A Platonic and Pagan Critique of Gnosticism
Plotinus Against the Gnostics
Imagine that Valentinus (a Gnostic teacher) and Irenaeus (a Gnostic critic) walk into a bar, and start having a massive argument about God, Jesus, and salvation, which gets louder and more heated as the beverages flow.
Nearby, a Platonic teacher is drinking his beer, listening carefully to their increasingly incendiary arguments. Then, after a while, he cannot resist, so he walks over, introduces himself, and joins the conversation.
Valentinus immediately thinks he’s found a kindred spirit, someone who shares his Platonic cosmology, who sympathizes with his worldview, and who understands his concerns, over and against the backward and bucolic rube of a bishop in Irenaeus.
But, much to Valentinus’ chagrin, he discovers that the Platonic philosopher, while affirming some aspects of what he says, thinks Valentinus is talking utter non-sense, has distorted Plato, and even sides with much of Irenaeus’ critique of Valentinus.
If you can imagine then, then you can understand Plotinus’ critique of Gnosticism.
Plotinus, the 3rd century Neo-Platonic philosopher, offered a penetrating critique of Gnosticism in his work Against the Gnostics (Enneads II.9) written probably sometime in the 260s.
This is interesting because Gnosticism was at one level trying to indigenize the Christian narrative into Platonic cosmology, theology, and anthropology. For certain Gnostic groups - and this did vary considerably among them - the Genesis creation story had either been supplanted or interpreted through a Platonic lens.
So Plotinus was offering a Platonic and pagan critique of Gnosticism partly because it represented a competing appropriation of platonic thought and because it moved the platonic trajectory into what he considered to be an unwholesome direction.
Plotinus regarded the Gnostics as unfaithful to the platonic tradition, irrational in their assertions, and immoral in the consequences of their claims. Added to that, he regarded them as smug and elitists for claiming to belong to some kind of superior philosophical caste. According to Jean-Marc Narbonne, Plotinus was “ceaselessly confronted by Sethian [Gnostic] interpreters [of Plato] who, right alongside him, were reading and commenting upon the very same texts as him, contemplatives who were spreading a doctrine of salvation that competed with his own and who shared with him several presuppositions, even if certain particular themes made them radical opponents” (Plotinus in Dialogue with the Gnostics, 5-6).
Here are the main elements of Plotinus’ critique of Gnosticism: