The Alien God — Radical Divine Transcendence
The Gnostic 'alien God' — utterly beyond the material world and unknown to its rulers — represents the most radical form of divine transcendence in ancient thought.
Philosopher Hans Jonas coined the term 'alien God' to describe the Gnostic highest divine principle — a God utterly foreign to this world, unknown to the Demiurge and Archons who rule it, and recognizable only to the pneumatics who carry a fragment of this alien light within them. This absolute alienness of the highest God from the material world creates the characteristic Gnostic emotional tone: the pneumatic feels alien in the world because they carry within them a fragment of a reality that is utterly foreign to the world. Jonas saw this as a 'gnostic existentialism' — an ancient form of the existentialist recognition that the self is not at home in the cosmos. The alien God is not indifferent but sends messengers (Christ, divine emissaries) to awaken the sleeping sparks. The response to the alien God is not worship in the conventional sense but Gnosis — the recognition that one IS a fragment of this alien light, as alien in this world as the God who sent one here.
Whoever has found the world and become rich, let him renounce the world — for the one who truly knows has found the world to be a corpse.
Philosopher Albert Camus's 'The Stranger' — with its central character Meursault who feels fundamentally alien to the social world around him — has been read by several scholars as an inadvertent Gnostic text: the experience of radical alienation from the conventional world is the beginning of the Gnostic awareness.
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- What Gnosticism says about loneliness
Hans Jonas named this God 'alien' because the Demiurge and the Archons who run the world do not know him. The claim about loneliness follows exactly: you feel foreign here because you carry a fragment of something foreign here. Jonas read it as an ancient existentialism — the self not at home in the cosmos.