David Robertson’s Gnosticism and the History of Religions is not a book about “the Gnostics,” individuals whom ancient heresiographers and philosophers alleged to have called themselves gnōstikoi (“knowers”). Nor is it about the distinctive myths that these sources associate with the mysterious “Gnostics,” revelations about malevolent creators and divine nature of humanity. Rather, Robertson seeks to tell the tell the story of the term “Gnosticism,” a modern “floating signifier” that became unmoored from ancient theological debates and discussed in contexts as diverse as theosophy and existentialism, of equal interest to scholars of phenomenology, political theory, and Pali. Robertson thus takes up the project of deconstructing the study of Gnosticism where Michael Allen Williams and Karen King stopped, examining “where this (imagined) historical entity is transformed into an ahistorical essence” (6, italics in original).
Following a chapter introducing some important evidence about ancient “Gnostics” and the modern coinage of “Gnosticism,” Robertson moves on to 19th-century “gnostic churches” and occultist circles, especially that of the Theosophical Society, and the latter’s engagement with Eranos, a Swiss forum for the study of religion that began meeting in 1933, in close engagement with the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung. Through the Theosophically-tinged Eranos Circle, Robertson avers, Jungian scholars would come to have decisive influence “on the publication and scholarly appraisal of the Nag Hammadi texts”—Coptic codices discovered in Upper Egypt, in 1945, containing a wealth of evidence pertaining to the legends of the ancient gnōstikoi—“and . . . the development and apotheosis of a phenomenological History of Religions methodology” (64).
Other chapters explore Gnosticism and German philosophy: Robertson’s treatment of the pioneering work of Hans Jonas highlights that it is in part thanks to the wide influence of phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger that experience—and scholarship obsessively directed towards the priority of individual, direct experience of the world and the divine—emerged as a Letimotiv in discourse about Gnosticism. Following the Second World War, the ostensibly anti-cosmic character of Gnosticism (according to Jonas) made it an attractive point of reference for thinkers grappling with theodicy and modernity after Auschwitz: it is here, Robertson shows, that scholars began to claim that “left is gnostic and right is gnostic” (in the memorable phrasing of Ioan Culianu, quoted on page 157) while the Nag Hammadi evidence languished in editorial purgatory.
Meanwhile, we learn that many of the founding figures of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) itself were Eranos delegates deeply invested in the notion of gnosis (“knowledge”) as “elite access to a transformational and salvific sacred essence,” to such an extent that “Gnosticism and the phenomenological History of Religion became increasingly indistinguishable” (104). Yet Robertson also offers a vision of what he thinks meaningful, theoretically informed scholarship on “Gnostics” could be: the study of contemporary Gnostic groups, who, constructing their own traditions by engaging History of Religions scholarship, transform the etic, academic discourse on Gnosticism into an emic self-identifier of a suppressed Christian church from antiquity centered on “gnosis as direct religious experience” (106). Closing chapters offer a critical reading of the work of Wouter Hanegraaff, April Deconick, and Jeffrey Kripal, who, in Robertson’s estimation, offer little more than a crypto-theological repackaging of Eranos spirituality, with its emphasis on individual religious experience articulated in terms of gnosis (cf. 133-134, 148-150, 152).
Overall, then, we are left here with a polemic, but a useful one. Even if one disagrees with Robertson that “Gnosticism has always been a dog-whistle for an essentialist phenomenological approach” (152, italics his), it is difficult to dispute that earlier theorizations of “Gnostic religion,” and specifically the “religion after religion” of Eranos, continue to inform the study of Gnosticism today, a legacy with which all scholars of the Gnostic dossier must reckon.
Gnosticism and the History of Religions is a most stimulating book and a good read to boot, if untidy. Most errors are of minor significance for the overall argument: for example, Robertson states that the Askew Codex contains “a version of Pistis Sophia somewhat different from the version later discovered at Nag Hammadi” (19), but there is no version of this text extant in the Nag Hammadi corpus. (Perhaps the Sophia of Jesus Christ is meant?) It is stated on several occasions that the only people who have ever self-identified as “Gnostics” are those belonging to contemporary Gnostic groups (3, 15, 70); even setting aside the question of the ancient gnōstikoi (about whom there is not a scholarly consensus), Robertson neglects to mention that the word “Mandaean” is a self-designation that means “Gnostic.” Glaring typos abound. Such things happen in the demiurge’s cosmos, but the errors are so chronic—even “Führer” is misspelled (46)—that the series editors and the press bear some responsibility. While this reviewer shares—and has made, in various publications—some of the criticisms levied by Robertson in chapters 9 through 11, these chapters are marred by a lack of comity towards one’s colleagues, and significant errors of fact and omission.
What Robertson does not ask, much less answer, is why the “Gnostic religion” has been such a successful “zombie” category (160). The book opens and closes with musings on the “strange allure” of Gnosticism but does not explore whence the allure derives. Robertson’s examination of the relationship between theosophy, Jungianism, and mid-century phenomenology of religion finally offers a proper genealogy of “Gnosticism” as a model of religion that privileges individual experience—a valuable contribution indeed. Yet when we turn to the actual ancient texts themselves, we find remarkable revelations, liturgies, and poetry—sometimes transgressive, always original—that are of terrific significance for our understanding of ancient religion and philosophy. The “allure of Gnosticism” ultimately derives from the distinctive beauty and power of the literature that raised the ire of the heresiographers, the Coptic translations of which we have the great fortune to be able to read today.
Dylan Burns is an assistant professor of the history of esotericism in late antiquity, University of Amsterdam.
Dylan Burns
Date Of Review:
January 31, 2023
