XXIV PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
and keep myself exclusively free for the philosophical task I have referred to. Then, with time, came other factors. One was that I suddenly heard of the Nag Hammadi. I think it was first in the Vigiliae Christianae, edited by Quispel, that I became acquainted with this new fact and, of course, one held one's breath. What would come from it? By the decree of fate, it was the Evangelium Veritatis22 that came out first and that, of course, was irresistible to me. That was the type of Gnosis which I had mostly thought of; that to me was somehow the core, the essence of Gnosticism. Rightly, yet by sheer accident, it was the first piece of the Nag Hammadi treasure to become public. So when Gnomon asked me to review it, I agreed. And so, I was "in" again.23 One such event after another enticed me back—for instance, Bianchi's invitation to Messina in 1966 to present a paper on the phenomenology and typology of the gnostic phenomenon24 and the appearance of Doresse's book The Secret Book of the Egyptian Gnostics in English translation25, which again I was asked to review, this time by the Journal of Religion in Chicago26; or an almost private New Testament colloquium of theologians in the United States, to which James Robinson recruited me and which used to meet annually on the occasion of some public convention, more than once in my home in New Rochelle for long sessions (sustained by potato salad, sausages and beer). Such events, following one another over the years, brought it about that I returned again and again to my old, if often betrayed, love—though with diminishing expertise in the newer developments of the field. Yet I must not conceal the satisfaction I felt when, in Messina, at the first international conference on Gnosticism (who would have dreamt of such a thing ever to happen when I did my wayward work in the early thirties!), I found that some of the vocabulary I had coined more than three decades before had become part of the lingua franca of the field and was used almost as a matter of course.
But meanwhile, the work in the field had really changed. Much of what was formerly guesswork had now become a matter for very solid questions of fact. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), the texts are of such a kind that they again admit different interpretations. So we will never really get out of the guessing game in this field. Also, since the time when I started work on it under Bultmann, and with Bousset, Reitzenstein and others as the guiding lights, I think that the whole style of work in this field has so changed that there must now be a division of labour, a distribution of tasks, a collectivity of effort which justifies and necessitates the kind of meetings that started in Messina, which, it is to be hoped, will be repeated from time
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION XXV
to time. Formerly, one could count on an occasional publication in the field which a synthesizer like me could integrate with his previous knowledge— something from the pen of a Reitzenstein or Schaeder or Cumont (whom I must not fail to mention among the great elders), or from Polotsky or Henning among the later ones. Somehow the "whole" seemed still manageable, if with a dash of impudence and at the price of some dilettantism. Today, however, a process is under way, and I now definitely am on the sidelines, an observer of what others do.
Sometimes I find cause for believing that I was right in the way I saw it at the time when we did not have the new evidence yet. At other times I see that I probably guessed wrong. I think that, in a sense, this is a farewell insofar as my own further participation in the ongoing work. It is not only a question of age, which of course is a factor; it is a question of competence in the particular fields of knowledge. It is the Coptologist's day. It is the Iranologist's day. The philosopher, the historian of religion and the explorer of the history of ideas have to defer, for a time now, to what the specialists and those working with the texts come up with. There will come again a time when the likes of me may try their hands in attempts at integration and new interpretation of the total phenomenon and the extraction of some philosophical relevance.
But may I, nevertheless, not conclude with a message of such resignation or withdrawal. I want to explain why I think that Gnosticism is really interesting, apart from the fact that so many documents happened to be discovered, which somehow cry out for editing and interpretation. What is really important here? What is interesting? In other words, why should a philosopher spend his time on the interpretation of such a phenomenon? Now, I have given one answer to that question in an essay which I published first in 1952 under the title "Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism,"27 and which later was added as an epilogue to The Gnostic Religion.28 What attracted me originally was not just the assignment that I write a seminar paper on γυωσιç - θεου in the Fourth Gospel. Something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular. Here is humanity in a crisis and in some of the radical possibilities of choices that man can make concerning his view of his position in the world, of his relation to himself, to the absolute and to his mortal Being. And there is certainly something in Gnosticism that helps one to understand humanity better than one would understand it if one had never known of Gnosticism. The same can be said of other historical phenomena, but there it has never been
XXVI PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
contested: everybody agrees that the knowledge of Greek Antiquity, of Socrates and Plato, of the Greek tragedians is an essential contribution to an understanding of what man is. But to see it in this strange and even shocking form of an extreme option about the meaning of Being, the situation of man, the absolute importance of selfhood and the wrestling with the saving of this selfhood from all the powers of alienation that impinge on man—to live in the company of this kind of thinking and imagery (in this case the most congenial vehicle of thought) is, I think, of interest not merely to the historian of religion. I still confess to a primary philosophical interest in the subject of Gnosticism and that is, in my own eyes, the true apologia for my life as a scholar, for my having spent so many years (with so many others forcibly diverted to non-contemplative pursuits) on the exploration of a field of which my fellow philosophers do not know a thing and of which most of them could not care less. I think, though, it is their loss. Thus, I like to think that even in my present philosophical project, which is technology and ethics, I can still profit from what Gnosticism has taught me.
