Reflections: More Gnostic Than Not

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Last night I finished my reading of Gnosticism in Modern Literature: A Study of the Selected Works of Camus, Sartre, Hesse, and Kafka by Josephine Donovan. I was led to this book, which was originally a Ph.D. thesis, by my rekindled interest in Gnosticism, about which I have been posting for some time now.


The portion of the selected bibliography of Donovan’s text devoted to readings on “Ancient Gnosticism” included a reference to Primitive Christianity, in its Contemporary Setting by Rudolf Bultmann. This sounded interesting. The title also suggested that it might well have resonance with The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, through which I have been making a laborious, but entertaining, trek for several weeks now. So I borrowed it from the library and have started reading it.

What follows here will not be a rigorous attempt to state and prove any kind of formal thesis. As is often the case when I post on large topics, it will merely point out some ideas of interest to me; ideas that (to me) seem to connect. I will be making no strenuous attempt to convince you, dear reader, to make those same connections. (I expect to be all over the ballpark with it.) But I do hope to interest you in the ideas embedded in what I’ve selected to write about.

Finally, I should point out that what prompted me to post just this, just now, was a piece that I read last night on the blog Vox Nova, with which I (in part) disagreed: i.e., I do not think that a “collective exorcism” is either desirable, or possible. I have expressed that opinion in more detail there; but as of this writing, my comment has yet to be approved and published.

So, to begin with an excerpt from Bultmann:

“The Divine Covenant”

God, according to the traditional view, exercises his power on behalf of Israel: for the prophets he can also exercise his power against Israel, and owing to the people’s wickedness will actually do so. Logically, this means the end of national religion. The more the prophets emphasize ethical obedience as opposed to the performance of the cultus as the sine qua non for the maintenance of the covenant, the more they abandon the old naïve sense of the latter. If the covenant depends primarily on loyalty to history, its maintenance is bound to be always in doubt. Thus, in the last resort, the past poses a question to the nation: the covenant can never be fully realized until the future. It can never have been concluded definitively in the past, nor can its permanence be secured by the performance of the cultus. If, as the naïve view supposed, the security of the individual rests on his membership of the elect nation, then conversely, according to the prophetic view, the election of the people depends on the individual’s obedience to the demands of God. And the less that is the case in the empirical course of history, the more the covenant develops into an eschatological concept. In other words, the covenant is not capable of realization in actual history: its realization is only conceivable in some mythical future of redemption.

Bultmann then goes on to quote Jeremiah. Part of the chosen selection reads:

After those days, saith the Lord,
I will put my law in their inward parts,
and write it in their hearts;
and will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor,
and every man his brother, saying,
Know the Lord:
for they shall all know me…

To my understanding, then, redemption and the possibility of salvation, comes of what the existentialist would call “authenticity” -- living truly according to one’s personal essence, rather than according to the prevailing “herd mentality.” That essence is the “law” that God has written on each man’s heart. If the man cannot read his own heart, he cannot live authentically. The world, the collective -- with all of its temptations and distractions -- blocks the individual from the kind of soul-searching necessary to achieve authenticity (or to be in compliance with God’s will, if looked at theistically.)

It is the thesis of Josephine Donovan that, as depicted in such classics of modern literature as Camus’ The Stranger, Sartre’s Nausea, and Hesse’s Demian and Steppenwolf, this achievement of authenticity comes to the “existential hero” in a flash of enlightenment, and that this sudden influx of reality is equivalent to the arrival of the “gnosis.” The characters of Kafka, by contrast, desperately seek the saving knowledge, but never reach their goal.

Gnosticism recognizes a category of individual known as the hylici. I understand these individuals to be characterized by Donovan as the equivalent of Heidegger’s das man. It occurs to me that this idea could also serve to support the Calvinist idea of the reprobate in the doctrine of predestination. Consider these excepts from the conclusion of Donovan’s text:

By means of the redemptive gnosis…the stranger learns that there is a truth beyond the lie of their world-order. It is a truth intuited within the Self. […]


We also found that in general the protagonists experience a fall into awareness of their alienation…[…]

