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OUR DEBT TO THE GNOSTICS  by Arthur Swan

The word “Gnostic” comes from the classical Greek word meaning “know”, and what these people “knew” was the basis of man’s relationship to his world and to its Creator. Such knowledge was rightly deemed to be divine wisdom, and one who sought it was a Philosopher, which latter term is a combination of two Greek words meaning “lover of wisdom”. We have a modern echo of these thoughts when a person who cannot really decide what he thinks on such matters is said to be Agnostic, meaning “without knowledge”.              A complete study of Gnosticism would involve tracing philosophical thought for a period of about a thousand years and, to do so in this one paper, would be like trying to give an adequate account of English history from the reign of Alfred the Great (10^th century) right up to the present. This being so, we will have to deal fairly briefly with earlier centuries and concentrate more on the later centuries when the Gnostics came under pressure from the Church of Rome.             Our review can begin in ancient Greece in the 5^th Century B.C., which saw the flowering of Greek genius under men like Plato. Greek scholars had learned a lot from ancient Egypt, but the latter’s scholarship was by then past its zenith and, indeed, was in decline, but the Greeks put their own stamp on it, so that the discourses of Plato, Pythagoras, and others, are even today still read with great respect.             In common with the rest of the ancient world, the Greeks were convinced that divine wisdom had to be preserved as a sacred trust, to be revealed only to those who had proved themselves worthy to receive it. To this end, there were the mystery schools, the Lesser and the Greater, but as those who attended were sworn to the strictest secrecy, our knowledge of the proceedings is necessarily rather sketchy. However, from various writings that have come down to us, we can infer that the Lesser Mysteries admitted suitable candidates who were instructed in basic teachings, on completion of which they achieved the Lesser Initiation. Thereafter, it was possible for the most outstanding candidates to progress through the Greater Mystery School to the Greater Initiation. Such initiates were deemed to be “seers”, because they would have seen the ‘gods’.             

The term “initiation” is instructive here as, with us, “to initiate” means “to begin”, and we would do well to remember that this is exactly what initiation meant to the contemporary of Plato. To him, initiation was not an end in itself, indeed it was not an end, in the sense of completion, at all, but very much a beginning, in the long process of refining and sublimation of the coarse vehicle of the flesh, so that the divinity within could more fully express itself.              TheGreece of the 5^th Century B.C. is sometimes depicted as an idyllic state which was the cradle of democracy. This was, in fact, true, but only to the extent that democracy applied only to the free class, and not to the substantial section of the population who were slaves. The latter were, of course, illiterate, as one would expect from those days, and this fact alone, quite apart from any lack of social standing, completely disqualified the slave class from participation in any of the mysteries, even at the lowest level.            

In all societies and in all ages, it has always been a problem for those wishing to disseminate some form of philosophy, how to provide meat for the strong, milk for the babes, and something adequate for those ranking in between. The ancient Greeks understood this and, for the unlettered populace, plays, pageants, etc were provided periodically, at which the educated people attended as a matter of public policy. It is obvious, therefore, that the mystery schools were definitely elitist, and this probably contributed to their eventual decline.            

By the time the A.D. centuries dawned, there had been a general decline of scholarship, which led to some ancient writings being interpreted literally, instead of allegorically. There had also developed a vigorous exchange of ideas between Greece, Asia Minor, the Near East, Alexandria in Egypt and even India, but unfortunately ideas received from outside were sometimes not fully understood. For example, the Jewish idea that a Messiah would come was, in our opinion, that this would be achieved when we, each of us, have graduated to a state of perfection, but it was taken by some to mean that a man would be born who would become King of the Jews and liberate Jerusalem and its temple from the conquering Romans. Poor scholarship like this beings restricted vision, and we are not surprised to find that outgrowth of many sects, who no doubt bickered among themselves about trifling points of doctrine.            

