EPILOGUE 791
freedom from conventional stricture and had a flair for inventing myth to
verbalize withdrawal and meditative flight. Even the current term gnosticism
(a fine umbrella term, today under fire) is largely, but not entirely, an eigh-
teenth-century invention for the ancient dualistic critique of the world. For
the polemical church fathers, the label "heretics," as in Irenaeus's Adversus
haereses, was commonly sufficient. Yet even Irenaeus was acutely aware that
gnosis was intrinsic to this group that dared to tamper with Christian
monotheism. The bishop's longer title for his attack reads On the Exposure
and Refutation of their Falsely Called Gnosis.
GNOSTIC DESPAIR AND INNER LIGHT, AND THE
EMERGENCE OF A SELF-CENTERED RELIGIONFrom the gnostics' very inception, their inner light came as a response to op-
pression and dismay. The circumstance of despair with the material world
that impelled their original alienated vision as well as their turn inward to
dissident knowledge and meditation probably had its beginnings with first-
century Jews who were shaken by the destruction of their temple in
Jerusalem and the forced diaspora into neighboring lands. With their apoca-
lyptic vision and hope arrested by exile and the failure of god to halt Roman
armies and their endless crucifixions, some Jews from Palestine and Alexan-
dria turned from faith in the outside creator god to a revelatory knowledge
attained in solitude. A similar dashing of apocalyptic hope also stirred early
Christians who were finding their way and from whose ranks was to come
the main body of converts to gnosticism.
From these multiple strands of Jewish and Christian hopelessness and from
hermeticism in Egypt, mythical theologies in Babylonia, and Zoroastrian du-
alisms in Persia came a new self-centered religion, based no longer on the cre-
ator god of the Jewish Bible but on imaginative forces of mind seeking a
personal awakening of the spirit to light. It is imperative to remember that
gnostics distinguish between soul and spirit. Spirit is higher, also associated
with breath {pneuma), while soul is still hylic, that is, connected to body and
the earth, dependent on their form but capable, through gnosis, of rising to
the salvific level of spirit.
In the notion of a self-centered religion we have the essence of gnosticism's
most radical contribution to the history of ideas. There is no longer only a so-
cial contract between god and humans in which obedience to the master god
is virtue. Now the se//is valuable. The self may become divine. The self may