For oneself then liberation from the propaganda and untruths of the crowd comes in the form of the saving knowledge. … In Existentialist terminology “evil” means that which tends to make a person machine-like; the hylici are the unenlightened robots who function like machines; the archons are the bureaucrats who run the machinery. The “way out” is a knowledge of one’s own authentic identity, one’s own divine self. To know this self is to liberate one’s spirit from the tyranny of objectification. […]

The one sure value in this life is that of the inner truth, the truth of being. Both the Gnostics and the Existentialists hold this as the one precious possession worth defending. To the moderns authenticity has achieved a rank once reserved for saintliness. [emphasis added by me]

As a biographical note, I began my philosophical quest for truth with my discovery of the French existentialists, when I was still in high school. It became immediately clear to me (as a baptized and confirmed Protestant Christian) that, despite the fact that a personal God had no place in Existentialist philosophy, the teachings of Jesus, centered on the individual as they clearly are, are fundamentally existentialist in nature. My subsequent discovery of Kierkegaard (and later other Christian existentialists) convinced me that my initial insight had merit.

While Existentialism posits an evil world into which man is “thrown” as an alienated “stranger,” it makes no attempt to reconcile this condition with a benevolent God. Christianity places the blame for evil on man himself, for having disobeyed that God. Neither of these approaches to the philosophical Problem of Evil is intellectually satisfying. Gnosticism, by relinquishing strict monotheism, does provide an approach to a reconciliation of evil with a good God which at least make sense. It has been gratifying to recently have come across both Josephine Donovan’s interesting thesis and Shlomo Giora Shoham’s indispensable The Bridge to Nothingness, each of which explores these issues and connections in satisfying depth. On the “religion” line of my Facebook profile, I have entered “More Gnostic than not.” I guess you can see why that is?
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Update: I can now report that the comment on Vox Nova referred to above has been published.
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Readings: Before You Take Those Advil

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We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy. ~ William Butler Yeats


Another passage from The Bridge to Nothingness by S. G. Shoham. This one deals with the positive aspects of pain:

Physical pain is the tool of the demiurgos* for guarding his “property” -- the body. Without the pain incidental to bodily injury, disease, and death, most human beings and many other creatures would probably take their own lives. The demiurgos thus controls built-in safety mechanisms to keep the inmates -- exiled particles of divinity -- incarcerated in their temporal prison, i.e. the body. Without pain souls would easily destroy their prison body and revert back to their origin in the Godhead. The demiurgal ananke, the coercive cosmic forces, as well as evolution, also avail themselves of pain in order to implement their aims. If one exceeds one’s moira, one’s fate in life, the Furies strike with a vengeance in order to push the deviants back into line. Those who do not fit the designs of evolution are wiped painfully yet unceremoniously out of history. Suffering and history are true phenomena, yet pain is also instrumental in jostling man out of his complacency in his demiurgal body and his fear of eternity (death). Man’s revolt against his demiurgal ananke and moira is thus prompted by pain and some suffering (though not too much) is also necessary for revelation and creativity.
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*Demiurgos: The Gnostic evil entity, which by the Gnostic participant**bias is responsible for the creation of the world judged vile by the Gnostics***.

**Participation: The identification of ego with a person (persons), an object or a symbolic construct outside himself, and his striving to lose his separate identity by fusion with this other object or symbol.

***Gnosis: The dualistic creeds developed in the Middle East before and concomitant with Christianity, according to which Good and Evil have independent existence.
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Readings: The Quest for Authentic Existence

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This should hold any readers that I still have for awhile. It is several pages of excerpts that I typed out this morning from one of the books on my current early-morning reading list. The excerpts serve--for me anyway--to outline Shoham's central thesis pretty well. His study encorporates philosophy, religion, psychology, and art, to synthesize epistemology, existentialism, and several varieties of gnosticism--a mix that appeals to me, big-time. I offer the excerpts without commentary. I apologize up front for the many typos readers will probably encounter. [The page numbers refer to the Associated University Presses 1994 edition]

Excerpts from the “Introduction” of The Bridge to Nothingness by Shlomo Giora Shoham

