Scheme of Gnosis
By Orlando Fedeli - Starting with misconception that evil has a being, and then thinking that this world is evil, to finally stating that we must acquire an special knowledge to free ourselves
Note from the translator: As Mr. Fedeli used to explain, gnosis is not a religion per se, but a type of error, a collection of ideas and systems that spreads not only in Catholicism, but also in Judaism, Islamism and so many other religions. There is also a good number of eastern religions that adopt gnostic ideas as their foundational principal.
It is crucial to understand the scheme of Gnosis in order to be able to identify which heresy, sect, religion, has adopted it. Have in mind that the Gnostics concepts are many times not adopted as a whole but just partially.
This is excerpt is from Part 3, Chapter 2, of work “The ‘Traditionalist’ Gnosis of René Guénon and Olavo de Carvalho”
It seems to me, my dear Felipe, that it would be didactic to make, here, a brief summary — or outline — of the Gnostic system, so that the readers of our site know better what is being discussed. Evidently, I will make a very succinct outline, just remembering some fundamental points of Gnosis, which Mr. Olavo sum it up badly.
1 - Gnosis is born from a lack of solution to the problem of evil
"Unde malum"? 1
This is the initial question of all Gnosis, which produced a multiplicity of systems, from Manichaeism to Romanticism, passing through Kabbalah.
Gnosis revolts not only against physical evil, but goes even further: it revolts against the limitations of the created being, judging these limitation (are) an evil in itself. The Gnostic suffers for not being God. Hence, it is contrary to the Creator God who created contingent beings, analogous to the divine Being.
Gnosis is an anti-metaphysical revolt, taken that term in the Thomistic and not Guénonian sense, of course.
2 - For Gnosis, one should distinguish Divinity and God
Divinity would be, at the same time, Everything and Nothing, the single Being and, at the same time, the Non-Being. Nothing would really be known of her (the divinity): it would be the unknown God, the hidden Divinity. From this Divinity, God would have come and would have oppose the Divinity as Being to Non-Being, Light to darkness. God would be known, revealed, while Divinity would be absolutely unknowable.
3 - Metaphysical dialectic
It is clear that this metaphysical contradiction that equates opposites — Being = Not Being; Everything = Nothing; Full = Empty; — destroys the fundamental principles of being and thought, for it denies both the principle of identity (Being is identical with itself) and the principle of non-contradiction (a thing cannot be and not to be, at the same time, under the same aspect).
It is from the clash of these two inner principles of the being — (Yin and Yang, in Taoist Gnosis) — that the Gnostic dialectic comes, which considers the being to have two equal and opposite principles in perpetual struggle, which would provoke the continuous evolution and make the things just flow, a continuous becoming.
4 - Evolution of Divinity
The Divinity would evolve, and in this evolution it would have emanated numerous divine principles — each Gnostic sect enumerates different emanations — and one of these emanations would be the revealed God, the Being, the known God, the Demiurge creator of the material universe, identified in several Gnostic sects with Yahwe. This would be the god of evil, as he created, imprisoned in matter, reason and morals, particles emanating from the Divinity.
5 - The fall of the Divinity in the Cosmos
Divinity would have suffered a fall in the world. This would be the great cosmic sin practiced by the creator Demiurge, the one that Scripture calls Yahwé.
While for Catholicism there is only moral evil, and not evil as a being, that is, there are bad actions and not bad things in themselves — because everything that God has made is good — for Gnosis, evil is in the order of being. Evil is ontological.
On the other hand, for Catholicism, the origin of all the drama was the original sin of Adam and Eve in Eden, while for Gnosis, the root of evil would be in the Divinity itself, responsible for an precursor original sin (Cfr. Michel Barat , Le Dualisme de la Gnose et L'Image Symboliquement Double de la Femme in Les Cahiers Jean Scot Ergène, no 1, Images de L'Homme et initiation, ed. Loje d'Études et de Recherche Jean Scot Erigène, Paris, 1988, pp.33-54).
6 - The particles of Divinity in created things
According to Gnosis, in each thing there would be a particle of Divinity. This particle would be the "center" of each being. These particles would be the âtmâs, the aeons, the Fünkenlein (Little Spark) of Maister Eckhart, the "primum" of Ibn Arabi, the "Si" (Soi or Self) of Guénon, etc. Because of these particles of Divinity existing in creatures, the things of the world would be beings, while the matter that imprisons them would be pure illusion. In men, in addition to the material body, the rational soul itself would be a prison of the divine particle, since reason would show man the world as intelligible and good, deceiving man who, understanding the world, would no longer want to leave it. Man's ability to abstract would lead him to cut the whole into concepts, forming an immense puzzle that man no longer knows how to reconstruct, creating the illusion that the whole, the unity, does not exist. Hence, some Gnostics say that abstraction is the sin of intelligence.
