The Gnostic Gospels 
by 

Elaine Pagels

 

The Power of Religious Imagination 

The central paradox of the religious imagination is its perennial attempt to constrain religious imagination. Elaine Pagels’s analysis of the so-called gnostic scriptures which were accidentally discovered in 1947 is a case study in the practical consequences of this contradiction. That human beings can hate, persecute and kill one another over poetry is a considerably greater mystery than any of the spiritual narratives contained in these texts.

Orthodoxy means ‘right-thinking.’ Such an idea is not inherent to all religious thought. Orthodoxy is primarily a political not a spiritual category. Its importance lies in its organizational, or perhaps more generally its tribal, implications. It is a way of distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’ and really has to do more with what is said or written rather than with what is thought. Orthodoxy is functionally the constraining of thought by the control of language.

Prior to Christianity, orthodoxy did not exist. Religious imagination was unconstrained and its expression in language was unproblematic. However, the introduction of ‘faith’ as a central category of the Christian religion necessitated not just an obsession with language but also its precise control in order to protect correct belief. Faith is a linguistic rather than a spiritual concept. Belief is expressed in words. Words are therefore inherently sacred; they are superior to any reality. Orthodoxy seeks to enforce that superiority and with it a fixed symbolic interpretation of reality.

The gnostic texts of Nag Hamadi are remnants of what were widely circulated documents in early Christianity. The originals of some of these documents may be older than those ultimately accepted into the Christian biblical canon. They are heretical, that is to say unorthodox, and were condemned as such by senior Christian apologists as early as the second century. In accordance with the linguistic demands of faith, copies of these documents were destroyed en masse when Christianity became the official religion of empire. But some survived - interesting poetry seems to resist complete destruction.

The gnostic texts are nothing if not interesting. ‘Gnosis,’ as Pagels notes, roughly translates as ‘insight.’ And the insights into human character and the nature of reality provided by these texts are fascinating, certainly ranking with the most thoughtful modern fiction. They deal with “illusion and enlightenment rather than sin and repentance.” They presume that the source of what is usually called the divine is internal to human beings not existing independently elsewhere. And they accept the simultaneous, and necessary, existence of good and evil in that divinity. Not until Jungian psychology in the 20th century were such insights again publically expressed.

I find it appropriate that the fifty-two Nag Hamadi documents are written in Coptic translated from Greek originals. Coptic uses a modified Greek alphabet and transliterates Egyptian hieroglyphs into phonetic script. The association of the documents with ancient and mysterious hieroglyphics emphasizes their purely linguistic character. They do not represent the reality of the world but only our human attempt to deal with it. The difference is crucial.