[pp.14-15]  In the first phase of separation, man is ejected from the cozy womb and cruelly exposed to the elements in a manner that was registered mythoempirically by the Kabalist catastrophe of the breaking of the vessels. However, before birth, there is pregnancy and the formation of the human fetus. This is depicted mythoempirically by the Kabalist dynamic of Tzimtzum—“contraction.”  Rabbi Haim Vital, the foremost disciple of Rabbi Isaac Luria and chief exponent of Lurianic Kabala, describes the process of Tzimtzum as follows:  “and when He (Infinity which is tantamount to Emanating Divinity) contracted Himself. A space all around was formed… After this contraction a space was, (thus), formed for emanant creatures to be created… And a line like a thin pipe extended from Infinity to create the worlds… And the pipe-line created a round form…linked to to emanatory (Infinity) by the pipe-line only…and the line is thin so that it emanates light (livelihood) by measure and ration as needed by the emanant.”  This seems to be a plastic, mythoempirical depiction of the formation of the fetus within the round womb fed according to its needs by the umbilical cord stemming from an unknown (to the fetus) emanatory in the away and beyond, perceived by the nascent awareness of the fetus and later projected onto mythology as infinity.

[p.17]  Psychologically, the pantheistic neonate learns by deprivational interaction with surrounding objects and life forms and especially with the mother or her surrogate who cannot fulfill all his wishes immediately and automatically as in the womb; the neonate is not with everything but against everything. The moment he becomes embodied in the scar tissue of the delimiting, individual “ego boundary,” pantheistic, participant togetherness gives way to the loneliness and encapsulated existence of the human individualized separtum. This separation, which is the existential coagulation of the individual self, is also perceived by the organism as a catastrophe and is projected onto mythology as the ejection from paradise following Original Sin, which according to the Kabala disrupted the equilibrium of all the worlds both divine and temporal.” [the “sin” here is the mutual sexual pleasure of the neonate and mother in nursing]

[p.26]  The separant vector generates life. It propels us out of the womb and induces us to develop, grow, and reproduce. It also guards against the participant vector’s wish to revert back to the unity of nonbeing. To this end, the separant vector implants in us the search for diversity and the rejection of similarity, whereas the participant vector seeks the togetherness of the family, membership in reference groups, the immersion in the engulfing cosiness of the camaraderie of “the boys in the back room,” the rotary club, the “people like us,” the party, the nation, the church. Per contra, the separant vector programs life forms to be attracted to nonlikes and to reject or be in conflict with likes. The separant vector thus places numerous obstacles and barriers against likeness, similarity, and uniformity; because these are intermediate steps towards the forbidden (from the separant vector’s point of view) partaking in the nonlife, nongrowth, and nonbeing of unity. We seem to be barred from communicating with the objects “out there” as well as from communicating with other people. The separant vector seem to program man to grow and become progressively separate, distinct, and unattached to surrounding objects and life forms. This is projected onto transcendence as the injunction of Genesis and similar myths in other creeds against epistemological “knowledge” (i.e., participant communication).  Indeed for the participant, the Ding An-Sich (the thing in itself) is nothingness and the injunction against knowledge in the Tantalic context is the proscription of partaking in the nonbeing of God and thus becoming like God. The prohibition of knowledge by the theistic God of Genesis may have both a separant and participant application.

[pp. 30-31]   From God's vantage point, man and creation are part of him and he experiences the world through them in infinite kaleidescopic ways; but man feels cut off, lonely, and free. So whatever the 'truth' behind his self-consciousness, it is less important than his own self-definition. If he defines himself as free of transcendence, free he is. This stems from W. I. Thomas's very useful basic theorum of the sciences of man, namely, that if man defines a given situation as real it becomes real in its consequences. Thus man's freedom is even independent of God's views about it. This has a very ingenious mythoempirical anchor in the Kabala. Keter, crown, is the first rung, sometimes regarded as part of infinity and thus not counted in the ten emanated rungs. Da'at, knowledge, is added in its stead as the third rung. However, if Keter is counted in the ten emanated rungs, Da'at is omitted. Hence, if God is present in creation, independent, separate self-consciousness is impossible, because consciousness is one and it belongs to God. However, if God is not within creation then the self-conscious freedom of the exiled individuals is feasible. The feeling of independence of the individual separata enables them to relay their experiences in an authentic context to their maker, precisely because they are not aware of their bondage. Man should not feel guilty about his freedom. He was created for purposes known to God but not to him. For the very same purposes, he was also cut off from his sense of partaking in the totality of unity and each of us became an individual separatum  through Original Sin. Hence, this sin was committed by God and not by man, who is a tool in a divine plan unknown to him. Thus, man's independence being instrumental to God, cannot and should not induce human guilt. This is the ideological essence of man's metaphysical rebellion.

