Hans Jonas, "The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God..." (1958)

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).

This is one of the most thought-provoking books that I have ever read. Jonas explores and unravels the intricate fabric of Gnostic religious thought that developed concurrently with early Christianity. The two faiths competed, responding to some of the same pressures rising within Judaism, the Greek cults, and other Middle Eastern religions. Where Jonas’ book is particularly thought-provoking is that he spends almost no time at all placing these beliefs within a socio-political context, instead exploring their philosophical origins, the basic tenets of their faith, and including examples (where they exist) of liturgy and theological writing from the Gnostics themselves.

Just one example of the intriguing concepts Jonas shares from the Gnostics is a comparison of the Greek and Gnostic conceptions of the term cosmos. While the Greeks perceived the word as addressing ‘the all’ as we think of it today, they also perceived this all-encompassing nature to intimate a kind of perfection – a universal order – that was intoned respectfully. The Gnostics, on the other hand, perceiving that the world itself was made faultily, by a flawed and imperfect god among other, higher gods, perceived the cosmos as the ultimate indication of imperfection within the human experience. Instead of perfection, the cosmos was an indicator of what humans needed to transcend. The cosmos’ imperfection was proof of Gnostics ideas regarding God.

The Gnostic Religion was written in the middle of the twentieth-century, and much has been discovered and written about the Gnostics since this time. Jonas updated his text with a chapter related to what were then the new discoveries at Nag Hammadi, but many of these texts had not been fully translated or released in ‘official versions’. Nonetheless, the book conveys a convincing sense of the theological environment in which Gnostic religious thought arose, by identifying different streams of thinking within Gnostic thought avoids the unhelpful reduction of this thought to ideology, and indicates some of the complexity and evolution within this body of thinking.

Fully considered, an excellent book, although with its rather involved theological discussions, perhaps not a good start for those new to thinking about Gnosticism, or those unfamiliar with philosophy or theological thinking.