Responding to Critics

“They call us unspiritual, common, and ecclesiastic.” That’s a bishop talking, around the year 180. Irenaeus of Lyon is complaining about Valentinian Christians who still sat in his congregation and took communion with everyone else. They just treated him as a man who couldn’t follow the conversation. If you’ve spent any time with Gnostic texts, you’ve probably met the charge that grows out of complaints like his. Gnosticism, it goes, split humanity into the saved few and the hopeless many, and the few decided they were the few. I want to give that charge its full weight, because some of it lands. Then I want to show you a few texts that pull hard the other way. ...

The charge against the Gnostics fits in one breath. They believed a lesser god made the world, so they decided matter was bad, so they hated the body. You can still hear the verdict whenever someone calls an idea “gnostic” because it treats flesh as an inconvenience to be managed or escaped. I’ve spent a lot of this blog reading these texts sympathetically, so it seems only fair to put the charge to them directly. The short answer is sometimes yes. The longer answer is that the texts fought about the body among themselves, and a few of them defended it more stubbornly than their critics did. ...