Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

OUT OF OBLIVION 121
whose call to the soul to know its origins and know itself as nothingness 5 and as a
stranger to the world will allow the divine light to gather up the particles of all its
luminosity and destroy forever all Matter, all World, all Cosmos, evil and darkness.
The purpose of redemption is to liberate the pneumatic spirit through the realization
of the transmundane nature of God and the state of illusion and alienation which is
life in the world. From the Nag-Hammadi 1945 discoveries of The Gospel of Truth,
the writings of Coptic-gnosticism: “What liberates is the knowledge of who we
were, what we became, where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we
speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.” 6
The Good One has decreed that matter (known as the Hyle) must be destroyed, so
that all light and divine particles will be liberated. Thus, Gnostics must “abstain from
marriage, the delights of love and the begetting of children, so that the divine Power
may not through the succession of generations remain longer in the Hyle” (Jonas:
1967, p. 232). It is not lust but reproduction which makes sexuality a contamination,
in contrast to the Christian Church’s opposite formulation, whereby reproduction is
the only justification for sexuality. Gnostic theology is fundamentally antireproduction:
“the souls are lost parts of the godhead to be retrieved—in that case
reproduction prolongs divine captivity and by further dispersal makes more difficult
the work of salvation as one of gathering-in” (Jonas: 1967, p. 145). Again, “the
reproductive scheme is an ingenious archontic [evil] device for the indefinite
retention of souls in the world” (Jonas: 1967, p. 145).
The study by Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, The message of the alien God
and the beginnings of Christianity delineates two types of Gnostic revolts against the
cosmos and the world: extreme asceticism and extreme libertinism. There is either
the withdrawal from the luxuries and pleasures of the senses, or a spiting of the
norms of nature, a transgression of balance and natural law which defies nature and
mundane norms through excess. Certainly, there is no moral perfectibility possible
or desirable in a view which sees the cosmos and its order as constraints on the
incorruptible but entrapped spirit’s return to Alien Light. Jonas points to the
obligation of gnostic libertinism “to perform every kind of action, with the idea of
rendering to nature its own and thereby exhausting its powers” (1967, p. 272). Sin,
excess and transgression are the pathways to transcendence and release from worldly
immanence. Jonas provides gnostic doctrines of libertinism reported by Irenaeus:
Not otherwise can one be saved than by passing through every action, as also
Carpocrates taught…. At every sinful and infamous deed an angel is present,
and he who commits it…addresses him by his name and says, “O, thou angel,
I use thy work! O thou Power such-and-such, I perform thy deed!” And this is
the perfect knowledge, unafraid to stray into such actions whose very names
are unmentionable (1967, p. 274).
5. See especially Hans Jonas (1967, pp. 280–281) for a contrast between Greek and Gnostic precepts
to “know thyself” or “flee thyself”.
6. Exc. Theod. 78.2 in Jonas (1967, p. 45). See Jonas (1967, pp. 42–47) for a summary of Gnostic
thought. Thanks to Larry Hurtado, Department of Religion, University of Manitoba, for discussions
on Gnosis and Midrash.