COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
(New York 27, N.Y.)

Department of Religion
710 Philosophy Hall

September 15, 1957

Dear Colleague:

This is to announce the preliminary schedule of the Colloquy in the History of Religions which was initiated at Columbia University towards the close of the last semester.

Those who have participated last year will remember that the colloquy grew out of the seminar in the history of religions which was conducted by Professor Martin Buber during the Spring of 1957. The discussions that developed in the eight meetings of this seminar gave to many participants the distinct feeling that it would be worthwhile to continue a colloquy in the field of the history of religions.

At a preliminary meeting last May where Professor Hans Jonas of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research presented a paper on "Pneumatic Freedom and Ecclesiastical Faith: the Gnostic Challenge to Early Christianity" it was agreed that the colloquy should be made a permanent institution at the university and that the membership for the colloquy should not be drawn from our university alone but should include scholars from various universities at Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, Baltimore and other institutions in the vicinity of New York.

During the Fall and the Spring Semesters of the coming academic year we shall convene once monthly, *the first Monday of every month in the academic year* at Columbia University, 708 Philosophy Hall, at 8:00 p.m. (*the seminar room of the Classics Department*).

October 7th Professor Hans Jonas is scheduled to present a paper on further considerations on the topic of gnosticism; November 4th Professor Krister Stendahl (Harvard University) on some aspects of Paul's theology; December 2nd Professor Herbert W. Schneider (Columbia University) on the topic of Sect, Denomination and Church; January 6th Professor Albert Jacques Cuttat (Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris) on Indian religion; February 3rd Professor Walter Kaufmann (Princeton University) on the idea of freedom in OT and NT.

For the Spring, Professor Mircea Eliade (University of Chicago), Professor Robert Grant (University of Chicago), Professor Benjamin N. Nelson (Hoffstra College) are scheduled, but the dates have not yet been fixed for the respective speakers. There will be further announcements for every meeting of the year specifying the themes to be discussed in more detail and reminding you of the date. We hope, however, that you would even now enter the first Monday of every month in the academic year into your calendar as reserved for the Colloquy in the History of Religions.

TWO TYPES OF DUALISM IN GNOSTIC SPECULATION

Introductory notes by Professor Jonas

The Gnostics were the first speculative 'theologians' in the new age of religion superseding Antiquity. Their task was set for it by the basic gnostic experience, objectified in a commonly shared view of existing reality. This 'a priori' view comprised as main tenets the ideas of an antidivine universe, of man's alienness within it, and of the acosmic nature of the Godhead. Reality being such, it presupposes a history in which it assumed its present 'unnatural' condition. The task of speculation was to tell this history i.e. to account for the present state of things by recounting the successive stages of its genesis from first beginnings, thereby to lift the vision of reality into the light of gnosis. The manner of doing so was invariably mythological; but the resulting myths, with their personifications, hypostases, and quasi-chronological narrative, are consciously constructed symbols of metaphysical theory.

Two types of theory, called here for short the Iranian and the Syrian, were evolved to explain essentially the same facts of a dislocated metaphysical situation; both 'dualistic' as concerns this, their common result: the existing rift between God and world, world and man, spirit and flesh. - The Iranian type, in a gnostic adaptation of Zoroastrian doctrine starting from a dualism of two opposed principles, has mainly to explain how the original Darkness came to engulf elements of the Light: i.e., it describes the world-drama as a war with changing fortunes, and the divine fate, of which man's is a part and the world an unwilled consequence, in terms of mixing and unmixing, captivity and liberation. - The Syrian speculation undertakes the more ambitious task of deriving dualism itself, and the ensuing predicament of the divine in the system of creation, from the one and undivided source of being - by means of a genealogy of (personified) divine states evolving from one another which describe the progressive darkening of the original Light in categories of guilt, error and failure: this inner-divine 'devolution' ends in the decadence of complete self-alienation that is this world.

Both dramas start with a disturbance in the heights; in both, the existence of the world marks a discomfiture of the divine and a necessary, in itself undesirable, means of its eventual restoration; in both, the salvation of man is that of the Deity itself. The difference lies in whether the tragedy of the Deity is forced upon it from outside, with Darkness having the first initiative or is motivated from within itself, with Darkness the product of its passion, not its cause. To divine defeat and sacrifice in the one case corresponds divine guilt and error in the other; to compassion for the victimized Light -pneumatic contempt of demiurgical blindness; to eventual divine liberation - re-formation through enlightenment.

The two types will be exemplified by their eminent representatives, the Manichaean and the Valentinian systems respectively. It will be shown that the difference of speculative principle signifies an important difference in attitude; and that, whereas the Iranian type permits the more concrete and gripping dramatization, the Syrian type is profounder and alone of the two can do full justice to the redemptive claim of gnosis so central to gnostic religion: this, because its opposite, 'ignorance' as a divine event, is here accorded an ontological role in the very origination of the cosmos (even matter and in sustaining the dualistic situation as such.