Post by MagnetMan on Mar 12, 2013 11:08:44 GMT -5
The Divided Influence of Gnosticism
In the latest First Things, David Bentley Hart has an interesting essay on Carl Jung’s eccentric, esoteric, solipsistic and impenetrable “Red Book,” which includes some perceptive remarks on the difference between the modern manifestations of Gnosticism and the more ancient variety:
To the Gnostics of old … this world is an immense prison guarded by malevolent powers on high, a place of exile where the fallen and forgetful divine spark dwelling deep within the pneumatikos (the “spiritual man”) languishes in ignorance and bondage, passing from life to life in drugged sleep, wrapped in the ethereal garments of the “souls” it acquired in descending through the planetary spheres, and sealed fast within the coarse involucrum of an earthly body. The spiritual experience at the heart of the Gnostic story of salvation was, as Hans Jonas puts it, the “call of the stranger God”: a call heard inwardly that awakens the spirit from its obliviousness to its own nature, and that summons it home again from this hostile universe and back again to the divine pleroma—the “fullness”—from which it departed in a time before time.
Thus the spiritual temper of Gnosticism is, first, a state of profound suspicion—a persistent paranoia with regard to the whole of apparent reality, a growing conviction that one is the victim of unseen but vigilant adversaries who have trapped one in an illusory existence—and then one of cosmic despair, and finally a serenity achieved through final detachment from the world and unshakable certitude in the reality of a spiritual home beyond its darkness. The deepest impulse of the gnostic mind is a desire to discover that which has been intentionally hidden, to find out the secret that explains and overcomes all the disaffections and disappointments of the self …
In Hart’s telling, modern Gnosticism retains this “assumption that spiritual disaffection is something to be cured by discovering and decoding some forgotten, half-effaced text inscribed somewhere within the self,” but drops the sense of alienation from the created world and the desire to escape its toils. Instead of seeking reconciliation with an original uncreated realm, a true God beyond all gods, the modern Gnostic seeks salvation through “reconciliation with one’s own primordial depths,” and the sense of consolation that this purely personal experience provides. In this sense, he suggests, Gnosticism has returned in a less radical and more therapeutic form, which calls its contemporary disciples to an essentially self-centered spirituality that offers comfort rather than transcendance:
For [the ancient Gnostics], the inner “call of the stranger God” remained an expression … of a perennial and universal spiritual longing: the wonder at the mystery of existence that is the beginning of all philosophy and all worship, the restlessness of the heart that seeks its rest in God, that luminous elation clouded by sorrow that is the source of all admirable cultural achievements and all spiritual and moral heroism.
Our spiritual situation may be very different indeed … For us, as could never have been the case in late antiquity, even distinctly gnostic spiritual tendencies are likely to prove to be not so much stirrings of rebellion against materialist orthodoxies as convulsions of dying resistance. The distinctly modern metaphysical picture of reality is one that makes it possible to regard this world as a cave filled only with flickering shadows and yet also to cherish those shadows for their very insubstantiality, and even to be grateful for the shelter that the cave provides against the great emptiness outside, where no Sun of the Good ever shines. With enough therapy and sufficient material comforts, even gnostic despair can become a form of disenchantment without regret, sweetened by a new enchantment with the self in its particularity. Gnosticism reduced to bare narcissism—which, come to think of it, might be an apt definition of late modernity as a whole.
I agree with parts of this diagnosis, but I think it’s slightly incomplete, because I think that much of modern Gnosticism is less disenchanted and post-metaphysical than Hart implies. Having spent a fair amount of time reading the various manuals of therapeutic spirituality for my recent book on American religion, I came away convinced that the Deepak Chopras and Eckhart Tolles and Elizabeth Gilberts are, indeed, enchanted “with the self in its particularity” — but that they’re also eager (desperately so, at times) to reconcile this enchantment with the God Within with the traditional monotheistic quest for the God Without, rather than treating one as a substitution for the other.
