Gnosis, Love, and the Incarnation
One of the first heresies ever combated by the Church in her history was Gnosticism. The very first was likely the heresy of the Judaizers, who sought in the AD 50’s and 60’s to prevail against Saint Paul and the other Apostles. They were destructive in that they held and taught, against the doctrine of the Apostles, that it was necessary for Gentile converts to be circumcised and observe the Law of Moses in order to be brought into the Body of Christ. This charge largely came from the Jewish elements of the Church, as Gentiles came pouring into the Church in Asia Minor and in Rome. Later, in the AD 70’s and continuing on for the next two centuries, as the Gentiles became the majority of the members of the Church, a heresy sprang up mysteriously from the midst of the Church that splintered into dozens of groups which began to write false gospels in the second century. These groups as a whole are loosely referred to as Gnosticism, and they represented a heretical group of individuals that claimed to be Christians but who demonically worshipped a plethora of gods they called aeons, of which two of them were, they believed, ‘Christ’ and the ‘Holy Ghost.’ Further, they suggested the great calumny of evil that the God of the Old Testament, the Creator of matter, was the evil in the cosmos and the equivalent of the devil, and that the true God, the true good, was the Unknown One, from whom all aeons emanated and who sent ‘Christ,’ whom they believed to be the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. ‘Christ’ in their system came not to become Incarnate of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, and be made man; rather, in their ravings, He came to enlighten man to the gnosis that we are spiritual and not matter, and we are therefore Gods and do not need a redeemer, and must merely realize our own divinity to be free from the shackles of sacrifice, the physical body, and morality, all of which were seen as the evil products of the evil Old Testament Deity, the Lord of Hosts. Through this gnosis, or knowledge, they believed man could be liberated from his body and achieve salvation as pure spirits in the presence of the Unknown One.
All of the splintered groups of Gnostics were very divided on which particular brand of their mythology they were pedaling, but they had universal disdain for the orthodox Christians who they viewed as unspiritual and naïve idiots, carnal and silly men who had to work for whatever salvation they could accomplish, since they clung to the physical world and believed matter was inherently good. The early Christians bothered them immensely with their physical Sacraments, such as Baptism and the Eucharist, and the sacramental Sign of the Cross, which were all living reminders of their living faith in God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible. Despite their diversity, two things were universally common among all groups of Gnostics. First, they utterly repudiated the Incarnation. They universally denied the Catholic teaching that Christ was the eternal Son of God who became truly and fully man for our sake, and they despised the notion that God would unite Himself to us creatures of spirit and matter fully, becoming consubstantial with us while remaining eternally consubstantial with the Father. They ridiculed the notion that He would suffer in the flesh, and that the Blood of God would be poured out for our sakes. In short, the Incarnation was too messy for them, and went against their belief that matter as evil and spirit alone was good. It was this attitude that St. John the Divine wrote so strongly and so dogmatically against, warning His sheep in the AD 90’s prior to His passing from this life:
“Dearly beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if they be of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. By this is the Spirit of God known. Every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God: And every spirit that dissolveth Jesus, is not of God: and this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh, and he is now already in the world.”- 1st St. John 4:1-3
And:
“And now I beseech thee, Lady (the local, particular Church St. John was addressing), not as writing a new commandment to thee, but that which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is charity, that we walk according to his commandments. For this is the commandment, that, as you have heard from the beginning, you should walk in the same: For many seducers are gone out into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh: this is a seducer and an antichrist.”- 2nd St. John 1:5-7
The second universal characteristic of all the Gnostic heretical groups was that all of them repudiated true love, charitas, the willing of the good of the other as other, and exalted pure knowledge, or gnosis in the Greek, above love and without love. It is from this word of knowledge in the Greek, gnosis, that they received their name. Knowledge was the final goal and love was considered weak and unnecessary. With this ignoring of supernatural love, which is the purpose of man throughout this life as Christ and the Apostles taught, vice and sin flourished among them, such that St. John linked rejecting charity and rejecting the commandments of morality as a composite whole with those who were the seducers, who had gone out into the world not confessing Jesus Christ, true God and true man.
The reason why Gnosticism is important to understand is because it has made a vigorous comeback in the West in our day under the cloak of such words as “New Age spirituality” or “spiritual, not religious,” or various other clichés. The false prophets abound. Even among many former Christians in the West, Gnostic ideas have taken hold. Remember the original Gnostics: The precise mythology that was presented by any one group was irrelevant. In varied groups today, many want to adopt the same two general characteristics: first, a scoffing at that testimony which Christendom shows forth to the world, that God truly became man, and assumed human nature into Himself, in order to wed Himself to us forever in true charity, and second, rejecting that true charity which can only flow from the physical Incarnation of God. I would like to draw your attention to this very important connection, the connection between the two rejections of Gnosticism in all ages and what binds them together.
We must understand this essential truth: the heart of authentic love is the Incarnation. God partaking of flesh and blood and the sheer physicality of the Incarnation is something that the devil hates, as do the demons. All evil shudders at it; the Blood of God, as its celebrated Litany states, is the victory over demons, and over all evil, because it represents the depths to which Love Himself descended. God is Charity, as St. John reminds us, and the God who is Charity cannot be separated from the physicality of the Incarnation because this is The Cosmic Expression of Unfathomable Love. If you want to deepen your prayer life, your meditations, and further your distance from the devil and all evil in this world, no matter who you are, close your eyes, and embrace the Crucified God, dead and risen. The more physical you can describe His taking on flesh and His Passion, the more literal you can be about the Blood of God poured forth, the more you embrace the logical outcomes of the Incarnation such as the fact that the Blessed Virgin is the Mother of God, the further you are from evil and the closer you are to God. St. John certainly didn’t mince words when He wrote, in the original Greek, that the Logos was made ‘sarx,’ or that we are to ‘trogon’ His ‘sarka.’ Logos means ‘Word’ as a Divine Title for God the Son, sarx and sarka are almost crudely literal words to describe ‘flesh,’ such as you might describe a red steak or a slab of meat, and trogon means ‘to gnaw’ on, or emphatically, ‘to eat, chew, and consume’ the Body of the Lord. The rejection of the physicality and literal reality of the Incarnation of God leads directly to the misunderstanding of what true love entails: Absolute Union of a Person to another person in body and spirit, in the midst of sacrifice, humility, and faithfulness. All these things are the Person of Our Lord, our Divine Spouse. This is the heart of Christian Charity, and separated from it, we will never find it, but will find ourselves Gnostics. Remember this Charity, for it is the Charity of the Incarnation, and the Offense thereof, that gave the Martyrs strength undergo their tortures and deaths. And we come to embrace this Charity which strengthens us in the Holy Eucharist, where Jesus Christ awaits us, to embrace us.
“I give glory to Jesus Christ the God who bestowed such wisdom upon you; for I have perceived that ye are established in Faith immovable, being as it were nailed on the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, in flesh and in spirit, and firmly grounded in Love in the Blood of Christ… I endure all these things, seeing as He Himself enables me, who is perfect Man.”
“But mark ye those who hold strange doctrine touching the grace of Jesus Christ which came to us, how that they are contrary to the mind of God. They (the Gnostics) have no care for Love, none for the widow, none for the orphan, none for the afflicted, none for the prisoner, none for the hungry or thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they allow not that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which Flesh suffered for our sins, and which the Father of His goodness raised up. They therefore that gainsay the good Gift of God perish by their questionings. But it were expedient for them to have Love, that they may also rise again.”
- both from St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, to the Church at Smyrna under St. Polycarp their Bishop, shortly before his Martyrdom in AD 107