is said to be common for candidates to visit the city to "pay homage" to Haghani religious leaders and "receive their blessing." Another source says "most Haghani people serve either in the security forces or in the military."
According to journalist Tim Rutten "the Haghani is a particularly aggressive school of radical Shiite Islam which lives in expectation of the imminent coming of the Mahdi, a kind of Islamic messiah, who will bring peace and justice -- along with universal Islamic rule -- to the entire world. ... Members ... of this school believe they must act to speed the Mahdi's coming."
Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi (The founder of Haghani School, is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ideological mentor and spiritual guide).
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# Hojjatieh
Hojjatieh — also called Hojjatieh Society — is a semi-clandestine traditionalist Shia organization founded in Iran in 1953 (in Tehran) by Shaikh Mahmoud Halabi (a Tehrani mullah from Mashhad; 1900-1998) with permission of Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi. The organization was founded on the premise that the most immediate threat to Islam was the Bahá'í religion, which they viewed as a heresy that must be eliminated. The group also opposes both Sunniism and the Khomeinist concept of Velayat-e Faqih. An earlier organization was founded by Halabi, the Anjoman-e Imám-e Zaman (called Anjoman-e Zedd-e Bahá'í privately) which later was re-named to the Anjoman-e Hojjatieh Mahdavieh (called Hojjatieh for short) after the Iranian Revolution. In March to June 1955, the Ramadan period that year, a widespread systematic program was under taken cooperatively by the government and the clergy. During the period they destroyed the national Bahá'í Center in Tehran, confiscated properties and made it illegal for a time to be Bahá'í (punishable by 2 to 10 year prison term.) Founder of SAVAK, Teymur Bakhtiar, took a pick-axe to a Bahá'í building himself at the time.
Halabi is said to have worked with SAVAK security agency under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, offering his full cooperation in fighting "other heathen forces, including the Communists." By doing so he was given freedom to recruit members and raise funds, and by 1977 Hojjatieh is said to have had 12,000 members. However, since the Shah's regime, in Halabi's view, allowed the Baha'is too much freedom, he then supported Khomeini's movement to overthrow the Shah.
The group flourished during the 1979 revolution that ousted the Shah and installed an Islamic government in his place. However it was forced to dissolve after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini speech on 12 August 1983. However there have been mentions of it again circa 2002-2004.
Doctrine
The Hojjatieh society has been described as "an underground messianic sect ... which hopes to quicken the coming of the apocalypse" in order to hasten the return of the Mahdi, the prophesied future redeemer of Islam. However, according to legal scholar Noah Feldman, the idea that supporters "want to bring back the imam by violence, rather than ... wait piously and prepare for the imam’s eventual return on his own schedule," is a misinterpretation of the society's position common "outside Iran". In fact, the "Hojjatiya Society was banned and persecuted by Khomeini’s government in part for its quiescent view that the mahdi’s arrival could not be hastened." Those who adhere to this perspective claim Hojjatieh is a millenarian group who put great stock on the return of the Mahdi and the idea of such a return bringing happiness to true believers.[citation needed]
Methods
Though initially claimed to be using "peaceful methods" allowing harassment but not direct insult or violence, a circle of spies infiltrated Bahá'í communities seeking out Iranians who were interested in the religion and "reconvert" them back to Islam as well as confronting muballighs or Bahá'í missionaries. According to one first hand testimony, suspicions were spread and reputations compromised leading Bahá'ís to treat inquirers badly who would then be recruited to the anti-Bahá'í movement. Students of the organization engaged in practice debates on various topics. See Allegations of Bahá'í involvement with other powers.
Rumored members
Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi is reported to be the highest ranking member of the Hojjatieh. He denies this and has said that if anyone finds a connection between him and Hojjatieh, he will denounce everything he stands for. It is noteworthy that while Hojjatieh generally renounces all Islamic (and other) governments before the arrival of the twelvth Imam as illegitimate, Mesbah Yazdi recommends and gives full authority to the pre-messianic Islamic government. Since the 1980's, Hojjatieh has been frequently cited in unfounded conspiracy theories which claim that real power lies in hands of people who are secretly affiliated with Hojjatieh.
The current president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also rumored to be an advocate of Hojjatieh through the influence of Ayatollah Yazdi, who was his mentor. Asia Times reports that Ahmad Tavassoli, a former chief of staff of Khomeini, claimed in 2005 that "the executive branch of the Iranian government as well as the crack troops of the Revolutionary Guards have been hijacked by the Hojjatieh, which, he implied, now also controls Ahmadinejad." According to the report, Hojjatieh were endangering Iran by working for Shia supremacy, Feldman writing in 2006 in the New York Times suggests this rumor was spread by Ahmadinejad's enemies. It is also reported that Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who was to have been Ahmedinejad's First Vice President, may be a Hojjatieh member, but the source of this information is unclear.
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# "Obeying Ahmadinejad like obeying God" -Iran cleric
12 August 2009
A hard-line cleric considered to be the mentor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on Iranians on Wednesday to follow the newly-re-elected president, saying that obeying him was akin to obeying God.
Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi also warned the country’s opposition groups against undermining supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been the country’s spiritual guide for 20 years.
‘When the president is endorsed by the leader, obeying him is similar to obedience to God,’ Mesbah Yazdi was quoted as saying.
Khamenei endorsed Ahmadinejad as president for a second term last week amid a continuing political crisis sparked by widespread protests against his June re-election.
Lashing out at opposition groups that refuse to acknowledge Ahmadinejad’s victory, Mesbah Yazdi said these ‘enemies’ also wanted to undermine Khamenei.
‘The enemies wanted to weaken or eliminate this main pillar and some people knowingly or unknowingly sought to do this in recent events,’ he said. [AFP]
--
# HOJJATIYA
By Mahmoud Sadri (15 December 2004)
A Shia religious lay association founded in 1953 by the charismatic cleric Shaikh Mahmud Halabi to defend Islam against the Bahai missionary activities.
HOJJATIYA, a Shia religious lay association founded by the charismatic cleric Shaikh Mahmud Halabi to defend Islam against the Bahai missionary activities. Hojjatiya exerted considerable, albeit indirect and unintended, influence on the education and world-view of the lay elite leadership of the 1979 Islamic revolution. The association was founded in the aftermath of the coup d’état of 1953. The explicit goal of Hojjatiya was to train cadres for the “scientific defense” of Shia Islam in the face of the Bahai theological challenge. Bahai missionaries argued that Shia’s awaited savior had already emerged and that Islam had been superceded by the Bahai faith. Hojjatiya sought to defend the Shia position based on both Islamic and Bahai texts. Halabi’s own sensitivity to this controversy stems from a personal encounter. As a seminarian he and his colleague Sayyed Abbās Alawi had been approached by a Bahai missionary, who had succeeded in persuading the latter to convert. Alarmed by this experience, Halabi abandoned the normal course of his studies and immersed himself in the study of Bahai history and original texts with the intention of composing a comprehensive Islamic response to the Bahai challenge. Halabi’s original plan to train a group of seminarians to discharge these duties was rebuffed by the clerical establishment in Qom. Halabi then embarked upon recruiting a corps of volunteer lay disciples adept at both substantive arguments and debating skills. This is the group that came to be known, after the Islamic revolution, as Anjoman-e hojjatiya .
Although the primary stages of Halabi’s project evolved in his native Mašhad, he met with little enthusiasm there. It took him six months to recruit and train his first serious student. Halabi’s decision to move to Tehran proved a strategic success. The first circle of his students in Tehran were comprised of religious merchants and professionals. They, in turn, succeeded in recruiting from a talented pool of ardent students from religious as well as secular high schools. By the late 1960s the second generation of Hojjatiya recruits had entered universities and embarked upon modernizing and standardizing the management of the association. Therefore, the early 1970s witnessed organizational reforms within the association that reflected increasing complexity and division of labor. Graduates of the basic instruction on Shia and Bahai history and theology were recruited in specialist teams of operations. The latter included: The Guidance Team, that was charged with debating Bahai missionaries, persuading Bahais to return to Islam, and neutralizing the effects of Bahai missionary activity on those exposed to it. The Instruction Team along with the Authorship Team jointly worked to standardize instructional material and levels. These came to include basic instruction, the intermediary training, and the graduate training. Most of the instructional material was distributed, in typed and copied form (poly-copy) in classes that met weekly in private homes across the country. They were retrieved within a week so that no copies would leave the provenance of the association. Students were instructed not to share or discuss the material with outsiders. The public speaking team organized weekly public gatherings in various venues that featured trained Hojjatiya speakers discussing Shia theology, critiquing Bahai positions, and fielding questions. The intelligence team, named the Investigation Team operated, in three distinct regiments, as a fifth column within the Bahai ranks and succeeded in thoroughly penetrating the Bahai hierarchy. Unbeknownst to Bahai’s, some members of the Hojjatiya had advanced to the rank of prominent Bahai missionaries. There were, also, smaller service-providing units within Hojjatiya such as the bureau of contact with foreign countries, bureau of libraries and archives, and bureau of publications. Thus, the most salient specialists in the association were known, in the jargon of Hojjatiya, as: polemical activists, public speakers, instructors, and intelligence operatives. Most full-fledged Hojjatiya members carried out at least two of the above duties in the course of weekly meetings. Bahais, reacted to the emergence of Hojjatiya by adopting a more defensive and reserved posture and by avoiding open debates and confrontations. This response further emboldened the Hojjatiya members and reassured them of the effectiveness of their approach. The organization steadily grew and by the early 1970s had spread throughout Iran and a few neighboring countries such as Pakistan and India. Indeed, in certain parts of Iran, Hojjatiya grew disproportionately to the Bahai threat and bred resentment among other Islamic organizations, that intended to mimic its success or to recruit from the same pool of talented religious youths.
