this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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'Gnostic Philosophy' is actually ... basically an anachronistic term that modern scholars do not like to use.
It originated back when all that was really known was that people originally seen as 'proper' early Christians referred to various heretical groups as Gnostic.
More research has revealed that there were actually very many different 'heretical' groups, such that it only even makes sense to call them heretics after Orthodoxy was formally decided on.
The early Christian movement was extremely diverse and contentious with many groups including or discluding many different texts and theological elements, and basically all of them were simultaneously arguing with, reacting to, and borrowing concepts from each other.
There isn't really a singular Gnostic version of Christianity or Philosophy. Its an outdated catch all term for distinct and specific groups such as the Valentinians, the Sethians, the Marcionites, Manichaeans... many more.
Many of them actually do have, written down, the secret knowledge that is said to grant one enlightenment or a ticket to heaven upon death once one knows it.
Many others only describe ways of living, thinking and acting that lead one toward the goal of the 'secret knowledge' without actually describing the knowledge itself.
Also, a great deal of syncretism, or merging of other religious or mythical tales and philosophical ideas from outside of Judaism and what we now know as modern Christianity was going on, mixing in concepts from Greece, Egypt, Persia, etc.
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Gnosis means knowledge. Gnostic means one with knowledge or one who knows.
Agnosis mean ignorance. Agnostic means one without knowledge or one who does not know.
They are opposites, not equivalents.
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At least the Gospel of Judas seems very much to be written with the idea that Yahweh / The Judaic God is actually evil.
A good number, though not all, 'Gnostic' sects wrote about or just rewrote the story of Genesis to make it much more plain that God was actually the one who lied in that story, and viewed the various other cruel acts of the God of the Torah as irreconcilable with a fundamentally 'good' deity.
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Long story short, you couldnt reconstruct some kind of 'true, original' Christianity if we somehow had a copy of every text of what every various sect in the 1st and 2nd century CE held dear: There are irreconcilable differences and incongruities between the amount we so have.
But thats not so dissimilar from today's widely varying religions and theological concepts that all identify as Christian.
This is enlightening, (pun intended).
May i ask where you acquired this knowledge?
While i know thats the literal meaning of gnostic/agnostic i mean it more in the context of “(a)gnostic (a)theist.”
I used to see myself as an agnostic spiritual but now i am not so sure.
I aim to understand the cosmos, it’s who/what i am. I involve myself with philosophy and science to satisfy my desire to know. To become gnostic.
I am already interpreting so much (to me) real knowledge from just the provided short summary of the gospel of Judas. That must count for something.
But i know i can never truly know the truth, that there will never be a state that i know that i am not wrong, or better nuanced i cant even know if anything at all can possibly reach a state of all knowing. My reality is that i don't know, i am agnostic.
I am less interested in what other people did with these ideas later on. Like write down the supposed truth, that just seems like missing the point, or maybe it goes a level deeper yet and that truth is that the truth is but a placebo effect.
I have for about a decade now, as a hobby, just followed various biblical scholars, archaeologists, ancient language experts, historians, a few esotericists, etc who give interesting lectures or youtube video presentations, publish books based off of their peer reviewed research, or other youtube channels of basically laymen with similar interests who make a point of interviewing such experts and getting their assistance for finding texts that are not well known outside of academic circles.
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I'll tell you right now, I'm not gonna be able to help you find any spiritual truth.
Using the terminology I think you are using, I am gnostic atheist, I don't believe in spirits or souls as any kind of real thing, don't believe in any Gods at all, and am quite convinced that such things I've read about in ancient stories are logically and physically impossible.
I think these texts and traditions are all fascinating bits of history, interesting stories that have shaped human history, but I don't literally believe any of it, or that there is some hidden, actually factually correct or true religion.
I was once religious, dove into it more and more to try to discern some kind of spiritual truth, but came away seeing more and more contradictions, came more to see these works as literature that evolved out of previous stories and traditions, over different ages and in different places.
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I tend to land closer to your last line, but its not a placebo... its an addictive drug.
Constantly seeking hidden meanings within meanings and patterns within patterns can give you a kind of high, as if you are always just on the threshold of some kind of utterly revolutionary discovery that will change your life or the world, that places you above others in some regard.
Try to connect too many ambiguous dots and you might at some point realize there are not actually any consistent rules governing how you are connecting them, and then it all falls apart.
Thats when the drug doesn't bring you a high anymore, it only brings rage and despair as the grand, uberidea you had been so studiously working toward for so long... no longer seems even the least bit consistent, coherent, or possible.
Its ok to just be, without expecting the impossible of yourself.
What is fascinating is i resonate so hard with this but from the opposite perspective.
“Try to connect too many ambiguous dots and you might at some point realize there are not actually any consistent rules governing how you are connecting them, and then it all falls apart.“
Especially this, is so core to my understanding of the world. But by using the word understanding i already invoke the paradox. Understanding is perceiving a truth.
But it doesn't fall apart for me. When i was 14 and deep (in depression) i came up with. “The point of life is that there is no point” and while super basic, that thought has always been comforting to me. And if thinking about such makes me experience comfort during a time i otherwise felt miserable, well you can tell where this is going. But maybe that is just the high of the placebo you mentioned.
An important key here is, like you i do not literally belief any religious, mythological or any human written text for that matter.
The concepts of a personified god, that you can talk to, that makes executive decisions or is all knowing in the same sense people have knowledge… they fascinated me as a child and Jesus was an important example for my personal growth. But i never believed any of it as historic or real. I actually assumed Jesus was a mythical fiction before religion told me “i was wrong, magic is real” symbolically followed with “no, not that kind of magic you dumb child”
When i say i am agnostic spiritual i mean two things.
I am agnostic because i cannot know the answers on my Most foundational philosopical questions (summarized by the one big question)
“Is physical matter all there is in the universe?”
I cannot known if there are higher consciousness then what we experience in the universe or outside of it.
If there are, then the chance that humans somehow accurately managed to describe such is 0%.
But what i can believe is that some people found a mutual understanding of perceived complex cosmic system that crucially does not need to be real real, but real enough for human being to experience, and used mythological storytelling as a tool to spread the understanding to find that knowledge.
What i find is that some of that knowledge can translate to useful and very relevant ideas.
So when i hear Jesus describe this bigger gnostic patenon. What i read is, we wrote it this here to weed out the gullable. The literal translation of the deity as “the blind one” that created the material world.
What i read is, potentially but in no way certainly the author is using the deity as a euphemism to refer to the human concept of materialism.
A wisdom to mental health is to accept yourself for what your life is. Mistranslate that a bit and you get be thankful for what you have. saying a literal thanking verse to a personified creator of the world is then just a useful misinterpretation from dogmatic religion tm.
I consider myself spiritual because i personally experience a benefit to some of the knowledge. Many types of prayer are just meditation guides. Prayer has always been nonsense to me, but meditation borders on life changing.
I dont need to know any truth to truthfully experience. And that is ~~the~~ my truth.