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The Gnostics

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JACQUES LACARRIERE. The Gnostics. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1989. Paperback, 136 pages. ISBN 0872862437

There are many studies of Gnosticism available today - well-researched, well-written, scholarly, objective, fact-filled, and occasionally even interesting. Bizarre personalities, myths, theories and practices are described, often in great detail, on every page of such studies. And we may be forgiven if we end up concluding that the Gnostics were a bunch of wackos and misfits and that the world is well rid of them.

We may end up thinking this because, unlike the present book, the orthodox studies tend to describe this fascinating phenomenon from the outside, and from the outside it certainly does look exceedingly strange if not perverse to modern sensibilities. Lacarrière's approach, however, is different.

In the first place, although his work is certainly as scholarly and well-researched as that of the orthodox, he sees the major Gnostics - Basilides, Carpocrates, Valentinus - not as wackos but as highly civilized, sophisticated, rational, and intelligent men. He also sees that, no matter how bizarre they may seem to us, they were engaged in a profoundly serious effort to tackle the central problem of their world, a problem that remains the central problem of our world, THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.

Not only that, but after a careful analysis of their key beliefs, an analysis that strips away all sensationalism and looks at these beliefs for what they were, Lacarrière confesses that he is inclined to agree with them. In other words, after carefully feeling his way into the world-view of the Gnostics he found there something that he resonates with, the presence of some profound truth, and he is not ashamed to admit this.

So if we want to learn something about Gnosticism we have a choice. We can head for the orthodox studies crammed with hundreds of dates and names and masses of footnotes and exhaustive bibliographies and written by scholars of impeccable credentials but limited imagination who would be terrified to be caught out actually BELIEVING in any of the stuff they write about let alone suspecting that there just might be something in it.

Or we can get hold of a copy of this slim volume by Lacarrière, a genuinely sympathetic study crammed with valuable insights, a book written by an honest and intelligent man who views the Gnostics as fellow human beings and their discoveries as important and as holding something true and powerful that is still relevant to us today.

I think you already know my own choice. As for other books that can help deepen our understanding of Gnosis, Lacarrière recommends Emile M. Cioran A Short History of Decay, Marguerite Yourcenar The Abyss: A Novel, and Rene Guenon The Crisis of the Modern World (Guenon, Rene. Works.)

Perhaps it's time for us to find out what the world is really all about.

...you will benefit from this "forbidden fruit." If you are aware that so much of what passes for truth is in fact so much wishful thinking, conditioning, and convenience, then you will enjoy this history. Read beyond the initial discussion of Gnostic metaphysics, and by book's end you may well have an enhanced perspective of some of the greatest questions of all.

An extended meditation on the lives, beliefs and practices of the ancient christian heretics, written with elegance and outrage. Highly recommended!

This is an excellent essay written with a somewhat literary style. The information it offers is fascinating, provided one has an open mind. I enjoyed reading it and have reread it several times over the past few years.

A well written and researched short account of nomads and heretics that existed during the first few centuries of the millenium, with glimpses into their erotic methods and sexual cult like rituals that were performed as a way for their spirit to cast off a corrupt body and ultimately reach god. Their persecution by first the romans and later the christians and what they did in order to escape their persecutors.

Giuseppe

mulaise@aol.com

Beautifully written reflection on how far man's mind can take him into the dark. Not all early Gnostics came to these dire conclusions, but certainly a great many did. Any thinking soul, not enslaved by some power-mad political machine or God-crazed religious system, can hardly be blamed for seeing life in all its terrible manifestations of sorrow and horror as somehow "evil," or "lost," or "less." No mystic sees life this way, and gnosis itself is a mystic's adventure. Gnosis is waking up. Gnosis is "knowing" with a direct certainty that makes such things as Christians believe perfect twaddle, and makes the teachings of Gnosticism (grown thorny with endless thinking, and without the mind-expanding experience of actual gnosis itself) sad, self-defeating, and unnecessary.

I would imagine the French, gloomy existentialists, or at least posing as gloomy existentialists, would understand the basic tenets of Gnosticism easily. Not so any who had experienced actual gnosis, or enlightenment. The world is an illusion, it is what we make of it. It is not, as Gnosticism teaches, a place we have, poor us, fallen into, in which we find ourselves helpless and trapped. And yet, I admire the thinking. It's certainly finer thinking that Augustine ever did, benighted soul that he was. And it is all a product of thinking...not "knowing." More than that, I admire the stand against the vicious Christian majority who cut these people down as if they were weeds.

Other than that, this book was written almost 30 years ago and scholarship has come a fair way since then. Lacarriere assumes the early Gnostics took some of their elements from the "Christian gospels." This might very well be the reverse...that Christians took symbolic Gnostic gospels literally, and made of them what we think of as Christianity today.

This book has in its first sections a quite well-done introduction to early Gnostic principles and metaphysics, as well as meditations on what little is known of the first "fathers" of the Gnosis such as Simon Magus. These are presented not as dry, scholarly text, but more of a speculative account bound together with enthralling prose.

In later parts, however, the author becomes increasingly hung-up on the practices of certain groups of supposed Gnostic disciples whose actual adherence to Gnostic teaching is questionable at best. More serious scholars like Mead are quick to discount the accounts of feticidal and orgiastic rites as either total fabrications by anti-heretical authors, or as the practice of only a few, marginalized followers who would have been more harshly berated by other Gnostics (who were often real ascetics) than by the orthodox church.

It cannot be seen as entirely the author's fault that the religion is presented in this skewed perspective however, as most of the surviving writings on Gnosticism are those of proto-Catholic apologists like Irenaeus. Naturally, these writings aimed more to repulse the reader than present the facts. All in all, I still recommend this book for those interested in beginning study of Gnosticism due to readability and breadth of material covered. Just bear in mind the two thousand year-old pitfall the author fails to recognize.

It's a lucid account of some Gnostic groups who were active in the early centuries of Christianity.

What I have perceived as a flaw is the total lack of links with the great variety of sacred texts which were circulating at the time and which were surely read and debated by the various groups. In other words, who read what? So, on this premise, it can't be considered as an academic work but, probably, the author didn't want to write for this kind of audience.

All in all, it can be considered as a valid sort of narrative, since it's well written and flows smoothly.