Gnosticism. At about the same time as the Hebrew
apocalyptics, and not without some interchange with
it, another manifestation of eschatological world per-
spective arose in the confluence of Iranian and Greek
spiritual thought, viz., Gnosticism. Gnosticism is like-
wise associated with the Iranian dualism of a good and
evil God. On this view, a personage from the world
of Light fell under the power of Darkness during the
battle between the two principles in primeval times.
The evil powers then created the world as a place of
sojourn and human bodies as prisons to hold this figure
of Light captured and divided by them into so many
separate sparks of light. The good god now sets into
motion the process of redemption in order to liberate
the sparks of light from the power of Darkness and
to return them to the world of Light. As soon as this
process of redemption is completed the world will
collapse into Nothing again, so that history comes
definitively to an end.
While for apocalyptics God controls the old aeon,
it is nonetheless subject to the power of sin so that
for the Gnostic the world and history are represented
mostly as a work of the Devil. Thus though one cannot
properly speak of a goal of history in Gnosticism, yet
the notion of an end of history is at the root of Gnostic
thought. One can therefore speak of an unhistorical
Gnostic eschatology, and the asceticism of this life
becomes an adequate expression of an eschatological
self-consciousness that strives for liberation from the
world itself.
Gnosticism, which was a serious competitor of
Christianity well into the fourth century, certainly
influenced the thought of the West (e.g., Neo-
Platonism), yet in both the West and the East, in oppo-
sition to anti-Gnostic dualism, the quest for the mean-
ing and the goal of world history controlled by God
proved victorious. The answer given by apocalyptics,
that the meaning of history lies concealed in its escha-
tological goal, incited powerful historically effective
forces in the West above all, and influenced both spir-
itual and world history. The philosophy of history, a
branch of inquiry still unknown to Greek antiquity,
could spring up only on a biblical foundation. Every
current quest for the ultimate meaning of world history
springs from biblical faith.
