Harpur's Gnosticism

Funny, you don't look Egyptian...

More notes on Tom Harpur's book The Pagan Christ:

Harpur quotes Kuhn approvingly, on p. 52, explaining the truth behind the Christ myth in these terms: “by the time the descent of the Monad … from the Logos of divine intellection into the water of the human body had been ‘clarified’ and ‘simplified’ to poor mental capacity as the baptism of a man in the Jordan River, it was a delusion and a snare to uncritical thought…” This is a precise statement of Gnostic theology, using Gnostic terminology.

Harpur talks of myths as a means to prevent “gnosis” (knowledge) from “falling into unworthy hands,” and says “The principal determinant of those admitted to the meaning of the myths … was genuine zeal for the divine.” Elsewhere he quotes Higgins saying that the true Gnostic Christ “could be shared only with initiates and ‘genuinely tested and accredited competents.’” (p. 53) This idea of a secret society of Illuminati is a fundamental part of Gnosticism.

What’s wrong with it?

First, it is a conspiracy theory, and, like all large or elaborate conspiracy theories, is intrinsically improbable. Occam’s razor. How likely would it be that any given organized group of self-appointed “knowers” who say that their true teachings are secret are in possession of real superior wisdom or knowledge? Without evidence, anyone can make that claim. So long as the teachings are secret, it is without evidence.

This has been a profitable con throughout the ages. The con artist claims to be in possession of secret spiritual knowledge that he will not divulge to just anyone. Anyone who denies his claims is simply said to be out of the know. Great source of power, prestige, possibly wealth.

This is why any claim of secret knowledge is anathema.

Second: if salvation comes through “gnosis,” through special knowledge of some hidden truth, there is an obvious cosmic injustice to those who happen through no fault of their own not to have been told the truth, or indeed who may not be able intellectually to understand it. Note that Harpur, in our opening quotation, speaks of people of “poor mental capacity” being unable to grasp the spiritual truth even if it is simplified for them. He speaks of the divine as “intellection” and of the dangers of “uncritical thought.”

So what happens to the stupid, in this theology? Simple: they have no hope of salvation.

A just God would not disseminate Truth in such a way.

Ergo, “gnosis” cannot be the key to salvation.

Third, this idea of secret societies and conspiracies intrinsically violates Jesus’s second commandment, to love your neighbor. This is the same commandment violated by Cain in the Old Testament. It separates humanity into us and them, the in group and the other, based on this secret membership and this supposed secret knowledge which one is not supposed to share. That means others are damned, and you are actively helping to damn them. This is only morally justifiable if you assume those “others” who do not possess the secret key to the Truth are less than human. If, then, they are less than human, you are also free to abuse them at will in other ways as well. This gets ugly.

You actually hear some of this tone, I fear, in Harpur. “Vulgar fables for the illiterate mob” and so forth (p. 52). “People who were ‘children in intellect;’ took the grand parables and allegories of the esoteric wisdom and ‘fed them to infantile minds” (p. 150). Belief in the resurrection is “unlearned foolishness.” (p 150).  “The Logos was declared to have come as the man Jesus walking the lanes … like any peasant” (p. 150). Sounds like contempt for the unlearned, contempt for the poor, contempt for the working class. God forbid that God might come as a “peasant.”

But the idea that the ordinary people and the poor are morally superior to the educated classes (i.e., the scribes and Pharisees) is in fact part of the literal message of Jesus in the Gospel. Nobody who thinks as Harpur and the Gnostics do has accepted the Gospel teachings, even apart from the matter of the incarnation.

Fourth, the way of thinking characteristic of Gnosis has dangerous effects on one’s mental equilibrium. Once you start down the path of vast conspiracies and secret knowledge, there is no longer any way to be sure the CIA is NOT controlling your brain, or the world is not being run by lizard-like aliens who can change their shape. Nothing can be certain any longer; anything could be true. Hence Occam’s Razor. But then, the existence of a good and all-powerful God is our guarantee that this cannot be so. He would ensure that every soul had a lifeline in plain sight; he would ensure that no vast conspiracies could arise to lead anyone of good will astray. Accordingly, the existence of God, once accepted, prohibits Gnosticism from being true.

Harpur claims that the true path for knowers is “realizing their own Christ-power within.” (p. 20). Later, he describes the essence of the true Christ myth as “To release the potential power of the Christos within.” (p. 25). He says that the goal of religion is “ultimately to deify humankind” (p. 22). Indeed, in his opening quotation, God himself, the “Monad,” is nothing more than the sum of all human souls.

This is Gnostic talk, not Christian talk.

What’s this about “power”? Is life really about gaining “power”?

Harpur’s promise here, and that of Gnosticism, is essentially the same one the serpent made to Eve in the Garden of Eden: “eat this fruit of knowledge, and you will become like gods, knowing good and evil.” Knowledge, power, self, divinity. Whether or not you accept that this is the original sin, as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam say it is, there is no way Harpur can honestly claim this is the “true” reading of the Bible. The Bible rejects it in its first story, its first myth. From the beginning.

To Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, indeed to any theist, this is a fifth, and vital, objection to Gnosticism: that it is fundamentally immoral. It is the primrose path to hellfire. It violates the first commandment.

One more element of Gnosticism that Harpur endorses: p. 21, “man is himself, in his real being, a spark of divine fire … buried in the flesh of the body.” “Buried,” he says, as if dead; elsewhere, he speaks of the spirit being “entombed” in the body. On page 45, he writes, “To be in the body was to be put—even impaled or crucified—on this cross of fleshly existence.” “The Greeks said that the body is the tomb of the soul.”

Problem number six: if the material word is a tomb for the spirit, a bad thing, a place in which the spirit is trapped, how did it come about? How could it have been created by a good and all-powerful God? Ergo, if you accept the fundamental principle of God’s existence, you cannot accept this view of the material world. The material world must be of value in itself, and it must also be redeemed. Otherwise you have an immoral God, or an impotent God, both of which Gnosticism commonly asserts. Goodbye monotheism.

This is in turn why it is necessary to assume that the Messiah really did come, or at least will come, in physical form, in history. The material world must be important, or God would not have created it. God must manifest himself there as well. It is not a question of whether God ever came in the flesh. It is a question of when he came: which report of him coming seems most probable.

Speaking of the temptations of Jesus in the desert, Harpur writes (p. 96) “Once understood in its symbolic sense, it speaks at a much deeper, cosmic level of the yin and yang of existence, the struggle to balance the polarities of life—light and dark, up and down, centrifugal and centripedal forces, hot and cold—and so on.”

This is pure Gnostic dualism. And watch out: notice that Harpur is talking, specifically, of good and evil here. As did many Gnostics, he is clearly implying that they need to be kept in balance. In other words, you should not be too moral, too good. Gnostic dualism can be used in this way to justify all kinds of moral depravity.

It is also a false justification, if you look carefully. There is no ultimate value in "balance." Even his specific examples are wrong. Scientifically speaking, there is no "balance" between and light: darkness does not exist as a real entity. It is simply a relative absence of light. It is the same with hot and cold: cold is nothing but the absence of heat. There are not two quantities here, but only one. There is no necessary balance between existence and non-existence. And there is no necessary balance between good and bad.



Harpur concludes by saying his new theology will lead to world peace and to healing the environment. It would be more likely to do the opposite. His claim that wars are usually based on religion, to begin with, is the opposite of the truth. Religion is probably the single most important way to prevent war; besides preaching against war, they offer ultimate principles to which both sides in a disagreement can appeal. Wars over religion are the exception, not the rule. Obviously, you cannot change a person’s mind by shooting at him, so wars over religion make no sense.

But to the extent that wars are based at times on religious differences, his theology opens a far greater gap between Christianity and the two other monotheistic religions, Islam and Judaism. His theology abandons monotheism for Gnostic dualism. If Jews and Muslims object to three persons in God, and to one man being divine, they are certainly going to object to several billion persons in God, and to everyone being divine.

As to the environment, it is Christianity that, among the world’s religions, takes the physical world most seriously, and we have the incarnation to thank for that. Remove it, and the physical world becomes, as Harpur calls it, a “tomb.” Not something to be tended and perfected, certainly; something to be gotten rid of.