The problem with the word ‘gnosticism’ is that nowadays it draws two kinds of responses. On the one hand, we have the occultists, for the most part the heirs of the Golden Dawn, who claim gnosticism as their peculiar spiritual preserve. On the other, we have the ‘scholars’, some legitimate, some self-designated. The self-designated scholars want the cachet of academe but commonly shade over into occultism. The true academics, on the other hand, not only eschew the occult and hew to the timid incrementalism of the contemporary schools, they also bring the baggage of their own inheritance, namely the Christian history of the departments of religion, with their prior orientation that gnosticism is heresy. And this has largely been true for most of the last century.
            What has changed is that in mid-century the Nag Hammadi find began to make its way through the realms of academic hubris into the light of public scrutiny. But the Nag Hammadi find compounds the dilemma. It documents, from a ‘positive’ side, all of the strange belief systems – with their peculiar religious, spiritual and intellectual problems – that had come to the fore as gnosticism developed up to the time of the burial of the Nag Hammadi texts, at the beginning of the 5^th century. But it also contained two texts, a Gospel of Thomas and a Gospel of Phillip, that evinced little or none of the later gnostic peculiarities. They cannot be described as dualistic. They do not purvey baroque cosmogonies. Thomas, for example, presents 114 sayings – according to the modern division – most of which are ascribed directly to Jesus. But the text fails to mention his death or resurrection. Phillip explores an apparently initiatory trope, the ‘chrism’ or ‘bridal chamber’, which seems to link fragmentary references in both the canonical scriptures and the later gnostic writings.

             What I am arguing here is that Thomas and Phillip constitute a sword that cuts through all the arbitrary contemporary garbage – in the radical sense – which surrounds the question of gnosticism. If we want to understand the initial impulse of gnosticism, we have to revert to these tracts, and particularly to Thomas. This does not mean that we can remove them from their historical context. The Jesus of Thomas is a powerful teacher. But we have to understand him in terms of the claims made about him not only implicitly and explicitly in the text itself, but also through the beliefs and expectations of other branches of the Jesus community and the grounding situation historically, both in terms of Judaism and of Mediterranean religion and culture in general.
            Thomas is not a spiritualist document. It does not advocate a magical agenda or process, as much of the later gnostic development might seem to do.It claims to be the ‘secret words’ of Jesus. But these secret words are written in an obviously public text, in a time when ‘secret words’ would imply an exclusively oral teacher / disciple transmission. Immediately following this assertion, the text tells us that ‘whoever finds the explanation of these words will not taste death.’ In other words, the ‘secrecy’ is the esoteric nature of the text itself, but the text is self-contained and accessible. Perhaps for the first time, we have a text that embodies a ‘secret’ tradition precisely outside the arena of exclusive teacher / disciple transmission. What the text advocates is a vocational process. ‘Let him who seeks not cease seeking until he finds’. The seeker will find. Each has a vocation. The good and big fish is the emotional guide. Each moment, we draw up our nets filled with fishes, but the big fish is the core emotional moment that constantly points toward our true vocation, regardless of our immediate needs and desires. The seeds of the sower tell us how to identify which moments of awakening are legitimate and which illusory. And the practice is the practice of seeking these moments of illumination untila central illumination of our vocation dawns. From that point, we will be guided from within.
            So, in a very real sense, Thomas is in fact an anti-occultist document.
            It is also an individualist document. It not only does not advocate a collective process, it is clearly aimed at a process of individual awakening from within. As such, while it makes no polemic statement whatsoever, we can only infer that it is inherently anti-institutional, at least with respect to ‘religious’ understanding and development. At the same time, the tract is intimately and overtly concerned with ‘kingdom’. How is this possible? The ‘church’ of Thomas is truly universal. It is based in the assertion that every child born into the world has the potential for vocation. Since vocation is inherently creative, no one can predict how another will manifest his or her vocation. The kingdom is written in vocations.
            The reason Thomas failed to survive as a continuously published document is that by its very nature it rejected all institutional development. This is why we can say, historically, that anyone who tried to defend a gnostic thesis from a collectivist or congregational position was necessarily already a degenerate gnostic. Like the Essenes, the gnostics tended to withdraw into separated communities, such as the Pachomian monastery in which the Nag Hammadi texts constituted part of the library. But for the more seriously involved, even these communities must have proved a trial. There are reasons to believe that monasticism itself began as an essentially gnostic function, and was only later adopted by the church, through a process of cleansing and rewriting the record. As Jesus says, in Thomas, ‘Blessed are the solitary and elect, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.’
            But gnosticism also came into the city. Or, rather, gnosticism was indigenous in the church until the time of Augustine, when a concerted effort by a powerful generation of ‘church fathers’ succeeded in the ‘final’ extirpation of the ‘heresy’, at least from a doctrinal or dogmatic point of view. The ‘heresy’ itself continued to reappear at regular intervals. What happened until the time of Augustine was that ‘gnostics’ of various stripes actually dominated congregations and institutions in the church on a regular basis. Donatus was a bishop in the church. The ‘heresy’ was particularly virulent in North Africa, which apparently had some predisposition for it. And, as a consequence, Augustine, the most philosophically brilliant ‘father’ of that generation, succeeded in writing the gnostics out of the church and, in the process, essentially created church dogma.