Gnosticism

1. Gnosticism While mainstream Christianity enshrined the Incarnation—both Christ's and our own—as the central mystery of its faith, the cross that must be both born and transcended, Gnosticism found repugnant everything bodily, everything concerned with matter. The fall into matter was for them unbearable and unacceptable. "Just as the semen of man, the minute, invisible, seed possessing a scarcely measurable weight, acquires size and weight as it develops," so for the Gnostics, Lacarriere explains, "do the primordial seeds, the potentialities of a hyper-cosmic world, acquire weight by falling into the lower world, becoming more and more dense in substance" (18). The Gnostics sought to reverse the process, to break the chain of being.

2. Gnosticism Gnosticism was convinced that (in the words of Jacques Lacarriere) "our thinking being is tied to evil as ineluctably as our physical being is tied to the carbon in our body cells" (24; my emphasis). "Why did ye carry me away from my abode into captivity and cast me into the stinking body?" one Gnostic text beseeches. "To surrender oneself to weight, to increase it in all senses of the term (by absorbing food, or by procreating, weighing the world down with successive births)," the Gnostics believed, "is to collaborate in this unhappy destiny. . . . To discard or lighten all the matter of this world, that is the strange end the Gnostics pursued" (Lacarriere 19). Even the most elemental phenomenon—nutrition—was thought to be a "maleficent interaction," part of "a never-ending circle, as vertiginous as the whirpool of the stars or the cycle of time" (Lacarriere 24). And so in the Gnostic mythology, Christ, for example, was idealized as a being who "ate and drank but did not defecate. Such was the strength of his continence that foods did not corrupt in him, for him there was no corruption" (Lacarriere 37).

3. Gnosticism For the Gnostics, "The simple fact of living, of breathing, feeding, sleeping, and waking," implied "the existence and the growth of evil" (Lacarriere 24). Only the eye, the Gnostics believed, is immune from worldly corruption; unlike the mouth, the anus, the navel, the eye lives on light instead of matter, on spirit instead of filth. Vision alone allows escape from the "noise" of this world to pursue the truly real.