Between the early 1950s and early 1970s a great number of the future elite of the Islamic revolution were trained, usually as a transitory stage in their ideological development, in pedagogic and practical venues provided by Hojjatiya. Beyond Hojjatiya’s explicit and stated objectives, a sense of dedication, engagement, and accomplishment akin to a Jesuit zeal electrified successive generations of its members. Along with Ali Aṣḡar (Allāma) Karbāsčiān’s Alawi High School, Halabi’s Anjoman-e Hojjatiya signified traditional Shia Islam’s attempt to acclimatize itself to the modern environment and to utilize its resources for the propagation of its worldview. Ironically, in its attempt to confront the Bahai challenge, Hojjatiya emulated a number of Bahai idiosyncra-cies such as the practice of secrecy with respect to the workings of its bureaucracy and access to its original literature, the lay hierarchical nature of the organization, and the unhindered access to modern means of communication and implements. For example, long before Ḥosayniya-ye eršād, the first modern Islamic lecture hall, was inaugurated in the north of Tehran, Hojjatiya’s public gatherings had become the first Islamic organization to replace rugs and pulpits with chairs and lecterns. Members of Hojjatiya, unlike their traditional brethren, were clean-shaven and groomed for success in the secular educational and professional world. Hojjatiya, under the leadership of Halabi, had succeeded in acquiring necessary religious dispensations and written permissions for usage of a portion of tithes from Shia grand Ayatollahs. These resources were spent for logistical purposes only, as the entire body of the Hojjatiya was comprised of volunteer members.
From the very beginning the activities of Hojjatiya attracted the attention of the security apparatus of the Pahlavi regime. Based on documents published after the Revolution, the leadership of Hojjatiya was pressured to formally register the association as a non-profit, philanthropic organization—hence the title, Anjoman-e Ḵayriya-ye Hojjatiya Mahdawiya—and to promise to abstain from political activities. The latter pledge came to haunt the association after the Revolution of 1979.
The Islamic revolution caught Hojjatiya by surprise. The initial reaction of the leadership toward the Islamic revolution was one of skepticism and suspicion. This caused many defections in its ranks. With the success of the revolution Hojjatiya, under the leadership of Halabi, attempted to placate the revolutionary leadership but was rebuffed. Ayatollah Khomeini, despite his earlier affirmation of the association, allowed open criticism of its apolitical nature and its “conservative bias” in interpreting Islam. Finally, five years after the Islamic revolution, Khomeini publically threatened Hojjatiya with violent suppression in thinly veiled words. Halabi, responded by terminating all of the activities of the Hojjatiya in a terse notice published in a number of newspapers. The announcement was followed by a widespread campaign to purge Hojjatiya affiliates from decision-making, academic, and educational bodies throughout Iran.
The animosity between Halabi and Khomeini is traceable to their distinct casuistries concerning the meaning of Messianism in Islam. Inasmuch as Islam shares the Judeo-Christian Messianic tendencies one may draw a parallel between the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic brands of pre-millenarianism and post-millenarianism. The quietist conservative interpretation of Hojjatiya is akin to a pre-millenarian world-view that, while advocating the ardent and pious practice of “awaiting” the savior, discourages active revolt in order to hasten the appearance of the “Mahdi” or any attempt to build the promised Islamic utopia in the absence of the awaited one. The revolutionary activism of Khomeini, on the other hand, is reminiscent of the post-millenarian tendencies in Christianity and Judaism in that it advocates taking an active role in bringing about the just Islamic society prior to the appearance of the Mahdi in order to hasten his coming. A telling incident illustrates the aforementioned contrast: in the months following the success of the 1979 Islamic revolution, the gatherings with Hojjatiya affiliation had adopted the slogan of “O Mahdi, make your appearance”. In response, the pro-Khomeini crowds composed a slogan of their own “O God, O God preserve Khomeini until Mahdi appears; preserve him even alongside Mahdi”.
In the years since the termination of the Hojjatiya activities, the origins, nature, and goals of the association have been publicly debated with varying levels of accuracy and objectivity. Its detractors from the left and the right have played a pivotal role in perpetuating views that vastly exaggerate and distort the organization’s influence and agenda through spreading myths and conspiracy theories about Hojjatiya. The pro-Khomeini religious establishment (both organizations such as the Revolutionary Guards and individuals such as Shaikh Ṣādeq Ḵalḵāli have repeatedly maintained that the Hojjatiya’s line remains alive and continues to pose a threat to the revolutionary cause in Iran. The secular critics (namely the Tudeh Party and its ideological allies) have claimed that the association, despite its obvious fall from favor, has been the true power broker behind the scenes. They have used the title Hojjatiya as a euphemism for all they deem retrogressive, authoritarian, bourgeois, and pertaining to an agent of imperialism in post-revolutionary Iran. However, the original members of the association have largely declined to join the debate, perhaps for reasons ranging from a pious penchant for secrecy to a genuine fear of reprisals.
As the leaders of Hojjatiya were committed to a non-violent, persuasive strategy in dealing with Bahais, the Association did not take part in persecution of Bahais in post-revolutionary Iran. For all Halabi’s animus against Bahais, he was a disciplined pacifist. He was distraught by violence and repeatedly warned his followers: “This is not the way, this is not our way”. [iranicaonline]
--
# Esoteric Cult of Iran Scares Israel
10 June 2006
Messianic leaders in Iraq and Iran
Professors at Haifa University discuss extremist leaders in Persian Gulf who believe in increasing chaos to facilitate judgement day
President Ahmadiebnjad believes he's in touch with God. Professor Baram is a little worried.
----
# Haghani Circle
Haghani school (also Haqqani) is a Shia school of thought in Iran by a group of hardliner right-wing clerics based in the holy city of Qom and headed by Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, an influential theologian. The Haghani Circle has its origin in the Haghani seminary, founded in 1964, which previously had been called Muntashiriya. After two of the leading members of the circle were assassinated (Ayatollahs Qodousi and Beheshti), the hawza changed its name to Shahidayn Seminary (Martyr Seminary).
The Haghani Seminary was founded by Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Ayatollah Beheshti, Ayatollah Sadoughi, and Ayatollah Taleghani. It was originally conceived in a reform effort to strengthen the weight of philosophy in the hawza curriculum. To this effect, Allameh Tabatabai was commissioned to write two introductory works, which he completed in 1970 (Bidayat al-Hikmah) and 1975 (Nikhayat al-Hikmah). Today, the school trains clerics with both a traditional and modern curriculum, including a secular education in science, medicine, politics, and Western/non-Islamic philosophy.
The Haghani Seminary has been described as "a kind of Ecole Nationale d'Administration for the Islamic Republic" whose alumni "form the backbone of the clerical management class that runs Iran's key political and security institutions." During Iran's elections it is said to be common for candidates to visit the city to "pay homage" to Haghani religious leaders and "receive their blessing." Another source says "most Haghani people serve either in the security forces or in the military."
According to journalist Tim Rutten "the Haghani is a particularly aggressive school of radical Shiite Islam which lives in expectation of the imminent coming of the Mahdi, a kind of Islamic messiah, who will bring peace and justice -- along with universal Islamic rule -- to the entire world. ... Members ... of this school believe they must act to speed the Mahdi's coming."
Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi (The founder of Haghani School, is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ideological mentor and spiritual guide).
--
# Hojjatieh
Hojjatieh — also called Hojjatieh Society — is a semi-clandestine traditionalist Shia organization founded in Iran in 1953 (in Tehran) by Shaikh Mahmoud Halabi (a Tehrani mullah from Mashhad; 1900-1998) with permission of Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi. The organization was founded on the premise that the most immediate threat to Islam was the Bahá'í religion, which they viewed as a heresy that must be eliminated. The group also opposes both Sunniism and the Khomeinist concept of Velayat-e Faqih. An earlier organization was founded by Halabi, the Anjoman-e Imám-e Zaman (called Anjoman-e Zedd-e Bahá'í privately) which later was re-named to the Anjoman-e Hojjatieh Mahdavieh (called Hojjatieh for short) after the Iranian Revolution. In March to June 1955, the Ramadan period that year, a widespread systematic program was under taken cooperatively by the government and the clergy. During the period they destroyed the national Bahá'í Center in Tehran, confiscated properties and made it illegal for a time to be Bahá'í (punishable by 2 to 10 year prison term.) Founder of SAVAK, Teymur Bakhtiar, took a pick-axe to a Bahá'í building himself at the time.
Halabi is said to have worked with SAVAK security agency under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, offering his full cooperation in fighting "other heathen forces, including the Communists." By doing so he was given freedom to recruit members and raise funds, and by 1977 Hojjatieh is said to have had 12,000 members. However, since the Shah's regime, in Halabi's view, allowed the Baha'is too much freedom, he then supported Khomeini's movement to overthrow the Shah.
The group flourished during the 1979 revolution that ousted the Shah and installed an Islamic government in his place. However it was forced to dissolve after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini speech on 12 August 1983. However there have been mentions of it again circa 2002-2004.
Doctrine
The Hojjatieh society has been described as "an underground messianic sect ... which hopes to quicken the coming of the apocalypse" in order to hasten the return of the Mahdi, the prophesied future redeemer of Islam. However, according to legal scholar Noah Feldman, the idea that supporters "want to bring back the imam by violence, rather than ... wait piously and prepare for the imam’s eventual return on his own schedule," is a misinterpretation of the society's position common "outside Iran". In fact, the "Hojjatiya Society was banned and persecuted by Khomeini’s government in part for its quiescent view that the mahdi’s arrival could not be hastened." Those who adhere to this perspective claim Hojjatieh is a millenarian group who put great stock on the return of the Mahdi and the idea of such a return bringing happiness to true believers.[citation needed]
Methods
Though initially claimed to be using "peaceful methods" allowing harassment but not direct insult or violence, a circle of spies infiltrated Bahá'í communities seeking out Iranians who were interested in the religion and "reconvert" them back to Islam as well as confronting muballighs or Bahá'í missionaries. According to one first hand testimony, suspicions were spread and reputations compromised leading Bahá'ís to treat inquirers badly who would then be recruited to the anti-Bahá'í movement. Students of the organization engaged in practice debates on various topics. See Allegations of Bahá'í involvement with other powers.
Rumored members
Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi is reported to be the highest ranking member of the Hojjatieh. He denies this and has said that if anyone finds a connection between him and Hojjatieh, he will denounce everything he stands for. It is noteworthy that while Hojjatieh generally renounces all Islamic (and other) governments before the arrival of the twelvth Imam as illegitimate, Mesbah Yazdi recommends and gives full authority to the pre-messianic Islamic government. Since the 1980's, Hojjatieh has been frequently cited in unfounded conspiracy theories which claim that real power lies in hands of people who are secretly affiliated with Hojjatieh.
