"Gnosis and Time"

Hellenistic thinkers appear to have conceived of reality in degrees of inferiority, in which a divine permanence and perpetuity occupies the summit of the hierarchy.¹ The movement and change perceived in Time, then, is cyclical, for the identical recurrence of the same things—thus ensuring their survival—is the natural expression of that ultimate reality. The immediate reality is governed by its superior realities of increasing regularity in the cosmic order, the celestial bodies and luminaries, who are empowered by if not of divine natures. The consequences are immediate and severe: notions of past and present break down, because no event is unique but has occurred, occurs, and will occur again, eternally. There is neither beginning nor end, nor can one fathom any kind of continuous progress in between. Cities rise, corrupt, fall, and rise again. Troy was before yet after, and therefore always. History does not exist as such.

This cyclical and ultimately atemporal conception of reality is at obvious odds with Christian understanding. For those in Christ, indeed, Time is rectilinear and continuous, having a definite starting point at the creation of the universe and an equally definite ending point at the impending Parousia. In between them is the Incarnation and the Resurrection. The former is definitively before the later, and both are concrete, irreplaceable, and unique: the Son of God took on humanity, died, and rose again once for all (Heb. 10:10, 1 Pet. 3:18). Whereas continuous progression is unthinkable in a Greek cosmos, divine Providence governs and orients the development of history, which with each step draws irreversibly nearer to its good and singular end.

The Gnostic philosophers embraced not some middling compromise between these diametrically opposed two but an autonomous conception bearing similarities to either whilst rejecting both. In this respect one can see that Gnostic teachings are neither mere Hellenisations of orthodox doctrine nor the result of Christian influences on Greek cosmology. Indeed, the various strains of Gnosis (such as Manichaeism, Hermeticism, or Mandaeism) testify to its emergence and development in non-Christian, pre-Christian, and anti-Christian flavours, in any case exceeding the dimensions of outright Christian heresy.

Naturally, the Gnostic’s conception of Time is caught up in his understanding of Salvation. Oppressed by the utterly scandalous presence of evil, he understands that he must by nature be or have originally been something other than and outside the Prison of alien servitude in which he finds himself. He is homesick for some transcendent reality, a former yet not completely forgotten paradise. This he shares with the Christian. But where the Christian understands that the creation, though created good by almighty God, has fallen by the sin of man, the Gnostic finds the creation itself wicked, a trap of enslavement fashioned by a lesser Creator. This demiurge is unlike the wise and good artisan of Platonic philosophy; he is foolish and evil. Where the Greek firmament evoked the awe and admiration of its observers, for the Gnostic the whole cosmos seems a deep and horrible tragedy. One Mandaean laments, “In this world [of Darkness] I lived for a thousand myriad years, and no one knew that I was there…. The years followed the years, the generations followed the generations: here I was and they did not know that I was living here, in their world.” For Marcion, the body is a “sack of excrement,” and, for the Archons, “being ignorant… [the demiurge] took counsel with his Powers; they engendered Destiny and bound the gods of the heavens, the angels, the demons, and men in measures and times [chronos] and moments [kairos].” Irenaeus, writing of the Marcosians, records that “they declare that the Demiurge, desiring to imitate the infinitude, and eternity, and immensity, and freedom from all measurement by time of the Ogdoad [being the eighth and final heaven] above, but, as he was the fruit of defect, being unable to express its permanence and eternity, had recourse to the expedient of spreading out its eternity into times, and seasons, and vast numbers of years, imagining, that by the multitude of such times he might imitate its immensity. They declare further, that the truth having escaped him, he followed that which was false, and that, for this reason, when the times are fulfilled, his work shall perish.”

Time, then, whether a product of ignorance or of malice, is a false imitation, a caricature of an immeasurably superior reality. There is need for a Salvation to deliver man from temporal suffering. The solution is found in the act of gnosis, or epignosis, that is, the “recognition” that the present humiliation is accidental and temporary, that he yet retains his true nature separate from base flesh. It is this reawakening that features across all strains of Gnostic thought: to regain knowledge of oneself is to redeem onself. The soul, or spirit, which is the true self, is detached from the prison of the body, fully restoring him to his atemporal condition. It is a regeneration, and a liberation from the tyranny of the cosmos into positive freedom, often the license to do whatever he pleases, even the most seemingly lecherous of acts. The Gnostic is utterly saved by nature and not by works; amoralism seems to some a fitting way to demonstrate his contempt for the material enterprise. Whether Time is a circle patterning immobility or a singular line, it is to be broken and destroyed.

This soteriological mechanism appears to be largely atemporal in nature. For “pneumatic” or “spiritual” men, the revelation is sudden and is in no way contingent on past events. Of course, it cannot be said that all temporal elements are excised. Valentinianism, for instance, derives the content of its saving revelation from claims to a secret tradition transmitted over the course of history. Other systems profess a succession of prophets including the oldest Biblical patriarchs or other figures such as Zoroaster, the Buddha, or Jesus. Even so, the person is typically expunged of all historical content, distilled for its transcendent meaning. The docetics assert that the Christ was not really a man but purely spiritual. His body, his sufferings, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection are all emptied of concrete and temporal reality; it is the intellectual, atemporal, or mythical, example that is essential. In this way, the flow of history is seen not in concrete and causal terms but through a mythical lens by which particular events reflect a supercosmic drama. Then time, if it must be ascribed a geometry, is to the Gnostic like a series of broken line segments: “It is the diverse phases of this mythical drama that give to history whatever meaning it can have, or rather that interrupt the course of concrete time, chopping it into an incoherent succession of dramatic episodes: sudden interventions of the transcendent in human affairs, sudden acts of God, which nothing justifies and nothing prepares the way for, arbitrary irruptions which put the finishing touches to the inorganic picture of Gnostic time.”²