Gnostics suffer imprisonment from limits imposed by matter...

The Gnosticism of Barack Obama


By Fr. Daniel Pattee, TOR


Eric Voegelin, one of the great political philosophers of the last century (1901-1985), professed no religion, but he recognized its falsifications. After extensively studying early Christianity, he found “Gnosticism” to render intelligible certain twentieth century movements like Nazism. 

• Gnosticism, as he understood it, spins an ideology within which all reality becomes refashioned and so falsified. 
• Gnosticism is “existence in rebellion against God and man.” 
• Gnostic ideology, which for Voegelin included Marxism, precipitates a “gnostic rebellion” whereby God becomes solely identified as a category of human consciousness. 

Once this step is taken, the “god of consciousness” can then be remade or simply “unmade,” thereby opening the way for a complete makeover of man, woman, and society. Pope John III published an anathema against them in the year 561: “If anyone introduces some other names of the Godhead in addition to the Holy Trinity because, as he says, there is in the Godhead himself a Trinity of the Trinity, just as the Gnostics and Priscillians have stated, let him be anathema.”

Early Christian Gnostics conceived a division in God prior to creation wherein the material world became the production of the “lesser god” of the division. It led Gnostics to devalue the material world within which a select few possessed a “spark” of divinity, experienced as longing for the “true God” beyond hapless matter. The escape route wasgnosis (Greek) or knowledge, a type of “awakening” that not all were capable of undergoing. 

The Gnostics envisioned all men and women in three categories: the “spiritual” elite, the “psychic” or soul-full, and the “material” or materially immersed. Unlike the spiritual ones who readily awakened to their destiny, the psychics could be saved, but only with difficulty, while the materially immersed were incapable of salvific enlightenment. Most women belonged to the third category, since from them camemore matter in the form of children in marriage which, in turn, led Gnostics to devalue marriage. Gnostic reinvention is well illustrated in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas(written between 140-180 AD) wherein Peter protests to Jesus about Mary, his mother: “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus responds: “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.”

Gnostics suffer imprisonment from limits imposed by matter, which contradicts Christian teaching regarding the Fall as source of human suffering. We suffer from sin and evil.

...............

Read more: www.crisismagazine.com