The current president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also rumored to be an advocate of Hojjatieh through the influence of Ayatollah Yazdi, who was his mentor. Asia Times reports that Ahmad Tavassoli, a former chief of staff of Khomeini, claimed in 2005 that "the executive branch of the Iranian government as well as the crack troops of the Revolutionary Guards have been hijacked by the Hojjatieh, which, he implied, now also controls Ahmadinejad." According to the report, Hojjatieh were endangering Iran by working for Shia supremacy, Feldman writing in 2006 in the New York Times suggests this rumor was spread by Ahmadinejad's enemies. It is also reported that Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who was to have been Ahmedinejad's First Vice President, may be a Hojjatieh member, but the source of this information is unclear.
--
# "Obeying Ahmadinejad like obeying God" -Iran cleric
12 August 2009
A hard-line cleric considered to be the mentor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on Iranians on Wednesday to follow the newly-re-elected president, saying that obeying him was akin to obeying God.
Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi also warned the country’s opposition groups against undermining supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been the country’s spiritual guide for 20 years.
‘When the president is endorsed by the leader, obeying him is similar to obedience to God,’ Mesbah Yazdi was quoted as saying.
Khamenei endorsed Ahmadinejad as president for a second term last week amid a continuing political crisis sparked by widespread protests against his June re-election.
Lashing out at opposition groups that refuse to acknowledge Ahmadinejad’s victory, Mesbah Yazdi said these ‘enemies’ also wanted to undermine Khamenei.
‘The enemies wanted to weaken or eliminate this main pillar and some people knowingly or unknowingly sought to do this in recent events,’ he said. [AFP]
--
# HOJJATIYA
By Mahmoud Sadri (15 December 2004)
A Shia religious lay association founded in 1953 by the charismatic cleric Shaikh Mahmud Halabi to defend Islam against the Bahai missionary activities.
HOJJATIYA, a Shia religious lay association founded by the charismatic cleric Shaikh Mahmud Halabi to defend Islam against the Bahai missionary activities. Hojjatiya exerted considerable, albeit indirect and unintended, influence on the education and world-view of the lay elite leadership of the 1979 Islamic revolution. The association was founded in the aftermath of the coup d’état of 1953. The explicit goal of Hojjatiya was to train cadres for the “scientific defense” of Shia Islam in the face of the Bahai theological challenge. Bahai missionaries argued that Shia’s awaited savior had already emerged and that Islam had been superceded by the Bahai faith. Hojjatiya sought to defend the Shia position based on both Islamic and Bahai texts. Halabi’s own sensitivity to this controversy stems from a personal encounter. As a seminarian he and his colleague Sayyed Abbās Alawi had been approached by a Bahai missionary, who had succeeded in persuading the latter to convert. Alarmed by this experience, Halabi abandoned the normal course of his studies and immersed himself in the study of Bahai history and original texts with the intention of composing a comprehensive Islamic response to the Bahai challenge. Halabi’s original plan to train a group of seminarians to discharge these duties was rebuffed by the clerical establishment in Qom. Halabi then embarked upon recruiting a corps of volunteer lay disciples adept at both substantive arguments and debating skills. This is the group that came to be known, after the Islamic revolution, as Anjoman-e hojjatiya .
Although the primary stages of Halabi’s project evolved in his native Mašhad, he met with little enthusiasm there. It took him six months to recruit and train his first serious student. Halabi’s decision to move to Tehran proved a strategic success. The first circle of his students in Tehran were comprised of religious merchants and professionals. They, in turn, succeeded in recruiting from a talented pool of ardent students from religious as well as secular high schools. By the late 1960s the second generation of Hojjatiya recruits had entered universities and embarked upon modernizing and standardizing the management of the association. Therefore, the early 1970s witnessed organizational reforms within the association that reflected increasing complexity and division of labor. Graduates of the basic instruction on Shia and Bahai history and theology were recruited in specialist teams of operations. The latter included: The Guidance Team, that was charged with debating Bahai missionaries, persuading Bahais to return to Islam, and neutralizing the effects of Bahai missionary activity on those exposed to it. The Instruction Team along with the Authorship Team jointly worked to standardize instructional material and levels. These came to include basic instruction, the intermediary training, and the graduate training. Most of the instructional material was distributed, in typed and copied form (poly-copy) in classes that met weekly in private homes across the country. They were retrieved within a week so that no copies would leave the provenance of the association. Students were instructed not to share or discuss the material with outsiders. The public speaking team organized weekly public gatherings in various venues that featured trained Hojjatiya speakers discussing Shia theology, critiquing Bahai positions, and fielding questions. The intelligence team, named the Investigation Team operated, in three distinct regiments, as a fifth column within the Bahai ranks and succeeded in thoroughly penetrating the Bahai hierarchy. Unbeknownst to Bahai’s, some members of the Hojjatiya had advanced to the rank of prominent Bahai missionaries. There were, also, smaller service-providing units within Hojjatiya such as the bureau of contact with foreign countries, bureau of libraries and archives, and bureau of publications. Thus, the most salient specialists in the association were known, in the jargon of Hojjatiya, as: polemical activists, public speakers, instructors, and intelligence operatives. Most full-fledged Hojjatiya members carried out at least two of the above duties in the course of weekly meetings. Bahais, reacted to the emergence of Hojjatiya by adopting a more defensive and reserved posture and by avoiding open debates and confrontations. This response further emboldened the Hojjatiya members and reassured them of the effectiveness of their approach. The organization steadily grew and by the early 1970s had spread throughout Iran and a few neighboring countries such as Pakistan and India. Indeed, in certain parts of Iran, Hojjatiya grew disproportionately to the Bahai threat and bred resentment among other Islamic organizations, that intended to mimic its success or to recruit from the same pool of talented religious youths.
Between the early 1950s and early 1970s a great number of the future elite of the Islamic revolution were trained, usually as a transitory stage in their ideological development, in pedagogic and practical venues provided by Hojjatiya. Beyond Hojjatiya’s explicit and stated objectives, a sense of dedication, engagement, and accomplishment akin to a Jesuit zeal electrified successive generations of its members. Along with Ali Aṣḡar (Allāma) Karbāsčiān’s Alawi High School, Halabi’s Anjoman-e Hojjatiya signified traditional Shia Islam’s attempt to acclimatize itself to the modern environment and to utilize its resources for the propagation of its worldview. Ironically, in its attempt to confront the Bahai challenge, Hojjatiya emulated a number of Bahai idiosyncra-cies such as the practice of secrecy with respect to the workings of its bureaucracy and access to its original literature, the lay hierarchical nature of the organization, and the unhindered access to modern means of communication and implements. For example, long before Ḥosayniya-ye eršād, the first modern Islamic lecture hall, was inaugurated in the north of Tehran, Hojjatiya’s public gatherings had become the first Islamic organization to replace rugs and pulpits with chairs and lecterns. Members of Hojjatiya, unlike their traditional brethren, were clean-shaven and groomed for success in the secular educational and professional world. Hojjatiya, under the leadership of Halabi, had succeeded in acquiring necessary religious dispensations and written permissions for usage of a portion of tithes from Shia grand Ayatollahs. These resources were spent for logistical purposes only, as the entire body of the Hojjatiya was comprised of volunteer members.
From the very beginning the activities of Hojjatiya attracted the attention of the security apparatus of the Pahlavi regime. Based on documents published after the Revolution, the leadership of Hojjatiya was pressured to formally register the association as a non-profit, philanthropic organization—hence the title, Anjoman-e Ḵayriya-ye Hojjatiya Mahdawiya—and to promise to abstain from political activities. The latter pledge came to haunt the association after the Revolution of 1979.
The Islamic revolution caught Hojjatiya by surprise. The initial reaction of the leadership toward the Islamic revolution was one of skepticism and suspicion. This caused many defections in its ranks. With the success of the revolution Hojjatiya, under the leadership of Halabi, attempted to placate the revolutionary leadership but was rebuffed. Ayatollah Khomeini, despite his earlier affirmation of the association, allowed open criticism of its apolitical nature and its “conservative bias” in interpreting Islam. Finally, five years after the Islamic revolution, Khomeini publically threatened Hojjatiya with violent suppression in thinly veiled words. Halabi, responded by terminating all of the activities of the Hojjatiya in a terse notice published in a number of newspapers. The announcement was followed by a widespread campaign to purge Hojjatiya affiliates from decision-making, academic, and educational bodies throughout Iran.
The animosity between Halabi and Khomeini is traceable to their distinct casuistries concerning the meaning of Messianism in Islam. Inasmuch as Islam shares the Judeo-Christian Messianic tendencies one may draw a parallel between the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic brands of pre-millenarianism and post-millenarianism. The quietist conservative interpretation of Hojjatiya is akin to a pre-millenarian world-view that, while advocating the ardent and pious practice of “awaiting” the savior, discourages active revolt in order to hasten the appearance of the “Mahdi” or any attempt to build the promised Islamic utopia in the absence of the awaited one. The revolutionary activism of Khomeini, on the other hand, is reminiscent of the post-millenarian tendencies in Christianity and Judaism in that it advocates taking an active role in bringing about the just Islamic society prior to the appearance of the Mahdi in order to hasten his coming. A telling incident illustrates the aforementioned contrast: in the months following the success of the 1979 Islamic revolution, the gatherings with Hojjatiya affiliation had adopted the slogan of “O Mahdi, make your appearance”. In response, the pro-Khomeini crowds composed a slogan of their own “O God, O God preserve Khomeini until Mahdi appears; preserve him even alongside Mahdi”.
In the years since the termination of the Hojjatiya activities, the origins, nature, and goals of the association have been publicly debated with varying levels of accuracy and objectivity. Its detractors from the left and the right have played a pivotal role in perpetuating views that vastly exaggerate and distort the organization’s influence and agenda through spreading myths and conspiracy theories about Hojjatiya. The pro-Khomeini religious establishment (both organizations such as the Revolutionary Guards and individuals such as Shaikh Ṣādeq Ḵalḵāli have repeatedly maintained that the Hojjatiya’s line remains alive and continues to pose a threat to the revolutionary cause in Iran. The secular critics (namely the Tudeh Party and its ideological allies) have claimed that the association, despite its obvious fall from favor, has been the true power broker behind the scenes. They have used the title Hojjatiya as a euphemism for all they deem retrogressive, authoritarian, bourgeois, and pertaining to an agent of imperialism in post-revolutionary Iran. However, the original members of the association have largely declined to join the debate, perhaps for reasons ranging from a pious penchant for secrecy to a genuine fear of reprisals.
