El d\u00eda de ayer comenc\u00e9 la lectura de un librito cuyo t\u00edtulo es por dem\u00e1s atractivo: The Gnostics. The first Christian heretics.<\/p>\n
Escrito por Sean Matin, este libro ofrece una visi\u00f3n m\u00e1s o menos bien documentada sobre el gnosticismo, sin preocuparse en demas\u00eda por los aspectos m\u00e1s \u00e1ridos de su tema, y en cambio, s\u00ed resaltando los elementos m\u00e1s s\u00f3rdidos, y que debieran tratarse con un m\u00ednimo de cuidado.<\/p>\n
Apenas en las primeras p\u00e1ginas, el polemista enconado hace su aparici\u00f3n, en un p\u00e1rrafo por dem\u00e1s cuestionable:<\/p>\n
\nDespite the writings of the early Church Fathers, most of whom were fanatics with an axe to grind, the term \u2018Gnostic\u2019 was not universally used by Gnostic teachers such as Valentinus and Marcion, who usually simply referred to themselves as Christians, nor by Church apologists such as Tertullian and Irenaeus, who often called them simply \u2018heretics\u2019. The problem is further compounded by the fact that the Gnostics themselves were comprised of diverse groups which did not have a uniform set of beliefs; indeed, diversity is one of the hallmarks of Gnosticism. Furthermore, not all Gnostics were Christian \u2013 some were Jews, some Pagan.
\nModern scholarship is divided over what is actually meant by the term \u2018Gnosticism\u2019. In 1966, a colloquium of scholars met at Messina in Italy to establish exactly what is meant by Gnosticism and gnosis. They concluded that Gnosticism refers to the religious systems developed in the early centuries of the Common Era, while gnosis is the attaining of knowledge. One could therefore have gnosis, but not be a Gnostic. (For the present book, we will try to adhere to the Messina definitions.) The political theorist Eric Voegelin further muddied the waters when he attempted to define Gnosticism as being derived from a general feeling of alienation and disconnectedness with society. As a result, he detected Gnosticism in Marxism, Communism and Nazism, all of which, according to Voegelin, were movements which wanted to bring about apocalypse (he dubbed it \u2018immanentising the eschaton\u2019).
\nGnostic tendencies have since been spotted in a wide variety of writers, thinkers, political and spiritual movements, and also across the spectrum of popular culture, from Hollywood movies to computer games and comics. This bewilderingly diverse group includes the likes of not only Jung, but also William Blake, Goethe, Herman Melville, Albert Camus, Hegel, Nietzsche, WB Yeats, Franz Kafka, Existentialists, all manner of Theosophists, Jack Kerouac, Philip K Dick, computer games such as the Xenosaga series, comics such as Neil Gaiman\u2019s Sandman and Alan Moore\u2019s Promethea and movies such as The Truman Show and the Matrix trilogy.<\/p>\nMartin, The Gnostics. The first Christian Heretics,<\/em> pp. 15-17. \u00a02006.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Dejando de lado ese tono sensacionalista, \u00e1vido de publicidad y reconocimiento, hay un punto a favor que este libro tiene de manera indudable: obliga al lector a repensar por completo su visi\u00f3n de la Iglesia, y en cuanto tal, ofrece la posibilidad de indicar un sendero de estudio e investigaci\u00f3n por dem\u00e1s v\u00e1lido, que quienquiera que est\u00e9 interesado en el tema podr\u00e1 sortear, tomando sus propios riesgos y obteniendo tambi\u00e9n sus propias conclusiones.<\/p>\n
La visi\u00f3n panor\u00e1mica -si bien afectada por ese af\u00e1n de pol\u00e9mica- de la Historia de la Iglesia de los primeros tiempos, resalta de una manera pr\u00e1ctica y tambi\u00e9n continua los altibajos que adolece dicho periodo hist\u00f3rico. Y sin dudar en llamar a Pablo ‘verdadero fundador del cristianismo’ o al mismo Pablo ‘el primer hereje cristiano’, el autor tambi\u00e9n repasa los testimonios m\u00e1s importantes sobre el tema, en este libro de divulgaci\u00f3n que involuntariamente resulta estar muy bien formado, aunque la argumentaci\u00f3n general no se atreve a sacar las \u00faltimas conclusiones de semejantes tramas.<\/p>\n
Un libro por dem\u00e1s interesante, que puede leerse como una curiosidad, y de la que, escudri\u00f1ando atentamente, puede obtenerse y sin duda alguna, un gran provecho.<\/p>\n
M\u00e9xico, Frontera Norte. 9 de Noviembre de 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"El d\u00eda de ayer comenc\u00e9 la lectura de un librito cuyo t\u00edtulo es por dem\u00e1s atractivo: The Gnostics. The first Christian heretics. Escrito por Sean Matin, este libro ofrece una visi\u00f3n m\u00e1s o menos bien documentada sobre el gnosticismo, sin preocuparse en demas\u00eda por los aspectos m\u00e1s \u00e1ridos de su…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,11,12,13],"tags":[23,36,86,120,61],"class_list":["post-1947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apocrypha","category-church-history","category-opinionscomments","category-patrologia","category-rare-and-curious-books","tag-against-heresies","tag-christianism","tag-early-fathers","tag-english","tag-patristics-related-theme"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1947"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1950,"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947\/revisions\/1950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/plgo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}