DBH on Gnosticism

.... certain motifs and turns of phrase that can be found in both
“gnostic” texts and the writings of patristic universalists are
similar to one another not because the former influenced the latter,
but because both derive their terms directly from the New Testa­ment.
What we call the “gnostic” schools should probably be seen as extreme
expressions—bedizened with often tediously opulent mythologies, some
perhaps only allegorical, many probably not—of a dualistic theological
register that is already present, in an only slightly more muted and
qualified form, in the earliest Christian documents, and that is
especially conspicuous in the Pauline corpus and in the fourth Gospel.
As does much of the New Testament, the “gnostic” narrative tells of a
cosmic dispensation under the reign of the god of this aeon (2
Corinthians 4:4) or the Archon of this cosmos (John 14:30; Ephesians
2:2), and of spiritual beings hopelessly immured within heavenly
spheres thronged by hostile archons and powers and principalities and
daemons (Romans 8:3, 39; 1 Corinthians 10:20-21; 15:24; Ephesians
1:21; etc.), bound under and cursed by a law that was in fact ordained
by lesser, merely angelic or archontic powers (Galatians 3:10-11,
19-20). Into this prison of spirits, this darkness that knows nothing
of the true light (John 1:5), a divine savior descends from the aeon
above (John 3:31; 8:23; etc.), bringing with him a wisdom that has
been hidden from before the ages (Romans 16:25-26; Galatians 1:12;
Ephesians 3:3-9; Colossians 1:26), a secret wisdom unknown even to
“the archons of this cosmos” (1 Corinthians 2:7-8) that has the power
to liberate fallen spirits (John 8:31-32, etc.). Now those blessed
persons who possess “gnosis” (1 Corinthians 8:7; 13:2) constitute
something of an exceptional company, “spiritual persons”
(πνευματικοί), who enjoy a knowledge of the truth denied to the merely
“psychical” (ψυχικοί) among us (1 Corinthians 14:36; Galatians 6:1;
Jude 19). By his triumph over the cosmic archons, moreover, this
savior has opened a pathway through the planetary spheres, the
encom­passing heavens, the armies of the air and the potentates on
high, so that now “neither death nor life nor angels nor Archons nor
things present nor things imminent nor Powers nor height nor depth nor
any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God”
(Romans 8:38-39).

Where the so-called “gnostic” systems, then, clearly depart from this
more general narrative morphology is not in the room they make for
universalism. Quite the reverse. It is in their willingness to amplify
the provisional or qualified dualism implicit in this vision of things
into a complete ontological schism, such that creation is conceived of
as having no natural relation to God at all, even in his eternal
intentions. Not only is lower reality the work of a lesser or
intermediary kind of divinity; it is wholly the product of an
alienation from God. As a result, here in the land of unlikeness,
below the turning spheres of the planetary heavens, all is governed by
cosmic fate, εἱμαρμένη, rather than by divine providence; and, far
from achieving his essence through creation, in time, by way of a fall
and return, the true God is so far beyond the reach of cosmic
eventuality that this world has no ontological relation to him at all,
not even of the most tenuously analogical variety. In place, then, of
the metaphysics of participation adopted by “orthodox” tradition,
these schools provided only a mediating mythology of absolute
estrangement, a grand epic of exile and ruin followed by rescue and
restoration. At least, so we are told by contemporary sources, and so
their own literary remains largely seem to confirm (though who can
tell how much of this language is ultimately figural?). Still,
throughout the whole of that tale, in every school, God—hidden forever
in his hyperouranian and inaccessible light, infinitely removed from
time and nature and history—is eternally the same. It is not his
story. He has no story.

All of which is only to say, again, that the notion of a secret
gnostic current in Christian thought extending from Valentinus (c.
100-c. 160) to Böhme is a fantasy.