[p. 43]  The participation with one’s surroundings is problematic, because ego’s interaction with objects and life forms is mostly conflictual and always dialectical. The I-it, non-dialogical relationship with other people is petrifying, and the I-thou dialogue borders, according to Buber, on the miraculous. A creative relationship with an object may effect extasis, in the Greek sense, of the creator’s spirit from time and space, and lend him a feeling of union with the object. However, this feeling is completely within the psyche of ego and regardless of his initial creative quests, they are bound to be different dialectically in the synthetic outcome. This is the fate of all Sisyphean endeavors directed towards the outside.

            The “generalized other,” the abstracted normative collectivity of other people, is oppressive, controlling, and depressing both from without and from within. Through authentic art the collectivity may become an audience and then its petrifying I-it attributes may change into a receptive I-thou, attuned for a while to a Paganini piercing souls with his violin, a van Gogh reaching his viewers through his savage yet structured colors on his canvas, and a Jacques Brel conveying his desperate sincerity to the whole nervous system of his listeners.

[…]

            As we ever crave for what we are not and for what we do not have, we are living in inauthentic time. The separant vector aims for the future and the participant vector longs for the past. When dominated by these two vectors, man does not exist in the present and his time is therefore a nonentity, false and inauthentic. If the quests and longings inherent in his core personality vectors cannot be fulfilled, there is an inevitable and constant rift between man’s aspirations and expectations, and his perceived reality. Hence man is ever confronted with the absurd.  This dual impasse of inauthenticity and the absurd makes the myths of Sisyphus and Tantalus so central to the human condition that they can rightly be considered metamyths. The initial inauthenticity of man’s existence in the world and his inevitable experience of the absurd, constitute man’s existential impasse, from which creativity and revelation are able to extricate him. Creativity thus constitutes the modus vivendi of Sisyphus with his stone burden, and revelation is the means by which Tantalus can go on living within his predicament. Man thus starts as an initial failure, yet through his ability to sublimate his unrealized quests into creativity and revelation, he is able to transform his initial impasse into authentic experience and existence. It seems that our programmer, whoever or whatever it is—God, chance, evolution, or the devil, programmed us to yearn to achieve goals that can never be achieved, to yearn to be different than we are at a given time and place, and not to cherish the present but to long either for earlier developmental phases and for nonbeing in the past or for the away and beyond in the future. Our nonrealizable, core personality quests control us the way the lure in front of the racing bitch controls the dog races. Our programmer intends, apparently, to see how our Sisyphean quests that cannot be fulfilled and our impossible Tantalic longings can be sublimated dialectically into creativity and revelation. …Both creativity and revelation are dynamic processes fueled by Sisyphean aims and Tantalic longings that would never be fulfilled. If they are, our yearnings are extinguished, and our potential for authentic being through creativity and revelation die with them.  …Revelation is not transferable, but through creativity, the revelatory insight of the creator becomes communicable.

[p. 48]  Authentic revelation should aim at the participant exposure of man to God, which constitutes a Tikkun, a mending of the blemished God and of the individual who partakes him. …Creativity should also be authentic in the sense that it should not be conducted in order to please a given audience or clique or for financial gain. It should be carried out in desperation, with one becoming immersed totally in one’s creativity. Marcel Azzola, Jacques Brel’s accordianist, described the performance of his late master thus: “…I have rarely seen such sincerity. With him one is obliged to give oneself completely. He committed suicide with each song.”

[pp. 50-51]  As neither the goals of the Sisyphean or Tantalic core vectors can be achieved, the only epistemic reality in existence is the dialectic interaction between the Sisyphean, nonrealizable, separant quests and the Tantalic, equally impossible, participant longing. Because the Sisyphean quests face the future and the Tantalic longing aims at the past, man is in an absurd impasse, without a present and within inauthentic time. Creativity and revelation are therefore meant to extricate man from his absurd and inauthentic impasse. Those who cannot be creative and revelatory also try to escape their absurd and oppressive reality by entertainment, fantasy, for daydreaming, which feed passively, with or without the aid of alcohol or drugs, on their pent-up yearnings. The dialectics of our yearning thus provide the fuel and energy with which ego can emerge from its inauthentic slumber and interact creatively or in a revelatory manner with objective and human surroundings. Moreover, as the dialectics between the Sisyphean quests and Tantalic longings constitute the epistemic processes underlying apparent reality, they are the prime movers of life and creation. Without the dialectic of yearning, both ego and its surroundings are dead and nonexistent.

