Gnosticism and Gnosis

Gnosticism and Gnosis

Erik Davis — 9 recordings in the archive.

The book: High Weirdness by Erik Davis.

Gnosticism and gnosis to say the least are very squirrelly terms when we describe something as Gnostic we can pretty much get away with almost whatever we want to so much so that many scholars who study the most classic the sense of Gnosticism which are the movements of late antiquity surrounding Christianity overlapping with certain apocalyptic Judaic tendencies as well as some pagan mysteries and this is really where the idea of Gnosticism and Gnostics come from but even when discussing these matters some scholars believe that the term Gnosticism has been so miss abuse are abused and we missed placed over the years that it's better just to abandon the term and come up with something else so why this complexity which we have to wrestle with if we're going to feel confident and talking about Gnosticism and in getting a sense that we're actually understanding something specific rather than having a new word to throw around well one of the reasons for this is that most of what we knew about Gnosticism at least before 1945 when the famous discovery of the naga hamadi library of coptic codices was occurred most of what we knew about Gnosticism came through the mouths of its enemies and so much so that the term Gnostic was actually a kind of almost a term of abuse and right off the bat there's a kind of fundamental disturbance and our understanding because if you were to read the Orthodox heresy arks those who pursued and sometimes quite relentlessly suppress things that they characterized as Gnostic that from these guys perspective Gnosticism was of course a heresy an evil distortion of the true religion but already this is a enormous distortion because there was no true religion at the point in which the Gnostics were really got going and we're talking about the 1st 2nd and especially 2nd and 3rd centuries after Jesus before Rome became Christian and a very crazy time of many different paths and gods and mysteries spreading through the anxious and in some ways very familiar milieu of the late Roman Empire that during this time there was no Orthodox exactly and what you had really was a collection of Christianity's for while Gnosticism stretches beyond Christianity it is largely Christian Gnosticism that we have as our sort of basis for understanding what Gnosticism is so at this point…