162 - The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modem Nihilism

The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modem Nihilism
By Ioan P. Couliano
San Francisco, Harper San Francisco, 1992. 296 pp. $24.95.

In this revised translation of Les Gnoses Dualistes d'occident (1991), Couliano (d. 1991) characterizes the punctuated appearance of gnostic thought as a creative move in the multiple-choice "mind game" of religion. The book of Genesis is chosen as the game board and the play becomes gnostic simply when the "Creator" in Genesis is distinguished from a higher and better god (denial of "ecosystemic intelligence") and humans are thought to "belong to a higher and better world" (denial of "the anthropic principle"). These random, recurring decisions of the mind are neither a product of some existential crisis nor borrowed from any precise source.

This provocative tone continues throughout the book, particularly in Couliano's cavalier dismissal of preand non-Christian Gnosticism and in his own theory of Gnosticism's ties to Christian Platonist circles. Sometimes the structure of the argument is choppy, the presentation of iconoclastic positions inadequate, and the reasons for including some groups in the discussion (e.g., Marcionism, Manichaeism, Bogomilism, Catharism, modern nihilism) and excluding others (Mandaeism, Hermetism) left unclear. Yet, on the whole, the breadth of scholarship applied to the problem of defining gnostic thought over the centuries is stimulating and welcome.

Robert A. J. Gagnon
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ.