Thursday, August 03, 2006
FROM THE GNOSTIC POINT OF VIEW...
There's an interesting article in the "New Dawn Magazine" website. It's titled "The Hidden History of the Secret Church" and was written by Tau Mikhael. The article sounds like something Dan Brown might have read when doing research for the DAVINCI CODE.
In the article you can learn that
* ...rather than tell the story of a god-man sacrificed for the sins of the world, as the orthodox Christians believed...Christ was the cosmic teacher who took on the form of the man Jesus to impart His gnosis to the apostles, but only gradually and not to all of them in equal measure. Mary Magdalene and St. John the Evangelist were held in particularly high regard by Gnostic Christians.
*...many...promulgate the doctrine of the so-called 'two churches': the church of Peter and the church of John, or of two 'epochs' - the epoch of Peter and the epoch of John. You know also that this doctrine teaches the end--more or less at hand--of the church of Peter, or above all of the Papacy which is its visible symbol...
* ...the time is coming when [the Church of John] will manifest itself in the world and show how far above the other churches it is. When it does, the church of St. Peter will have to reform and make many changes, whether it likes to or not.
* The Cathars were the legitimate heirs of the early Gnostic Christians and through them of the first apostles....Rejecting most of the Old Testament, whose deity they identified with Satan, the Cathars held the Gospel of John in highest esteem and made use of it in their rituals.
* Institutional Christianity, with its religious dogmatism and obsession with commandments, is a contemporary example of the same force that confronted and sought to kill Jesus in his own time.
The author quotes some extracts from Valentin Tomberg's MEDITATIONS ON THE TAROT to make his points. In fact the second quote up above is taken from the book.
According to the article nineteenth century Gnostic history includes the tale of Eugene Vintras who founded the Gnostic Church of Carmel in France. While Vintras was serving a 5-year sentence in a French prison, the Abbe Marechal took charge of the Carmel community and "began publicly teaching certain rituals that had a sexual content. According to some reports, he confided to his congregation, "Those who feel love for one another should share it often."
Yet despite this danger of turning the love doctrine of the Gnostic Church into a sexual religion, the author still states with approval that
The Johannite church of Love (Amor) is decentralised, shamanistic, free and eternal; the church of Rome is centralised, hierarchical, complex, and worldly. The battle between the two churches is the Old Testament battle of the prophets with the priests. Mystic vision versus organised religion.
The mystic's life raft is doctrine. Without it, the mystic is subject to whatever roving spirits might desire to impart. Not all spirits are good or even benign; and without doctrine, there is no protection because there is no means of discernment. Gnosticism, time after time, has fallen into sexual corruption. The ultimate expression of this corruption is libertine Gnosticism as practiced by Aleister Crowley, and Rabelais before him. I strongly suspect that within the Roman Catholic Church a measure of this libertine Gnosticism has been the cause of the sexual abuse scandal we are living through, all in the name of the "luv" doctrine that many orthodox Catholics have noted permeating liberal circles of Roman Catholic theology in recent years. Certainly those who have abused the laity's offspring were not Roman Catholic in their thinking, since Roman Catholicism proposes a celibate priesthood and rejects homosexual activity.
In any case, and despite the constant preaching of spirit contact and abandonment of commandments, even the Gnostic community must finally resort to doctrine in order to explain itself to the rest of the world. You will find that doctrine in a position paper titled "Ecclesia Gnostica Position Paper Concerning the Thelemite or Crowleyan Gnostic Churches" by The Rt. Rev. Stephen A. Hoeller in P. R. Koenig's website. There Hoeller attempts to separate the Crowleyites from the Gnosticism practiced by the Ecclesia Gnostica. Hoeller provides a 4-point conclusion which contains the following:
The issue of the Thelemite bodies brings us[sic] a delicate point which all Gnostics must face sooner or later. While Gnosis and Gnosticism cannot and should not be rigidly defined, from this one should not draw the erroneous conclusion that everything is Gnostic that adopts that name.
Anyone who has studied the history of Roman Catholicism knows that much of our doctrine has been defined in response to heresy. Hoeller, though he wishes to avoid the term, is defining Gnostic doctrine here in response to the Thelemic heresy.
Gradually, as challenges to belief become more common, Gnosticism too will be forced to espouse doctrine, just as Roman Catholicism does, in the effort to define itself. In fact it is entirely possible that Gnosticism will one day resolve into the very doctrine that it so stridently rejects.
