Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism III: Valentinianism
Despite my interest in Gnosticism and all things apocryphal, I must confess that I find reading one Gnostic cosmogogical myth after another rather tedious. I have speculated before that perhaps other young religious systems went through a similar process of crafting such myths before an official one (or two) became standard. For Christian and non-Christian Gnosticism we get to see mythmaking in process—in all its joys and pains.
So, I struggled a little this week to find something in our discussion of Valentinianism that would excite me, and therefore excite the class. We ambled through the lecture material—an overview of sources, a tour of Ptolemy’s myth, a catalogue of sacraments, and a peak here-and-there into some of the texts (including the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, and the extant fragments of Valentinus’ works). Then we were left with an hour to do…something.
I decided to try our hand at Valentinian exegesis. I selected three pericopae from the gospels to examine: the Parable of the Sower, the Parable of the Unjust Judge, and the Woman with a Hemorrhage. The selection was somewhat random; I figured that we’d get more out of the endeavour if they were not obvious (the Johannine Prologue, for example, invites Gnostic exegesis and would be too easy). So the class was broken into groups and asked to do an allegorical reading of the pericopae—put more specifically, they were to read Valentinian cosmology and anthropology into (or is that out of?) the texts.
The exercise went surprisingly well. The class came up with ideas that I did not consider. There was some concern about extraneous material (for example, in the Parable of the Sower, there are four groups of seeds mentioned, when three would best suit Valentinian thought), but I just assured the class that allegorical interpretation allows for simply dropping the elements that don’t completely fit. There are several lessons I hoped they would take from this; chief among them is that, as strange as Gnostic thought might seem, the Christian Gnostics could see their views reflected in the canonical texts, and were just as legitimate to read the texts this way as Orthodox Christians (such as Origen) or Jews (Philo) who also practiced allegorical interpretation. Hopefully this exercise helps with the goal of sympathizing with the ancient Gnostics—i.e., of trying to see the world through their eyes and not simply dismissing their views as weird and “utterly incomprehensible.”
I actually really enjoy reading all the different cosmologies and learning about them, but perhaps it’s because I spent my entire first year comparing Babylonian, Greek, and Jewish creation myths and loved every second of it… I find the cosmologies to be a similar experience. And as for helping us be sympathetic to the Gnostics, in some cases I’m actually surprised HOW much on their side I am!
This course provides an interesting insight in the sense that different people looking at similar text can come up with profoundly different interpretations. This must have been true for the early Christians, as other religions. I guess, interpretation is not as much about the text as it is about the individual interpreting. We interpret information based on our views, experiences and wishes. Therefore, often same statements can have radically different meanings for different people.
Gnosticism does take a bit of time to digest, so I was a bit taken aback by the exercise (hence my quite lame hockey analogy – I actually think life can be boiled down to a hockey game, where anything from a high stakes relationship can be referred to as winning a game in overtime).
But I digress. What I found enlightening about the exercise in hindsight, was how it seemed to represent the natural human instinct to make all material personal to one’s self. It happens all the time. People will be inspired from books and movies, but for completely different reasons simply because something resonated with them specifically. This got me thinking about how the Gnostics could have used this very approach when dealing with canonical texts they found problematic. By taking aspects that resonated with them, they crafted intimate beliefs that made sense.
Religion tends to go awry when people get lost in the technicalities. A wonderful person that I know often states that her religious beliefs are whatever helps to make a person a better human being. The exercise in the context of reading Pagels’ work really helps emphasize how this can relate to Gnosticism, especially the Gnostic suggestion that spiritually is always a search rather than a set of definite answers. Maybe if people explored their faith and viewed it as a personal journey rather than a law that needs to be upheld, the world might be a happier place.
I apologize – this edition of Joshua’s rant had more tangents than a Grade nine math paper.
Cheers,
Joshua
I can’t face any of these myths, so I have always been grateful to all you hippy-dippy sorts who can. 🙂
it is really ironic that the early church fathers who are considered orthodoxy really disliked gnostic sects like the vatlentinians and sethians because they adopted platonic and hellenist traditions with their belief in myths. Roman Catholicism was created by a pagan who was baptised in his death bed centuries after so isn’t the orthodox church preaching hypocrisy for their elitist traditions?