As the leaders of Hojjatiya were committed to a non-violent, persuasive strategy in dealing with Bahais, the Association did not take part in persecution of Bahais in post-revolutionary Iran. For all Halabi’s animus against Bahais, he was a disciplined pacifist. He was distraught by violence and repeatedly warned his followers: “This is not the way, this is not our way”. [iranicaonline]
--
# Esoteric Cult of Iran Scares Israel
10 June 2006
Messianic leaders in Iraq and Iran
Professors at Haifa University discuss extremist leaders in Persian Gulf who believe in increasing chaos to facilitate judgement day
President Ahmadiebnjad believes he's in touch with God. Professor Baram is a little worried.
----
Political Gnosis
--
The Fusion of the Gnosticsm and Politics in Ayatollah Khomeini
By Dr, Hamid Algar
It is related that when teaching a class on ethical advancement at Qum in the 1930s, Imam Khomeini would always close his lectures with the following sentence from the Munajat-i Sha'ban, a litany unique in that all the Twelve [Ma’sumin] Imams recited it:
O God, grant me total separation from other than You and attachment to You; brighten the vision of our hearts with the light of looking upon You, so that they may pierce the veils of light and attain the source of magnificence, and our spirits be suspended from the splendor of Your sanctity.
The Imam always assigned great importance to the study and recitation of the supplicatory prayers of the Imams from the Ahlul-Bayt, as a means of attaining Munajat-i Sha'ban spiritual insight as well as petitioning the Creator, but this appeal from the Munajat-i Sha'ban seems to have been particularly close to his heart. It appears in texts and pronouncements belonging to different phases of his life: in the commentary on a hadith of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq concerning "the meeting with ALLAH" (liqa'ullah), contained in Sharh-i Chihil Hadith, a work completed in 1939; in one of his works concerning the inner dimensions of prayer, Mi'raj al-Salikin, also finished the same year; in Jihad-i Akbar ya Mubaraza ba Nafs, a lecture on ethical purification delivered in Najaf in about 1972; in the lectures on the exegesis of Surat al-Fatiha that were televised in December, 1979 and January, 1980; and in Rah-i 'Ishq, a letter written by the Imam to his daughter-in-law, [Khanum] Fatima Tabataba'i, in 1983.
The aspiration "to pierce the veils of light and attain the source of magnificence" may therefore be regarded as a constant element in the devotional life of the Imam, and only by bearing it in mind can the totality of his struggles and achievements, including the political, be correctly understood. It was with a gaze fixed on "the source of magnificence", a mode of vision utterly different from that of the common political leader, that the Imam led a vast revolutionary movement to success.
The integrality and comprehensiveness of the Imam's personality and vision of Islam are such that analytical distinctions among their various dimensions are in a sense artificial, reflecting an effort to understand the Imam rather than his actuality. It is nonetheless legitimate - or at least inevitable - to speak of the Gnostic (irfani) and political aspects of his life and activity and to accord a certain primacy to the former, in terms of not only chronology but also significance. The Imam is generally regarded, by both Westerners and Muslims, as nothing more than an unusually gifted revolutionary leader, yet all who knew him intimately, as well as many who met with him but briefly, can testify that he possessed a vision transcending the political at the very same time that it controlled and embraced it. It is precisely this inclusion of the political in the Gnostic that is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Imam's persona.
As for the chronological primacy of gnosis in the life of the Imam, this is amply demonstrated by the history of his early years in Qum. His immediate purpose in going there in 1920 was no doubt to study with Shaykh 'Abd al-Karim Ha'iri, one of the principal authorities of the day in jurisprudence, and he distinguished himself in this essential area of Islamic learning long before his emergence as a marja'-i taqlid in the early 1960's. But in Qum he soon developed an interest in ‘irfan and associated disciplines that set him apart from many of his contemporaries and was, indeed, often viewed with suspicion and even hostility; many years later he had occasion to remark: "It is regrettable that some of the ‘ulama should entertain such suspicions and deprive themselves of the benefits to be gained from studying ‘irfan."
His first guide in the pursuit of ‘irfan was Mirza'Ali Akbar Yazdi (d. 1926), a pupil of Husayn Sabzavari who had himself studied under Mulla Hadi Sabzavari (d. 1872), the author of Sharh-i Manzuma, one of the basic texts of ‘irfan; the Imam was thus affiliated to one of the principal lines of the teaching and transmission of Shia gnosis. Another early guide was Mirza Aqa Javad Maliki Tabrizi (d. 1924), who had been teaching in Qum since 1911. He held two classes on philosophy and ethics, a public one at the Madrasa-yi Fayziya and a private one in his own home that was attended by a number of gifted and favored students including the Imam.
The Imam also studied with Sayyid Abu al-Hasan Rafi'i Qazvini (d. 1975), among whose few published writings is a commentary on the Du'a al-Sahar, the same profound supplication to which the Imam devoted his first work, Sharh Du'a al-Sahar; it is therefore possible that the Imam's attention was first drawn to this text by Qazvini.
The Imam's chief teacher in gnosis was, however, Ayatullah Muhammad 'Ali Shahabadi (d.1950), to whom he respectfully referred in his own writings on ‘irfan as "our master in theosophy" (ustad-i ilahi-yi ma). He met Shahabadi soon after the latter's arrival in Qum (probably in the late 1920's), and the answer he gave the Imam to a question on ‘irfan convinced him that he was in the presence of a true master. After initially refusing the Imam's request for permission to study with him, Shahabadi consented to teach him philosophy, but it was gnosis the Imam wished to pursue, and he persisted until Shahabadi agreed to instruct him in that discipline. Every Thursday and Friday, as well as on holidays, usually alone but sometimes in the company of one or two other students, the Imam listened to Shahabadi lecturing on the commentary by Da'ud Qaysari (d. 1350) on the Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn 'Arabi, the Miftah al-Ghayb of Sadr al-Din Qunavi (d. 1274), and the Manazil al-Sa'irin of Khwaja 'Abdullah Ansari (d. 1089). The Imam's interest in these texts, particularly the last, remained demonstrably with him throughout his life.
In so far as the Imam's fusion of Gnostic and political concerns can be traced to any source other than illumination and immersion in the Qur'an and the teachings of the Ma’sumin, it is to another aspect of Shahabadi's influence upon him that it may be attributed. Shahabadi was one of the relatively few ‘ulama in the time of Reza Shah to raise his voice against the misdeeds of the Pahlavi dynasty. He would regularly preach against the first Pahlavi during the commemoration of 'Ashura, and on one occasion manifested his extreme discontent by entering an eleven-month retreat at the shrine of Shah 'Abd al-'Azim.
A similar commitment to the political sphere manifested itself in one of his books, Shadharat al-Ma'arif, a brief work which has been well described as "social as well as Gnostic in content." Here Shahabadi analyzes the causes of decline and discontent in Muslim society, proposes the diffusion of authentic Islamic knowledge as a means of remedying the situation and creating unity, and concludes that although the establishment of perfect Islamic governance is a task reserved for the Sahib al-Zaman [Imam Mahdi], the political dimension of Islam, implicit in all its juridical ordinances, cannot in any way be neglected, for "Islam is most certainly a political religion" (pp. 6-7).
The Imam began his teaching career at the age of twenty-seven by providing instruction in hikmat, a discipline closely related to ‘irfan, and soon thereafter organized private sessions in ‘irfan itself. It was in these sessions that the Imam trained and inspired some of his closest associates, including above all Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahhari, whom the Imam described after his assassination in May 1979 as "the very quintessence of my being." The texts taught to this elite were the section on the soul (nafs) in the Asfar al-Arba'a of Mulla Sadra and the Sharh-i Manzuma.
Gnostic and devotional matters also formed the subject matter of the Imam's earliest writings. In 1928, he wrote a detailed commentary on the Du'a al-Sahar, the prayer recited before dawn during Ramadan by Imam Muhammad al-Baqir. This work was followed in 1931 by Misbah al-Hidaya ila al-Khilafa wa al-Wilaya, a brief but dense exposition of the innermost reality of the Prophet and the Imams that draws not only on a meditation on the hadith of the Ma’sumin but also on the akbari concept of the Universal Man (al-insan al-kamil).
In 1937, the Imam completed a series of glosses on Qaysari's commentary on the Fusus al-Hikam and on the Misbah al-Uns, Hamza b. Fanari's commentary on the Miftah al-Ghayb of Qunavi. Two years later, the Imam completed his first work in Farsi, Sharh-i Chihil Hadith, a voluminous commentary on forty hadith of predominantly ethical and gnostic content. Also dating from 1939 is the Imam's Mir'aj al-Salikin wa Salat al-'Arifin (also known as Sirr al-Salat), a treatise in Farsi detailing the inner meaning of every part of the prayer, from the ablution that precedes it to the threefold takbir that concludes it. Somewhat more accessible than this dense and challenging work is another book on the same theme, Adab al-Salat, completed in 1942. Finally, mention may be made of Sharh-i Hadith-i Junud-i 'Aql o Jahl, a work completed in 1944 which, has been described as the fullest and most systematic exposition of the Imam's views on ethics and gnosis.
Beyond this enumeration, it is neither possible nor desirable on the present occasion to attempt a fuller presentation of the Imam's contribution to the discipline of ‘irfan; it will be enough to refer the reader to Yahya Christian Bonaud's L'Imam Khomeyni, un gnostique méconnu du XXe siecle (Beirut, 1997), an excellent work of both synthesis and analysis. However, in connection with the trajectory of the Imam's life - the transition from early emphasis on ‘irfan to later engagement in the political realm - it is imperative to note that the Gnostic writings are not a digest or extension of received opinions and formulations, drawn up in youth only to be laid aside in maturity; rather they are the manifest fruit of a powerful, original, and lasting vision.
