Gnosticism

Gnosticism is a collection of religious and philosophical movements of late antiquity that located salvation in direct, inward knowledge of the divine (gnosis), placing it above faith, tradition and the authority of organized religious institutions.

The word derives from the Greek gnōstikós, 'having knowledge', and gnōsis, 'knowledge'. As a general label, however, it is comparatively late: it was coined in the seventeenth century by Henry More to name the heresy that Irenaeus of Lyons had described as the 'so-called learned' or 'intellectual' sect. The groups now grouped under the term emerged from early Jewish and Christian sects alongside other syncretic currents, and reached their full development by the mid-second century. They were never a single homogeneous tradition or religion, but a family of doctrines sharing certain features.

At the centre of the Gnostic worldview lies a distinction between a hidden, uncorrupted supreme being and an inferior deity, often called the demiurge, held responsible for creating the material world. For these groups, material existence was flawed or even evil, and within the human being dwells a spark of divine origin that must awaken and return to its source. Salvation consisted in recognising one's own divine nature. Many of their texts speak more of ignorance, illusion and enlightenment than of sin and repentance. In Christian Gnostic circles, Christ was understood as a divine being who descended into human form to lead humanity towards that recognition.

Scholars have stressed the mixed character of its sources: Hellenistic Judaism, Middle Platonism, Persian traditions and, according to some, Eastern influences. The best-known groups include the Valentinians, the Sethians and the Basilideans, while Manichaeism and Mandaeism are regarded as heirs of these ideas. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 transformed knowledge of the subject, since until then scholars had relied largely on the refutations written by orthodox opponents.

Scholarly debate continues over whether Gnosticism should be understood as a form of early Christianity, as an interreligious phenomenon or as an independent tradition. Some researchers even question whether the category remains useful, since it was largely a construction of the heresiologists. The term has also given rise to neognosticism, modern currents that reinterpret its ideas through esotericism and contemporary philosophy.