The Gnostic Myth
Of course one question I did not address in my
previous piece was who the audience for the human drama could be. I recall some Stoic
or other (I can’t remember who) who said that the sufferings of the just were a
spectacle for the gods. We might, however, ask whether they are really so
satisfying to the harassed and abused actors. If theodicy works, then I suppose
Hamlet exists for the sake of Hamlet
as he is who he is and realizes whatever value he realizes through playing his
part in the story. Plus, there is no scenario in which I can realize any end or
good for myself without partaking in the drama of the world. I need a story of
some sort to be in and some of those stories will be set in medieval Denmark.
There are of course other options. One of those options is the Gnostic myth.
This is the myth according to which the actors are trapped in a play they did
not write. Moreover, the script is bad and the direction inept. The actor, the
individual, is trapped in someone else’s bad drama and really, REALLY needs to
get out. As far as I can tell Christians originated this myth though the point
is contested. Of course, other Christians soon ran the Gnostics out of their
churches for they had an incompatible myth: that of the incarnation of God. I
won’t go over this history here as it would take too long. Suffice it to say
that Christianity begins as a myth of world alienation. The Gnostics take the
idea of world alienation as far as it can intelligibly go (and indeed beyond).
They do so taking cues from certain phrases and passages in the New Testament
that speak of the ‘world’ as a darkness (in which the divine light has shined)
which is ruled by adverse demonic powers. The mainline church, though, eventually took its
stand on the solid realities of time, space and matter while the Gnostics spun
off into ever more elaborate mythologizing.
This, though, has
not been the last word on the matter for if the Gnostic churches have
disappeared the Gnostic myth has not.[1]
As one of the basic mythic options I don’t suppose it CAN disappear. When I was
teenager nobody cared what I read or whether it was 'age appropriate'. For this reason, I could borrow the Nag Hammadi Library in English and
puzzle my way through it[2].
It contained texts with esoteric sounding titles like Trimorphic Protonoia, The
Hypostasis of the Archons, and Thunder:
Perfect Mind. If the secret of the universe was to be found anywhere surely
it was in books with titles like these! Of course these texts were English
translations of Coptic translations of Greek texts which may well have garbled
the original. Moreover, they are physically damaged and full of gaps. My
puzzled mind, though, did manage to make out the basic point of these texts
though they often read like gibberish. No doubt this is because the basic myth
they contained is fairly simple: we are strangers in this world and belong to
another, better one. We live in a world to which our nature is not fitted and
must escape it for one in which we are free to be ourselves. This makes eminent
sense to a 17year old. Indeed, I might well have wondered why it took any
special gnosis to see something so glaringly obvious. In antiquity, of course,
this myth was more complex and developed than simple teen angst and alienation.
For the Christian we are inhabitants of the world and the world does not know
God. This is what John tells us. In
this original context ‘the world’ refers to those powers and authorities that
oppress and inhibit human flourishing. These powers can be human or demonic or
even natural. Jesus comes to liberate us from subjection to these adverse
forces. Gnostics extend this notion: the powers that oppress us are not simply
parts or aspects of the world that are less than ideal. They ARE the world in
its cosmic totality. OUR oppressor is first and foremost the God of the law and
the creator of nature: moral and physical necessity. World alienation is total.
We do not belong in the created universe if we are children of the light
(though there are people who are not ‘special’ in this way and they are just
fine in this universe). As to where we
DO belong (if we are part of the chosen elite who contain the divine spark of
light) it is in the ‘pleroma’: an intelligible heaven of light containing
innumerable spirits or ‘aeons’ who have emanated from the mysterious, hidden
God who dwells in the original silence. This is the world with which our
spirits are consubstantial and in which we belong.
Authors as diverse
as Eric Voegelin and Harold Bloom have told us we are living in a Gnostic
moment though they hardly agree on whether and how that might be a good thing.
