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out, abortion of the German Republic took place. These three decisive mental experiences were the following: First, the Prophets of Israel, whom I read at that time not in Hebrew, but in a translation provided by the Protestant text-critical school. The translators were H. Gressmann, H. Gunkel and others.1 It was through their historical rendering and their text-critical notes, connected with a commentary, that I discovered the Prophets of Israel; not through the Jewish Religionsunterricht of my childhood, but through the Protestant rendering of that school. Second, Imanuel Kant, of whom I first read Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, which begins with this immortal sentence that thunders through my life similarly to the words of the Prophets: "Es ist uberall nichts in der Welt, ja auch ausserhalb derselben zu denken moglich, was ohne Einschrankung konnte fur gut gehalten werden, als einzig ein guter Willie."2 And third, there was Martin Buber. At that time I read Buber's famous Drei Reden uber das Judentunv1 and Die Legende des Baalschem, the beginnings of his great work on Chassidism, and strangely enough it blended with Kant and with the Prophets of Israel. It was a blending which could probably not stand a rigorous critique of compatibility, but somehow it fused in my own mind. Thus, when I entered university, two things were clear for me. One was that I wanted to study philosophy. The other was that religion is an essential aspect of humanity, and that no study of philosophy is possible without somehow being joined with a study of the religious phenomena. How much of a personal commitment to one or another religion or creed is at play in such a vision is a secondary consideration. The first consideration was that religion, especially as part of the tradition of Western man, is as indispensable an aspect in giving account of oneself and one's background as is the great tradition of philosophy starting with the Greeks, with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. This combination has somehow gone with me through my life, and this statement is the first attempt to explain what brought a philosophy student to the study of Gnosticism.
But of course, it would be a distortion to pretend that things are only governed by internal consistency, by intrinsic logic; accident and chance play a role. Without certain teachers, influences and tasks set at one time or another, without a certain combination of circumstances, which in my case were mainly focused in the two names of Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, I would not have become what I am, and the study of Gnosticism would have, for better or for worse, gone without the participation of Hans Jonas. It was this combination which I encountered in
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Marburg that brought me to the study of Gnosticism by a sequence of events which I will briefly relate, and that also somewhat explains why I thought and still think that Gnosticism, apart from the challenge it poses to philologians, historians, theologians and so on, also poses a challenge to philosophers. Among philosophers I am still, it seems, the only one who has acted on that belief; in spite of everything I have always been something of an outsider, because my interest was not quite the same as that of the real workers with the texts, i.e., those who read Iranian, Coptic, Turkish, and so on, and who know the whole field at first hand.
What was the philosophical situation at the time when I studied in the twenties in Germany? There was the powerful figure of Edmund Husserl in Freiburg, the founder of the phenomenological school in philosophy, and there was his disciple, a young, impressive and disturbing Privatdozent, Heidegger, who in some manner transferred the phenomenological method, i.e., the careful description of phenomena of the mind, from the purely cognitive field to which Husserl had confined it (perception, thinking, knowing, conceptualization and so on) to the phenomena of existence, i.e., the individual enmeshed in the concerns of life, being more than an ego cogitans, being engaged in the business of living and dependent on the "facticity" of his being which he had not chosen himself. Kierkegaard, in addition to Husserl, stood behind Heidegger: not the theologian Kierkegaard or Kierkegaard the Christian thinker, but Kierkegaard the discoverer of "existential" thought as such. In other words, in the person of Heidegger "existentialism" had entered the sacrosanct domain of the strictly objective, descriptive style of Husserlian phenomenology. An entire young generation came under his spell. It so happened that Heidegger, after I had first experienced him as a Privatdozent under Husserl in Freiburg, received a call to Marburg/Lahn, and his faithful students, including myself, followed him. One of the most wonderful combinations came about there, namely a close friendship between Heidegger and Bultmann. It was almost "bon ton" among certain of Heidegger's disciples to go also to Bultmann and study New Testament theology and, if admitted, to enter Bultmann's seminar on the New Testament, and vice versa, for the better or more favoured or serious students of Bultmann to go to Heidegger's lectures and, if admitted, also to be members of his seminars. As a result this consensus of young minds came about: study both fields! While I had continued the study of the Old Testament for three semesters in Berlin during my early student years under Gressmann and
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Sellin in addition to attending the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums, I found myself, through this combination, suddenly a student of New Testament theology.
