Quick Answer
The book that turned Gnosticism from a heresiologist's list of sects into a single vision of existence, written by a student of Heidegger who recognised in the ancient texts the same alienation his teacher had described. Jonas argues that every Gnostic system expresses one attitude, that the world is foreign and the self is a stranger who must be woken and called home, and he traces it through Simon Magus, Marcion, Valentinus, the Mandaeans and Mani in prose that scholars rarely manage. The Nag Hammadi discovery, still mostly unpublished when he wrote, has since complicated the thesis. It has not replaced the book.
Key Takeaways
- One Gnostic principle: the world is alien, the true God is beyond it, the self is a stranger.
- Thrownness and the call: Heidegger's categories, found in the second century.
- Two ethics from one premise: asceticism and libertinism as siblings.
- Written before Nag Hammadi was read, and the field has moved.
- The epilogue on Gnosticism and nihilism is the book's real subject.
17 min read
What This Book Is
The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity was published by Beacon Press in 1958, revised and expanded in 1963, and has remained in print since. It is around three hundred and fifty pages in thirteen chapters and an epilogue.
It is a condensation, for English readers, of the work that occupied Jonas from his student years in the 1920s: Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity, a two-volume study in German whose first volume appeared in 1934 and whose second was delayed by war and exile until 1954. The English book keeps the argument and the key sources and drops most of the philological apparatus.
Its structure is simple. An introduction on the historical setting and the meaning of gnosis. A chapter on the Gnostic imagery and its symbolic language. A sequence of chapters on the main systems, arranged to show two types, the Syrian-Egyptian and the Iranian. Chapters on Gnostic morality and on the symbolism of the soul's ascent. And an epilogue, added to the English edition, on Gnosticism, existentialism and nihilism.
When it was written matters. The Nag Hammadi library, fifty-two Coptic texts found in a jar in Upper Egypt in 1945, was mostly unpublished until the 1970s. Jonas worked from the reports of the Church Fathers who wrote against the Gnostics, from the Mandaean and Manichaean literature, from the Hermetica and from the handful of Gnostic texts known before 1945. The second edition adds the Gospel of Truth. Every later book on Gnosticism has the library; this one has the mind that made sense of the field before the library arrived.
Who Hans Jonas Was
Hans Jonas was born in Mönchengladbach in 1903 to a Jewish family, studied philosophy at Freiburg under Husserl and Heidegger, followed Heidegger to Marburg, and studied theology there under Rudolf Bultmann, who directed his doctoral work on Gnosticism. He was a Zionist from youth and left Germany in 1933, the year his first volume appeared and the year Heidegger joined the Nazi party.
He went to Palestine, taught in Jerusalem, and in 1940 joined the British Army's Jewish Brigade, serving through the Italian campaign; in 1948 he fought in the Israeli war of independence. His mother was murdered at Auschwitz. He taught in Canada from 1949 and from 1955 at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he remained.
The Gnostic work was the first half of his career. The second, from the 1960s, was a philosophy of the organism and, in The Imperative of Responsibility, an ethics for the technological age that made him a public figure in Germany. He died in 1993. The two halves are connected, and the epilogue of this book is the hinge.
From Heidegger to the Gnostics
The intellectual origin, which Jonas describes in the epilogue and which explains the book's shape.
As a student he had absorbed Heidegger's analysis of human existence: that we are thrown into a world we did not choose, that we live for the most part in forgetfulness of our situation, that anxiety reveals the groundlessness of things, and that authentic existence begins with a call that wakes us. He turned to the Gnostic texts as a philologist and found the same structure: a self thrown into an alien cosmos, asleep or drunk in forgetfulness, woken by a call from beyond, and summoned home.
The recognition gave him a key. The Gnostic myths, which the Fathers had presented as absurd, became intelligible as expressions of an experience of existence, and the experience was one a modern reader could recognise. That is the book's method: to read the myths as the symbolic language of an attitude, and to make the attitude visible.
