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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