Gender Theory and its Gnostic Roots, Part I

Our look at the gnostic roots of gender theory begins with a look at the early history of the gnostic heresy and the thought of Simone de Beauvoir.

From Catholic Stand

By Antonio J. Galindo Aleman

Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler are two of the most influential characters in the formulation of the so-called ‘Gender Theory’ in the last 30 years, which has become the norm in society. Both of them, through their famous writings, began a sexual revolution that has brought to society a false humanistic ideology with a new understanding of gender and sex, which has been crucial in the shaping of the Third Millennium. However, even though it seems to be a new thing in the world of thought, we can notice that it is not new. It is an old lie that is found in Gnosticism.

An Early Heresy

Gnosticism was one of the first great heresies Christianity suffered. It was born out of the struggle with the question of evil, and Gnosticism gave an easy answer to this existential problem by presenting a dualistic view of the world and the human person. It proposed belief in both a Good God and a Bad God.

According to this heresy, the Good God is totally transcendent of the material world, he is unknowable, and he contemplates himself eternally living in Hyperuranius. Gnostics believed that from the contemplation of himself, different emanations (Aeons), lesser spirits, come into existence. The lowest emanation from the Good God is called the Demiurge who created the material world as an act of rebellion towards the Good God.

Gnostics identified this Bad God as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Furthermore, this Bad God, Yahweh, is the very one who created the material world and stole human souls, which are divine sparks, from the Hyperuranius imprisoning them in material bodies.

Here we can see a dualistic view of the human person that presents the human soul as a divine spark that is enslaved in the body and thus needs to be liberated from the material world.  How do we free ourselves from the material world which is a prison? By beginning a revolution against the God of the Old Testament and his commandments which enslave us.

Original Disobedience

The Gnostics believed that this revolution consists mainly in fighting against the Bad God by disobeying his commandments.  This is the main point of Gnosticism: the Ten Commandments are evil, together with the natural law, and you have to disobey and deny them in order to free yourself from the Bad God.

Needless to say, this mentality has tremendous consequences for the moral life because, according to Gnosticism, the more immoral you are, the more perfect you become! This is why Gnosticism argues that the man who breaks the commandments is the pneumatic man who has freed himself from the Bad God.

Gnosticism further presents the serpent of Genesis (Satan) as a messenger sent by the Good God who comes to show us the way to freedom, which is by eating from the fruit: the very image of breaking the commandments. Man as a Divine spark decides what is good or evil and thus he is called to do whatever he wants in order to liberate himself from the slavery of the Evil God. This is a just a very simplified explanation of Gnosticism, but it is enough to see its characteristics present in Gender Theory especially in Simone de Beauvoir and in Judith Butler.

Feminist Gnosticism

According to Beauvoir, women have become enslaved by a patriarchal society that has given women an inferior place to men.  She argues that we have arrived at this situation through a process of mystification carried out by man, who, through cultural power, has mystified women to convince them that to be submissive to man is her natural place where she will experience true happiness. Man has used the excuse of motherhood, encompassing her flesh and facticity, to convince women that this is their highest calling: to be incubators of flesh.

Beauvoir accepted the facticity of the human body and the necessity of basing gender roles on the facticity of the biological sex. However, it is important to note that, even though Beauvoir accepts this facticity, it is a facticity that has no meaning. In Beauvoir’s view, culture throughout the ages, created by the hands of the (male) ‘mystifiers,’ has established the meaning of to how to act according to your biological sex by constructing a gendered culture based on the meaningless fact of sex.

Society has created a number of expectations telling women what it means to be a woman. This social construction assigns to women the place of the second sex where women are called to be happy by being submissive to man, thus allowing themselves to be defined by him.

As such, according to Beauvoir, the main project we must embark upon is a process of demystification, of both man and woman, through which each will begin to realize that they are committing an act of bad faith because they are not respecting the freedom of the other, so that they can begin a rebellion to liberate each other’s freedom.