            The “inspiration” for creativity and the sudden “enlightenment” attendant upon the experience of revelation are the conscious and cognitive awareness of the otherwise clandestine dialectics of yearnings.

[p. 53]  The Sisyphean component of the prime mover, emerging from the dialectical quests, tried to achieve a rapport, a Tikkun, or, a system-in-balance with its surroundings through creativity; whereas the Tantalic component tries to achieve a Tikkun with transcendence by revelation. Hence, the synthetic interplay of the dialectical quest necessitates both a Tantalic participant longing for revelation and a Sisyphean quest for creativity.

[pp. 65-66]  Both man and God are ever longing and striving, and it is precisely this characteristic that makes them ever revelatory and creative. Indeed, Dante sends the souls of those whose wishes came true and whose longings were fulfilled to eternal damnation in hell. The less-than-perfect God with his capacity to long for and strive, which are the prime movers of life, creativity, and revelation (these are similar to Bergson’s “creative evolution”), is perfect precisely because of his imperfection. This is brought to life in Saint Anselm’s “proof” for the existence of God but in an inverse manner: the imperfection of our transcendence lends it more perfection than if it was perfect. Perfection in God sterilizes him into nonbeing, whereas non-perfection gives him the evolving perfectibility of longing, together with his junior partners—man and other life forms—for revelation and of striving for creativity, which are the essences of authentic existence.

[p. 69]  Inclusion as the unifying mechanism of existence ordains that man can never achieve his Sisyphean quests and Tantalic longings but only a synthesis between them that then serves as a thesis for another dialectical zigzag ad infinitum.  Consequently, man’s fate is to ever seek something and always attain something else. …We can therefore never achieve whatever our aims might be because dialectics will lead us somewhere else. Hence, authentic rebellion concentrates on processes of creativity and revelation, because their goals are unattainable to begin with and because whatever aim we may wish to attain, dialectics will move us to another synthetic goal.

[…]

…If one exceeds the middle course and one’s moira (i.e. one’s lot in life), one commits the capital sin of hubris…

[p. 72]  As Sisyphus has to have his stone in order to be creative, so ego has to feel apart and separate from transcendence for the interactive experience of creativity or, for that matter, for all experience except for revelation, to take place. Hence, ego is a partner of transcendence in creativity, and through the metaphysical programming of Sisyphus, transcendence vicariously experiences ego’s triumphs and disasters.

[p. 76]  The catastrophe of the breaking of the vessels bound both God and man in an endless cycle of dialectics of creation and perdition. The Original Sin bound God and man within the fetters of space and time, but established man as a unique and ontologically separate individual, capable of independent volition. The sacrifice, of Isaac and Jesus bound man normatively to God, but enabled man to judge God morally for having exploited him for his own purposes, unknown to man.

[p. 79]  One awareness permeates both God and all his creatures including man. Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud deprived man of his primacy among creatures, and modern physics deprived the physical world of any purpose, seeing it as particles moving around like drunken sailors without any goal or motivation. With the help of the teleological models of the Kabala one may envisage a purpose in both a blemished God and his erratic mortal partners. Their dialectical interaction is all there is, but in it they are free both to face their common predicament and, perchance, to experience grace.