There’s no question which of the two Gods these authors ultimate privilege — hence the tendency toward spiritual solipsism that Hart rightly identifies. (If the God you find within disagrees with the God of your scriptures or your traditions, well, so much the worse for your scriptures or your traditions.) But this privileging does not amount to anything like a true denial of transcendance. Indeed, most of these authors would dismiss (and seem altogether untroubled by) the possibility that the materialists are correct and nothing but a “great emptiness” exists beyond our psyches and our selves. They are, I think, more authentically optimistic than Hart gives them credit for, because their faith, while self-centered, is not a faith in the self alone; rather, it’s a faith that looks to the self for the key to uniting cave, cosmos and Creator in one glorious, positive-thinking, all-reconciling whole.
This doesn’t meant that these authors and their ideas aren’t influenced by the materialist world-picture — all of contemporary religion exists in the shadow of naturalism to some extent. But overall, when I look at how the Gnostic impulse shapes Western thought today, what I see is less a surrender to materialism than a kind of divided influence. The Gnostic idea that spiritual disaffection can be cured by looking deep within the self has been appropriated by the cosmic optimists like Chopra, and at the same time the deep Gnostic pessimism about the created order has become the property of actual materialists — our militant atheists and anguished agnostics, that is, rather than our New Age preachers and esoteric gurus.
Indeed, much of the appeal of contemporary anti-theism rests on precisely the kind of arguments that the ancient Gnostics leveled against the Old Testament God — arguments from theodicy, for the most part, which invoke the evidence of human suffering and the obvious broken-ness of the world to reject the possibility of a benevolent Creator God. (Susan Jacoby’s essay on “The Blessings of Atheism” in the most recent Sunday Review is a characteristic example of these arguments in action.) These writers don’t posit a “stranger God” who can save us from the Judeo-Christian demiurge, of course; they posit no God at all. But their palpable anger against the God whose existence they reject often partakes of the same combination of “profound suspicion” and “cosmic despair” that Hart identifies as characteristically Gnostic. And while these arguments from evil and suffering aren’t the only argument that the new atheists make, in my experience they’re the ones that readers seem to find most powerful.
So yes, the Gnostic spirit is everywhere in contemporary religion, and in contemporary religious debates. But the difference between how it manifests itself in the polemics of the anti-theists and the reassuring theology of the God Within may be a more important difference, and division, than Hart’s analysis sometimes suggests.
In the latest First Things, David Bentley Hart has an interesting essay on Carl Jung’s eccentric, esoteric, solipsistic and impenetrable “Red Book,” which includes some perceptive remarks on the difference between the modern manifestations of Gnosticism and the more ancient variety:
To the Gnostics of old … this world is an immense prison guarded by malevolent powers on high, a place of exile where the fallen and forgetful divine spark dwelling deep within the pneumatikos (the “spiritual man”) languishes in ignorance and bondage, passing from life to life in drugged sleep, wrapped in the ethereal garments of the “souls” it acquired in descending through the planetary spheres, and sealed fast within the coarse involucrum of an earthly body. The spiritual experience at the heart of the Gnostic story of salvation was, as Hans Jonas puts it, the “call of the stranger God”: a call heard inwardly that awakens the spirit from its obliviousness to its own nature, and that summons it home again from this hostile universe and back again to the divine pleroma—the “fullness”—from which it departed in a time before time.
Thus the spiritual temper of Gnosticism is, first, a state of profound suspicion—a persistent paranoia with regard to the whole of apparent reality, a growing conviction that one is the victim of unseen but vigilant adversaries who have trapped one in an illusory existence—and then one of cosmic despair, and finally a serenity achieved through final detachment from the world and unshakable certitude in the reality of a spiritual home beyond its darkness. The deepest impulse of the gnostic mind is a desire to discover that which has been intentionally hidden, to find out the secret that explains and overcomes all the disaffections and disappointments of the self …
In Hart’s telling, modern Gnosticism retains this “assumption that spiritual disaffection is something to be cured by discovering and decoding some forgotten, half-effaced text inscribed somewhere within the self,” but drops the sense of alienation from the created world and the desire to escape its toils. Instead of seeking reconciliation with an original uncreated realm, a true God beyond all gods, the modern Gnostic seeks salvation through “reconciliation with one’s own primordial depths,” and the sense of consolation that this purely personal experience provides. In this sense, he suggests, Gnosticism has returned in a less radical and more therapeutic form, which calls its contemporary disciples to an essentially self-centered spirituality that offers comfort rather than transcendance:
For [the ancient Gnostics], the inner “call of the stranger God” remained an expression … of a perennial and universal spiritual longing: the wonder at the mystery of existence that is the beginning of all philosophy and all worship, the restlessness of the heart that seeks its rest in God, that luminous elation clouded by sorrow that is the source of all admirable cultural achievements and all spiritual and moral heroism.