The Gnostic Principle
The thesis, stated in the introduction and carried through every chapter.
Beneath the variety of Gnostic systems, Jonas finds one principle: a radical dualism between God and the world, and between the human spirit and the cosmos. The world was not made by the true God but by a lesser power, the demiurge, and its order is not divine order but imprisonment. The true God is wholly other, unknown, beyond the heavens, and the human spirit is a spark of that God, fallen or thrown into matter and held there by the archons who rule the spheres.
Salvation is knowledge, gnosis: not information but the awakening of the spirit to its origin, brought by a call from beyond the cosmos, which allows it to ascend past the archons and return. Everything in Gnosticism, the myths of Sophia's fall, the aeons, the demiurge's ignorance, the redeemer's descent, the passwords for the spheres, is the unfolding of this principle in narrative.
The claim that all the systems express one principle is the book's strength and the point at which later scholarship has pushed back hardest.
The Imagery of Alienation
The second chapter, and the one that most repays reading on its own.
Jonas collects the recurring symbols of Gnostic literature and reads each as a figure of the one attitude. The alien, the stranger, the one who is not from here. Beyond, the outside, the other world. The worlds and aeons as a system of confinement. The cosmic prison and the sleep, intoxication and forgetfulness in which the imprisoned spirit lives. The noise of the world, which drowns the call. The call itself, and the awakening. The alien man, the redeemer who comes from outside and is himself a stranger.
The chapter is a dictionary of Gnostic feeling, and readers who know the Nag Hammadi texts will find that Jonas's list, drawn from other sources, fits them with uncanny precision. He had identified the grammar before the largest body of sentences was available.
The Hymn of the Pearl
The text Jonas chose as the purest expression of the principle, and the book's centrepiece.
A king's son is sent from the East to Egypt to bring back a pearl guarded by a serpent. In Egypt he eats the food of the country, forgets who he is and why he came, and falls asleep. His parents send a letter, which flies to him as an eagle and speaks; he wakes, remembers, charms the serpent, takes the pearl, and returns to the East, where his robe of glory, which had grown with him in his absence, comes to meet him and he puts it on.
The hymn is embedded in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, and Jonas reads it line by line as the Gnostic myth in its most beautiful form: the descent, the forgetting, the call, the awakening, the ascent, the reunion. His reading has been the standard one since, and the chapter is where the book's method shows most clearly what it can do.
Simon Magus and the Beginnings
The chapter on origins, which follows the Fathers in beginning with the magician of Samaria.
Simon, who appears in the Acts of the Apostles and whom Irenaeus called the father of all heresies, is presented as the first Gnostic: a Samaritan who claimed to be the supreme power, who travelled with a woman called Helena whom he identified as the first thought of God, fallen into the world and passed through many bodies, including Helen of Troy, and rescued by him. The myth of the fallen thought, imprisoned in matter and redeemed by the descent of the power that emitted her, is the Gnostic principle in its earliest reported form.
Jonas is careful about the historical Simon, whose real teaching is unrecoverable, and uses the Simonian material as the tradition preserved it, as the type of Gnostic origins rather than the fact.
Marcion
A chapter on the figure Jonas found most instructive, because he was the least mythological.
Marcion of Sinope, a shipowner who came to Rome around 140 and founded a church that rivalled the catholic one for centuries, taught that the God of the Old Testament, the creator and lawgiver, was a different and inferior being from the God of Jesus, who was unknown before Christ and wholly good. He rejected the Hebrew scriptures, edited the Gospel of Luke and the letters of Paul to remove Jewish elements, and preached a gospel of pure grace from a God who had no prior relation to the world.
Jonas treats Marcion as the Gnostic principle without the Gnostic mythology: the alien God, the contempt for the creator, the salvation by a stranger, stated as theology rather than as narrative. The chapter is among the book's sharpest and it shows how far the attitude could go without a single aeon.
Valentinus and the Speculative Type
The longest chapter, on the most sophisticated system.