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Quote du Jour: All and Everything

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[Solovyov's] goal was the full reconciliation of the divine and the human--or spirit and matter, male and female--not through a motley, syncretic accumulation of beliefs or a crude dualism that privileged either the material world or the world of spirits, but through a triadic and ultimately mystical operation of faith. Sophia provided him with the third element to effect this interpenetration.
xxxx~ Divine Sophia - the Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
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Readings: Out of the Box

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To wrap up the Hans Jonas/Gnostic posts, there are these two final excerpts; the first is Jonas’ restatement of a Gnostic “formula” for salvation, as found in an apocryphal Christian Gnostic scripture from Nag Hammadi, entitled The Gospel of Truth:

The Gospel of Truth: the Formula

“Since ‘Oblivion’ came into being because they did not know the Father, therefore if they come to know the Father, ‘Oblivion’ becomes, at that very instant, non-existent.” Of this bald proposition it is then emphatically asserted that it represents the gist of the revelation of truth, the formulation as it were of its logic: “That, then, is the Gospel of Him whom they seek, which Jesus the Christ revealed to the Perfect, thanks to the mercies of the Father, as a hidden mystery.”

The second is a restatement of the formula from The Gospel of Truth as a philosophical “equation”:

The Pneumatic Equation

That the human-individual event of pneumatic knowledge is the inverse equivalent of the pre-cosmic universal event of divine ignorance, and in its redeeming effect of the same ontological order; and that thus the actualization of knowledge in the person is at the same time an act in the general ground of being. The “formula” is precisely a shorthand expression of that pneumatic equation—which thus is the Gospel of Truth. [emphasis added]

Kind of “existential,” isn’t it? As pessimistic as is the dualistic Gnostic understanding of the cosmos, at least it offers the human being who finds himself exiled in the material world a little help from Beyond—unlike, say, French Existentialism, which offers Man only his acceptance of the fate of Sisyphus as a remedy for the absurdity of existence—and his freedom as a condemnation, rather than as a blessing. At bottom, Gnosticism was an attempt to provide a detailed solution to the Problem of Evil, rather than just labeling it a “mystery” and passing the plate.
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Readings: Spooky Stuff

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In continuing his explication of the Gnostic interpretation of heimarmene, Hans Jonas provides us with the following excerpt from the Corpus Hermeticum:

[I]t is the natural condition of man to be a prey of the alien forces which are yet so much of himself, and it requires the miraculous supervening of gnosis from beyond to empower the imprisoned pneuma [spirit] to come into its own. “Those who are enlightened in their spiritual part by a ray from the divine light—and they are few—from these the demons desist…all the others are driven and carried along in their souls and their bodies by the demons, loving and cherishing their works…All this terrestrial rule the demons exercise through the organs of our bodies, and this rule Hermes calls “heimarmene” (Corpus Hermeticum)

Jonas then comments:

Thus inner-worldly existence is essentially a state of being possessed by the world, in the literal, i.e., demonological, sense of the term.

I guess that depending on how one chooses to interpret the word "demon," one could derive either St. Paul's "powers and principalities," or the myriad lusts and urges teeming around in Freud's Id, or even, maybe, whatever the hell it is that Tom Cruise was bedeviled by before he graduated to "Clear," leaving him free to bounce unashamedly on Oprah's couch.
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Readings: In But Not Of

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Along with the excerpts from Paula Fredriksen with reference to John’s gospel cited in my previous post, Hans Jonas illuminates additional Gnostic parallels to scriptural Christianity here:

An essential mental reservation qualifies participation in the things of this world, and even one’s own person as involved with those things is viewed from the distance of the beyond. This is the common spirit of the new transcendental religion, not confined to Gnosticism in particular. We remind the reader of St. Paul’s saying:

But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it; for the fashion of this world passeth away. (I Cor. 7:29-31)

The world and one’s belonging to it are not to be taken seriously. … [A]s a dimension of existence [gnostic dualism] does not offer occasion to the perfectibility of man. The least, then, that the acosmic attitude must cause in the relation to inner-worldly existence is the mental reservation of the “as-though-not.”

To the extent possible, we are to be in the world without being of the world. Is this not are the very core of St. Paul’s message?
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Readings: What Comes Down Must Go Up

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In this installment on the speculations of Hans Jonas on Gnosticism, we see him again contrasting the prevailing Greek philosophical orthodoxy with the upstart Gnostic conception of man’s place and rôle in existence:

Virtue in the Greek sense (arête) is the actualization in the mode of excellence of the several faculties of the soul for dealing with the world. …In other words, it is up to man to transform his inchoately given nature into his true nature, for in his case alone nature does not automatically realize itself.
[…]
It is obvious that Gnosticism had no room for this conception of human virtue. “Looking towards God” has for it an entirely different meaning from the one it had for the Greek philosophers. There it meant granting the rights of all things as graded expressions of the divine within the encompassing divinity of the unverse. The self-elevation in the scale of being through wisdom and virtue implies no denial of the levels surpassed. To the Gnostics, “looking towards God” means just such a denial: it is a jumping across all intervening realities, which for this direct relationship are nothing but fetters and obstacles, or distracting temptations, or at best irrelevant. The sum of these intervening realities is the world, including the social world.

