DeConick A.D

350
GNOSTICISM OUT ON A LIMB
Allogenes the Stranger. It may also have included some pieces of the Corpus
Hermeticum.
The fourth Gnostic awakening is so massive that we are still in its
throes. The extraordinary recovery of so many texts written by ancient
Gnostics has inspired an unprecedented renaissance of Gnostic spirituality
in America. This renaissance helped build up New Age movements on
the old Gnostic frame, which has been bent or broken open to accommodate
modern developments such as Darwinism, environmentalism, and
our race into space. The fourth Gnostic awakening has fueled skeptical,
spiritual-but-not-religious sensibilities, which condemn conventional organized
religion in favor of personal religious satisfaction and direct experiences
of the holy.
Gone is the God of damnation. Gone is the focus on sin and retribution.
In its place is the God of Love that the Gnostics claimed to know.
Separation from God and reunification with the sacred has become the
story of salvation. Behind it all is the individual as the divine human agent
empowered to do great things. The demand is for therapy, for religion
that is useful. To be successful, religion today must promote personal
well-being, health, and spiritual wholeness. It must be attuned to a raising
of consciousness, to global awareness, to life that is linked with the
transpersonal or transcendent.
The Future of Gnosticism
When it comes to the survival of Gnostic spirituality, there is another factor
that most modern people are uncomfortable trying to explain, because
it is irrational, but it has happened and still happens and will happen over
and over again: rapture. The spontaneous religious experience. The sudden
overwhelming revelation. The ecstatic encounter with transcendence,
with ultimate reality, with the God Beyond All Gods. Such rapture can be
routinized through particular religious rituals and practices, as gnostics
did, so that the ecstatic experience of the God Beyond All Gods is the living
source of the Gnostic current. Whether we can explain it, ecstasy and
the transcendence of the self is what continually births Gnostic spirituality.
The ecstatic experience of an all-encompassing transcendent reality, a
source of being that is goodness and love, prompted many Gnostics to
seek religious truth beyond their ancestral and regional religions. Because