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The Creeds are photos everyone agreed on. They are minimal and crisply focused, not fancied-up. They are not a substitute for personal experience, but a useful guide for comparison, for discernment. If someone's snap shows King Kong climbing up the Tower, we can say, "Hey, you're off base there. Something's messing with your head." If Kong is wearing a lei and a paper party hat we might say, "Aw, now you're just making stuff up."
That's what early Christians said to the Gnostics. The problem wasn't the insistence that we can directly experience God. It was that the Gnostics' schemes of how to do this were so wacky. Preposterous stories about creation, angels, demons, and spiritual hierarchies multiplied like mushrooms. (Even some Christians, like Origen and Clement of Alexandria, dabbled in these fields.) The version attributed to Valentinus, the best-known Gnostic, is typical. Valentinus supposedly taught a hierarchy of spiritual beings called "aeons." One of the lowest aeons, Sophia, fell and gave birth to the Demiurge, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. This evil Demiurge created the visible world, which was a bad thing, because now we pure spirits are all tangled up in fleshy bodies. Christ was an aeon who took possession of the body of the human Jesus, and came to free us from the prison of materiality.
"Us," by the way, didn't mean everybody. Not all people have a divine spark within, just intellectuals; "gnosis," by definition, concerns what you know. Some few who are able to grasp these insights could be initiated into deeper mysteries. Ordinary Christians, who lacked sufficient brainpower, could only attain the Demiurge's middle realm. Everyone else was doomed. Under Gnosticism, there was no hope of salvation for most of the human race.
Now you can begin to see what the early Christians found heretical. Gnosticism rejected the body and saw it as a prison for the soul; Christianity insisted that God infuses all creation and that even the human body can be a vessel of holiness, a "temple of the Holy Spirit." Gnosticism rejected the Hebrew Scriptures and portrayed the God of the Jews as an evil spirit; Christianity looked on Judaism as a mother. Gnosticism was élitist; Christianity was egalitarian, preferring "neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free." Finally, Gnosticism was just too complicated. Christianity maintained the simple invitation of the One who said, "Let the little children come unto me." Full-blown science-fiction Gnosticism died under its own weight.
Pagels does not endorse this aspect of Gnosticism. But the Gnostics would not endorse her version either. They did not think of these elaborate schemes as mythopoeic (which is how Neo-Gnostics describe them), but as factual. Your salvation depended on getting it right, and Gnostics argued with each other much as theologians do today. Some claimed that the body was so evil you had to give up sex; others said the body was so illusory that it didn't matter what you did with it. A well-meaning postmodernist who murmured "You're both right" would be reviled for not grasping what's at stake.
Neo-Gnostics share our culture's penchant for pick-and-choose religion, and in this case that's better than inhaling the original whole. But every pick-and-choose religion has this limitation: the follower can never grow any larger than his own preconceptions. He has established himself a priori as the ultimate authority, and his thoughts will never be larger than his hat size. Two heads, or a billion, are better than one. This is the reason for community. We might think there are two ways of determining truth, either top-down authority, or every-man-for-himself. But there is an alternative: consensus. We see it from the start of Christian History, in the discussions of Acts 15; we see it in St. Vincent of Lerins' handy rule that we trust "what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all." A modest core of creeds and Scriptures tells us all we require, while a generous circle of liturgies, devotional writings, and commentaries casts additional light.
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