Our spiritual situation may be very different indeed … For us, as could never have been the case in late antiquity, even distinctly gnostic spiritual tendencies are likely to prove to be not so much stirrings of rebellion against materialist orthodoxies as convulsions of dying resistance. The distinctly modern metaphysical picture of reality is one that makes it possible to regard this world as a cave filled only with flickering shadows and yet also to cherish those shadows for their very insubstantiality, and even to be grateful for the shelter that the cave provides against the great emptiness outside, where no Sun of the Good ever shines. With enough therapy and sufficient material comforts, even gnostic despair can become a form of disenchantment without regret, sweetened by a new enchantment with the self in its particularity. Gnosticism reduced to bare narcissism—which, come to think of it, might be an apt definition of late modernity as a whole.
I agree with parts of this diagnosis, but I think it’s slightly incomplete, because I think that much of modern Gnosticism is less disenchanted and post-metaphysical than Hart implies. Having spent a fair amount of time reading the various manuals of therapeutic spirituality for my recent book on American religion, I came away convinced that the Deepak Chopras and Eckhart Tolles and Elizabeth Gilberts are, indeed, enchanted “with the self in its particularity” — but that they’re also eager (desperately so, at times) to reconcile this enchantment with the God Within with the traditional monotheistic quest for the God Without, rather than treating one as a substitution for the other.
There’s no question which of the two Gods these authors ultimate privilege — hence the tendency toward spiritual solipsism that Hart rightly identifies. (If the God you find within disagrees with the God of your scriptures or your traditions, well, so much the worse for your scriptures or your traditions.) But this privileging does not amount to anything like a true denial of transcendance. Indeed, most of these authors would dismiss (and seem altogether untroubled by) the possibility that the materialists are correct and nothing but a “great emptiness” exists beyond our psyches and our selves. They are, I think, more authentically optimistic than Hart gives them credit for, because their faith, while self-centered, is not a faith in the self alone; rather, it’s a faith that looks to the self for the key to uniting cave, cosmos and Creator in one glorious, positive-thinking, all-reconciling whole.
This doesn’t meant that these authors and their ideas aren’t influenced by the materialist world-picture — all of contemporary religion exists in the shadow of naturalism to some extent. But overall, when I look at how the Gnostic impulse shapes Western thought today, what I see is less a surrender to materialism than a kind of divided influence. The Gnostic idea that spiritual disaffection can be cured by looking deep within the self has been appropriated by the cosmic optimists like Chopra, and at the same time the deep Gnostic pessimism about the created order has become the property of actual materialists — our militant atheists and anguished agnostics, that is, rather than our New Age preachers and esoteric gurus.
Indeed, much of the appeal of contemporary anti-theism rests on precisely the kind of arguments that the ancient Gnostics leveled against the Old Testament God — arguments from theodicy, for the most part, which invoke the evidence of human suffering and the obvious broken-ness of the world to reject the possibility of a benevolent Creator God. (Susan Jacoby’s essay on “The Blessings of Atheism” in the most recent Sunday Review is a characteristic example of these arguments in action.) These writers don’t posit a “stranger God” who can save us from the Judeo-Christian demiurge, of course; they posit no God at all. But their palpable anger against the God whose existence they reject often partakes of the same combination of “profound suspicion” and “cosmic despair” that Hart identifies as characteristically Gnostic. And while these arguments from evil and suffering aren’t the only argument that the new atheists make, in my experience they’re the ones that readers seem to find most powerful.
So yes, the Gnostic spirit is everywhere in contemporary religion, and in contemporary religious debates. But the difference between how it manifests itself in the polemics of the anti-theists and the reassuring theology of the God Within may be a more important difference, and division, than Hart’s analysis sometimes suggests.