“the divine being [True Self] is hidden deep within human nature”
The Gnostics were early Christians in the 1st century AD. They emphasized personal spiritual knowledge (simplicity) above orthodox teachings and traditions (complexity) and rejected the authority of the Jewish and Christian leaders. By the end of the 2nd century, Gnostics were considered heretics because they believed an individual could be transformed and access divine wisdom, which the mainstream Jews and Christians rejected.
Gnostics made efforts to reach profound inner heights through purification in order that their True Self could be fully integrated. Manly P. Hall, in his book The Secret Teachings of All Ages (2009), described Gnostics as “resplendent with intellectual and spiritual understanding, [they] were the perfect fruitage of the divine tree, bearing witness before the material world of the recondite source of all Light and Truth.”[i]
Insight # 42 comes to us from Elaine Pagels (b. 1943) a Professor of Religion at Princeton University who has conducted extensive research into early Christianity and Gnosticism.
“Gnostic Christians castigated the orthodox for making the mistake of reading the Scriptures—and especially Genesis—literally, and thereby missing its ‘deeper meaning.’ And when the Jewish theologian Martin Buber sought to explore the sources of religious experience, he characterized the Jewish devotee’s relationship to God as ‘I and Thou;’ but no orthodox Jew, any more than an orthodox Christian, could say, with the Hindu devotee, ‘I am Thou.’ But Gnostic interpreters share with the Hindu that very conviction—that the divine being [True Self] is hidden deep within human nature, as well as outside it, and although often unperceived, is a spiritual potential latent in the human psyche.”[ii]
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Additional Reading:
- Gnosticism, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
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[i] https://ascendingpath.org/gnosis-and-gnostic-teachings/
[ii] Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1998, pp. 63-65.