Quite soon, in 1924, I was an active member of Bultmann's New Testament seminar together with another Jewish student of Heidegger, to whom a lifelong friendship has bound me since: it will be fifty years next year that we have been friends. She is Hannah Arendt, whose name is known as that of a political philosopher. We two were the only Jews in Bultmann's seminar. One day I accepted an assignment from Bultmann, namely to submit a report about the concept of γιγυώσκειυ θεου — γυωσιç - θεου in the Fourth Gospel. Let me offer a few words on the importance of the Gospel of John to Bultmann, In his New Testament work he felt more and more attracted to this Gospel for reasons which, I would say, belong to the nonarguable ones, a kind of decision about which it is entirely inappropriate to ask: Is it correct or incorrect? I never followed him there, since I personally never liked the Fourth Gospel particularly. To me, the epistles of Paul, which I also learned to know through Bultmann, became the most essential, the most interesting, the historically and philosophically decisive documents in the New Testament. But Bultmann's love was the Fourth Gospel, and through its medium came the point of contact with Gnosticism: especially with the newly discovered Mandaean documents that came out of the masterhand of Lidzbarski4 and were first, if I remember rightly, treated in their possible importance for the Gospels by Reitzenstein in Das Mandaische Buch des Herrn der Grosse und die Evangelienuberlieferung.5 It was the possible bearing of the Mandaean nomenclature, of their vocabulary and their imagery on the problem of authorship and the whole meaning and spirit of the Gospel of John, which brought Bultmann into the realm of gnostic studies. And so one day he assigned to me the task of investigating the meaning of the terms γιγυώσκειυ θεου — γυωσιç - θεου in the Fourth Gospel for a report in his seminar session. This is what I meant with the role of chance in the story of a life. The Gospel of John became my destiny through this connection. For when I prepared this seminar paper (in 1925 or 1926), I delved, of course, into the background which Bultmann himself had pointed out. For the first time I studied the Mandaean writings in Lidzbarski's translation. I studied Reitzenstein. I read Norden's Agnostos Theos, which had come out in a second edition about that time. It was a powerful book, which I think was subtitled Untersuchungen zur Formengeschichte religioser Rede.6 I
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found myself in a world where I soon realized one thing: this is not just a task for a seminar paper. It kept growing under my hands. The result was that I committed what in itself is an unforgivable sin. Instead of using my thirty minutes of the seminar session for the report and leaving the remaining hour and a half for discussion, I kept talking from notes for two solid hours and at the end of the session still had not come remotely to the end of what I had to say. Looking back, I believe that this determined a good part of my future. Bultmann, who had said only a few words at the end, talked to me afterwards and said, "Jonas, this was really important! You must go on with it! This is only a beginning!" He did more. He told Heidegger, who was my main teacher and under whom I was supposed to write my doctoral dissertation, about my performance, including its unfinished character. Heidegger talked to me about it and said, "If you want to, I am willing to accept a dissertation in philosophy on that topic or something connected with it. I have Bultmann's assurance that he will serve as a Korreferent for that kind of dissertation." That settled it.
