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gnosticism
August 2007 
The Way of the Gnostics: Find Your Way: Draft chapter 3
Posted on Aug 25th, 2007
by 
Gray Raven
Gray Raven
Hans Jonas wrote: ‘the common secular culture was increasingly affected by a mental polarization in religious terms, leading finally to a breaking up of the former unity into exclusive camps.’ Do his words strike a chord? Do they seem to be describing the times that we are currently living in?
Actually he was writing not about our time but about conditions in Western Civilization that lasted throughout that period of time that saw the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It all started with the conquest of Alexander the Great, when the culture of Greece was exported to the entire Western world. One culture became the dominant worldview; Greek cultural influences were all-pervasive. This was a time of large urbanization and pouring into those urban settings were the displaced millions, due to war and conquest. So many people were uprooted from their place of birth, physically and spiritually. The old ways were failing or so it seemed, since old nations and old religions failed to protect. People felt a need for a new sense of meaning to fill the void that once was filled by their prior lives that had been shattered.
What happened back then was called the Hellenization of the Western World. What has been happening in our times is a comparable set of circumstances. We are experiencing the ‘conquest’ of our planet by one culture and this is resulting in a Corporate-Market-Driven-Americanization of the world. The response to this cultural conquest in our times is similar to the response people had in their time to the conquest of Alexander the Great.
Jonas states in his book that the turmoil caused by the Hellenistic conquest gave rise to the Gnostic answer: the Gnostic religions that were prevalent across the Western Hellenized World.
The word Gnostic is from the Greek word for knowledge. In this context it is being used to describe a special kind of knowledge concerning a view of the world. This special knowledge is of a secretive revelation that brings salvation. The gnostic map described the world as one filled with chaos, confusion, uncertainty, despair, pain and unrelenting suffering in large and small ways; a world that did not feel right, a world in which those values and beliefs of childhood that once made sense and felt right, no longer did. A world without the feeling of certainty and the comfort of one’s childhood beliefs and values was a world without meaning. The Gnostic view of life described the world as being a place of Hell, a place of entrapment that one has been thrown into.
The Gnostics believed they saw ‘life as it is’ and called it a Hell that they were trapped in. They did not believe that one could conceive of a ‘life as it should be’ – there was no hope for the ‘reality’ of life as they believe it to be. They could only imagine one alternative to the life they envisioned. They wished for release from this life through abandonment and escape from this Earthly and material coil.
I wish to offer an alternative to these ideas of withdrawal, escape and abandonment.
Actually he was writing not about our time but about conditions in Western Civilization that lasted throughout that period of time that saw the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It all started with the conquest of Alexander the Great, when the culture of Greece was exported to the entire Western world. One culture became the dominant worldview; Greek cultural influences were all-pervasive. This was a time of large urbanization and pouring into those urban settings were the displaced millions, due to war and conquest. So many people were uprooted from their place of birth, physically and spiritually. The old ways were failing or so it seemed, since old nations and old religions failed to protect. People felt a need for a new sense of meaning to fill the void that once was filled by their prior lives that had been shattered.
What happened back then was called the Hellenization of the Western World. What has been happening in our times is a comparable set of circumstances. We are experiencing the ‘conquest’ of our planet by one culture and this is resulting in a Corporate-Market-Driven-Americanization of the world. The response to this cultural conquest in our times is similar to the response people had in their time to the conquest of Alexander the Great.
Jonas states in his book that the turmoil caused by the Hellenistic conquest gave rise to the Gnostic answer: the Gnostic religions that were prevalent across the Western Hellenized World.
The word Gnostic is from the Greek word for knowledge. In this context it is being used to describe a special kind of knowledge concerning a view of the world. This special knowledge is of a secretive revelation that brings salvation. The gnostic map described the world as one filled with chaos, confusion, uncertainty, despair, pain and unrelenting suffering in large and small ways; a world that did not feel right, a world in which those values and beliefs of childhood that once made sense and felt right, no longer did. A world without the feeling of certainty and the comfort of one’s childhood beliefs and values was a world without meaning. The Gnostic view of life described the world as being a place of Hell, a place of entrapment that one has been thrown into.
The Gnostics believed they saw ‘life as it is’ and called it a Hell that they were trapped in. They did not believe that one could conceive of a ‘life as it should be’ – there was no hope for the ‘reality’ of life as they believe it to be. They could only imagine one alternative to the life they envisioned. They wished for release from this life through abandonment and escape from this Earthly and material coil.
I wish to offer an alternative to these ideas of withdrawal, escape and abandonment.
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