Gnosticism: Encyclopedia II - Gnosticism - Matter

Gnosticism - Matter

Some Gnostics, again in common with such Neoplatonic philosophers as Plotinus, held matter to be evil, but only as a method of depicting its extreme distance from the monadic source of the universe (which is, of course, supremely good). Thus matter is not evil in and of itself, but only in its distance from and its contrast to its monadic source (compare summum bonum). Many Gnostics also made use of ritual; these rituals being the manipulation of material objects in imitation of divine events or occurrences, this presupposes at least the ability of matter to be used for positive effect. Valentinus himself, sometimes deemed the Gnostic teacher par excellence, only referred to matter as an obscuration of the truth; that is, as 'error', not as inherently evil.

However, it should be noted that Gnostics typically present a view of the universe shared by neither Classical Greek philosophy nor the orthodox Christian tradition. The former typically saw the universe as a cosmos (from the Greek 'kosmos' meaning 'universe' with implications of totalising order and harmony). The earliest usage of the word in this sense is in Heraclitus: 'This kosmos, the same of all, no god or man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and quenched in measures.' Heraclitus posits a conservation of order that is described in matter: not the retention of identity by material things or even of their individual mass, but rather of a total volume of matter. As one material element is ‘kindled’, another is ‘quenched’; thus the orderly nature of the universe is to be found in the organisation of matter within it. This view of the universe would later develop into the Stoic indentification of the universe with God; this is not to imply that the Stoic saw the universe as an object of worship, but rather as an object of contemplation.

The Christian view may be likened to the Platonic view rather than the Stoic one, in that Christianity typically held the material universe to be only one level of reality, and that beyond it lay an incorporeal universe superior to it. The material universe became theophanic (Gr. 'God-revealing'); a revelation of the benevolence and superiority of the Almighty, made manifest in the orderliness and harmony of material reality; not the most superior of all possible beings, as with the Stoics, but an indicator of God's superiority, and therefore a positive thing. This view remains common today.

The Gnostic view, on the other hand, held materiality to be a flawed creation, or if not flawed at least incomplete. Like Platonics, Neo-Platonics and Christians, they also held the universe to be only the most immediate level of reality; unlike these groups, they did not view the universe as a cosmos, but rather as a flawed process from which the true, spiritual source of beauty is distant. Thus, while the former groups might draw comfort from the harmony and order of matter in its formation as the cosmos, Gnostics typically might not, and thus assess matter as evil. However, such assessments of matter should be viewed only as an expression of a feeling of alienation within the world (‘Man in the Cosmos’, Armstrong, A.H. (ed.), Plotinian and Christian Studies, (London: Variorum, 1979), 7.). Such feeling, it may be observed, is an occasional consequence of the idealization of what to one is not immediately manifest; when what is truly existent – indeed, the realm of the Divine – is located beyond the sensible (a feeling taken to radical extremes in gnostic texts, but also detectable in Plotinus) one cannot help but feel alienated within the empirically observable universe.

Nevertheless, the unsubtle characterisation of matter as simply evil is a trait that is commonly used to define gnostic systems, often by those who seek to detract from them, or by those too reliant on heresiological texts for their understanding of them (the two groups aren't mutually exclusive). This unfair characterisation, amongst others, has been challenged by Michael Allen Williams in his important work Rethinking Gnosticism.

It would be more accurate to characterize the Gnostic relationship with matter as one fraught with ambivalence; their views are an attempt to explain and clarify the divine's relationship with the imperfect universe, and to create a contextual basis for the individual Gnostic's feeling of alienation within the universe.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Matter", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki