I have never been able to decide exactly how I feel about Gnosticism. In college I was on a Gnostic kick. I even took a Coptic course in which we read nearly a third of the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic. I read a couple of books on the subject, and numerous scholarly articles. To this day I feel like I hardly have any idea what Gnosticism is about. Much Gnostic literature is difficult reading. It is filled with tedious cosmogonies built on the genealogical relationships between all of these abstract ideas that have been deified and only barely personified. After reading this stuff a while I feel utterly lost in the world.
This past weekend I listened to Elaine Pagel's "Beyond Belief." I was hestitant to get it, but I had just finished Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus," and was looking for something else as basic and enjoyable. "Beyond Belief" had the clear virtue of being available as an audio book, so I could listen to it while I watched our daughter. Even though I am somewhat skeptical of Elaine Pagel's work (I found her work on Satan to be dubious at best), I had seen her at the SBL meeting a couple of years ago, and had been intrigued at least by what she was saying about the Gospel of Thomas.
"Beyond Belief" is essentially Pagel's brief history of the development of orthodoxy. I had hoped there would be a lot more about the Gospel of Thomas, which is what I was listening for, but the book offers an interesting reading of early Christianity. It posits the pivotal role played by Irenaeus in promoting the Gospel of John to emphasize Christ's divinity, which is, according to this Gospel, uniquely his among humans. Here is where the Gospel of Thomas comes in. Pagels sees this Gospel promoting a different view in which all human beings have the divine light or spark. As a Mormon this view appeals to me more. Mormons see humans as belonging to the same species as God, and thus being essentially the same in nature. While not the same, this is closer to the 'Thomas' view of a shared divine nature.
My favorite part of "BB" was Pagel's discussion of epinoia, which strikes me as a kind of creative revelatory experience. Among Gnostics this creative revelation was central. By meditating on the truth, Gnostics were ever discovering new truths and committing them to text. Hence the plethora of Gnostic scriptures of which we only possess a fraction. Men like Irenaeus hated this, because they were promoting a unified, universal (catholic) truth. Aside from a successful opposition, Gnostics also had other problems. They tended to be elitist in their attitude toward non-Gnostic Christians, whose Christianity was deemed by them to be a primary school variety of truth.
I love the concept of epinoia as Pagels described it. This creative, revelatory exercise matches my own view of what all scripture essentially is. Scripture is an act of mythography. Only by applying authority to certain texts at the exclusion of others after the fact does one come to a concept of authoritative 'canon.' One can legitimately ask, however, what the necessary value of Paul's witness, Luke's witness, or 'John's' witness is over any Gnostic text. None of these people personally saw Jesus, and thus one trusts, rather blindly IMO, their 'revelation' over others largely because of the somewhat arbitrary authority a certain group of Christians gave them many hundreds of years ago.
Here is where Mormonism comes in. Joseph Smith's scriptural writings offer us a glimpse of a post-canonical, latter-day epinoia. Interestingly they assume the authority of the canon, but it is an authority that is besieged by problems and doubt. The revelations of Smith, his meditations on Christianity, come to the rescue. They comprise a new voice to prop up the old. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you view these matters), Smith viewed himself as one bearing unique authority from God to do this latter-day epinoia. Others who claimed revelation, like Hiram Page (ahem), were muscled out of the picture. This has not prevented numerous Smith copycats from surfacing over the years, beginning with James Strang who claimed to have found another ancient American record called the 'Voree Record'. Even today there are schismatic Mormons writing addendums to Smith's mythos. The mythmaking continues unabated.
