DeConick A.D

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GNOSTICISM OUT ON A LIMB
centuries without a church home that lived alongside the Catholic, Orthodox,
and Protestant institutions.
As I have shown, the solution lies in understanding Gnosticism as an
emergent religious orientation, an innovative form of spirituality, a new
way of being religious that persisted outside conventional religious structures
while engaging them in disruptive ways. Gnosticism arose in the
first century CE as an innovative spirituality of human empowerment and
individualism, at a time when nothing like it existed. It worked at the
edges of the conventional religions, engaging the margins by critiquing
and subverting the old servant models of religion. In the wake of its interrogation
of the old structures, new religious movements began to form
that worked for the welfare of the human being rather than the welfare
of the gods.
So where does Gnosticism historically survive, if not within its own
institutions? Quite simply, it is embedded in the literature our ancestors
wrote and the cultural artifacts they created, whether as expressions of
Gnostic spirituality or as attacks meant to suppress it. Artifacts such as literature
do not require a church to pass on a tradition from one generation
to the next in a historical chain of transmission. All they require is people
like Shirley MacLaine—at any given time, in any given location—to pick
up the book and read it for themselves. The connection to Gnostic spirituality
is made directly, from text to readers, whenever and wherever they
are. Time and location are irrelevant.
Each time literature like this is read and then distributed to larger
populations, whether through word of mouth or through public channels,
Gnostic spirituality is reengaged. Each time a religious movement
emerged as an expression of this reengaged Gnosticism, and then was suppressed,
the concept of “the Gnostic” was redistributed and entrenched
deeper and deeper into the structures of our personal and social memories,
becoming part of our human story and consciousness.
In discussing literature that has been consistently accessible in the
West ern world since antiquity, we should mention the great opponents of
Gnosticism such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Tertullian of Carthage, whose
writings have been available to readers since they were first published
in the late second and early third centuries. We also ought to include
the later diatribes of Augustine and others fighting the Manichaeans in