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GnosticismExcerpted from HUM 102: HESSE AND JUNG: GNOSTICISM IN MODERN FORM: The recent publication of hitherto unknown Gnostic manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt has generated much scholarly interest and reawakened public curiosity about the Gnostic religion. Gnosticism, a religious worldview, sees man's soul as an alienated spark of heavenly light struggling in a hostile world of matter. Every individual has to be redeemed from this alienation by spiritual knowledge, gnosis, of his or her real nature and divinity. In fact, knowledge of God is, for the Gnostic, inseparable from knowledge of the Self. Gnosis is an intensely personal experience, in which the recognition of the divine light within becomes both self-realization and God-realization. Gnosticism flourished from the first to the fourth centuries A.D., but the gnostic world-view has found expression since in religion, psychology, philosophy and literature, particularly in the novels of Hermann Hesse, and the writings of C.G. Jung, the Swiss psychologist. The reasons for Gnosticism's re-emergence are not hard to understand. When modern individualism broke the restraining authority of the church, alternative forms of spirituality were allowed to develop. These led into an absorbing interest in the deeper, unconscious aspects of the Self - that inner world whose wealth the Gnostics drew out two thousand years ago in their myths and legends. Yet, the most powerful motivation for the modern Gnostic search for the inner God is the alienation of man's soul in the bleak and superficial materialism of our technological, ego-centered world. Many experience today the cosmic homelessness that the Gnostics felt when the struggling flame of divinity in their souls was stifled by the crass materialism of ancient Rome. Perhaps we need to find the modern equivalent of Gnosticism in the form of a free spirituality that springs from a rational, but nonetheless creative and individual, exploration of the Self. That way, we can resolve the conflict in the soul of modern man and harmonize willing, thinking and feeling into an inner unity, the divine experience. |
HUM 102: HESSE AND JUNG: GNOSTICISM IN MODERN FORM |