Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PopeFrancis - Gnosticism
PopeFrancis - Gnosticism
You may be Gnostic if you are seeking nothing but feelings from religion.
A line from an old song by Leonard Cohen seems to describe what has happened in my life again and again: “When you’re not
feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.”
While being able to have feelings is part of what makes us human, we tend to confuse our feelings — positive or negative — with
the real state of our soul.
In 2013’s The Joy of the Gospel, Francis called this a gnostic tendency and warned against “a purely subjective faith whose only
interest is a certain experience or a set of ideas and bits of information which are meant to console and enlighten, but which
ultimately keep one imprisoned in his or her own thoughts and feelings.”
It’s not whether you feel holy or not that matters. Holiness is about love of God and neighbour, not what you’re feeling.
You may be Gnostic if you think what you know is more important than what you do.
St. Jerome, the early Christian scholar, is famous because of his time spent translating the Bible — but he is a saint because he
was willing to stop translating it sometimes.
He ceased all scholarly work for months to care for refugees. “Today we must translate the precepts of the Scriptures into deeds,”
he said. “Instead of speaking saintly words, we must act them.”
For Christians, “a person’s perfection is measured not by the information or knowledge they possess, but by the depth of their
charity,” Francis says in Rejoice and Be Glad. “Gnostics do not understand this, because they judge others based on their ability to
understand the complexity of certain doctrines.”
You may be Gnostic if you feel you totally understand the faith.
Embracing God means embracing a mystery. We cannot understand God or exhaust his meaning. At best, we stand in front of him
and appreciate him.
But “Gnostics think that their explanations can make the entirety of the faith and the Gospel perfectly comprehensible,” writes
Pope Francis.
Yes, you can and should think through the Church’s teachings. But Francis warns against the tendency to “reduce Jesus’ teaching
to a cold and harsh logic that seeks to dominate everything.”
If you think you have God figured out, and think you can judge exactly as he would — you may be a Gnostic.