"Gnosticism" As A Potentially Flawed Category
In 1966 in Messina, Italy, a conference was held concerning systems of gnosis. Among its several aims were the need to establish a program to translate the recently acquired Nag Hammadi library (discussed above) and the need to arrive at an agreement concerning an accurate definition of "Gnosticism". This was in answer to the tendency, prevalent since the 18th century, to use the term "gnostic" less as its origins implied, but rather as an interpretive category for contemporary philosophical and religious movements. For example, in 1835, New Testament scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur constructed a developmental model of Gnosticism that culminated in the religious philosophy of Hegel; one might compare literary critic Harold Bloom's recent attempts to identify Gnostic elements in contemporary American religion, or Eric Voegelin's analysis of totalitarian impulses through the interpretive lens of Gnosticism.
The "cautious proposal" reached by the conference concerning Gnosticism is described by Markschies:
In the concluding document of Messina the proposal was "by the simultaneous application of historical and typological methods" to designate "a particular group of systems of the second century after Christ" as "gnosticism", and to use "gnosis" to define a conception of knowledge transcending the times which was described as "knowledge of divine mysteries for an élite".
— Markschies, Gnosis: An Introduction, p. 13
In essence, it had been decided that "Gnosticism" would become a historically specific term, restricted to mean the Gnostic movements prevalent in the 3rd century, while "gnosis" would be a universal term, denoting a system of knowledge retained "for a privileged élite." However, this effort towards providing clarity in fact created more conceptual confusion, as the historical term "Gnosticism" was an entirely modern construction, while the new universal term "gnosis" was a historical term: "something was being called "gnosticism" that the ancient theologians had called 'gnosis' ... concept of gnosis had been created by Messina that was almost unusable in a historical sense". In antiquity, all agreed that knowledge was centrally important to life, but few were agreed as to what exactly constituted knowledge; the unitary conception that the Messina proposal presupposed did not exist.
These flaws have meant that the problems concerning an exact definition of Gnosticism persist. It remains current convention to use "Gnosticism" in a historical sense, and "gnosis" universally. Leaving aside the issues with the latter noted above, the usage of "Gnosticism" to designate a category of 3rd century religions has recently been questioned as well. Of note is Michael Allen Williams' Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for the Dismantling of a Dubious Category, in which the author examines the terms by which Gnosticism as a category is defined, and then closely compares these suppositions with the contents of actual Gnostic texts (the newly recovered Nag Hammadi library was of central importance to his argument).
Williams argues that the conceptual foundations on which the category of Gnosticism rests are the remains of the agenda of the heresiologists. Too much emphasis has been laid on perceptions of dualism, body- and matter-hatred, and anticosmism without these suppositions being properly tested. In essence, the interpretive definition of Gnosticism that was created by the antagonistic efforts of the early church heresiologists has been taken up by modern scholarship and reflected in a categorical definition, even though the means now existed to verify its accuracy. Attempting to do so, Williams contests, reveals the dubious nature of categorical "Gnosticism", and he concludes that the term needs replacing in order to more accurately reflect those movements it comprises. Williams' observations have provoked debate; however, to date his suggested replacement term "the Biblical demiurgical tradition" has not become widely used.
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