A Religion, or at Least a Philosophy, for Our Fractured Times?

About ten years ago, Lee and Steven Hager, wife and husband, published a remarkable book whose title tells us plainly what it comprises -- Understanding Gnosis -- Inside and Outside the Gnostic Gospels.  

As far as I know, the Hagers are not credentialed academics in the field of the history of religion, in contrast to, say, Elaine Pagels of Princeton, who brought the alternative gospels into fashion decades ago.  And yet they have written a most comprehensive and highly literate deep introduction to Gnostic thought that draws on many and disparate sources.  

They begin by admitting that there are various strands of Gnosticism that often are in tension, sometimes extreme tension, with each other.  The most important division is between an exclusionary and dualistic strain, where the elect can expect to find and experience the One, the Source, the Godhead, but others may expect not endless reincarnation, nor even the fires of hell, but not to exist at all after this brief life is over!  In the contrasting strain, every man and woman is one with the Divine and destined to partake in the Divine because, foundationally, the One is All There Is.  What makes it appropriate to characterize both of these schools of thought as "Gnostic" is that in both systems the knowledge that we are seeking is direct, experiential knowledge of God, not anything we can learn from books.  (The Hagers readily admit the paradox that notwithstanding they have devoted 400-odd pages to the task of at least pointing us in the direction of this experiential knowledge!)

Next, the Hagers examine the so-called "Nag Hammadi texts" that are the principal historical Gnostic sources, from a big-picture point of view.  Then they do a deep dive into those same texts, including the Book of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, and the Gospel of Mary, as well as sources that we may know only because they are referenced in texts that have survived, as they have not.

With this extensive background, the Hagers then explain the various formal schools of thought that we think of as Gnostic, including, for example, Hermeticism and Manichaeism, and how these schools, or most of them, came to be considered heretical deviations from Orthodox Christianity.

The next and penultimate major section of Understanding Gnosis highlights the extent to which non-Gnostic traditions share Gnostic insights, most especially the concept of oneness with the Divine, achieved via direct knowledge and experience.  This to me is the most interesting part of the book.  It draws into the discussion everything from the Greek/Egyptian philosopher Plotinus, to alchemists, to devotees of Carl Jung, to the Hindu Upanishads, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Sufi mysticism and even mainstream Christianity itself!

A subtle realization comes over one incrementally as one encounters through this part of the book the Gnostic resonances in all of these ancient and modern traditions -- Lee and Steven Hager are not just enthusiastic autodidact scholars of Gnosticism; they are adherents, devotees of the "Oneness" branch of it, eager for us to work it into our own lives as an all-encompassing personal philosophy and cosmology!  Indeed, the final section of the book makes this rallying of our spirits to the cause explicit.

What do I find personally appealing in the Hagers' Oneness Gnosticism?  Among other things:

• Its simplicity.  It needs and relies on virtually nothing by way of dogma.
• Its lack of judgment, rewards and punishments.  Like Roger Daltrey of The Who, we can embrace it and still proclaim "I've no need to be forgiven!"
• Its recognition, whether or not explicit, that the Christ embodies a higher level of divinity than that of Yaldabaoth or Jehovah, which are two names for the same flawed Being who is said to have made us, and made us in His image and likeness!  This is in contrast to Orthodox Christianity, which via various forms of sophistry attempts to obscure the obvious and fundamental differences between God the Father and God the Son as they are portrayed in the texts.
• A point closely related to the last.  My research into UFOs and related "paranormal" phenomena has led me to a place that seems to be populated by hyper-intelligent beings that are not uniformly benevolent.  These can be called "demi-gods," and they can rightly be called "demons" as well, so long as that word is not meant to imply a wholesale importation of the Biblical notion of Satan and his minions into ufology.  This in turn has led me to fear that upon our deaths we do not enter a land of light and love, but rather a realm of chaos and hostility (this, incidentally, not inconsistent with the visions we are said to encounter in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, except that for the Buddhists the demons are not real but illusory).  But the "Oneness Gnosticism" seems to say that we need not battle the demons for eons as part of our journey to the Source, because we partake of the Source even now, "mourning and weeping in this Valley of Tears."  According to this cosmology, we can, we do, leapfrog the Devil!
• A point made explicitly by the Hagers towards the end of the book.  The Eastern traditions often insist that when we graduate from the cycle of death and rebirth, we reunite with the Source as a raindrop falls into the ocean.  We lose every aspect of our individuality, what makes "us" us.  But further, the ocean into which we fall is an Ocean of Complete Nothingness.  This has always struck me as a terrifying conception of immortality, not less terrifying than the annihilation that comes with death according to our friends the strict materialists.  The Hagers plainly insist that in Oneness Gnosticism we partake of the Divine and and in the process relinquish our lower-case selves, but an upper-case Self, unique to us, always survives in communion with the One.

Here I should acknowledge the obvious.  We may choose our cosmology in part on the basis of its congeniality, but a cosmology is not more likely to be true just because it entails a happy ending for us; otherwise we might as well construct a new religion based on the experience of Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz!"

In any case, the Hagers do us a great service.  I now walk away from Understanding Gnosis convinced that Gnostic Christianity deserves to be considered canonical, and the New Testament as offered to us in our churches heretical, not the other way round.