Valentinus, an Alexandrian Christian who taught in Rome in the mid-second century and nearly became its bishop, produced the most elaborate Gnostic theology: a pleroma of thirty aeons emanating from the unknowable Father; the fall of the youngest, Sophia, through her desire to know the Father directly; her expulsion and the creation of the lower world from her passions; the demiurge's ignorant rule; and the redemption of the spiritual seed through Christ.
Jonas reads the system as the Syrian-Egyptian type, in which the dualism is not original but arises within the divine through a fall, and in which the drama is one of knowledge and ignorance rather than of warring substances. His exposition of the Valentinian myth is the clearest in English, and the chapter's analysis of Sophia's error, as the desire to know that becomes the cause of the world, is a piece of philosophical reading that has not been bettered.
Mani and the Iranian Type
The chapter on the other type, and the one that reaches furthest east.
Mani, a Persian prophet of the third century who founded a world religion that lasted a thousand years and reached from Spain to China, taught a dualism of two eternal principles, light and darkness, whose war produced the mixed world and whose separation is the purpose of history. Jonas reads this as the Iranian type: dualism as original rather than derived, the drama as conflict rather than error, and salvation as the extraction of light from the darkness that swallowed it.
The chapter is the book's most sustained treatment of a single system and it explains why Manichaeism, which most readers know only as Augustine's youthful heresy, was the most successful Gnostic religion by far.
The Hermetic Poimandres
A chapter that places the Hermetic literature within the Gnostic field.
The first tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Poimandres, describes a vision in which the divine Mind reveals the creation of the world, the fall of the primal Man into nature through love of his own reflection, and the soul's ascent back through the spheres, shedding a vice at each. Jonas reads it as Gnostic in structure, pagan in colouring, and Egyptian in setting, and uses it to show that the Gnostic principle was not confined to Christian heresy.
The reading has been contested, since the Hermetica are more world-affirming than the Gnostic texts in places, and the chapter is where Jonas's unifying thesis is most visibly straining. It is also where a reader sees how wide he thought the phenomenon was.
Gnostic Morality
One of the book's most original chapters.
If the world's law is the law of the demiurge and his archons, then obedience to it is complicity with the prison. Jonas identifies two responses that follow. The ascetic refuses the world, its food, its sex, its procreation, so as to owe it nothing. The libertine defies the world, breaking its laws deliberately, to show contempt for their author and, in some accounts, to exhaust every experience the spirit must pass through. Both, he argues, are the same attitude in opposite forms: not indifference to the cosmos but hostility, expressed either by withdrawal or by transgression.
The Fathers reported the libertine Gnostics with relish and the ascetic ones with grudging respect, and Jonas shows that neither was an aberration. Both were the ethics the metaphysics demanded, and the chapter is the best account of why a religion of the alien God produced saints and scandals in equal measure.
The chapter on morality is where Jonas's philosophical training does its most useful work. He does not explain the libertine Gnostics away as slander, nor treat the ascetics as the real ones. He shows that a person who really believes the world is a prison built by a hostile power has two coherent options, to refuse it or to defile it, and that both are forms of the same refusal to be at home. That is an analysis of an ancient sect and it is also a description of a temptation that any radical spirituality faces, which is the reason the chapter has been read by people with no interest in the second century.
The Soul's Journey
The chapter on the symbolism of ascent, and the book's most lyrical.
The Gnostic spirit, released at death or in ecstasy, must pass upward through the spheres of the archons, and each sphere demands a password, a seal, a garment shed or a name spoken. Jonas gathers the texts, from the Ophite diagram to the Mandaean liturgies, and reads the ascent as the reversal of the fall: the spirit puts off at each stage what it acquired in the descent, until it stands naked before the Father and is clothed in light.
The chapter connects the Gnostic ascent to the Hermetic and to the later Jewish and Christian mystical journeys, and it shows how much of what became the Gnostic imagination in the West was already present in the second century.
What Nag Hammadi Did
The discovery that came too late for the book and that has shaped every reading of it since.