About this time too, there came into use the word “Christos” and its variants, based on the word “to pour” in the sense of anointing, and adherents of these sects were generally known as Christian or ‘Chrestian’. In the Christian Bible, there are a number of epistles by the Apostle Paul to several “churches” in Asia Minor and Greece, and one would naturally assume (and is probably meant to assume) that these churches were followers of Jesus, the man born in Bethlehem, but H.P. Blavatsky says quite specifically in “Isis Unveiled” that these churches had no knowledge of a Saviour literally born as a man.              For the first three centuries or so A.D., there was a massive ferment of ideas, and the number of writings multiplied enormously, many describing in great detail the author’s idea of what the life on earth of the Christ would have been, if he ever really came. Naturally, as these people were writing fiction, they were completely free to write whatever seemed to them to be appropriate, so the early Church had to make a selection when assembling what we now know as the Holy Bible, and it is interesting to find Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, writing in about 185 A.D. that, out of a multitude of descriptions of the earthly life of the Saviour, only four were chosen, because there are four winds of heaven and four points of the compass. These four are still with us as the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and they were evidently chosen because they best supported the young Church’s conviction that the Saviour had literally walked and preached in Judea early in the first century A.D., but even these four disagree on some points, which is perfectly understandable, given the fictional origin mentioned above.             While these early centuries were mostly a time of poor scholarship, there was a great flowering of philosophical writing by men who, in their own times, and ever since, have been called Gnostics. They tried to revive and enlarge upon the ideas of Plato, and later scholars have called them Neo-Platonists. Their basic teaching was that the Christ, by whatever name he was known, was the ever-coming one – indeed, he was each one of us as we can and eventually will become in some future incarnation. He was an Exemplar, to show us what we could achieve, if we would but try. They believed that the Greater Initiation was essential to our spiritual progress, and that if a really virtuous man were to die without having achieved that Greater Initiation, his reincarnating ego would be infallibly guided to rebirth in a body which would have that opportunity. Some of them said of the Saviour that he never closed his eyes – an idea which probably came from India, where it was said that the god never sleeps, but this idea hardly fits a physical body as we know it. Another description is of Jesus answering questions from a group, and most of the questions come from the women, which would be frowned upon by some churchmen, even today.             As practically all the above points are in direct conflict with orthodox Christianity, it is not surprising that when the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome in about A.D. 338, the Church lost no time in destroying all writings of the Gnostics that could be found. As a result of this, we know literally nothing at all but some of the Gnostics themselves, and all that we know of their writings has to be gleaned from the criticisms of the Church Fathers, chiefly Irenaeus, about A.D. 185 and Hippolytus, some fifty years later. As the Fathers all display varying degrees of hostility, one is entitled to wonder just how reliable their quotations from Gnostic writings really are.              

Fortunately, about 130 years ago, several codices were discovered, and an excerpt from one known as the Acts of John is given below:-            (The Lord had appeared to John on the Mount of Olives, whence he had fled from the crucifixion)-“Our Lord stood in the midst of the cave and filled it with light and said ‘To the multitude below, in Jerusalem, I am being crucified and pierced with lances and reeds, and gall and vinegar is given Me to drink; to thee now I speak, and hearken to my words. Twas I who put it in thy heart to ascent to this mount, that thou mightest hear what disciple must learn from Master, and Man from God.’ And having thus spoken, He showed me a cross of light set up, and about the cross a great multitude, and therein one form and one likeness; and on the cross another multitude, not having one form, and I saw the Lord Himself above the cross, not having any shape, but only a voice; and a voice not such as was familiar to us, but a sweet and kid voice and one truly of God, saying unto me ‘John, it is needful that one should hear these things from me, for I have need of one who will hear. This cross of light is sometimes called the Word by Me for your sakes ……This is not the cross of wood, which thou will see when thou hast descended, nor am I He that is upon the cross, whom now thou seest not but only hearest a voice….. the multitude of one aspect that is about the cross is the lower nature…..”             This, you will agree, is both lofty and perceptive, but it also called for a good education and the breadth of vision which goes with a cultivated mind. Also, it is much more suggestive of a ritual like initiation than of an actual historical occurrence. As such, it was elitist and quite out of the reach of the illiterate masses. Indeed, this illustrates the very weakness which was mentioned earlier in our discussion of the ancient Greek mysteries. Christianity as we know it did not come to the Roman Emperors from professors or other learned men – that would have been coming in at the top. What it did was creep up from the bottom, through the scullery, kitchen or stables. An emperor would probably first hear of Christianity from his barber or valet or the groom of his favourite horse.             

Such underlings were regarded with disdain by educated Romans like Pliny, but those masses did need a philosophy of some kind, so Christianity rose through the social scale, gradually taking over from the so-called pagan beliefs. The father of theology as we know it today is generally conceded to have been Augustine who, it is interesting to note, had originally been a pupil of the Neo-Platonists. His whole-hearted espousal of the new creed may to some seem like a step downward into crude fundamentalism, but perhaps we should credit him with a compassionate desire to provide a philosophical benison for the masses. Of necessity, this had to be quite simple, even simplistic, and it is a great pity that some way was not found to preserve something on a higher level of thought. About the best that has come down to us through the Church are the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, whose writings have a strongly Gnostic tone and do not seem to know a literal Jesus of Nazareth.              When the Christian Church first received recognition as the State religion, it became the first organisation in history to claim to have a monopoly of truth – a breath-taking assertion which really only proved a very limited understanding of such matters. However, the Church had the full support of the Emperor Constantine, who ordered the closing of all the academies (similar to our universities), which eventually led to the Dark Ages that later closed over Western Europe. This was a serious blow to Gnosticism, which faded out in Rome, but continued a little longer in Alexandria, until even there it was extinguished by the invading Arabs newly converted to Islam.

This is the text of a lecture given by the author at a public meeting of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena) in Melbourne, Australia. The ideas expressed in all our public meetings are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the TS (Pasadena).