R.I.P - Playing Catch-up

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The miniscule, but exclusive, clique of high-minded readers who have been visiting Rodak Riffs since its launching are familiar with my practice of noting the deaths of prominent writers. It was anomalous, then, that I let the recent suicide of postmodernist superstar, David Foster Wallace, go by without mention. I neither linked to the NY Times obit, nor to any of the several articles that were published about him in the aftermath of his death.

Partially, it was just too depressing: he was very young. Partially, I didn’t feel that I knew him well, having read only one book of his short stories, and having failed to tackle his magnum opus, the 1000-page novel Infinite Jest. which had been just too difficult, too long, and not of the right tenor to suck me in on the occasion of my having taken it out of the library a couple of years ago. I read the first 100 or so pages and gave up.

Since his death, however, I have read his story collection Oblivion, and have almost finished another: Girl With Curious Hair. The last piece in the latter is a very long story, or novella entitled “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” of which I am about half way through. It is very funny, in my opinion. The following excerpt is a good example of that humor.

Here we see a market research operative named Hogan in an airport in Illinois. He is there in connection with the arrival for a grand reunion of all the people who have ever appeared in a McDonald’s commercial. We overhear him speaking to two of the arriving former commercial actors. The subject of his discourse is his boss, J.D. Steelritter, the adman behind the McDonald’s commercials since day one:

“… This man is a genius. It’s an honor to even do market research for J.D. Steelritter. Even in this God-forsaken place.” He looks around as if for eavesdroppers. “This is the man, this is the legendary man, I’m sure you two know, who eventually got Arm and Hammer baking soda customers to start pouring the stuff down the drain. As…get this…drain freshener!” He licks a bit of sweetener off the heel of his hand. “Is that genius? Is that textbook planned-obsolescence, or what? And all off fear. J.D. eventually figured out that anybody who’d buy a box of baking soda out of fear of refrigerator odor wouldn’t hesitate one second to shell out for another box to prevent drain odor.” He laughs a marvelous laugh. “Drain odor? What’s that, for Christ’s sake? It’s just fear. Very careful research, fear, and the vision of a genius."

Prior to this scene, Hogan had been engaged in fear research in the airport in the conduct of which he had been handing out money in exchange for having his targets name their worst fear. Says Hogan:

“I ask the person who’s taking the money to name, right off the top of their head, what they fear most in the whole world. Their one great informing fear.”

The list of the fears named, as Hogan recites them, is darkly hilarious – my favorite one being:

“That I die and go to heaven and I get there and it stops being heaven because I’m there.”

I don’t know about you, but I can relate to that. I pray that the very talented, super-intelligent, and sadly funny, David Foster Wallace, who finally lost his battle with chronic depression, was not prophetic in writing those words.

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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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Reflections: Last Word on the Current Depression

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XXXXXXXXXXINOCULATED


XXXXXXXXXXAs a child I knew that I
XXXXXXXXXXwould never drive a Cadillac

XXXXXXXXXXI knew as a child
XXXXXXXXXXthat I would die

XXXXXXXXXXHaving never one-upped
XXXXXXXXXXJones like that.
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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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Rants: Alliterative Licks

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I can feel myself getting into a dust-up over Church tradition/apostolic succession over at Disputations. Rather than act the troll over there, I’ve decided to transplant my consternation over here, to my home turf.

What got me going was this following parenthetical barb, tossed off by Tom as a kicker to his post about a book under his review:

(Yes, yes, we can learn lots of valuable things from modern scholars. But somehow they never seem to want to teach us the value of our earliest traditions.)

My response to that, over there, was:

By "teach" I assume that you imply "affirm?"

And we’re off to the races. My question is: would it be preferable that biblical scholarship had consisted entirely of 1800 years of simply reiterating that Irenaeus (et al.) was 100% correct? If so, then better that men had stopped studying circa 200 A.D. and the university system had never been created.

Then Western man could have persevered in a perpetual peasantry of plough, plunder, plague and preprogrammed piety: perfect. Publish post.
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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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