And, as we will see later, Olavo says that abstracting is, deep down, a wrong thing, a true sin that would require absolution.
7 - Man according to Gnosis
For Gnosis, man would then be composed of a material body, psychic soul, and pneuma or divine spirit. Both the body and the soul would be prisons of the divine aeon (atma or spark).
According to the predominance of one of these components, men are classified by Gnosis or as Hylikoi [materials], when the body predominates in them; Psykikoi, or psychics, when the soul predominates; and finally, as pneumatikoi, or spiritual, when the divine spirit prevails in them.
Therefore, a Gnostic society — like that of India, for example — accepts castes. For Gnosis, men are fundamentally, naturally unequal. Hence the castes. And, following Guénon also in this, Olavo sympathizes with the existence of castes in society. (Cfr. Olavo de Carvalho, O Jardim das Aflições, p. 346-347 and note 219. Cfr. René Guénon, A Crisis do Mundo Moderno, pp. 69-70).
8 - Gnostic Soteriology: Redemptive Knowledge
The liberation of the divine particles, imprisoned in the prisons of matter, reason and morality created by the Demiurge, would be carried out by intuitive Knowledge ("Metaphysical", in the language of Guénon, of the "Perenialists", and of Olavo).
What would liberating knowledge be? It would be the Gnosis — the Knowledge — that, in the depths of our being, we are the Divinity itself. This Knowledge — this gnosis — would not be an intellectual knowledge, nor a rational one, but a supra-rational one, which would allow an intuitive illumination that any distinction of things is illusory. By this intuition, man would see that he is the Universe, and that the universe is Divinity itself. Intuition would be the Knowledge that, through the unity of the atmas, Man is the Universe, and is Divinity itself.
This saving Knowledge would free man from the illusion of matter, from the illusion of rationality and abstraction, from the illusion of the value of the moral law.
Man would be his own redeemer, and redeemer of Divinity. Christ would not then be the Redeemer of men. Christ would have been just one of those who redeemed himself, a prophet — as the Quran claims — but not God incarnate. Gnosis rejects the Incarnation of the Word: either it — like the Arians — affirms that Christ was only the first of creatures, a man only; or, it says — with the Eutychians — that Christ was a god, but without a real human body.
9 - Gnosis, Morals and Reason
If the redemption — Liberation — of man is achieved through Gnostic Knowledge or "Wisdom", it is understood that the practice of morals has no place in the salvific process of the eons.
Indeed, for Gnosis the moral Law was established by the Demiurge in order to keep the divine particles imprisoned in matter. Therefore, to obey the moral Law would be to cooperate in maintaining the incarceration of the atmas in the material world. Hence, the antinomianism of Gnosis. Liberation requires the violation of the moral law, the contempt of the 10 commandments.
This contempt for the moral law is realized either through moral anarchism that abuses creatures, or through the practice of an unnatural asceticism that despises matter as evil in itself, that refuses and denies all good to creatures. Therefore, many Gnostic sects condemn women and sexual reproduction. Others treat women as a means of liberation, considering sexual union as the first step towards the abolition of individuality.
Another means of liberation would be the contempt of rational order, science and metaphysics (in the Aristotelian-Thomist sense), giving preference to intuition over reason, magic and secret sciences over intelligence and the natural sciences. That's why Gnosis considers the esoteric sciences (Alchemy, Astrology, Numerology, Magic, etc.) as the only correct and salvific ones, because they are anti-rational.
10 - Gnostic ecclesiology
In the same way that Gnosis rejects the Incarnation of the Word, it rejects the idea of a structured, organized Church, with a hierarchy and with properties. Gnosis only accepts a Spiritual Church — Ecclesia Spiritualis — without dogmas and without material riches, without structures.
The Ecclesia Spiritualis of Gnosis would be made up of all the people who, within each organized religion, possess the "Tradition"— as Olavo and the “perennialists” say — and have the Knowledge that their spirit is a particle of Divinity. (Cfr. Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans Église, Gallimard, Paris, 1969).
Note from the translator: "Unde malum" is Latim for “Where does evil come from?”