![]() The savior did not come for these pitiful folk.īut to those few who were fallen angels imprisoned in flesh, the savior brought the saving knowledge of their true origins and a complicated set of esoteric passwords so that, after death, these divine souls could navigate past the Demiurge and his minions and make their way back at long last to the realm of light. Most of humanity was “carnal” and therefore belonged to this realm of decay. Some spiritual being had to descend from the realms of light and bring this knowledge. Such liberation could happen only through gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. Redemption for them is to discover their true spiritual identity, escape from the body and its disgusting passions, and return to their true heavenly home. And the most tragic mistake is that some sparks of divinity, some truly spiritual realities, managed to get trapped in human bodies. In any case, this physical world he created is not “good,” as it says in Genesis 1, but rather a terrible mistake. Some held that the Demiurge was pure evil. The physical realm is a work of darkness created by a lower spiritual being called the Demiurge. It would never cross his mind to create the slime and muck of this material world. He dwells in the realms of light and is purely spiritual. This material world, the Gnostics held, was not created by the Supreme Being. Have you ever had the feeling that you don’t quite fit with the people and society around you? That you are a fish out of water? That’s because you are different, the Gnostics would say. What we want to understand is the essence of Gnosticism, the basic ideas that people called Gnostics held in common. The important thing here, though, is not what they disagreed about or even where they got their ideas from. Gnosticism was not a tightly organized religion but rather a general way of thinking that characterized a wide variety of sects following different leaders and often disagreeing sharply on several points. So it is no wonder that ideas from Persia-married to a mishmash of ideas drawn from Greek philosophy, magic, and other exotic sects-coalesced into a something that came to be known as Gnosticism. ![]() In such an environment, people often look to far off, exotic lands for something new and exciting. ![]() Affluence and corruption led to boredom and restlessness. Worship of the emperor and the Roman gods was a matter of civic virtue, not true religious devotion. No one took the religion of Jupiter, Juno, and the Vestal Virgins very seriously. Sensuality and materialism were the order of the day. But the empire was far from its republican roots and republican virtues. For over a hundred years the Pax Romana had reigned over the Mediterranean world, a peace kept in place by the unrivaled power of the Roman military machine. Under the emperor Trajan the empire had reached its greatest territorial extent. In the second century, the Roman Empire had grown tired. ![]()
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