It is apparent that the “self-elevation” of which Jonas writes posits the possibility for Gnostic transcendence as both immediately available and vertical in orientation. Compare this to these excerpts from Paula Fredriksen’s discussion of the canonical Gospel of John which have been sitting for weeks on my desktop, awaiting an apt moment for their presentation:

John’s Jesus is not the wandering charismatic Galilean who appears in the synoptics, but an enigmatic visitor from the cosmos above this cosmos, the preexistent, supremely divine Son (e.g. 1:1-4; 8:23, 42, 58; 17:5; 20:28). As he travels repeatedly between Jerusalem and the Galilee, this Jesus encounters, not fellow Jews, but sons of darkness, denizens of the lower cosmos who can never receive the word of God (8:23, 43-47; 10:25;12:34; cf. 15:19-22). To those divinely chosen to receive it, Jesus brings the message of eternal life, of the glory of the Son and the Father, pronounced in the elliptical idiom of this gospel as much by Jesus’ wondrous signs as by his own mysterious speech (e.g., 3:15, 36; 4:14; 5:24; 6:35-53; 11:1-4). The topic of his address is, most frequently, himself. An image of Jesus thus does not emerge from John’s gospel: it dominates his entire presentation.
[…]
Thus, through his Christology, John rotates the axis of Christian tradition ninety degrees, away from the historical, horizontal poles of Past/Future to the spiritualizing, vertical poles of Below/Above.

It would seem that despite their outsider status in the ancient world, and the suppression by the soi-disant orthodox establishment of both their sects and their texts, the Gnostics could lay claim to a legitimate spiritual connection to at least some of the extra-synoptic traditions that can be traced back all the way to the Christ himself.
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Readings: Man, oh Man

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As the next excerpt that I had lined up from the Jonas book on the Gnostics is both rather long and, I think, self-explanatory, I will just go ahead and present it without superfluous prefatory comment:

Plotinus…bears witness to the resistance which Greek piety offered to this detraction of the stellar world…: [e.g.] “If men are superior to other living creatures, how much more superior are they (the spheres), which are in the All not for tyrannical rule but to confer on it order and harmony... .”

Obviously Plotinus’ argument is conclusive only on the common Greek assumption (tacitly presupposed by him) of the general homogeneity of all cosmic existence, which permits comparison between all parts by a uniform standard of evaluation. The standard is that of “cosmos,” i.e., order itself, and by this standard man indeed must rank far below the stars, which achieve undeviatingly and for the whole what man may at best achieve passingly and on his small scale, namely, ordered activity. The argument as to worth is hardly convincing to us. How much farther Plotinus as the representative of the classical mind is here from our own position than the Gnostics are with all their mythological fancy, the following quotation will make evident.

Even the basest men they [the Gnostics] deem worthy to be called brothers, while with frenzied mouth they declare the sun, the stars in the heavens, and even the world-soul, unworthy to be called by them brothers. Those who are base have indeed no right to claim that kinship, but those who have become good [have acquired the right].

Here the two camps confront each other with inimitable clearness. Plotinus maintains the unity of all being in the universe, with no essential separation of the human and the non-human realm. …Gnosticism, on the contrary, removes man, in virtue of his essential belonging to another realm, from all sameness with the world, which is now nothing but bare “world,” and confronts him with its totality as the absolutely different.