As was remarked by Sayyid Ahmad Fihri, who attended some of the Imam's lectures in Qum during the 1930's, "it is apparent that he [the Imam] has experiential knowledge of all he wrote upon." To put it somewhat differently, the Imam's works on ‘irfan were but the early, literary expression of a process of suluk, of continuous advancement towards the repeatedly invoked "source of magnificence." The Imam's leadership of the Islamic Revolution and his establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran may be therefore be said to have constituted, from a certain point of view, a further stage in that process of spiritual wayfaring; the fruits of his inward strivings came ultimately to transcend his own person and to manifest themselves with profound effect in the political realm.
This characterization may be justified with reference to the first three of the four journeys that furnish both the subject and the title of Mulla Sadra's Asfar al-Arba'a, a work with which the Imam was intimately acquainted. The first is the journey from creation to the divine reality (min al-khalq ila al-haqq), a movement away from immersion in the multiplicity of creation to exclusive awareness of the sole reality that is coterminous with the divine essence. The second journey takes place within the divine reality by means of that reality itself (fi al-haqq bi al-haqq); it consists of the perception of the divine perfections (kamalat) and of a series of extinctions in the divine names followed by subsistence through them. The third journey is that which leads back from the divine reality to creation (min al-haqq ila al-haqq); however, it does not bring the wayfarer back to his point of departure, for it is a journey that is accomplished by means of the divine reality (bi al-haqq) and has as its result the perception of the mysteries of the divine acts (af'al) as they unfold in the phenomenal world.
If the impertinence of speculating on the spiritual progress of the Imam be forgiven, it may be suggested that his period of primary emphasis on ‘irfan and associated matters corresponded to the first and second journeys described by Mulla Sadra, and that his involvement in the political sphere and his leadership of the Islamic Revolution were analogous to the third journey. What is certain that the unique insight the Imam displayed at critical junctures during the revolution and the early years of the Islamic Republic cannot be explained purely in terms of political sagacity; a clarity of vision was at work which enabled him to see beyond the immediate conjuncture, and it may be permissible to describe this capacity as a witnessing of the af'al as they became manifest in the political sphere. If this characterization is justifiable, it becomes plain that the Imam generally refrained from overt political activity until 1962 not only because of an unwillingness to dispute the quietist attitude of the senior ‘ulama of the day, but also because an essential process of inner preparation was underway. It was the Imam's own progress toward "the source of magnificence" that enabled him to lead a revolution that was like a collective suluk of the Iranian people.
This having been said, it must be conceded that the scheme of the three successive journeys has an inevitably metaphorical character, in that the concreteness and definite accessibility of a terrestrial destination are lacking in the trackless realm of inward journeying. Moreover, the application of the scheme to a given life cannot be taken to imply an exact correspondence to chronologically distinct periods. It is no doubt for this reason that traces of political awareness and interest can be discerned in the life of the Imam even before his emergence on the national scene in 1962.
He had some contact with scholars who contested various policies of Reza Shah, not only his master Shahabadi but also Hajj Aqa Nurullah Isfahani and Mulla Husayn Fisharaki who led a protest in Isfahan against compulsory military service in 1924; Ayatollah Angaji and Mirza Sadiq Aqa who led a similar movement in Tabriz in 1928; Aqazada Kafa'i who was brought to Tehran for trial after the Mashhad uprising of 1935; and Sayyid Hasan Mudarris, whom the Imam later described as "the leader of those who stood against oppression." Moreover, the Imam often touched on political themes in the poetry he wrote at the time and which was privately circulated in Qum. Thus when in 1928 Reza Shah abolished the capitulations that had been granted to foreign powers and sought thereby to present himself as an authentic patriot, the Imam responded with a poem that included this line: "It's true he has now abolished every capitulation, but only to hide from you the abolition of the nation!"
In any event, such was the climate of the day in Iran that even such an essential component of Shia spirituality as rauzakhwani {the recitation of texts commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain} automatically took on political connotations. In an interview granted to the present writer in December 1979, the Imam recalled that the assemblies of rauzakhwani in which he participated in Qum during his youth rarely took place, and even then informers often infiltrated them, with the result that those participating were arrested. Still less to the liking of the Pahlavi regime than such traditional manifestations of piety were the public lectures on ethics given by the Imam in Qum in the early 1930's and, after a hiatus, from 1941 onward.
Although based on the Manazil al-Sa'irin of Ansari, one of the texts the Imam had studied with Shahabadi, these lectures served as the vehicle for a comprehensive exposition of Islam as a whole, including its political dimensions. Sayyid Ahmad Fihri recalled: "I count the time I spent attending those lectures among the most precious hours of my life. In his lectures the Imam taught true Islamic ethics, which cannot be separated from revolution, in such a way that he left a deep impression on all who attended." Another listener to those lectures, Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahhari, attributed to them "the formation of a good part of my intellectual and spiritual personality." Moreover, it was not only religious scholars who attended the lectures; people from other walks of life would come from places as far a field as Tehran and Isfahan, defying the wish of the Pahlavi regime to isolate the religious institution in Qum from the general population.
The interconnectedness of the Gnostic and sapiential with the political and confrontational also came clearly to the fore in Kashf al-Asrar, which appearing in 1945 was the first published work of the Imam. The book is in the first place a crushing response to Asrar-i Hazarsala, a Wahhabi-inspired polemic against many of the key doctrines of Shia Islam. This is accomplished largely through the marshalling of a wide range of scriptural and rational arguments, but the Imam also has recourse to the great authorities of hikmat and ‘irfan, men such as Ibn Sina, Suhrwardi, and Mulla Sadra. Further, the currency of works such as Asrar-i Hazarsala is denounced by the Imam as one consequence of the anti-religious policies of the Pahlavi regime, and it is in Kashf al-Asrar that the Imam expounds for the first time the doctrine of "the governance of the jurisprudent" (Vilayat-i Faqih) that was to become the constitutional foundation of the Islamic Republic.
In May 1944, at about the same time he must have been engaged in writing Kashf al-Asrar, the Imam issued what appears to have been his first political proclamation, calling for action to deliver the Muslims of Iran and the entire Islamic world from the tyranny of foreign powers and their domestic accomplices; the autograph copy of this proclamation is headed not only by the bismala but also by the injunction, "read it and put it into effect." The Imam begins, very significantly, by citing Qur'an, 34:46:
"Say: I enjoin upon you one thing only -- that you rise up for God, in pairs and singly, and then reflect."
This is the same verse that opens the chapter on awakening (bab al-yaqza) at the very beginning of Ansari's Manazil al-Sa'irin, the handbook of spiritual wayfaring beloved of the Imam since his days of study with Shahabadi. "Rising up for God" counts, then, as the essential point of departure for suluk; it is defined by Ansari as "awakening from the slumber of neglect and rising from the pit of lassitude." The Imam similarly says of the verse in question that in it "God Almighty has set forth the progress of man from the dark realm of nature to the farthest point of true humanity," so that the injunction contained in it is "the sole path of reform in this world."
But immediately after offering this Gnostic and ethical interpretation of the verse the Imam proceeds to analyze the lamentable state of the Muslim world, attributing it to the fact that all are engaged in "rising up for the sake of their appetitive souls" (qiyam barayi nafs); it is only through "rising up for God" that matters can be rectified. "Rising up for God" thus becomes both an act of personal redemption and a commitment to change and reform Muslim society, an insurrection equally against spiritual lassitude and neglect in oneself and against corruption, irreligion and tyranny in the world. There is perhaps no clearer textual indication of the interconnectedness of the ethical and Gnostic with the political in the worldview of the Imam than in this understanding of "rising up for God."
During the roughly eighteen years that elapsed between the issuing of this early proclamation and the beginning of the Imam's sustained public struggle against the Pahlavi regime in the autumn of 1962, he appears to have devoted himself primarily to teaching fiqh and usul and writing authoritative books on those disciplines. It has, however, already been pointed out that for the Imam ‘irfan was above all an existential matter, so that the diversion of his pedagogical and literary energies to fiqh and usul cannot be taken to mean that ‘irfan disappeared from the horizons of his inner life.
There is evidence; moreover, that even his teaching of these exoteric sciences was colored by Gnostic concerns and that this was one factor in attracting an unusually large number of students to his classes. To quote Sayyid Ahmad Fihri once more, the Imam was able "to demonstrate the conformity of the shari'a to the logic of ‘irfan as well as the conformity of ‘irfan to the logic of the shari'a." In addition, the teaching methods of the hauza [theology school] have always involved the transmission to the student of more than formal learning; a complete ethos and worldview pass from one generation to the next. That the Imam in particular was able to convey to his students essential spiritual virtues and qualities is apparent from the testimony of the late Muhammad Javad Bohonar that "the Imam would instill in us a sense of spiritual nobility, of responsibility and commitment, of spiritual and intellectual richness; his words would resound in our ears for many days after we left Qum to go preaching during Ramadan."
The Imam addressed himself in detail to this task of the ethical and spiritual training of his students in the lectures on the "Major Jihad", the struggle against the self-indulgent tendencies of the self, which he delivered at Najaf in 1972. It is significant that these lectures were given after the better-known series on the governance of the jurisprudent, and appropriate that they were first published as a supplement to them. For the establishment of Islamic government was seen by the Imam as both dependent on and aiming at the spiritual purification of Muslim society and those called upon to lead it, the religious scholars; success in the "minor jihad," the struggle against external forces hostile to Islam, was indissolubly linked to exertion in the " Major Jihad."
It is surely not accidental that the first tradition selected for commentary by the Imam in his Sharh-i Chihil Hadith was the hadith from which this pair of terms, major and minor jihad, is derived: "When a group of combatants whom the Prophet had sent forth returned, he addressed them saying, 'Welcome to a people who have completed the minor jihad; the major jihad remains for them to fulfill.' They asked: 'O Messenger of God, what is the major jihad?' He replied: “The jihad against the self.” In his commentary on this hadith, the Imam expounds a concise but complete program of inner combat, its first stage being the reflection (tafakkur) that is ordained in Qur'an, 33:46, the verse cited by the Imam at the beginning of his first public proclamation.
