Esoteric Christianity

“In 1958 Morton Smith made the kind of discovery every scholar dreams of. While researching manuscripts at Mar Saba, a great Eastern Orthodox monastery near Jerusalem, he was perusing an otherwise unremarkable volume. In it he found copied by hand “a letter of the most holy Clement, author of the Stromateis,” written to one Theodore. Smith gaped incredulously at the text before him. “The most holy Clement” was Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), one of the earliest and greatest of the Church Fathers; no letters of his were known to have survived. Smith was even more amazed by what Clement’s letter said: that in addition to the familiar Gospel of Mark, there was another, secret Gospel, which Mark had written in Alexandria “for the use of those being perfected” and which would “lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth hidden by the seven [veils].”

Clement’s letter quotes a passage from this Gospel, which tells of the resurrection of a “young man” not unlike Lazarus. Six days after being raised from the dead, the young man comes to Jesus, “wearing a linen cloth over his naked [body].” Jesus spends the whole night with him, teaching him “the mystery of the kingdom of God.” What this “mystery” was we do not know. The text breaks off in mid-page…

That the Christian faith may originally have been closer to an occult lodge or a secret society than to a religion should not come as a complete surprise. Secrecy is a major theme in the Gospels: Jesus teaches in parables, refusing to explain them except to his disciples; he heals people and insists that they keep quiet about it; even the great passage in the third chapter of John, in which Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, may be an account of an initiation like the one in Mark’s secret Gospel…

Another startling piece of evidence for this view lies in an enigmatic work called the Gospel of Thomas. Fragments of this Gospel in the original Greek were found in the nineteenth century, but the complete text was only discovered in a Coptic translation as part of a cache of scriptures found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. Thomas is extremely short and simple. It consists of 114 logia of Jesus—sayings, usually aphorisms or parables—connected with the minutest amount of narrative. The very simplicity of Thomas suggests that it may be extremely ancient; it may even be older, and closer to Christ himself, than the canonical Gospels…

Equally remarkable is the portrait that Thomas paints. Here Jesus does not preach the end of the world; he performs no miracles; he does not claim to rescue people from their sins or to be the Messiah long awaited by the Jews. The Jesus of Thomas enigmatically mentions a secret knowledge that confers spiritual liberation; as he says in the opening verse, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings shall not experience death.” Like Clement’s fragment of Mark, Thomas even hints at an initiation. At one point Jesus takes Thomas aside to impart secret teachings to him. When he returns, the other Apostles ask him what Jesus said. Thomas replies, “If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up” (Thomas, 13).

The earliest Christians we know of who were concerned with this inner knowledge, or gnosis, were called the Gnostics: Thomas’s Gospel is usually regarded as a Gnostic text. The conventional view is that Gnosticism was a heresy that grew up in the second century. The writings of Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement himself depict it as such. But if Thomas is as old as it seems, it suggests that Gnosticism in some form is not a deviation from Christ’s teaching but may hark back to Christ himself.

More and more, scholars are coming to believe that from the outset the Apostles understood Christ’s message in different, even contradictory, ways. Almost immediately these divergences produced several “faith communities,” each clustered around a particular Apostle and having its own slant on Christianity. They included the church in Jerusalem, led by James, the brother of Jesus, which continued to observe the Jewish Law; Paul’s churches, which did not feel obliged to follow the Law; the Johannine community associated with John; and the Christianity of Thomas, centered in Syria. Even in New Testament times there were disputes among these groups, as we can see from Acts and Galatians. The Johannine and Thomas communities tended the most toward what was later called Gnosticism, but even Paul’s teaching was sometimes understood in this light: Valentinus, one of the greatest of the Gnostics, traced his teachings back to Paul.