The Nag Hammadi library, published in full in English in 1977, gave scholars for the first time a large body of Gnostic texts in the Gnostics' own words. What they found confirmed much of Jonas: the alien God, the ignorant demiurge, the fallen Sophia, the call and the awakening are all there. What they also found was variety that his unified religion had not predicted: texts closely engaged with Jewish scripture and Platonic philosophy, texts with no demiurge, texts that affirm the world, Christian texts that look more like alternative Christianities than like a separate religion, and texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, that fit no Gnostic system at all.
Jonas lived to see the library and revised the book's second edition lightly in its light. He did not rewrite it. The book is the interpretation of the field on the eve of its transformation, and readers should take it as such.
The Category Question
The debate the book has been at the centre of for thirty years.
From the 1990s, scholars led by Michael Williams and Karen King argued that Gnosticism as a category is a modern invention built on the Fathers' polemics, that the texts grouped under it share no single set of features, and that the term should be retired in favour of the specific movements, Valentinian, Sethian, Marcionite and so on. Jonas's Gnostic religion, the single vision behind the variety, is the principal target of this argument.
The debate is not settled. Defenders of the category, and of Jonas, point out that the texts do share a family resemblance that the Fathers did not invent, and that the alternative is a field with no name. Whatever one concludes, the argument has been conducted on ground Jonas cleared, and his book is where a reader learns what is being argued about.
Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism
The essay added to the English edition, and the book's real subject.
Jonas closes by making explicit the parallel that guided his reading. Ancient Gnosticism and modern existentialism are both responses to a cosmos that has been emptied of meaning: for the Gnostics, because the true God is beyond it and its order is hostile; for the moderns, because science has removed any order that could ground value and left the human being alone in an indifferent universe. Both produce a self that is a stranger, thrown, anxious, and called to authenticity from outside the world's terms.
He then draws the difference. The Gnostic stranger had a home to return to, a God beyond the cosmos who had sent the call. The modern stranger has none: the alienation is the same and the beyond is gone, so that existentialism is Gnosticism without the pleroma, dualism with one of the terms removed, which is nihilism. Jonas found this unbearable and spent the rest of his career trying to rebuild, from biology and from ethics, a ground for value that neither the Gnostics nor Heidegger had allowed. The epilogue is the moment of the turn.
The Prose
Worth a word, since it is why the book is read by people who read nothing else in the field.
Jonas wrote English as a second language and wrote it better than most scholars write their first. The sentences are long, exact and rhythmic; the sources are quoted generously and translated with feeling; the argument is always visible. The chapter on the imagery, the reading of the Hymn of the Pearl and the epilogue are pieces of prose that hold up beside anything in the literature of religion.
The Objections
Three, and the field has made all of them.
The unity is imposed. The single Gnostic religion is Jonas's construction, and the texts are more various than his principle allows.
The sources are the enemies'. Built largely on the Fathers' reports, the book inherits their framing and, some argue, their hostility.
The existentialism is the lens. A reader who came to the Gnostics through Heidegger found Heidegger in the Gnostics, and the fit may be the reader's doing.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want Gnosticism as a worldview rather than as a list of texts, and want it from the person who first made the worldview visible.
Read it before Pagels and the Nag Hammadi library, so that the texts arrive with a frame, and then read the texts against the frame.
Read it if you know Heidegger and want to see what a student of his did with the analysis of existence when he took it into the second century.
Read the epilogue even if you read nothing else. It is a short essay on the condition of modern thought and it has not dated.
The book's lasting idea is the stranger. Jonas found in the ancient texts a self that does not belong to the world it finds itself in, that has forgotten where it came from, and that can be woken by a call it did not expect, and he recognised the figure because he had met it in his own century without the theology. The Gnostics gave the stranger a home to return to. The moderns took the home away and kept the strangeness. Jonas's whole later work was an attempt to find a third position, in which the world is not a prison and the self is not alone in it, and the attempt began with this book's refusal to let either the ancient answer or the modern one stand. That refusal is still the right place to start.
