Gnosticism - The Route to God is Through Individual Insight

Douglas Todd wrote yesterday, Monday, September 03, 2007, for the Vancouver Sun that Robertson Davies, one of Canada's greatest novelists and most respected, was drawn to the early Christian "heresy" of Gnosticism before it became as popular as it is now today in 2007. When Douglass Todd interviewed Robertson Davies, author of Fifth Business and Rebel Angels in 1994, one year before his death, Davies said Gnosticism was not widely known because its history had been written by its enemies, the patriarchs of the orthodox Christian church.

"It's only just now that people are beginning to sift out what it may have really been about. And of course the church is very very much down on it. I have a very unpopular theory of why that is." Davies's theory about why Gnosticism, which comes from the Greek word for "knowledge," was shoved underground has now become almost mainstream, thanks to the incredible success of the book and movie, The Da Vinci Code, as well as groundbreaking Bible discoveries.

Davies believed the Gnosticism Christian sect, which rose up soon after the death of Jesus, was suppressed because church fathers didn't like their claim that Jesus taught the route to God was through individual insight, a goal associated with Buddhist and Hindu enlightenment.

There is no doubt Gnostic ideas have become a force in popular culture, especially through movies such as The Da Vinci Code and The Matrix series, as well as Blade Runner and Minority Report (both based on science fiction novels by Philip K. Dick.) Gnosticism also shaped the influential psychologist Carl Jung, the poetry of William Blake, the Theosophy of Helen Blavatsky and the Jewish mystical tradition known as Kaballah, which the singer Madonna has recently embraced.

Douglas Todd wrote, “Gnosticism is in vogue in part because of the waning power in the West of the once-mighty Christian church. Sometimes the backlash against the church has a knee-jerk quality to it, but it is nevertheless luring more people to feel suspicious about whether church authorities are telling the complete story about the origins of Christianity.”

Here's how Davies puts his thoughts about Gnosticism in my book, Brave Souls: "The church worked on the theory that salvation is free; as long as you believed, you were saved. But the Gnostics thought you had to have some brains. The Gnostics taught that salvation, or enlightenment, could only be achieved through an inner journey."
Davies, despite being an active Anglican, maintained the early church fathers also couldn't stomach Gnosticism's heterodox emphasis on Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom, which represents a feminine aspect of the divine.