THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

Christianity (this due to the fact that his writings were embedded in Origen),
excoriates, lampoons, and ultimately logically refutes Christian thought in his
masterwork On the True Doctrine. Celsus speaks for the entire heterodoxy of the
pagan world in his reaction to Christian ideology:
Why should we not worship gods? I mean, if it is accepted that all of nature –
everything in the world – operates according to the will of God and that nothing
works contrary to his purposes, then it must also be accepted that the angels, the
demons, heroes – everything in the universe – are subject to the will of the great
God who rules over all ... The notion that one cannot serve many masters is the
sort of thing one would expect of the race of Christians – an eccentric position,
but one perhaps predictable of a people who have cut themselves off from the
rest of civilisation. 16
It need hardly be stressed that without the existence of an exclusivist orthodoxy there
can be no heresy. Some 2000 pages of “Gnostic” manuscript have come down to us
thus far. More interesting than the obsessive work done on a small group of selected
texts by a small group of specialists in a few fields, is the exclusion of the majority
and indifference to a Sitz that has been left a virtual void. Said’s larger point is that we
allow ourselves to be silent about the actual historical and social world (of the
Oriental) that we have appropriated. Textuality has been surgically removed from the
circumstances that engendered it in the first instance, and so we have a Foucaultian
“structure of punishment” erected about those authors that have been made to inhabit
the orientalist panopticon. They are observed and transformed, disciplined and
reorganised, by the applied scholarly dynamic of consensus. Insofar as their Egyptian
voice is not being allowed to speak to us, we are presented with an alarmingly fictive
author function in Gnostic thought, one that is self-disciplining to follow Foucault’s
model.
This is interesting, because the implicit Hellenistic Gnostic deconstructionist
stance towards language was itself arrayed against hierarchy, canonicity, the notion of
complete textual authority placed upon the unimpeachable word – precisely the
“political” contentiousness apparent in modern literary-critical theory, especially
among the poststructuralists. How many traditionalist English professors now don the
hat of Irenaeus and damn the young Gnostic “deconstructionists” in their midst? This
has everything to do with a perceived tearing up of the hallowed and respectful
approach to texts, in favour of a pneumatic artistic integrity wherein Tradition and his
Rules – the perennial “shh!” librarian – is kicked out the door and the texts
mythopoeically reappropriated. Of all the religious groups to have had their true
characteristics blanched by the orientalising author-function, the Gnostics are the
most unlikely to remain quiescent. They appear to have understood exceedingly well
the profound ethical and practical motivations that shape mythopoeic and ideological
enterprises.
“Reappropriation” on the Gnostic side of the equation can be seen to be a
euphemism for a radical and antithetical inversion. Bloom’s notion of “misprision”
denotes an apparent contempt and failure to appreciate the value of something; in
legal terms it is the spirit of wilful felony or treason. 17
As this spirit can be seen to
16
Hoffman, Celsus, On the True Doctrine, 15.
17
Harold Bloom, “Lying Against Time: Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism,” in The Rediscovery of
Gnosticism, vol 1, ed. Bentley Layton (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980), 57-72.