The alien God, the stranger self and the call from beyond: Gnosticism as one vision, from the scholar who first saw it whole.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of how Nag Hammadi and the category debate have complicated the book's thesis is set out above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Gnostic Religion about?
The Gnostic movements of the first centuries CE, Valentinian, Marcionite, Mandaean, Manichaean and others, presented as expressions of one underlying religious vision: that the world is alien, that the true God is beyond it, and that the self is a stranger who must be awakened and returned home.
Who was Hans Jonas?
A German-Jewish philosopher, 1903 to 1993, who studied under Heidegger and Bultmann, fled Germany in 1933, fought in the British Army and the Israeli war of independence, and taught at the New School in New York. He later became known for his philosophy of biology and his ethics of responsibility.
What is his central claim?
That behind the bewildering variety of Gnostic myths lies a single attitude toward existence, which he calls the Gnostic principle: a radical dualism between the divine and the cosmos, and a corresponding sense of the human self as thrown into an alien world.
What does existentialism have to do with it?
Jonas came to the Gnostics through Heidegger's categories of thrownness, anxiety and alienation, and found that they fitted. The book's epilogue argues that ancient Gnosticism and modern existentialism are two responses to the same experience of a world without meaning.
When was it written?
The English book appeared in 1958, a revised edition in 1963. It condensed Jonas's two-volume German study Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, begun in the 1920s, whose first volume appeared in 1934 just as its author was leaving Germany.
Does it use the Nag Hammadi texts?
Barely. The library was discovered in 1945 but mostly unpublished when Jonas wrote; he used the Gospel of Truth and a few others in the second edition. The book is built on the Church Fathers' reports, the Mandaean and Manichaean sources, and the Hermetica.
Which systems does it cover?
Simon Magus, the Hymn of the Pearl, the Hermetic Poimandres, the Apocryphon of John, Marcion, the Mandaeans, Valentinus and his school, Basilides, and Mani, with chapters on Gnostic imagery, morality and the symbolism of the soul's ascent.
What is the Gnostic morality?
Jonas identifies two opposite ethics from the same premise: since the world's law is the demiurge's, one may either reject it through asceticism or defy it through libertinism. Both, he argues, express contempt for the cosmos rather than indifference.
Has scholarship moved on?
Considerably. The Nag Hammadi texts showed more variety and more continuity with Judaism and Platonism than Jonas's unified Gnostic religion allows, and some scholars now reject the category of Gnosticism altogether. The book is a classic whose thesis is contested.
Is it readable?
Yes, unusually so for a scholarly book. Jonas wrote English prose of real power, quotes the sources at length, and organises the material so that a reader with no background can follow. It has never been out of print.
How does it compare to Pagels?
Pagels wrote after Nag Hammadi and about the texts' relation to orthodox Christianity. Jonas wrote before and about the Gnostic vision as such. Pagels is the introduction to the texts; Jonas is the introduction to the mind that produced them.
Who should read it?
Anyone who wants Gnosticism as a coherent worldview rather than a catalogue of sects, readers of existentialism curious about its ancient cousin, and students of the field who need to know the book everyone since has been arguing with.
Read the pearl as yours
Take the Hymn of the Pearl, ten minutes of reading, and read it once as Jonas reads it: not as a story about a prince but as a description of a condition. Sent for something, arrived somewhere, ate the food, forgot the errand, slept. The hymn's bet, and the book's, is that every reader recognises the sleep and knows roughly when it began. What the letter says when it arrives is the part no book can supply. But the recognition that one is asleep is the first half of gnosis, and Jonas thought it was available to anyone honest enough to check.
Sources & References
- Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 3rd ed., Beacon Press.
- Jonas, Hans. Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 2 vols., 1934 and 1954.
- Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English.
- Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category.
- King, Karen. What Is Gnosticism?
- Jonas, Hans. Memoirs, ed. Christian Wiese, for the life.