From Poimandres to Jacob Bohme: Gnosis, Hermetism, and the Christian Tradition (review)

This handsomely produced book contains lectures presented at an Amsterdam symposium held in honor of Gilles Quispel on the occasion of his eightieth birthday on 30 May 1996, along with a number of scholarly articles, some previously published, by Quispel and Roelof van den Broek. The other contributors are Jean-Pierre Mahé, the famous scholar of the Hermetica; Peter Kingsley, author of Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) and other works on ancient esoterica; and Carlos Gilly, librarian of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica. As the title suggests, the essays explore what Joost R. Ritman, the founder of the Bibliotheca, calls "the Hermetic-Christian Gnosis," which (he says) runs from antiquity to modernity as "a third cultural component next to theology and philosophy" in the West (10). The essays of Kingsley, van den Broek, and Quispel focus on antiquity; those of Mahé and Gilly on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Contemporary scholarly approaches to "Gnosis," "Gnosticism," "Hermetism," and the like fall along a spectrum from an extreme minimalism, which eschews the use of the term Gnosticism at all, to an extreme maximalism, which can speak of "the Hermetic-Christian Gnosis" as an enduring entity in Western civilization. While the scholarly pendulum has been moving in the minimalist direction over the last decade, the essays in this book are unabashedly, even defiantly, maximalist in every way, from their scholarly categories to their use of parallels to the significance they attribute to their topic. "Gnosis" is simply "the inner experience of ultimate reality," which can take "ancient, medieval, and modem forms" (13). Thus, in antiquity Mani was a "gnostic Christian" (161), and "Paul, after all, was a Hellenist, and as such a Gnostic" (294); in modernity, Chagall was a Jewish Gnostic, Blake a Christian Gnostic, Jung a Hermetic Gnostic (333).

In order to map this pervasive Gnosis, the closest relationships must be attributed to texts that contain parallel phrases or imagery. When the alchemic Tabula Smaragdina says, "That which is below is as that which is above/and that which is above is as that which is below," it may have been "inspired" by the Gospel of Thomas 22, which likewise speaks of making "the above like the below" (324). Esoteric writings take on the highest religious, philosophical, and historical significance: "The so-called Hermetic texts are just one manifestation of a much vaster esoteric tradition that runs like a thread through antiquity, stretching backwards and forwards in time . . . . A correct assessment of the nature and function of ancient esotericism is essential for a correct assessment not only of religious history in the West, but also, ultimately, of what we now are as individuals in the modem western world" (18-19). Ritman believes that a present-day "revival" of "Hermetic-Christian Gnosis" signals "a new phase in our global history" (10-11).

Even JECS readers who situate themselves more toward the minimalist pole of the scholarly spectrum than these authors (and there will be few who do not) may find the essays on antiquity by van den Broek and Quispel stimulating. The former's chapter on "The Hermetic Apocalypse and Other Greek Predictions of the End of Religion" (97-113) provides a fascinating entry into the polemics surrounding religious change in the fourth and fifth centuries. And Quispel's "The Original Doctrine of Valentinus the Gnostic" (233-63), a 1996 revisiting of his famous article of 1947, presents a vigorous, if indirect, response to Christoph Markschies's Valentinus Gnosticus? (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), a minimalist argument that Valentinus was not a Gnostic. In this essay one finds the detailed, parallel-based arguments of the maximalist scholar at their most persuasive: indeed, "it is especially when Valentinus is put against...