The Three Questions of Gnosis
The Valentinian tradition summarized the content of Gnosis in three questions: Who were we? What have we become? Where were we? Whither are we hastening? From what are we delivered? What is birth and what is rebirth?
Clement of Alexandria (Excerpts of Theodotus 78.2) preserves the Valentinian summary of Gnostic knowledge as the answer to three fundamental questions: 'Who were we? What have we become? Where were we? Whither have we been cast? Whither are we hastening? From what are we delivered? What is birth? What is rebirth?' These questions constitute the complete Gnostic anthropology: the origin of the divine spark (who were we — children of the Pleroma), its present condition (what have we become — exiles in matter), its exile (where were we and whither cast — from the Pleroma into matter), its destiny (whither are we hastening — back to the Pleroma), its liberation (from what are we delivered — from ignorance and the Archons' power), and its ultimate transformation (birth as material existence, rebirth as Gnostic awakening). Together these six questions constitute a complete program of spiritual reflection — designed not to produce anxiety but to reorient the soul toward its divine origin and destiny.
Who were we? What have we become? Where were we? Whither have we been cast? Whither are we hastening? From what are we delivered?
Philosopher Karl Jaspers's fundamental 'boundary situations' (death, suffering, struggle, guilt) — the experiences that force reflection on ultimate human condition — parallel the Valentinian three questions: both identify the situations that compel the deepest existential reflection.
Excerpts of Theodotus
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- What Gnosticism says about knowing yourself
A Valentinian teacher reduced the whole of self-knowledge to a short list of questions: where we came from, what we have become, where we are heading, what we are delivered from. It works as a set of prompts even if you take none of the cosmology.