None of this means that Gnosticism exists now in the form of an elaborate and
elaborately mythologized spiritual hierarchy including archons, aeons,
demiurges and higher and lowers Sophias. Nor does it include magic formulae for
ascending past the archons on our way to the pleroma or the elaborate (and very
sophisticated) negative theology that guards the mystery of the godhead from a
prying discursive faculty. In his book The
New Science of Politics Voegelin tells us that the Gnostic myth is the
secret master narrative of western politics particularly in its revolutionary
form. HE thinks that is a bad, a very bad
thing but it seems that whatever you think of the rights or wrongs of the
matter he is not entirely incorrect. The notion that the given is that against
which pure freedom asserts itself against is at least one core modern notion.
In ancient Gnosticism this is figured
vertically: we turn against human society and tradition and against the
physical world itself and by negation ascend to the world above. In modernity
freedom is projected horizontally; as futurity. Instead of ascending to the
pleroma we project a utopia and destroy all the conditions that prevent its
realization. The Gnostic either thinks that the good cannot be realized in the
world of matter and necessity or cannot be realized in present social and
natural conditions without these being violently transformed and purged.[3]
The most literal
manifestation of this is the apocalyptic thinking of evangelical cults which
Bloom identified as Gnostic some time ago. They want God to burn nature but if
God won’t do it they will. Neo-liberals and other utopians have a similar
vision: if nature cannot sustain our aspiration for limitless innovation and
profit then nature is wrong not us. We are better dead than green for there can
be no freedom that recognizes nature as a limit (except perhaps in the ‘pleroma’
of outer space!).[4] Similarly,
we are better dead than vaccinated. Freedom cannot be freedom unless it is
absolute. We may add to this many forms of psychic and personal alienation that
express themselves in the framework of the Gnostic myth. Here we might include
the many people abducted by U.F.O’s, born on other planets but stuck on this
one, born to the wrong parents, and indeed all the people born into bodies other
than the bodies they should have been born in. Nature is a tragic mistake! Conditions
are not freedom and freedom must establish itself against them. We are not of
this world but belong in another our reason, desire or imagination can project.
Unlike Voegelin, I
do not despise the Gnostic myth or the people who express their alienation through
its framing (and PLEASE note that I do NOT use the word ‘myth’ to designate
anything as false or untrue). Freedom often DOES take the form of overturning
the archons and powers and confronting them with the arbitrariness of their
rule. And if the myth of world alienation is a powerful one that is because there
is much wrong with the world. Plus, I tend to think people should choose the
myths that suit them and name their alienation in the way that is best for them.
At the same time, as Jung would counsel us, our myths should not submerge our
autonomy and reflective powers but enhance them. A myth that runs away with the
field is a myth that should be questioned and if the incarnational myth can
make us too cozy about the world (as Simone Petrement has argued in her
masterful book A Separate God) the
Gnostic myth can lead us into dangerous and destructive abstraction. Freedom
must, at the end of the day, be embodied and conditioned in some form or we will die as a species.
This would not be a tragedy for the hard core Gnostic I suppose (whether in his
ancient or modern manifestation) but I think it would for the rest of us who
are children of the earth as much as of the pleroma of light.
[1] I
am well aware that there ARE neo-Gnostic churches with bishops and clergy but
these are self-conscious modern revivals.
[2]
This is a collection of texts found in a cave in Egypt in 1945. Previous to
the discovery of these texts the words of the ancients Gnostics were almost entirely
known from quotations in the works of their orthodox opponents. As to who used
and buried these books there seems no clear consensus. At any rate the
treatises range from pagan and orthodox Christian works to more typically Gnostic
ones with several of them occupying an indeterminate point between (i.e. they
could be read as Gnostic works but need not be- in this category we find such
well known pieces as the Gospel of Thomas).
[3] The Gnostic myth even lurks in the bosom of analytic philosophy for Wittgenstein states it with absolutely clarity in his Tractatus: “How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.” (6.432). At 6.41 we read: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.” The Hypostasis of the Archons could not have put it better!
[4] The astral religions of antiquity dreamed of an ascension of the dead to the stars and our sophisticated billionaires have revived this aspiration with ghastly literalism. If Jeff Bezos finds conditions on earth thwarting and confining what will he think of Mars? Some signal has been crossed in the collective unconscious if ancient dreams of beauty and light are to translated into literal physical conditions that approximate hell. It is always dangerous to try and literalize a metaphor.
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