https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JOFJOzRu-H4
Alright, what is your opinion of Gnosticism? I think I’ve talked about this before. I think one of the problems with people who look at Gnosticism is that, okay, if you read the book by St. Irenaeus on Gnosticism, it is actually called, I think it’s called something like for the identification and overthrow of the so-called Gnostics. And the reason why they’re called so-called Gnostics is because the notion of gnosis in Christianity is actually very important. It’s a very important aspect of Christianity. The difference between the Gnostics and the traditional gnosis in Christianity is that Gnosis in Christianity is really in a manner what I talk about when I talk about symbolism. That is, Gnosis is viewed as a sexual union in the Bible, knowledge, like he knew his wife. It’s seen as this coming together of two realities. And if those who are reading Matthew’s book will see it in that manner too. It’s the joining of heaven and earth. That’s what gnosis is. Knowledge is the two coming together in the traditional sense. And so in Christianity, that’s why we have this whole incarnational vision of the world. Christ is incarnate. He is the total joining of divinity and humanity, the total joining of meaning and in a person. Everything is joined together. That’s what gnosis is in the Christian tradition. The Gnostics, they tended to view gnosis in the Platonic sense as moving out of the cave. The world of manifestation is actually an illusion and a kind of lie. And you have to kind of transcend the manifestation so that you see the principles for themselves. their vision of Christ is that either there’s a separation between the logos of God and the human Jesus, that those two are separate and that the logos of God leaves Jesus before his crucifixion, that type of thinking. Or you have this idea that Christ was a ghostly figure, that he wasn’t fully manifested. You have these images like his feet didn’t touch the ground or these types of images to say that Christ was not a fully incarnate being. Whereas in Christianity, it really is this notion of incarnation. So I think that Gnosticism, in Christianity, you do have this notion of transcending. You do have this notion of ascending the mountain, of going up the ladder of principality, let’s say, moving towards the divine darkness, removing the garments of skin. All of those images could be seen as akin to this notion of leaving the cave, let’s say. But if you look at the final result of that, it’s always that in the end, we recover what we had removed, let’s say. So that as you move into the divine darkness, you find that everything was joined together. You see that in St. Maximus the Confessor. He talks about how as the spiritual person sees the logi, sees the spiritual reasons for things separate from the manifestations, like the particularities, he sees that there’s no contradiction between the two, that they actually are in full agreement with each other. And so when Moses enters into the divine darkness in St. Gregory of Nyssa, he encounters the pattern of the tabernacle. And in the pattern of the tabernacle, he finds the garments of skin in the tabernacle. And so he removed his sandals at the base of the mountain to ascend the mountain, but once he enters into the highest point, then he finds that the whole mountain, you could say that the whole mountain is actually inside that point, right? That the highest point of the hierarchy is actually not that which transcends the hierarchy, but that which contains the whole hierarchy. And that’s one of the things maybe that’s kind of different between what I think and Jordan Peterson. We’ve actually talked about this in, I think even online we’ve talked about this, how Christ, it’s not that Christ transcends the hierarchy, it’s that Christ fills the hierarchy. And so the image of Christ is not of the, just the image of the emperor or the image of the highly successful person. Even he’s not just the image of the person who accepts suffering, but he’s also an image of a criminal being crucified. So he’s both the judge of all things, he’s the son of man, he has all this glorious imagery, but at the same time he is the crucified criminal outside the city. You see it in the opposition in the story where Christ goes into the temple, clears out the temple, acts as this holy scourging fire which purifies everything, but then he’s taken outside the city and he’s crucified. So it’s like bang, those two radical opposites just jam together. And Christ always manifests that fullness of the hierarchy where he’s both the top of the hierarchy and the bottom of the hierarchy at the same time. And then he says, he says the alpha and the omega, I am the beginning and the end. And he also says that those two things are related to each other, that there’s a connection between the beginning and the end, right? You know, you see it in that snake eating its tail.