Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism
Richard Smoley
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0060858303
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The success of books such as Elaine Pagels's Gnostic Gospels and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code proves beyond a doubt that there is a tremendous thirst today for finding the hidden truths of Christianity – truths that may have been lost or buried by institutional religion over the last two millennia.
In Forbidden Faith, Richard Smoley narrates a popular history of one such truth, the ancient esoteric religion of gnosticism, which flourished between the first and fourth centuries A.D., but whose legacy remains even today, having survived secretly throughout the ages.
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“bind together.” Religion’s function is to bind individuals both to God and to one another. There is no real contradiction between these two purposes; ideally they should work together in perfect harmony. But this rarely happens. More often than not, these two functions conflict in various ways, just as individual needs frequently clash with collective ones. One problem arises when an individual has some kind of spiritual experience that doesn’t fit with accepted theology. This person poses an
A.D., possibly in Athens, though he spent most of his life in Alexandria. Allusions in his written works indicate that he could have been an initiate of the pagan mystery religions, about which he seems unusually well informed. He sought spiritual knowledge from a number of sources, and makes reference to six “blessed and memorable men” whom he does not name but who, he says, spoke in “plain and living words.” The last of these, who was “first in power,” is usually identified as Pantaenus, head
Kabbalist Moses Cordovero writes, “These names are the sefirot. It is not that these names are ascribed to the sefirot, God forbid. On the contrary, the [divine] names [themselves] are the sefirot.”20 If this is so, penetrating the structure of the divine names would enable the Kabbalist to enter the supernal garden of the divine realm and to glimpse the nature of God himself. Kabbalistic practice with the divine names can take any number of forms. Some are meditative. In one method, the
the nineteenth century (my edition lists no date or publisher). It tells of the use of the “semiphoras,” which is a mangled version of shem ha-meforash, the “divided Name,” created by permuting the Hebrew letters in three verses of the Bible (Exod. 14:19–21). Unfortunately, the discussion on the “semiphoras” is not about the actual shem ha-meforash, but on the uses of the names of God connected with the sefirot (in other words, a completely different set of divine names). The text goes on to
fundamentalist and secularist thought, like Frederic Spiegelberg, who saw the black-and-white thinking of the mass mind as a degenerate form of Manichaeism. But Bloom doesn’t go in that direction. Instead he finds the answer in the “transcendent self” that, he says, lies at the core of all American religious belief and expression: The American finds God in herself or himself, but only after finding the freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude. Freedom, in a very special sense,