What I think has been said here is that there was something distinctly modern about the Gnostics' rejection of the Greek cosmic model. To a certain extent, we are all Gnostics now.
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Readings: Just Like the Weather

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In Part Two of our consideration of things Gnostic, we must contemplate the development that there came to be those for whom the Greek cosmic model did not adequately address the "problem of evil": if the universe was the creation of a perfect and benevolent God, why was our world such a terrifying mess? To generally summarize the central tenet of the several Gnostic philosophies, we can say that these disgruntled participants in the terrestrial drama found the best solution to the quandry to be the simplest one: they concluded that the world had been a mistake from the git-go, created by an imperfect and ignorant "Demiurge," who believed himself to be the supreme God, but didn't even come close. The beautiful harmony of the spheres experienced by the Greeks was perceived to be an oppressive set of immutable and tyrannical laws, presided over by the myriad "powers and principalities" with all the acumen of teams of Wall Street investment bankers being prodded and goosed along by the Invisible Hand. The cosmos, including the microcosmic human body and psyche, was a demon-ridden nightmare. The argument of the Gnostics was that Everybody's complaining about the heimarmene, but nobody's doing anything about it:

We can imagine with what feelings gnostic men must have looked up to the starry sky. How evil its brilliance must have looked to them, how alarming its vastness and the rigid immutability of its courses, how cruel its muteness! The music of the spheres was no longer heard, and the admiration for the perfect spherical form gave place to the terror of so much perfection directed at the enslavement of man. The pious wonderment with which earlier man had looked up to the higher regions of the universe became a feeling of oppression by the iron vault which keeps man exiled from his home beyond. But it is the “beyond” which really qualifies the new conception of the physical universe and of man’s position in it. Without it, we should have nothing but a hopeless worldly pessimism. Its transcending presence limits the inclusiveness of the cosmos to the status of only a part of reality, and thus of something from which there is an escape. …The total gnostic view is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but eschatological: if the world is bad, there is the goodness of the outer-worldly God; if the world is a prison, there is an alternative to it; if man is a prisoner of the world, there is a salvation from it and a power that saves. It is in this eschatological tension, in the polarity of world and God, that the gnostic cosmos assumes its religious quality.
~ Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion

Man, in this world, was a resident alien: lost in Space/Time. To quote a contemporary Gnostic bard: We are spirits in the material world.
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Readings: What Makes the World Go 'Round?

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I don’t know how the rest of you are faring in this economic debacle, but the atmosphere in my neck of the woods has been pretty much uniformly stressful. We here in Dogpatch, USA are cursed with living in interesting times because the world is too much with us. And since I have previously been accused by various cyber-Catholics of being a world-hating Gnostic—i.e., as showing either Marcionite or Manichean tendencies—I thought that I’d post some gleanings from my recent readings on the subject of Gnosticism, rather than dwelling on bale-outs and retention bonuses and partisan political horseshit.

The book I’ve been reading is The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas. As its subtitle—The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity—would indicate, it contrasts the concept of an immanent deity to the concept of an utterly transcendent deity. This distinction results, in the case of the latter, in a dualistic view of the cosmos and man’s place in it: the world is bad; matter is bad; the only thing of importance is escaping from this fallen world of slavery to fate and existential alienation and returning to our true home, with God.

My next few posts will consist largely of excerpts from Jonas’ book, which highlight the primary points of antagonism between classical Greek philosophy/orthodox Christianity on the one hand, and the more “Eastern” (Syrian- and Persian-rooted) concepts which gave rise to Gnosticism, on the other.

To kick things off, here is Jonas on the fundamental Greek attitude toward life in the cosmos:

The Pythagoreans had found in the astral order the proportions of the concordant musical scale, and accordingly had called this system of the spheres in operation a harmonia, that is, the fitting together of many into a unified whole. Thereby they created the most enchanting symbol of Greek cosmic piety: “harmony,” issuing in the inaudible “music of the spheres,” is the idealizing expression for the same fact of irrefragable order that astrology stresses less optimistically in its own context. Stoic philosophy strove to integrate the idea of destiny as propounded by contemporary astrology with the Greek concept of harmony: heimarmene to the Stoics is the practical aspect of the harmony, i.e., its action as it affects terrestrial conditions and the short-lived beings here. And since the stellar movements are actuated by the cosmic logos and this logos functions in the world-process as providence (pronoia), it follows that in this wholly monistic system heimarmene itself is pronoia, that is, fate and divine providence are the same. The understanding of and willing consent to this fate thus interpreted as the reason of the whole distinguishes the wise man, who bears adversity in his individual destiny as the price paid by the part for the harmony of the whole.

If heimarmene is truly pronoia, is that a good thing? If so, the above all sounds not too shabby, don’t you think?
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