The Gnostics

By Jacques Lacarriere

Gnostics have always sought to "know" rather than to accept dogma and doctrine, often to their peril. This inquiry into Gnosticism examines the character, history, and beliefs of a brave and vigorous spiritual quest that originated in the ancient Near East and continues into the present day. Lawrence Durrell writes, "This is a strange and original essay, more a work of literature than of scholarship, though its documentation is impeccable. It is as convincing a reconstruction of the way the Gnostics lived and thought as D.H. Lawrence's intuitive recreation of the vanished Etruscans."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Release date: Jan 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9780720618020

Reviews for The Gnostics

[Peter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great introduction to a difficult subject, very inspiringly written. The author clearly sympathises with the Gnostic world view and describes its diverse and colourful forms without judgement. The final chapter places the Gnostic quest in our current era, and provides several interesting references for further reading. So if you want to know something about Gnosticism, this book is a good start.

[pomonomo2003 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is a lyrical meditation on ancient gnosticism as the 'betrayal' of the physical cosmos. It is beautifully written. Lacarriere has heavyweight fans like Lawrence Durrell and Marguerite Yourcenar.Lacarriere nicely conveys the alienated horror the ancient Gnostics felt for the world around them. And he maintains that this is in some ways comparable to our contemporary alienation under capitalism. In this way, an ancient heresy and modern revolution are used to illuminate each other. And our author goes about this in a manner that is very convincing.I found myself also quite interested by the brief criticisms our author permits himself of the so-called Traditionalist School (the discussion occurs towards the end of the book) that begins with René Guénon. For our purposes here, let us say that the Traditionalist maintain that the Truth that all the Great Religious Traditions point to is unsurpassable, and thus they, and only they, are the bearers of Truth.The argument with this is (or so I take Lacarriere to mean) that given the radical evil of the World (according to the Gnostics), we can expect no help from past religions that all spoke to a very different time. Our author argues that this 'cult of the past' "can only distract man from his true quest: the quest for a new consciousness, springing from his immediate experience and contingent on the present."Of course, this is exactly what Guénon feared most. 'Everyone doing their own thing'. While I think Guénon has a point specifically here, Lecarriere is certainly right to argue that Man is no longer the passive recipient of natures blows that he was in either ancient or even medieval times. The modern capitalist industrial / technological revolution has changed all that! The several great religions born in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution and consequent rise of Empire cannot hope to speak to a world in which Man has become an Effective Power.This is radically new. Our author maintains that religious answers to the human condition, if they can be found, must only be in the future, not the past.A Huge If, ...but I agree. Modernity has changed the way people live as much as the Agriculture Revolution once did. The Axial Age Religions arose as a response to this. If the changes wrought by modernity (industry, technology and science, media and the internet) prove to be as profound as those at the dawn of History and continue to endure, it is no longer entirely impossible to imagine a new religion (and religious sensibility / ethos) eventually rising and swallowing up its predecessors.I think that Lecarriere not only imagined this, but hoped for it too