Wrestling with Archons: Gnosticism as a Critical Theory of Culture by Jonathan Cahana-Blum

Abstract

[...]the monastic context of the Nag Hammadi texts has been questioned. There have been suggestions that they belonged to a private owner who was buried with the texts and that the monastic letters in the bindings of the Nag Hammadi codices might have come from a heap of scrap papyri of diverging origins. Cahana-Blum builds on Hans Jonas’s works and concludes that Gnostic ritual was a way to free the Gnostic of the dualism of the cosmic sphere. [...]it gives the Gnostic a view of the conditions that seem to be self-evident cosmic perspectives, but from an acosmic perspective that is open to critique