Jonas was a Jewish philosopher and, perhaps, the second most famous student of Heidegger’s. This book was originally his German dissertation, which he later fleshed out, and then, again, briefly updated as more of the Nag-Hammadi discovery was translated. However, most of Jonas’ history of the Gnostic movement does not rely on the more recent discoveries. Nonetheless, this book is a thorough examination of Gnostic belief and its opposition to contemporary standard Christianity, neo-Platonism, paganism, and Jewish thought. Jonas begins, “The name “Gnosticism,” which has come to serve as a collective heading for a manifoldness of sectarian doctrines appearing within and around Christianity during its critical first centuries, is derived from gnosis, the Greek word for “knowledge.” The emphasis on knowledge as the means for attainment of salvation, or even as the form of salvation itself, and the claim to the possession of this knowledge in one’s own articulate doctrine, are common features of the numerous sects…. The Church Fathers considered Gnosticism as essentially a Christian heresy.”
For Gnosticism, knowledge does not quite have its secular meaning. Knowledge “refers to objects which we nowadays should call those of faith rather than of reason…. Gnosis meant pre-eminently knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical transcendence of the deity it follows that “knowledge of God” is knowledge of something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural condition…. It is closely bound up with revelatory experience, so that reception of the truth either through sacred and secret lore or through inner illumination replaces rational argument and theory…. “Knowledge” is not just theoretical information about certain things but is itself, as a modification of the human condition, charged with performing a function in bringing about salvation. Thus gnostic “knowledge” has an eminently practical aspect. The ultimate “object” of knowledge is God.”
Jonas relates how man fits into gnostic metaphysics, “Reduced to ultimate principles, his origin is twofold: mundane and extra-mundane….Through his body and his soul man is a part of the world and subjected to the heimarmene. Enclosed in the soul is the spirit, or “pneuma” (called also the “spark”), a portion of the divine substance from beyond which has fallen into the world…. The radical nature of the dualism determines that of the doctrine of salvation. As alien as the transcendent God is to “this world” is the pneumatic self in the midst of it. The goal of gnostic striving is the release of the “inner man” from the bonds of the world and his return to his native realm of light… The transcendent God is unknown in the world and cannot be discovered from it; therefore revelation is needed…. The Greek meaning of psyche, with all its dignity, did not suffice to express the new conception of a principle transcending all natural and cosmic associations that adhered to the Greek concept. The term pneuma serves in Greek Gnosticism generally as the equivalent of the expression for the spiritual “self,” for which Greek, unlike some oriental languages, lacked an indigenous word…. The discovery of this transcendent inner principle in man and the supreme concern about its destiny is the very center of the gnostic religion.”
The Gnostics had two main schools, Iranian and Syrian. These two schools principally differed in their conception of dualism. “The Gnostics were the first speculative “theologians” in the new age of religion superseding classical antiquity…. [Gnosticism] comprised as main tenets the ideas of an antidivine universe, of man’s alienness within it, and of the acosmic nature of the godhead…. Two types of system, called here for short (and without undue commitment to a theory of actual genetics) the Iranian and the Syrian, were evolved to explain essentially the same facts of a dislocated metaphysical situation—both “dualistic”…. The Iranian type, in a gnostic adaptation of Zoroastrian doctrine starting from a dualism of two opposed principles, has mainly to explain how the original Darkness came to engulf elements of the Light: i.e., it describes the world-drama as a war of changing fortunes…. The Syrian speculation undertakes the more ambitious task of deriving dualism itself, and the ensuing predicament of the divine in the system of creation, from the one and undivided source of being…. This inner divine “devolution” ends in the decadence of complete self-alienation that is this world…. Both dramas start with a disturbance in the heights; in both, the existence of the world marks a discomfiture of the divine and a necessary, in itself undesirable, means of its eventual restoration; in both, the salvation of man is that of the deity itself.”
Later, Jonas goes back to refining a conception of gnostic knowledge, “We have found “gnosis” to mean one of these things: knowledge of the secrets of existence as related in the gnostic myth, and these comprise the divine history from which the world originated, man’s condition in it, and the nature of salvation; then, more intellectually, the elaboration of these tenets into coherent speculative systems; then, more practically, knowledge of the “way” of the soul’s future ascent and of the right life preparing for this event; and, most technically or magically, knowledge of the sacraments, effective formulas, and other instrumental means by which the passage and liberation can be assured…. The mystical gnosis theou—direct beholding of the divine reality—is itself an earnest of the consummation to come. It is transcendence become immanent…. The ecstatic experience exhibits the double-edged character of the true eschaton of eschatological transcendental religion, which it draws—illegitimately, as we think—into the range of temporal life and the possibilities open to it…. It is this transposition of eschatology into the inwardness which yields the surpassing concept of gnosis.”
Jonas touches again on the nature of man in the cosmos, “This elevation—whether going that far or not—of ‘Man’ to a transmundane deity, prior and superior the creator of the universe, or, the assigning of that name to such a deity, is one of the most significant traits of gnostic theology…. That terrestrial man can identify his innermost being (“spirit,” “light,” etc.) with this supracosmic power, can therefore despise his cosmic oppressors and count on his ultimate triumph over them—and it becomes visible that the doctrine of the god Man, and in the creation story specifically: the humiliation of the demiurge in his name, mark the distinctly revolutionary aspect of gnosticism on the cosmic plane.”
Finally, Jonas circles back to gnostic dualism, “It is on this primary human foundation of a passionately felt experience of self and world, that the formulated dualistic doctrines rest. The dualism is between man and the world, and concurrently between the world and God…. Primarily would then be the feeling of an absolute rift between man and that in which he finds himself lodged—the world…. The divine is alien to the world and has neither part nor concern in the physical universe…. The true god, strictly transmundane, is not revealed or even indicated by the world, and is therefore the Unknown, the totally Other, unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies…. In its cosmological aspect it states that the world as the creation not of God but of some inferior principle whose law it executes; and, in its anthropological aspect, that man’s inner self, the pneuma (“spirit” in contrast to “soul”=psyche) is not part of the world, of nature’s creation and domain, but is, within that world, as totally transcendent and as unknown by all worldly categories as its transmundane counterpart, the unknown God without…. But whoever has created the world, man does not owe him allegiance, nor respect for his work…. The world, then, is the product, and even the embodiment, of the negative of knowledge. What it reveals is unenlightened and therefore malignant force, proceeding from the spirit of self-assertive power, from the will to rule and coerce. The mindlessness of this will is the spirit of the world, which bears no relation to understanding and love. The laws of the universe are the laws of this rule, and not of divine wisdom.” Jonas ends by quoting a famous Valentinian school saying, “What makes us free is the knowledge of who we were, what we have become; where we were, wherein we have been thrown; whereto we speed, where-from we are redeemed; what is birth and what rebirth.”
No comments:
Post a Comment