One may say that one link between the study of Gnosticism and that of the modern situation of man is provided by dualism as such, which figures very prominently in the story of what leads to a philosophy of organism.29 Gnosticism has been the most radical embodiment of dualism ever to have appeared on the stage of history, and its exploration provides a case study of all that is implicated in it. It is a split between self and world, man's alienation from nature, the metaphysical devaluation of nature, the cosmic solitude of the spirit and the nihilism of mundane norms; and in its general extremist style it shows what radicalism really is. All this has been acted out in that deeply moving play as a lasting paradigm of the human condition. The analogical modernity of ancient Gnosticism, or the hidden Gnosticism in the modern mind, has struck me early and was expounded in my essay "Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism." So in the gnostic paradigm we have all these things with the sharpness of unblushing naivete, and that proves an enlightening help. I could go on arguing an analogy between things gnostic and things modern, or a relevance of things gnostic to things modern and of Gnosticism to philosophy. But it would be possible that what I would really be doing is trying to persuade myself of some continuity in my life's intellectual journey—and of that, one's own biased self is the last judge to be trusted. But at least my bias, for what it is worth, tells me that I did keep faith of some sort with my theoretical beginnings—that is, with Gnosti-
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION XXV11
1. H. Gressmann, H. Gunkel, M. Haller, H. Schmidt, W. Stark und P. Volz, trans. Die
Schriften des Alten Testaments in Auswahl neu iibersetzt und fur die Gegenwart erkldrt, GTttingen, 1911.
2. I. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 3rd ed., 1906. p. 10.
3. M. Buber, Drei Reden uber das Judentum, Frankfurt am Main, 1920; idem, Die Legendedes Baalscbem, Frankfurt am Main, 1922.
4. M. Lidzbarski, Manddische Liturgien, Gottingen, 1920; idem, Das Johannesbuch derMandder, Giessen, 1925; idem, Ginza, DerSchatz oder das Grosse Buch der Mandder. Gottingen,1925.
5. R. Reitzenstein, Das Manddische Buck des Herrn der Gr'dsse und dieEvangelienuberlieferung (Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften,1919 Abh. 12), Heidelberg, 1919.
6. Ed. Norden, Agnostos Theos: Untersucbungen zur Formengeschicbte religioser Rede, 2nded. Leipzig and Berlin, 1923.
7. R. Reitzenstein, Poimandres: Studien zur griechisch-dgyptischen und frubcbristlichenLiteratur, Leipzig, 1904.
8. R. Reitzenstein, Das iraniscbe Erlb'sungsmysterium, Bonn, 1921; idem, Die hellenistiscbenMysterienreligionen, 3rd ed. Leipzig, 1927.
9. A. von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. 1, Freiburg, 1886. ,
10. E.g. EC. Andreas-W. Henning, Mitteliranische Manicbaica aus Cbinesisch-Turkestan, I-III, hrsg. von W. Henning (SPAW 1932-34), Berlin, 1932-34. Cf. now M. Boyce, ACatalogue of the Iranian Manuscripts in Manichean Script in the German Turf an Collection, Berlin,I960.
11. C. Schmidt and HJ. Polotsky, eds., Ein Mani-Fund in egypten: Originalschriften desMani und seiner Schuler (SPAW 1933), Berlin, 1933; C. Schmidt, "Neue Originalquellen desManichaismus aus Egypten," ZKG 52 (1933), pp. Iff.
12. H. Jonas, Gnosis und spdtantiker Geist. Erster Teil: Die mythologische Gnosis. Mit einerEinleitung zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Forschung (FRLANT 51), Gottingen,1934. 3rd revised and enlarged edition, 1964.
13. W. Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis (FRLANT 10), Gottingen, 1907; idem,"Gnosis," in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopddie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, vol. 7,Stuttgart, 1912, col. 1503-1533, and "Gnostiker," ibid., col. 1534-1547; idem, KyriosChristos, 2nd ed., Gottingen, 1921, pp. 183-215.
14. E.g., F. Cumont, Die Mysterien des Mithra, 3rd German ed., Leipzig, 1923; idem, Dieorientalischen Religionnen im romischen Heidentum, 3rd German ed., Leipzig, 1931-
15. F.C. Burkitt, Church and Gnosis, Cambridge, 1932.
16. A.D. Nock, "Review of Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spatantiker Geist I," Gnomon 3(1936), pp. 605-612. First German version in Gnosis und Gnostizismus (WdF CCLXII), ed. K.Rudolph, Darmstadt, 1975, pp. 374-386.
17. In fairness, it should be added that some German periodicals may have waited for PartII, whose impending publication had been announced—optimistically—on the cover of PartI.
18. G.A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, "Review of Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spatantikerGeist I," Nieuw Theologisch Tijdschrift 24 (1935), pp. 74-77.
19- Attempts at identification of this publication were regretfully in vain.
20. R. Bultmann, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Myers KEK II), Gottingen, 1941.
21. H. Jonas, Gnosis und spdtantiker Geist. Zweiter Teil/erste Hdlfie: Von der Mythologie zurmystischen Pbilosophie (FRLANT 63), Gottingen, 1954. ...
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