The numerous proclamations and directives, gathered together in the 22-volume collection entitled Sahifa-yi Nur, that the Imam issued first in the course of the struggle that led to the foundation of the Islamic Republic and then during the first ten years of its existence necessarily deal first and foremost with the problems and crises of the day. These documents also contain, however, numerous allusions to Gnostic and ethical concerns, demonstrating once again the inseparability of the spiritual and ethical in the worldview of the Imam; a thematic index of the Sahifa-yi Nur lists more than 700 passages of varying length dealing with the concerns of ‘irfan.
Here, only two examples will be discussed. On December 22, 1979, when addressing the people of Qum, the Imam described the success of the revolution as due to the fact that the people of Iran had oriented themselves to the divine presence and thereby taken on "a divine existence." Later, after the beginning of the Iraqi aggression in September 1980, the Imam repeatedly said of the martyrs that they had gone to "the contemplation of ALLAH" (liqa'ullah). This contemplation, a major theme of ‘irfan, had been the subject of a small treatise written by the Imam some time during the 1930's and published as a supplement to the lengthier work of his teacher, Aqa Javad Maliki Tabrizi, on the same subject. He treated the subject at greater length in his Sharh-i Chihil Hadith, where he clarifies that the meaning of liqa'ullah is not comprehensive rational knowledge of the divine essence but "a comprehensiveness of Gnostic witnessing attained by inner vision " (ihata dar ‘irfan-i shuhudi va qadam-i basirat). He connects it, moreover, to the same supplication with which we opened this discussion, and it may therefore be concluded that for the Imam the martyr was one who by means of his death penetrated "the veils of light" to attain "the source of magnificence."
Perhaps the clearest public evidence of the Imam's continuing attachment to ‘irfan and even his belief in the permissibility of conveying it to the broadest possible public came with his televised lectures on the exegesis of Surat al-Fatiha in December 1979 and January 1980. The lectures were suspended for a variety of reasons before the Imam had proceeded beyond the first two verses of the surah, but even in their incomplete form they are a remarkable exposition, clear, eloquent, and accessible, of key topics of ‘irfan, especially the modes of divine manifestation and the meanings of the divine names.
Worthy of note are also the tumultuous events through which Iran was passing at the time the lectures were delivered: the intensified confrontation with the United States that followed on the deposed Shah's entry to America and the occupation of the United States Embassy in Tehran by the Students Following the Line of the Imam; the struggle to institutionalize the new order; various counterrevolutionary plots; and upheaval in the armed forces. It was against this background of turmoil that the Imam chose, with the perfect tranquility that characterized his demeanor, to lecture to the Iranian nation on key topics of ‘irfan that might have been thought irrelevant to the urgent concerns of the day.
To understand this choice, it may be appropriate to recall an episode in the life of Imam 'Ali ('alayhi 's-salam) to which the Imam himself refers in the lectures on Surat al-Fatiha. Once, when advancing to do battle with Mu'awiya, Imam 'Ali began discoursing on the inner meaning of Tawhid. One of his companions asked him whether the time was suitable for the discussion of such matters. He responded, "this is the reason that we are fighting Mu'awiya, not for any worldly gain." The conclusion follows that it is precisely in the midst of the struggle for the establishment of an Islamic order that the deepest meanings of Tawhid may be fittingly evoked; the Gnostic and the political, ‘irfan and jihad, are seen once again to be indissolubly linked.
The Imam's concern that Islamic gnosis should be properly known expressed itself even in the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic. In a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union, dated January 4, 1988, the Imam not only foretold the collapse and utter discrediting of Communism, with a prescience that outstripped the expertise of conventional Kremlinologists, but also warned against the spiritual and ethical chaos into which post-Soviet Russia has now in fact fallen. The essential problem confronting Russia, the Imam asserted, was not that of property, the administration of the economy, or personal freedom, but the absence of a valid faith in God. As a contribution to remedying the situation, the Imam proposed that Gorbachev dispatch Soviet scholars to Qum to study inter alia the works of Farabi, Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra, and Ibn 'Arabi.
Important and eloquent testimony to the Imam's essential nature as a Gnostic of high rank is also contained in more intimate documents, written towards the end of his life: the poems in which he anticipated the union with the Divine Beloved to which he had constantly aspired, and letters to his son, the late Hajj Sayyid Ahmad Khomeini, and his daughter-in-law, [Khanum] Fatima Tabataba'i. Both the poems and the letters are marked by a strongly emotive tone that distinguishes them from the writings on ‘irfan he had composed during the first phase of his life in Qum.
As for the public testament that was released after the Imam's death on June 3, 1989, it consists primarily of counsels to various classes of the Iranian people and warnings of the problems they will face in preserving the Islamic Republic. It is therefore easy to dismiss as a mere preliminary the Imam's opening emphasis on the hadith-i thaqalayn, that foundational text for all of Shia thought, and to overlook the occurrence, in the exordium, of a reference to "the reserved name" (al-ism al-musta'thar) of God.
The sense of this term, which ultimately goes back to a petitionary prayer of the Prophet, may be summarized as the divine name (or compendium of names) that relate to the divine qualities that are not and never will be manifested, being "held in reserve" in God's hidden knowledge concerning himself. As has been suggested by Ayatollah Muhammadi Gilani, the reference made by the Imam to "the reserved name" at the very beginning of his testament indicates a wish on his part to encourage the cultivation of ‘irfan after his passing as an indispensable part of his legacy. It is from the invocation of "the reserved name," together with all the names manifest or capable of manifestation, which the Imam descends, as it were, in the main body of his testament, to the plane of the divine acts that is simultaneously the plane of socio-political struggle. He thus underlined for the last time, subtly but unmistakably, the linkage between the Gnostic and the political that had been the hallmark of his life and one measure of his full and creative assimilation of the guidance of the Qur'an and the Ma’sumin.
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The Fusion of the Gnosticsm and Politics in Ayatollah Khomeini
By Dr, Hamid Algar
It is related that when teaching a class on ethical advancement at Qum in the 1930s, Imam Khomeini would always close his lectures with the following sentence from the Munajat-i Sha'ban, a litany unique in that all the Twelve [Ma’sumin] Imams recited it:
O God, grant me total separation from other than You and attachment to You; brighten the vision of our hearts with the light of looking upon You, so that they may pierce the veils of light and attain the source of magnificence, and our spirits be suspended from the splendor of Your sanctity.
The Imam always assigned great importance to the study and recitation of the supplicatory prayers of the Imams from the Ahlul-Bayt, as a means of attaining Munajat-i Sha'ban spiritual insight as well as petitioning the Creator, but this appeal from the Munajat-i Sha'ban seems to have been particularly close to his heart. It appears in texts and pronouncements belonging to different phases of his life: in the commentary on a hadith of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq concerning "the meeting with ALLAH" (liqa'ullah), contained in Sharh-i Chihil Hadith, a work completed in 1939; in one of his works concerning the inner dimensions of prayer, Mi'raj al-Salikin, also finished the same year; in Jihad-i Akbar ya Mubaraza ba Nafs, a lecture on ethical purification delivered in Najaf in about 1972; in the lectures on the exegesis of Surat al-Fatiha that were televised in December, 1979 and January, 1980; and in Rah-i 'Ishq, a letter written by the Imam to his daughter-in-law, [Khanum] Fatima Tabataba'i, in 1983.
The aspiration "to pierce the veils of light and attain the source of magnificence" may therefore be regarded as a constant element in the devotional life of the Imam, and only by bearing it in mind can the totality of his struggles and achievements, including the political, be correctly understood. It was with a gaze fixed on "the source of magnificence", a mode of vision utterly different from that of the common political leader, that the Imam led a vast revolutionary movement to success.
The integrality and comprehensiveness of the Imam's personality and vision of Islam are such that analytical distinctions among their various dimensions are in a sense artificial, reflecting an effort to understand the Imam rather than his actuality. It is nonetheless legitimate - or at least inevitable - to speak of the Gnostic (irfani) and political aspects of his life and activity and to accord a certain primacy to the former, in terms of not only chronology but also significance. The Imam is generally regarded, by both Westerners and Muslims, as nothing more than an unusually gifted revolutionary leader, yet all who knew him intimately, as well as many who met with him but briefly, can testify that he possessed a vision transcending the political at the very same time that it controlled and embraced it. It is precisely this inclusion of the political in the Gnostic that is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Imam's persona.
As for the chronological primacy of gnosis in the life of the Imam, this is amply demonstrated by the history of his early years in Qum. His immediate purpose in going there in 1920 was no doubt to study with Shaykh 'Abd al-Karim Ha'iri, one of the principal authorities of the day in jurisprudence, and he distinguished himself in this essential area of Islamic learning long before his emergence as a marja'-i taqlid in the early 1960's. But in Qum he soon developed an interest in ‘irfan and associated disciplines that set him apart from many of his contemporaries and was, indeed, often viewed with suspicion and even hostility; many years later he had occasion to remark: "It is regrettable that some of the ‘ulama should entertain such suspicions and deprive themselves of the benefits to be gained from studying ‘irfan."
His first guide in the pursuit of ‘irfan was Mirza'Ali Akbar Yazdi (d. 1926), a pupil of Husayn Sabzavari who had himself studied under Mulla Hadi Sabzavari (d. 1872), the author of Sharh-i Manzuma, one of the basic texts of ‘irfan; the Imam was thus affiliated to one of the principal lines of the teaching and transmission of Shia gnosis. Another early guide was Mirza Aqa Javad Maliki Tabrizi (d. 1924), who had been teaching in Qum since 1911. He held two classes on philosophy and ethics, a public one at the Madrasa-yi Fayziya and a private one in his own home that was attended by a number of gifted and favored students including the Imam.
The Imam also studied with Sayyid Abu al-Hasan Rafi'i Qazvini (d. 1975), among whose few published writings is a commentary on the Du'a al-Sahar, the same profound supplication to which the Imam devoted his first work, Sharh Du'a al-Sahar; it is therefore possible that the Imam's attention was first drawn to this text by Qazvini.
