– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992)
Not unlike XVIIth-century science, research on Gnosticism in the first half of our century (with the partial exception of Hans Jonas’s beautiful existentialistic analysis in the first volume of Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity, 1934) was dominated by two concerns:
1. origins;
2. classification.
A history of research, undertaken elsewhere, is beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say the German school of history of religions supplied complete theories concerning the “origins” of Gnosticism (and anything else) and painstaking classifications thereof, as monumental as useless, whose latest extrapolations are ungainly hypotheses concerning a “school” of Thomas the Apostle and the existence of a “Sethian” Gnosticism, still held with vigor in the works of a few idiosyncratic scholars. Genetic claims have been deduced from classifications, and vice versa. Today it has become increasingly clear that such assumptions cannot be proven unless the scholar himself becomes a “gnostic”-that is, pretends to be in possession of secret knowledge that allows him or her to perceive the links between systems in such a way that they would yield information about actual gnostic groups. Such knowledge is by nature verifiable in no other way. A number of “gnostic” scholars of Gnosticism undoubtedly exist, as we noted elsewhere. But their species seems to be declining under pressure from more rewarding directions of research.
In sketching here the main hypotheses concerning the origins of Gnosticism, we must observe from the outset that all of them are based on a number of implicit, hidden assumptions that have nothing to do with Gnosticism in itself but with the world of the scholars of Gnosticism. The latter have their own “mythologies of history,” to use here an expression applied by Quentin Skinner to political history. Whoever deals with them ought not trust unconditionally the illusion of objectivity they put forward but should exert to a reasonable extent the instrument of Ideologiekritik (criticism of ideology), uncovering the hidden assumptions before believing the overt ones, which are subordinated to the former and may in fact contradict them. Such an operation should never abandon the principle that covert assumptions are prior and hierarchically superior to overt ones. In other words, if the scholar claims that he is as impartial as the mechanic who takes apart the pieces of a motor and puts them together again yet at the same time makes an estimate as to the country of origin of the pieces and their age, his choice is by no means determined by his overt premise and promise of objectivity but by hidden assumptions of which he is as unaware as we are until we begin to be suspicious of them. A hermeneutics of suspicion may be reductive and perhaps unnecessary as far as religion itself is concerned, but it is certainly the only one that can responsibly be applied to scholars of religion in their historical setting.
Pp. 51-2