The Cosmology of the Gnostics and the Orthodox Church

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original titleThe Cosmology of the Gnostics and the Orthodox Church
3. Language term English
4. lemma author Tampakis, Kostas
5. lemma category Cosmology- Anthropic principle
6. lemma work The Cosmology of the Gnostics and the Orthodox Church
7. lemma manifestations Journal Of Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion
8. Keywords gnosticism - Vassileides - Conflict thesis
9. Url Click Here
10. Lemma body

    1. This article takes as a given fact that science and religion clash. It seeks to find the roots of this controversy in elements of gnostic philosophy that have been incorporated within modern theories. Since gnostic philosophy had been condemned as heretical in the second and third centuries, the article proposes that modern scientific theories cannot but be in opposition with Christianity. The authors identify four characteristics of Gnosticism, which are dualism, in which a benevolent God exists alongside an evil God of matter, its Docetism, in which the Crucifixion was only apparent and to real, its anti-Judaism, in which the Old Testament is rejected and its asceticism. They go on to discuss the worldview of the 2nd Century Egyptian Gnostic Valentine, in which a timeless God rested alongside a female deity ‘Sige’ (Silence), until they begot the ‘Centuries’, beyond-the-world- spiritual projections of entities. The last Century was Sophia (Wisdom) which coupled with a previous century, Mind, to give birth to Christ and the Holy Spirit. Vassileides, who taught in Alexandria during the second century AD, is described as stressing the distance of the unknown God and the perceived world, proposing a cosmology of 365 different ‘skies’. The Judean God is the King of Angels of the lower world. God send Mind to Earth in the guise of Jesus Christ to liberate humans from the power of the God of Judaism. The paper goes on to propose that Gnostic cosmology is of interest today because it places humans within the Universe and tries to fathom their relationship with the cosmos. For the Gnostics, our world is imperfect and hostile to humanity, ruled by spiritual beings themselves hostile. Jesus Christ came down to the Earth to liberate the humans, partly by teaching them mysteries of spiritual cosmology and cosmogony. From this description of Gnostic philosophy, the authors conclude that modern science has incorporated some of those ideas, and thus, that the roots of the clash between certain modern cosmological theories and Christian theology can be traced there. However, the authors only reference another book of Theodossiou and Danezis and make no effort to discuss the possibility of other alternatives to the conflict thesis, or of more current scholarship on the Gnostics.