The Imam's chief teacher in gnosis was, however, Ayatullah Muhammad 'Ali Shahabadi (d.1950), to whom he respectfully referred in his own writings on ‘irfan as "our master in theosophy" (ustad-i ilahi-yi ma). He met Shahabadi soon after the latter's arrival in Qum (probably in the late 1920's), and the answer he gave the Imam to a question on ‘irfan convinced him that he was in the presence of a true master. After initially refusing the Imam's request for permission to study with him, Shahabadi consented to teach him philosophy, but it was gnosis the Imam wished to pursue, and he persisted until Shahabadi agreed to instruct him in that discipline. Every Thursday and Friday, as well as on holidays, usually alone but sometimes in the company of one or two other students, the Imam listened to Shahabadi lecturing on the commentary by Da'ud Qaysari (d. 1350) on the Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn 'Arabi, the Miftah al-Ghayb of Sadr al-Din Qunavi (d. 1274), and the Manazil al-Sa'irin of Khwaja 'Abdullah Ansari (d. 1089). The Imam's interest in these texts, particularly the last, remained demonstrably with him throughout his life.
In so far as the Imam's fusion of Gnostic and political concerns can be traced to any source other than illumination and immersion in the Qur'an and the teachings of the Ma’sumin, it is to another aspect of Shahabadi's influence upon him that it may be attributed. Shahabadi was one of the relatively few ‘ulama in the time of Reza Shah to raise his voice against the misdeeds of the Pahlavi dynasty. He would regularly preach against the first Pahlavi during the commemoration of 'Ashura, and on one occasion manifested his extreme discontent by entering an eleven-month retreat at the shrine of Shah 'Abd al-'Azim.
A similar commitment to the political sphere manifested itself in one of his books, Shadharat al-Ma'arif, a brief work which has been well described as "social as well as Gnostic in content." Here Shahabadi analyzes the causes of decline and discontent in Muslim society, proposes the diffusion of authentic Islamic knowledge as a means of remedying the situation and creating unity, and concludes that although the establishment of perfect Islamic governance is a task reserved for the Sahib al-Zaman [Imam Mahdi], the political dimension of Islam, implicit in all its juridical ordinances, cannot in any way be neglected, for "Islam is most certainly a political religion" (pp. 6-7).
The Imam began his teaching career at the age of twenty-seven by providing instruction in hikmat, a discipline closely related to ‘irfan, and soon thereafter organized private sessions in ‘irfan itself. It was in these sessions that the Imam trained and inspired some of his closest associates, including above all Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahhari, whom the Imam described after his assassination in May 1979 as "the very quintessence of my being." The texts taught to this elite were the section on the soul (nafs) in the Asfar al-Arba'a of Mulla Sadra and the Sharh-i Manzuma.
Gnostic and devotional matters also formed the subject matter of the Imam's earliest writings. In 1928, he wrote a detailed commentary on the Du'a al-Sahar, the prayer recited before dawn during Ramadan by Imam Muhammad al-Baqir. This work was followed in 1931 by Misbah al-Hidaya ila al-Khilafa wa al-Wilaya, a brief but dense exposition of the innermost reality of the Prophet and the Imams that draws not only on a meditation on the hadith of the Ma’sumin but also on the akbari concept of the Universal Man (al-insan al-kamil).
In 1937, the Imam completed a series of glosses on Qaysari's commentary on the Fusus al-Hikam and on the Misbah al-Uns, Hamza b. Fanari's commentary on the Miftah al-Ghayb of Qunavi. Two years later, the Imam completed his first work in Farsi, Sharh-i Chihil Hadith, a voluminous commentary on forty hadith of predominantly ethical and gnostic content. Also dating from 1939 is the Imam's Mir'aj al-Salikin wa Salat al-'Arifin (also known as Sirr al-Salat), a treatise in Farsi detailing the inner meaning of every part of the prayer, from the ablution that precedes it to the threefold takbir that concludes it. Somewhat more accessible than this dense and challenging work is another book on the same theme, Adab al-Salat, completed in 1942. Finally, mention may be made of Sharh-i Hadith-i Junud-i 'Aql o Jahl, a work completed in 1944 which, has been described as the fullest and most systematic exposition of the Imam's views on ethics and gnosis.
Beyond this enumeration, it is neither possible nor desirable on the present occasion to attempt a fuller presentation of the Imam's contribution to the discipline of ‘irfan; it will be enough to refer the reader to Yahya Christian Bonaud's L'Imam Khomeyni, un gnostique méconnu du XXe siecle (Beirut, 1997), an excellent work of both synthesis and analysis. However, in connection with the trajectory of the Imam's life - the transition from early emphasis on ‘irfan to later engagement in the political realm - it is imperative to note that the Gnostic writings are not a digest or extension of received opinions and formulations, drawn up in youth only to be laid aside in maturity; rather they are the manifest fruit of a powerful, original, and lasting vision.
As was remarked by Sayyid Ahmad Fihri, who attended some of the Imam's lectures in Qum during the 1930's, "it is apparent that he [the Imam] has experiential knowledge of all he wrote upon." To put it somewhat differently, the Imam's works on ‘irfan were but the early, literary expression of a process of suluk, of continuous advancement towards the repeatedly invoked "source of magnificence." The Imam's leadership of the Islamic Revolution and his establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran may be therefore be said to have constituted, from a certain point of view, a further stage in that process of spiritual wayfaring; the fruits of his inward strivings came ultimately to transcend his own person and to manifest themselves with profound effect in the political realm.
This characterization may be justified with reference to the first three of the four journeys that furnish both the subject and the title of Mulla Sadra's Asfar al-Arba'a, a work with which the Imam was intimately acquainted. The first is the journey from creation to the divine reality (min al-khalq ila al-haqq), a movement away from immersion in the multiplicity of creation to exclusive awareness of the sole reality that is coterminous with the divine essence. The second journey takes place within the divine reality by means of that reality itself (fi al-haqq bi al-haqq); it consists of the perception of the divine perfections (kamalat) and of a series of extinctions in the divine names followed by subsistence through them. The third journey is that which leads back from the divine reality to creation (min al-haqq ila al-haqq); however, it does not bring the wayfarer back to his point of departure, for it is a journey that is accomplished by means of the divine reality (bi al-haqq) and has as its result the perception of the mysteries of the divine acts (af'al) as they unfold in the phenomenal world.
If the impertinence of speculating on the spiritual progress of the Imam be forgiven, it may be suggested that his period of primary emphasis on ‘irfan and associated matters corresponded to the first and second journeys described by Mulla Sadra, and that his involvement in the political sphere and his leadership of the Islamic Revolution were analogous to the third journey. What is certain that the unique insight the Imam displayed at critical junctures during the revolution and the early years of the Islamic Republic cannot be explained purely in terms of political sagacity; a clarity of vision was at work which enabled him to see beyond the immediate conjuncture, and it may be permissible to describe this capacity as a witnessing of the af'al as they became manifest in the political sphere. If this characterization is justifiable, it becomes plain that the Imam generally refrained from overt political activity until 1962 not only because of an unwillingness to dispute the quietist attitude of the senior ‘ulama of the day, but also because an essential process of inner preparation was underway. It was the Imam's own progress toward "the source of magnificence" that enabled him to lead a revolution that was like a collective suluk of the Iranian people.
This having been said, it must be conceded that the scheme of the three successive journeys has an inevitably metaphorical character, in that the concreteness and definite accessibility of a terrestrial destination are lacking in the trackless realm of inward journeying. Moreover, the application of the scheme to a given life cannot be taken to imply an exact correspondence to chronologically distinct periods. It is no doubt for this reason that traces of political awareness and interest can be discerned in the life of the Imam even before his emergence on the national scene in 1962.
He had some contact with scholars who contested various policies of Reza Shah, not only his master Shahabadi but also Hajj Aqa Nurullah Isfahani and Mulla Husayn Fisharaki who led a protest in Isfahan against compulsory military service in 1924; Ayatollah Angaji and Mirza Sadiq Aqa who led a similar movement in Tabriz in 1928; Aqazada Kafa'i who was brought to Tehran for trial after the Mashhad uprising of 1935; and Sayyid Hasan Mudarris, whom the Imam later described as "the leader of those who stood against oppression." Moreover, the Imam often touched on political themes in the poetry he wrote at the time and which was privately circulated in Qum. Thus when in 1928 Reza Shah abolished the capitulations that had been granted to foreign powers and sought thereby to present himself as an authentic patriot, the Imam responded with a poem that included this line: "It's true he has now abolished every capitulation, but only to hide from you the abolition of the nation!"
In any event, such was the climate of the day in Iran that even such an essential component of Shia spirituality as rauzakhwani {the recitation of texts commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain} automatically took on political connotations. In an interview granted to the present writer in December 1979, the Imam recalled that the assemblies of rauzakhwani in which he participated in Qum during his youth rarely took place, and even then informers often infiltrated them, with the result that those participating were arrested. Still less to the liking of the Pahlavi regime than such traditional manifestations of piety were the public lectures on ethics given by the Imam in Qum in the early 1930's and, after a hiatus, from 1941 onward.
Although based on the Manazil al-Sa'irin of Ansari, one of the texts the Imam had studied with Shahabadi, these lectures served as the vehicle for a comprehensive exposition of Islam as a whole, including its political dimensions. Sayyid Ahmad Fihri recalled: "I count the time I spent attending those lectures among the most precious hours of my life. In his lectures the Imam taught true Islamic ethics, which cannot be separated from revolution, in such a way that he left a deep impression on all who attended." Another listener to those lectures, Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahhari, attributed to them "the formation of a good part of my intellectual and spiritual personality." Moreover, it was not only religious scholars who attended the lectures; people from other walks of life would come from places as far a field as Tehran and Isfahan, defying the wish of the Pahlavi regime to isolate the religious institution in Qum from the general population.
The interconnectedness of the Gnostic and sapiential with the political and confrontational also came clearly to the fore in Kashf al-Asrar, which appearing in 1945 was the first published work of the Imam. The book is in the first place a crushing response to Asrar-i Hazarsala, a Wahhabi-inspired polemic against many of the key doctrines of Shia Islam. This is accomplished largely through the marshalling of a wide range of scriptural and rational arguments, but the Imam also has recourse to the great authorities of hikmat and ‘irfan, men such as Ibn Sina, Suhrwardi, and Mulla Sadra. Further, the currency of works such as Asrar-i Hazarsala is denounced by the Imam as one consequence of the anti-religious policies of the Pahlavi regime, and it is in Kashf al-Asrar that the Imam expounds for the first time the doctrine of "the governance of the jurisprudent" (Vilayat-i Faqih) that was to become the constitutional foundation of the Islamic Republic.
