Gnosticism

 I've used the term Gnosticism or Gnostic to describe several characters or plotlines within some of my favorite series, including Sailor Moon, DC Comics, and Shamanic Princess mostly because some are directly referencing the concept. Because of that and the term's relative obscurity I wanted to create a quick blog explaining what Gnosticism is. 

There is a difference between Gnosticism Proper, a Christian Heretical cult of the late 1st Century AD and Gnostic as a general term that is used as a descriptor of something having the most notable trait of Gnosticism. So let me start by explaining the original cult.

Gnosticism essentially took the notion of the material world being fallen to a logical extreme. Its proponents believed in a cosmology with a pure and good spiritual deity presiding over everything, The Monad, and a malevolent lesser entity called the Demiurge that created the material universe, creating a binary duality of spiritual = good and physical = evil. Gnosticism's goal was to attain a spiritual existence devoid of physicality or the acquisition of spiritual enlightenment. (Gnosis) The belief system had a lot of specific beliefs with it often being thought that the God of the Hebrew Bible actually being the malevolent Demiurge and that Jesus was either a normal human who attained spiritual enlightenment or was actually a benevolent spiritual entity who took the guise of a physical body, but wasn't actually physically present because the material was sinful. While Gnosticism was condemned as heresy and was destroyed, the background elements of its philosophy seeped into Western Occult traditions, such as the notion that the material universe was illusory and that attaining enlightenment would allow one to control it. 

Indeed Gnostic today can simply be used as a synonym for arcane or occult. However, when used more specifically it refers to the binary notion of the physical world as inherently corrupt and the spiritual world as being inherently pure. In this sense, it is obviously contradictory to Christianity as a religion that preaches that God incarnated as a physical human and that our physically substantiated bodies are good, as well as of spiritual powers that are evil. (Demons) Gnosticism indeed could be said and has been analyzed to actually have more notable parallels to Buddhism with the notion that the physical world is illusory and lesser, and with the goal of attaining spiritual enlightenment. 

However, any religion can and will have people tending towards Gnosticism and the reason I believe is Gnosticism is an impulse that is in all people to a greater or lesser extent that is characterized by a fixation on the flaws of things that are particular or material, things, as well as a fixation on the perfection of the universal or immaterial. Someone who is spiritual but with a Gnostic tendency might pray and deny themselves but would be judgmental towards others and not give to charity because they're valuing the religious ideals and not the particular people and situations that present themselves. In this way, you can even imagine a hypothetical Secular Gnosticism as paradoxical as that sounds. Such a person wouldn't be religious but would fixate on a philosophical or political ideal but not the people that actually comprise that ideal, it's a focus on the universal and a disdain for the particular, a love for the perfection of the metaphysical and disdain for the imperfection of the physical.

Having the term I have found it to be very helpful as it's a good way to express the problem in some forms of thinking that are otherwise hard to express. There's another reason I think having a term for this human impulse is good. I have to be honest, I have a particularly strong Gnostic Impulse in myself, I love thinking of things in the abstract where they are pure and lacking the little flaws of actual living things. I love humanity in general and will tear up at expressions in fiction about the triumph of the human spirit but I don't generally like being around specific persons with their foibles and little eccentricities. I love fully the beauty of meaning, perfect unto itself, and I dislike the arbitrary parts of things that aren't meant to express meaning. But having a term for this impulse has helped me to identify and work on it. This is why my favorite series often enough deal with Gnostic themes, because I understand the conflict that they're expressing. 

If you're not especially Gnostic and want to identify Gnostic thinking in fiction or in real life, look for a disdain for the material and mundane as somehow morally lesser or wrong. If you too have a strong Gnostic impulse and recognize it as a flaw I would suggest trying to remember to be gracious for the beauty of small things, to understand how many of the greatest wonders of the universe can be seen even in day-to-day life.