As the Gnostics liked to stress, Paul said, “We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world to our glory” (1 Cor. 2:6).6 For the Gnostics, what was most important was not deliverance from sin; it was awakening the “hidden wisdom” to which Paul alluded. And the deliverance it promised was not from eternal damnation but from what esoteric Christians have always called the “world”—the congeries of forces in life to which human consciousness is subject. This intrinsic hostility to the world, which is one of the earmarks of the ancient Gnostic tradition, evokes a deeply felt truth in the human soul…

But to regard the ancient Gnostics as mere forebears of today’s hermeneutics of suspicion does them little justice. The Gnostic dread of the world cut much deeper. Its central theme can be detected obliquely in Mark’s secret Gospel, which speaks of the “truth hidden by the seven [veils].” The number seven here is not just a piece of mystical obfuscation but refers to an ancient esoteric view of the universe. The earth was seen as the center; surrounding it were the spheres of the seven planets as they were then known: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Esoteric philosophers believed that the spirit, as it took incarnation, passed through the spheres of each of these planets in turn, each of which in turn imbued it with its own negative characteristics—Venus with lust, Mars with anger, Jupiter with gluttony, and so on. (These can also be correlated with the Seven Deadly Sins of later Christianity.) By the time the soul reached earth, it was fettered by the very qualities that determined its nature.

For the Gnostics, the bondage of the world consisted not of external political and social control, or even the natural limits of physicality, but the nature of the mind as it has been molded by the planets. These influences were personified as the archons, the rulers of the seven planetary spheres, who were not servants of the true, good God but inimical celestial gatekeepers. To be liberated was to vanquish their dominion, not in the outside world, but in oneself. The Epistle to the Ephesians alludes to this idea: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12).

Although expressed in mythic terms, the Gnostic view was extremely sophisticated. It recognized one of the most essential truths of spiritual life: that the things in ourselves with which we most identify—the personality with its likes and dislikes, loves and hatreds—are not ourselves in the deepest sense but encrustations that fetter and impede the true essence of the self. Only spiritual illumination can free this self…

Yet in the end Gnosticism failed. It reached its peak in the second and third centuries and fell into decline afterward, vanishing more or less completely by the fifth century. One reason for its disappearance certainly lies in its insistence on inner knowledge and experience, which was sure to limit its audience. Inner illumination has never had mass appeal. Gnosticism may also have perished because it tended to be individualistic, idiosyncratic, and diffuse. Each Gnostic teacher had his own system and his own intricate and arcane picture of the universe. These tendencies did not allow the Gnostics to form a cohesive polity such as orthodox Christianity, which, with its tight but flexible network of bishops, was developing in the second and third centuries. Moreover, the Gnostic emphasis on inner illumination aroused some discomfort in this nascent ecclesiastical establishment. As the scholar Elaine Pagels has pointed out, “Gnostic teaching . . . was potentially subversive of this order: it claimed to offer every initiate direct access to God of which the priests and bishops themselves might be ignorant.”
This was bound to be irritating to the priests and bishops. Consequently, they launched into a vigorous campaign against Gnosticism. Once they achieved secular power, as they did when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, they were in a position to come down on the Gnostics and other heterodox Christian sects with the might of the state…

The Gnostics believed that the world is irremediably evil, created not by the true, good God but by a second-rate deity known as the Demiurge (from a Greek word meaning “craftsman”). Gnosis is a way of fleeing from this jerry-built universe; Jesus was a messenger sent by the true God to help us escape. In the end this implacable hostility to ordinary reality simply became too depressing, “too hostile to the world,” in the words of the scholar Kurt Rudolph…

Clement opposed the Gnostics. His letter mentioning the secret Gospel of Mark is chiefly devoted to combating a libertine Gnostic sect known as the Carpocratians. But the central theme of Clement’s chief work, the Stromateis (meaning “Patchwork” or “Miscellanies”), was to show that the orthodox Christian faith was perfectly consistent with true gnosis. Clement goes so far as to characterize the true Gnostic as the summit of Christian virtue; gnosis, the knowledge of God, is an end worthy in itself, even the supreme end. He writes, “Could we, then, suppose any one proposing to the Gnostic whether he would choose the knowledge of God or salvation; and if these, which are entirely identical, were separable, he would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge of God.”