What was my conception then, when I started seriously? The time had come after many years of being a student. In Germany at that time you could draw out your university studies as long as you liked or your father permitted by sending his monthly Wechsel. One could also change universities at will. I do not know how matters are now, but at the time I moved from Freiburg to Berlin, from Berlin back to Freiburg, from Freiburg to Marburg. When Marburg became a bit boring to me, once I worked on the dissertation and did not attend classes anymore, I went to Heidelberg for some time, which was a much livelier place in some respects. The time had come when I had, after all, to produce something and show my father that I was not the eternal student. So I "conceived a conception," to use gnostic language, and brought forth an emanation, so to speak, a still formless fruit, and its name was to be "Pistis and Gnosis." I wanted to take up the question: Why did the Church reject Gnosticism? Apart from the obvious reason that many of its teachings were fantastic and not in agreement with the Gospels, why was Gnosis as such from Paul on rejected as a possible option? Why was Pistis chosen instead? This I wanted to explain to my own satisfaction and probe into the meaning of that momentous decision, for Pistis and against Gnosis. I realized that the first thing to do was to try to understand what is Pistis and what is Gnosis. I started with Gnosis for obvious reasons: Gnosis had one familiar basis, namely the Greek philosophical antecedents of the term "to know." As a student of Plato and
Aristotle, I was familiar (or thought I was ) with what knowledge means in the Greek context. And so I set myself as a first task to find out what is different in the gnostic from the Greek meaning of "Gnosis." I started to collect material from the patristic literature (which I still have lying in copious notes, destined never to be used) about the meaning of "to know" in the religious context. It turned out to be very different from that of theoretical knowledge in philosophy and science, and the religious thinkers themselves were aware of the difference. As an example I refer to the Genesis sentence "and Adam knew Eve his wife." There, "to know" stands for the sexual union, and already the Church Fathers used the sentence exegeticaily for denoting a knowledge that terminates in a reciprocal union with its object—namely God—as opposed to the "distancing" theoretical knowledge of the Greeks. You still find Luther making the same use of this Hebrew paradigm. Clearly, to "know God" in the Hebrew sense is different from the knowledge of the Divine in the Aristotelian sense. Yet neither of the two is "gnostic." But there is a third sense: Gnosis as mystical knowledge, and the Genesis passage is particularly apt to represent this when given that turn (from which patristic exegesis on the whole refrained). It was in this direction that I began to search for the meaning of γυωσιç - θεου in the gnostic context; and once I had discerned such a salvational type of "knowledge" with its own phenomenology, I suddenly glimpsed, as in a blinding light, the possible, nay, persuasive hypothesis that what the Gnostics understood by "Gnosis" is by no means confined to them in the environment of declining antiquity: rather, that what the later Platonists— Plotinus, Porphyry and others—had to say about the highest form of knowledge, about the union with the One, is another, more refined version of this same type of knowledge that goes beyond the knowledge of "logos" and of "theory" in the Greek tradition. In other words, I suddenly found my terms widened even beyond the vast enough sphere of theological
thought Christian and Jewish, orthodox and heretical—and stretched
also over the whole sphere of late-pagan quasi-philosophical thought that hovers on this curious borderline of philosophy and mysticism, where it is difficult to say whether it is philosophy in the sense of Plato and Aristotle, or whether it is mysticism. It is, of course, both.
At this point, the vastness of the subject took matters out of my hands and relegated "Pistis," the original matching mate of my twin-topic, to an indefinite "later." "Pistis and Gnosis" shrank to "Gnosis" pure and simple. And this I decided to attack from the end rather than from the beginning,
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from Plotinus and the Neoplatonists after him, even as late as Dionysius Areopagita, i.e., from the philosophic-mystical elaborations of that "knowing" which is at the same time a union with the divine reality. My aim in this was not a record of its history but a hermeneutics of its phenomenology as it manifested itself in those testimonies. That was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, "Der Begriff der Gnosis," which only made passing references to the whole mythological area of the second century and concentrated mainly on third- and fourth-century "spatantikes" thinking. However, for future publication, I had to write a historical introduction to that, namely on the mythological Gnosis of the second century, which more and more I realized presented the real flesh-and-blood form of what appeared in such a spiritualized, conceptually rarefied form in the later mystical thinkers who tried to keep as much as possible within the Greek tradition. That introduction, once the dissertation itself lay behind me, grew into the first volume of Gnosis und spatan...
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