Theoretical Challenges in Studying Religious Experience in Gnosticism

Abstract

Several theoretical impediments face the ancient historian who wishes to embark on the study of religious experience within ancient cultures. While many of these difficulties face other religious studies scholars, the historical quality compounds these challenges. This paper explores several of these theoretical difficulties with a specific focus on the Valentinian, Sethian, and other so-called “Gnostic” groups in late antiquity. Specifically, the study of religious experience tends to give privileged interpretative position to insiders (evoking the etic/emic problem) and psychological analyses due to the “personal” or “individual” quality of such experiences (typified by perennialist approaches) (Otto, Wach, Eliade, Smart), or, following James and Jung, focus on the initial charismatic moment’s effect upon subsequent social structures. In contrast to such tendencies I suggest, by building on Fitzgerald’s lead in the Guide to the Study of Religion and largely agreeing with constructivist approaches, that we re-direct our focus toward the external social forces at play that discursively facilitate, shape, and direct experiential moments within the confines of social identity construction. This article builds on attachment theory from social psychology. Such analysis will allow us to better appreciate the experiential aspects of “Gnosticism” while appreciating the individual, communal, and (most importantly) discursive quality of the intersection of the individual and communal. Specific examples of such social facilitation will be briefly explored from Nag Hammadi, where ritual, narrative, and mythological discourse function to enable, and thereby define, religious experience.

Transgression and Countercultural Gnosticism: A Review Essay of April DeConick’s The Gnostic New Age

“…Gnosticism, much like the category "religion", is not (contra DeConick) a self-evident, transhistorical or phenomenological taxon that simply reveals historical manifestations of itself or its essence/core. Rather, Gnosticism is a second-order analytical category that modern social actors-both within and without scholarly circles-have created and utilized to various end goals often to reinforce claims to religious orthodoxy or authenticity by creating the "heretical other" (for more on this rhetorical use, see King 2003 and on Gnosticism as second-order taxon, see Tite, 2001Tite, , 2009Tite, , 2013. Rather than offering a counterargument to such critical assessments of the category, or arguing for an alternative historical reconstruction based on empirical data, such as David Brakke (2010) tries to do with this category, DeConick simply dismisses such critiques and asserts the historical-and indeed transhistorical or universal-nature of Gnosticism: "Gnosticism" existed in antiquity as a historical manifestation of a transhistorical (sui generis) religion that continues to exist in modern manifestations.…”

“…First, DeConick's call for us to seriously study the role of religious experience in ancient Gnosticism. As argued elsewhere, the study of religious experience is oddly lacking in Gnostic studies, supplanted perhaps by a current fixation on philosophical, theological, and philological analyses of systems of thought (see Tite, 2013), except for those who have evoked phenomenological models such as posited by Hans Jonas or Ioan Couliano (1992). Yet, as Michael Kaler (2013) has stressed in recent years, our texts point to the importance of the experiential for these ancient social actors-and, thus, if we are to understand and explain these social actors, we need to study their experiences even if only indirectly through the writings left behind.…”