In May 1944, at about the same time he must have been engaged in writing Kashf al-Asrar, the Imam issued what appears to have been his first political proclamation, calling for action to deliver the Muslims of Iran and the entire Islamic world from the tyranny of foreign powers and their domestic accomplices; the autograph copy of this proclamation is headed not only by the bismala but also by the injunction, "read it and put it into effect." The Imam begins, very significantly, by citing Qur'an, 34:46:
"Say: I enjoin upon you one thing only -- that you rise up for God, in pairs and singly, and then reflect."
This is the same verse that opens the chapter on awakening (bab al-yaqza) at the very beginning of Ansari's Manazil al-Sa'irin, the handbook of spiritual wayfaring beloved of the Imam since his days of study with Shahabadi. "Rising up for God" counts, then, as the essential point of departure for suluk; it is defined by Ansari as "awakening from the slumber of neglect and rising from the pit of lassitude." The Imam similarly says of the verse in question that in it "God Almighty has set forth the progress of man from the dark realm of nature to the farthest point of true humanity," so that the injunction contained in it is "the sole path of reform in this world."
But immediately after offering this Gnostic and ethical interpretation of the verse the Imam proceeds to analyze the lamentable state of the Muslim world, attributing it to the fact that all are engaged in "rising up for the sake of their appetitive souls" (qiyam barayi nafs); it is only through "rising up for God" that matters can be rectified. "Rising up for God" thus becomes both an act of personal redemption and a commitment to change and reform Muslim society, an insurrection equally against spiritual lassitude and neglect in oneself and against corruption, irreligion and tyranny in the world. There is perhaps no clearer textual indication of the interconnectedness of the ethical and Gnostic with the political in the worldview of the Imam than in this understanding of "rising up for God."
During the roughly eighteen years that elapsed between the issuing of this early proclamation and the beginning of the Imam's sustained public struggle against the Pahlavi regime in the autumn of 1962, he appears to have devoted himself primarily to teaching fiqh and usul and writing authoritative books on those disciplines. It has, however, already been pointed out that for the Imam ‘irfan was above all an existential matter, so that the diversion of his pedagogical and literary energies to fiqh and usul cannot be taken to mean that ‘irfan disappeared from the horizons of his inner life.
There is evidence; moreover, that even his teaching of these exoteric sciences was colored by Gnostic concerns and that this was one factor in attracting an unusually large number of students to his classes. To quote Sayyid Ahmad Fihri once more, the Imam was able "to demonstrate the conformity of the shari'a to the logic of ‘irfan as well as the conformity of ‘irfan to the logic of the shari'a." In addition, the teaching methods of the hauza [theology school] have always involved the transmission to the student of more than formal learning; a complete ethos and worldview pass from one generation to the next. That the Imam in particular was able to convey to his students essential spiritual virtues and qualities is apparent from the testimony of the late Muhammad Javad Bohonar that "the Imam would instill in us a sense of spiritual nobility, of responsibility and commitment, of spiritual and intellectual richness; his words would resound in our ears for many days after we left Qum to go preaching during Ramadan."
The Imam addressed himself in detail to this task of the ethical and spiritual training of his students in the lectures on the "Major Jihad", the struggle against the self-indulgent tendencies of the self, which he delivered at Najaf in 1972. It is significant that these lectures were given after the better-known series on the governance of the jurisprudent, and appropriate that they were first published as a supplement to them. For the establishment of Islamic government was seen by the Imam as both dependent on and aiming at the spiritual purification of Muslim society and those called upon to lead it, the religious scholars; success in the "minor jihad," the struggle against external forces hostile to Islam, was indissolubly linked to exertion in the " Major Jihad."
It is surely not accidental that the first tradition selected for commentary by the Imam in his Sharh-i Chihil Hadith was the hadith from which this pair of terms, major and minor jihad, is derived: "When a group of combatants whom the Prophet had sent forth returned, he addressed them saying, 'Welcome to a people who have completed the minor jihad; the major jihad remains for them to fulfill.' They asked: 'O Messenger of God, what is the major jihad?' He replied: “The jihad against the self.” In his commentary on this hadith, the Imam expounds a concise but complete program of inner combat, its first stage being the reflection (tafakkur) that is ordained in Qur'an, 33:46, the verse cited by the Imam at the beginning of his first public proclamation.
The numerous proclamations and directives, gathered together in the 22-volume collection entitled Sahifa-yi Nur, that the Imam issued first in the course of the struggle that led to the foundation of the Islamic Republic and then during the first ten years of its existence necessarily deal first and foremost with the problems and crises of the day. These documents also contain, however, numerous allusions to Gnostic and ethical concerns, demonstrating once again the inseparability of the spiritual and ethical in the worldview of the Imam; a thematic index of the Sahifa-yi Nur lists more than 700 passages of varying length dealing with the concerns of ‘irfan.
Here, only two examples will be discussed. On December 22, 1979, when addressing the people of Qum, the Imam described the success of the revolution as due to the fact that the people of Iran had oriented themselves to the divine presence and thereby taken on "a divine existence." Later, after the beginning of the Iraqi aggression in September 1980, the Imam repeatedly said of the martyrs that they had gone to "the contemplation of ALLAH" (liqa'ullah). This contemplation, a major theme of ‘irfan, had been the subject of a small treatise written by the Imam some time during the 1930's and published as a supplement to the lengthier work of his teacher, Aqa Javad Maliki Tabrizi, on the same subject. He treated the subject at greater length in his Sharh-i Chihil Hadith, where he clarifies that the meaning of liqa'ullah is not comprehensive rational knowledge of the divine essence but "a comprehensiveness of Gnostic witnessing attained by inner vision " (ihata dar ‘irfan-i shuhudi va qadam-i basirat). He connects it, moreover, to the same supplication with which we opened this discussion, and it may therefore be concluded that for the Imam the martyr was one who by means of his death penetrated "the veils of light" to attain "the source of magnificence."
Perhaps the clearest public evidence of the Imam's continuing attachment to ‘irfan and even his belief in the permissibility of conveying it to the broadest possible public came with his televised lectures on the exegesis of Surat al-Fatiha in December 1979 and January 1980. The lectures were suspended for a variety of reasons before the Imam had proceeded beyond the first two verses of the surah, but even in their incomplete form they are a remarkable exposition, clear, eloquent, and accessible, of key topics of ‘irfan, especially the modes of divine manifestation and the meanings of the divine names.
Worthy of note are also the tumultuous events through which Iran was passing at the time the lectures were delivered: the intensified confrontation with the United States that followed on the deposed Shah's entry to America and the occupation of the United States Embassy in Tehran by the Students Following the Line of the Imam; the struggle to institutionalize the new order; various counterrevolutionary plots; and upheaval in the armed forces. It was against this background of turmoil that the Imam chose, with the perfect tranquility that characterized his demeanor, to lecture to the Iranian nation on key topics of ‘irfan that might have been thought irrelevant to the urgent concerns of the day.
To understand this choice, it may be appropriate to recall an episode in the life of Imam 'Ali ('alayhi 's-salam) to which the Imam himself refers in the lectures on Surat al-Fatiha. Once, when advancing to do battle with Mu'awiya, Imam 'Ali began discoursing on the inner meaning of Tawhid. One of his companions asked him whether the time was suitable for the discussion of such matters. He responded, "this is the reason that we are fighting Mu'awiya, not for any worldly gain." The conclusion follows that it is precisely in the midst of the struggle for the establishment of an Islamic order that the deepest meanings of Tawhid may be fittingly evoked; the Gnostic and the political, ‘irfan and jihad, are seen once again to be indissolubly linked.
The Imam's concern that Islamic gnosis should be properly known expressed itself even in the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic. In a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union, dated January 4, 1988, the Imam not only foretold the collapse and utter discrediting of Communism, with a prescience that outstripped the expertise of conventional Kremlinologists, but also warned against the spiritual and ethical chaos into which post-Soviet Russia has now in fact fallen. The essential problem confronting Russia, the Imam asserted, was not that of property, the administration of the economy, or personal freedom, but the absence of a valid faith in God. As a contribution to remedying the situation, the Imam proposed that Gorbachev dispatch Soviet scholars to Qum to study inter alia the works of Farabi, Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra, and Ibn 'Arabi.
Important and eloquent testimony to the Imam's essential nature as a Gnostic of high rank is also contained in more intimate documents, written towards the end of his life: the poems in which he anticipated the union with the Divine Beloved to which he had constantly aspired, and letters to his son, the late Hajj Sayyid Ahmad Khomeini, and his daughter-in-law, [Khanum] Fatima Tabataba'i. Both the poems and the letters are marked by a strongly emotive tone that distinguishes them from the writings on ‘irfan he had composed during the first phase of his life in Qum.
As for the public testament that was released after the Imam's death on June 3, 1989, it consists primarily of counsels to various classes of the Iranian people and warnings of the problems they will face in preserving the Islamic Republic. It is therefore easy to dismiss as a mere preliminary the Imam's opening emphasis on the hadith-i thaqalayn, that foundational text for all of Shia thought, and to overlook the occurrence, in the exordium, of a reference to "the reserved name" (al-ism al-musta'thar) of God.
The sense of this term, which ultimately goes back to a petitionary prayer of the Prophet, may be summarized as the divine name (or compendium of names) that relate to the divine qualities that are not and never will be manifested, being "held in reserve" in God's hidden knowledge concerning himself. As has been suggested by Ayatollah Muhammadi Gilani, the reference made by the Imam to "the reserved name" at the very beginning of his testament indicates a wish on his part to encourage the cultivation of ‘irfan after his passing as an indispensable part of his legacy. It is from the invocation of "the reserved name," together with all the names manifest or capable of manifestation, which the Imam descends, as it were, in the main body of his testament, to the plane of the divine acts that is simultaneously the plane of socio-political struggle. He thus underlined for the last time, subtly but unmistakably, the linkage between the Gnostic and the political that had been the hallmark of his life and one measure of his full and creative assimilation of the guidance of the Qur'an and the Ma’sumin.
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