As one reads the contemporary literature surrounding gnosticism, which, of course, is almost entirely a consequence of the Nag Hammadi find, with its gospels of Thomas and Phillip, one gradually feels the unspoken groundswell – the almost irresistible sense – that the writers believe they have found the Rosetta Stone of a new religion. But, of course, almost all are equally intent on maintaining their scholarly decorum, their pretensions to the present standards of intellectual authority. And, traditionally, anyone espousing gnosticism as an actual religion has passed beyond the pale and entered the anti-academic regions of the occult, if not the realms of the unbalanced.
            But what the Nag Hammadi find shows us very clearly is that gnosticism was not only once a viable religious alternative to Christianity, it was also, quite possibly, a legitimate and complete alternative interpretation of the message of Jesus.
            What the present writer has been trying to show, throughout this blog as elsewhere, is that one can draw a more or less direct line from gnosticism to science, that science itself is not, strictly speaking, a rational phenomenon, that the core experience of science is anything but rational – that in actuality it is a mystical experience – and that both gnosticism and science point to a philosophy of self-awareness which has been emerging explicitly in the last two centuries of western history, has produced, in fact, the modern, and which explains and validates both ‘spirit’ and ‘the divine’, if not rationally at least empirically, much as modern physics has ceased to be rational, but remains empirical.
            Obviously, this is a slightly larger thesis than most contemporary scholars would be willing to undertake, much less defend. But as we have said elsewhere, our chairs are so much less valuable, we are not particulary concerned about losing them. In fact, our chairs impart no authority whatsoever. Therefore our only fear is falling on the floor, not falling from the regions of academic grace.

            If I were to attempt to argue this thesis – or rather, these theses, this array of propositions – as a contemporary academic, I cannot imagine how many book-length works I would be required to produce in order to justify my assertions.
            But we do not argue like an academic. We argue as a poet and philosopher. And our forensic disposition relies on what Pound defined as the ‘luminous detail’. The luminous detail is like Cézanne’s petit sensation. It is not just a single element. It is a point of confluence, something that may appear simple, but in fact embodies a complex, embodies it reflectively, perhaps, but contains it within the frame of a specific turn – visual or verbal, intellectual or symbolic – that can be expressed more or less cryptically.
            For example, in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, ‘Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are two or one, I am with him.’ Nothing like this exists in the canonical texts. Clearly, it is an instruction concerning ‘proselytizing’, or at least, the spreading of the ‘message’ or understanding of Jesus. But it is essentially ‘anthropological’, a way of understanding, but not a dogma. Perhaps it means, ‘Where there are three gods, you can teach the message directly, but where there are two or one, you must engraft the names of Jesus and Yahweh.’ But, in any case, I would suggest that it is the origin of the doctrine of trinity, not directly, but by opposition.

            Augustine was not only the greatest polemicist against the gnostics, in his day he was the primary political instrument for their suppression. The Nag Hammadi texts were buried explicitly as a consequence of his general campaign against gnosticism and his explicit campaign against them in North Africa. And Augustine was a brilliant polemicist. Instead of addressing them as a generic alternative to Christianity, Augustine continued the policies of the earlier anti-heresiarchs, fragmenting the opposition by treating them as disparate sects – a trick so successful it persists to the present day in the scholarship about the gnostics. Granted there were a variety of teachers teaching a range of interpretations. But the same is true of the canonical gospels. If they were really different ‘sects’, however, we must question why all their texts were found together in the Nag Hammadi find.
            In North Africa, he attacked them, not as an alternative religion, but as a schismatic sect. A religious teacher, Donatus, had insisted that the sacraments of an unclean priest were null. It is essentially a gnostic assertion, but certainly not the whole of gnosticism. But Augustine insisted this was the whole of the difference between his understanding of religion and the North African dissidents. He invited their leaders to come into the cities and argue with him. Since the gnostics of the time felt that the cities were corrupt and corrupting, only ambitious, self-aggrandizing individuals came in. And of course, Augustine easily defeated them, at least in his own reports. It is not surprising that, by the time of the Islamic conquest, only the cities of North Africa remained ‘Christian’.

            All of this is largely beside the point, except to establish the orientation and vehemence of Augustine. But the other aspect of an adversarial relationship like this is preemption. You steal your opponent’s thunder. As I say, nothing like the statement about ‘three gods’ appears in the canonical texts. The early anti-heresiarchs show that the ‘church’ was already sufficiently organized and sufficiently defensive by the second century to feel obligated to protect its core dogma, however indefinite at that point. And such an institution has lost its primary intellectual creativity. For the gnostics, the power of three was a living spiritual reality. For the church, trinity was originally an essentially scholastic development. Augustine’s teacher, Ambrose of Milan, esteemed Plotinus, and apparently saw Plotinus’ ‘three hypostases’ as a psycho-spiritual description, a linking of psychology and the world through the forms of the Platonic archetypes, and therefore a suitable description of ‘reality’ for a ‘Christian’. Augustine, in On the Trinity, adapted this as a description of ‘Godhead’. In other words, Augustine epitomizes the act of institutional preemption.
            The reason this is important is because, slightly less than a millennia later, trinitarian Godhead becomes the vehicle for the objectification of the world. With the assimilation of the Aristotelian corpus, during the High Middle Ages, the pre-scientific mindset emerges, the mutual objectification of God the Father as Creator, in the modern objectivist sense, and the corollary objectification of the world as something entirely independent of consciousness. Neither of these viewpoints had subsisted before in world history.

            So we take these two ‘luminous details’ from the vastness of history, the formal emergence of trinitarian doctrine from a preemption of the gnostics and the re-emergence of an essentially gnostic viewpoint from the body of ‘the church’ in the form of proto-science, and we can establish our argument that the church, unintentionally, became the chrysalis in which the caterpillar of primitive or original gnosticism gestated into the butterfly of science.
            And, of course, the beauty of science, when we recognize that the experience of ‘objectivity’ is essentially a mystical experience and a gateway to the philosophy of reflection, is that we suddenly have a key to mysticism as a non-elite or mass phenomena.