Clement’s influence probably prevented a decisive split between the esoteric and exoteric faces of the church in his day, ensuring that it would continue to provide a hospitable dwelling for gnosis—at least for a time. An equally important influence on early esoteric Christianity was Clement’s pupil Origen (185–253 A.D.). Origen is an embarrassing figure for those who claim that there has been a single consistent doctrine handed down from Christ and the Apostles, for Origen’s teachings were considered orthodox in their own time and only condemned by the church some two hundred years after his death. Before then his formidable learning and prolific output (he wrote about a thousand books, only a few of which have survived), along with his personal piety and devotion, had led him to be described as “the greatest teacher of the Church after the Apostles.”

Yet Origen taught a number of ideas that differ from mainstream Christian doctrine as it has come down to us. He argued for the preexistence of souls before earthly life, for reincarnation, and for a final apocatastasis or restoration of all things at the end of time that at least theoretically includes the redemption of the Devil himself. The fact that he could expound these views within the church of his era suggests that they are compatible with the essence of Christ’s message. It also leads one to think that later pronouncements of orthodoxy may have closed off some ways of understanding that could be helpful today. Origen also speaks of different levels of existence, both visible and invisible.
His is essentially a hierarchical system. At the top is God the Father, followed by the Son and the Holy Spirit (Origen’s views on the Trinity were not entirely consistent with later formulations - one reason he was eventually condemned).

Below this divine level is that of the “rational natures” who exist on a purely spiritual level. Some of these are good, some evil; in short, they are angels and devils. Then follows what Origen calls “those spirits who are judged fit by God to replenish the human race”—the souls of humans. Finally there is the physical realm we know. This system says there are four basic levels of existence—the divine, the spiritual, the level of the soul or psyche, and the physical realm. This doctrine can be found in other Western esoteric systems, notably the Kabbalah, which speaks of four worlds that correspond exactly to these levels, as well as in Gnosticism, which developed hierarchies of creation that were far more complex than this. The fundamental difference between Gnostic systems and Origen’s was that the Gnostics viewed the celestial intermediaries entirely in negative terms, as demonic and tyrannical.

This cosmic scheme parallels the inner anatomy of human beings. Each of us is a microcosm, a reproduction of the universe in miniature. In the hidden teachings of Christianity there are three levels to the human makeup: the spirit (in Greek, the pneuma or “breath”), the soul (psyche in Greek), and the physical body. This tripartite structure is central to esoteric Christianity. It existed before Origen and goes back at least to Paul (see, for example, in his reference to the “spiritual body” of resurrection, 1 Cor. 15:44). One thing about this schema that may seem peculiar is that it distinguishes between the spirit and the soul—a demarcation that has often been ignored by Christian thinkers (in fact an ecumenical council of the ninth century explicitly stated there was no difference between the spirit and the soul, contrary to the Bible itself). While this distinction may seem quite abstract, it is not. The Greek word for the soul is psyche—literally, the psyche, the nexus of thoughts, emotions, and desires that occupy most of our inner lives. The spirit, or pneuma, is consciousness in a purer form…

Origen goes on to say that these three tiers are paralleled by three different levels of meaning in Scripture. He writes: One must therefore portray the meaning of the sacred writings in a threefold way upon one’s own soul, so that the simple man may be edified by what we may call the flesh of the scripture, this name being given to the obvious interpretation; while the man who has made some progress may be edified by its soul, as it were; and the man who is perfect and like those mentioned by the apostle: “We speak wisdom among the perfect; yet a wisdom not of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, which are coming to nought; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory”—this man may be edified by the spiritual law, which has “a shadow of the good things to come.” For just as man consists of a body, soul, and spirit, so in the same way does the scripture.”

~ Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition