The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: Superiority Lost

{Friedrich Gogarten, a German theologian and contemporary of Karl Barth, pointed out that Gnosticism and early Christianity both considered man fundamentally alien to the world. For Gnosticism, the alienation derived from the bungling and malevolence of the demiurge, the false creator god; for Pauline Christianity, man’s sin had caused his own, and the world’s, alienation.}   

“It is the orderly world, anchored in the law, from which Christian faith frees us.”

Friedrich Gogarten (from Despair and Hope for Our Time):

The apostle Paul, proclaiming freedom from the law as freedom from the legalistic powers of the world, could not be more explicit. These powers possess divine and all-permeating force. However, since they belong to the created world, they are not gods at all but creatures—which should not overshadow the fact that they are of prime significance in the world. Because they are powers of the law, they preserve the world as world; that is, these powers keep the world in its worldly order without which it would not be the world, would not be an ordered entity. ¹ They accomplish this by attempting to enclose the world, so that the world seeks its basis and its meaning in itself. On the one hand, the powers fulfill their task as creatures; on the other hand, they become, in effect if not intent, hostile to God. Inasmuch as the world becomes self-enclosed, it shuts itself up against its creator and against its own creatureliness.

These powers pervade the world and close it off from God, but they are not, as Paul understands them, in essence hostile to God. Their seeming hostility must be understood as man’s doing. According to Paul, man is not caught in some cosmic fate but in his own guilt. Man’s sin has enabled the powers to engulf the world; sin, for Paul, means that man has decided in favor of the world against God.

When Paul attacks “the ungodliness and wickedness of men,” he attacks a false piety in which man worships the powers as a divine reality. For such a piety, Paul’s argument is bound to appear as a horrible blasphemy; it elevates man above the divine power of the world, which, in the view of pagan thought, entails an intolerable profaning of the world and of the powers which pervade it. When this happens, pagans argue, nothing can be divine anymore for man; his life falls prey to an inevitable arbitrariness and becomes totally meaningless. ²

For Paul, the evil which befell man and the world is the result of man’s guilt and not of a cosmic mishap. Man’s sin, in which he serves and worships the creature instead of the creator, causes the unfortunate transformation of the cosmos. God’s creation—in which everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected—has been corrupted, through man’s, sin into this fallen world which is in the power of the evil one. Sin affects God and the world, it perverts the fundamental order of all existence, the relation between the creation and the creator; therefore, it becomes a fate which man cannot reverse.

The Christian faith and Gnosticism are similar in maintaining man’s superiority over the world. In this, both are in sharp opposition to previous ancient thought; in both, therefore, the world is overturned. In opposition to all previous thought, both Gnosticism and the Christian faith understand man as a being who is not from the world, who owes his existence not to the fact that it is enclosed by the world and embedded in its order but to its not-being-from-the-world.

Gnosticism represents the breakthrough of the insight into the basic foreignness of everything worldly to everything human, causing a “tremendous insecurity, a world anxiety, fear of the world and of oneself.” This insight and this anxiety are the driving forces of Gnosticism: they define its attitude toward the world and hence to everything else. Therefore, it can content itself with negative statements concerning man who stands in opposition to the world, and concerning the god in whom man finds his salvation. Gnosticism expresses the ontological foreignness of human existence over against the world and hence man’s superiority, although this only means that human existence is not worldly, not “of’ the world. In this way, Gnosticism is the pioneer in discovering man’s selfhood, a true consciousness over against everything worldly, one which is no longer enclosed by the world.

Gnosticism’s view of man, however, has only the negative meaning of “non-worldly and anti-worldly.” The superiority of man over the world as it is revealed by the Christian faith is of a very different sort. Admittedly it, too, has a negative meaning:  Christians are admonished to return to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil who had caught them and made them obey his will, to rise from sleep and to be awake because they belong to the day and not to the night. As in Gnosticism, which uses the same expressions, this means that they are being called out of the world. Here, too, the world is called evil and hostile to God; it is the realm of the lord of this eon, and its wisdom is folly in God’s sight. What Gnosticism says of the law which belongs to the world is true here as well: It does not bring life, as man is wont to believe in his worldly captivity; on the contrary, it brings death.

But all these statements have a fundamentally different meaning for the Christian faith. For while Paul says that the law brings death to man, he also says that this law has been given to bring life. For “the law is holy . . . and just and good.” The reason for the fact that it causes death for man who deals with it and seeks life in it, is not the law itself but man’s sin. It is not the law which has become death for him, but sin which through the law caused death; hence, it is man who has caused this evil. Through him this world has become—and this is emphatically stated in the New Testament—“this world,” the world of sin and hostility toward God.

Man’s superiority as discovered by the Christian faith is of a fundamentally different kind from that of Gnosticism. Christianity understands man’s superiority over the world as having been forfeited, along with his salvation, by sin. Man must now be addressed as a sinner who has lost his superiority over the world.

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Friedrich Gogarten - Wikipedia

¹ Gogarten here pictures the world’s “powers” as a katechonic force for law and order. Carl Schmitt would later promote the same idea.

² This “pagan” argument is more or less the argument made by David Bentley Hart in his essay, “Christ and Nothing”.

Saturday Sermon: "Vision and Violence"

{While Eric Voegelin gained fame, of a sort, for labeling as ‘Gnostic’ modern political movements such as Communism, Fascism, and Progressivism, Arthur Mendel’s unheralded book ‘Vision and Violence’ (1999) offered a better grasp of the links, and the distinctions, between classic Gnosticism and modern ideologies. In essence, Mendel held that revolutionary movements are a form of millennialism, a secular variant of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic. Although they display certain similarities of temperament with Gnostics, they lead down an entirely different path.}  

Arthur Mendel (from Vision and Violence):

Those who believed Jesus was the Messiah suffered persecution, martyrdom, and crushing disappointment when their savior did not return. The sinful world went on as before, and believers had to live in it. Since the apocalyptic promise of immediate and total transmutation of the world had failed to materialize, Christians turned for solace and hope to the other side of their Gnostic-Judaic heritage and adopted the characteristically Gnostic posture of being ‘in’ but not ‘of’ this fallen world of flesh and sin, trapped in an alien realm until either death freed their souls or Jesus returned to establish the millennial Kingdom.

Christian hermits, for instance, flocked to the desert by the thousands to await the End as anchorites in isolation, silence, prayer, and contemplation, proving their merits by spiritual feats of heroic deprivation. Since everything material, especially the body and all that served the needs of the flesh, belonged not to God but to the demonic ‘ruler of this world,’ the heroes of the faith were those who were most repelled by such needs. Among other examples of the persistent Gnostic alienation inherent in early Christianity were those found in Augustine’s works. At one time a convinced Neoplatonist, Augustine later turned fiercely against such views, particularly as expressed by the Gnostics.  Nevertheless, much of what he wrote was filled with Neoplatonist and Gnostic renunciations and denunciations of the material world of flesh and corruption, tirades as vehement as those that Simon Magus, Marcion, Valentinus, and other Gnostics and Manicheans had published.

Of course, there were equally forceful expressions, among early Christian leaders, of the kind of materialistic optimism that characterized some of the Jewish apocalyptic pronouncements. But the essentially Jewish expectation of an earthly material paradise for Gnostic pessimism and spiritual perfectionism, especially given the continued delay of the Second Coming. In time, an Augustinian resignation, along with the Neoplatonist and Gnostic alienation that accompanied it, prevailed throughout Christendom. Sin condemned humanity to this vale of pain, and the best the good Christian could do was to suffer it patiently, draw comfort and guidance from Christ’s temporal vicar, the Church, and await the promised bliss in the next world. Disappointed in their hope that Jesus would carry them now out of this sordid and painful world, Christians turned their faith into a Kingdom of God within and the Church into an island of grace, the home of the saved remnant in Augustine’s city of God:

 ‘In regard to mankind I have made a division,’ wrote the Bishop of Hippo, ‘between those who live according to man and those who live according to God. In a deeper sense, we may speak of two cities or two human societies, the destiny of the one being an eternal kingdom under God, while the gloom of the other is eternal punishment along with the Devil.’   

To live in the City of God meant to live the Christian life and thereby prepare oneself for the life to come. As for the social, economic, and political world in the city of Man, that was as God decreed it to be and, in any case, adequate at least for living according to God and his Church.

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Five hundred years after Augustine had counseled Christians to resign themselves to living in a fallen world, the arrival of the chronological millennium reawakened the Christian apocalyptic:

The apocalyptic theory at the beginning of the Christian medieval era and the apocalyptic practice at its close helped set the stage for the secular-revolutionary millennialism that was to follow. From the ‘messianism of the poor’ that accompanied the first two crusades (1096 and 1146), through the fourteenth-century social violence of the Tafurs (vagabonds), Free Spirits, Pastoureaux, and English Peasants’ Revolt, to the millennial movements of the Bohemian Taborites, Thomas Muntzer’s Allstedt millennium, and the Anabaptists’ New Jerusalem of Munster, we clearly see the modernization of the Apocalypse into an earthly utopia, based on communal ownership and achieved through violent class struggle.

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For Mendel, the common denominator between Gnosticism and modern ideologies was “radical alienation”:

The distinction between mystics and apocalyptic prophets should not overstated, however; the two were closely related, and the ideas of the mystics generated some of the most extreme excesses of the apocalyptic communities. In fact, the two were contrasting poles of the same radical alienation. No longer able to bear reality, the suffering soul responded either with the ‘all’ of total apocalyptic destruction and transmutation of the world, or with the ‘nothing’ of total Gnostic-mystical withdrawal and detachment of the world. The same revolutionary ‘all’ and solipsistic ‘nothing’ have guided disenchanted critics of our culture and society ever since, some shifting from one pole to the other, from a passive, detached contemplation of the ideal within oneself to an apocalyptic, revolutionary struggle to realize the ideal in the world outside. In both cases, what had to be avoided at all costs was the flawed reality in the middle.

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Mendel’s posthumous CV states: “The late Arthur P. Mendel was Professor of History, University of Michigan, specializing in Russian intellectual history. His first book, Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism, established him as one of the outstanding historians of his generation.” Mendel also wrote a biography of the 19^th-century Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin, whom he portrayed as an apocalyptic prophet pursuing what he believed was “the sacred goal of realizing freedom and brotherhood, realizing the Kingdom of God on earth.”    

The Metaxy: between Transcendence and Oblivion

The Great Refusal: "An outrage in the womb of Nothingness"

{Gnosticism has always inspired in me a weird and paradoxical passion. I find myself sympathetic to the Gnostic temperament even though I reject it, and I will defend the merit of Gnostic thought despite disagreeing with almost all of it. Moreover, I have made no secret of my annoyance at how Gnosticism, which invented an entire metaphysics in its quest for spiritual salvation, has more recently been identified with the Promethean materialism of Communism and of Modernity itself. Immanentizing the eschaton was (and is) a pastime of Christians obsessed with Jesus’ return. Gnostics wanted nothing to do with redeeming or remaking this world; they believed they were in a pit, and they simply wanted to climb out.}      

In Western history, foremost among the great refusers were the Gnostics, bizarre heretics of the early centuries of the Common Era who refused—well, everything. The Gnostics, wrote Jacques Lacarriere, “see the whole of material creation as the product of a god who is the enemy of man. Viscerally, imperiously, irremissibly, the Gnostic feels life, thought, human and planetary destiny to be a failed work, limited and vitiated in its most fundamental structures. Everything, from the distant stars to the nuclei of our body-cells, carries the materially demonstrable trace of an original imperfection which only Gnosticism and the means it proposes can combat.”

Setting aside (for now) the more positive aspects of the Gnostic vision—redemption from the “failed work” of a deficient creator was possible if one followed the Gnostic way—we should recognize that Gnosticism constituted “a radical teaching which held almost all the systems and religions of former times to be null and void. In spite of its links with some philosophies of the time, and apart from minor reservations—since they borrowed certain beliefs indiscriminately from various systems, prophets or sacred books—one can say that Gnosticism is a profoundly original thought, a mutant thought.”

Gnosticism, in short, amounted to a Great Refusal, a refusal not just of doctrines and dogma but of earthly existence itself. “Stop the world, I want to get off” could have been a Gnostic slogan, as Lacarriere explains:

This rejection of all systems, and of a world governed not by men but by shadows or semblances of men, forced Gnostics to live on the fringes of all established society, and to preach a refusal to compromise with false institutions, a refusal to procreate, to marry, to live in families, or to obey temporal powers, whether pagan or Christian.

To sum up the essential position of the Gnostics in still simpler terms, let us say that in their eyes the evil which taints the whole of creation and alienates man in body, mind, and soul, deprives him of the awareness necessary for his own salvation. Man, the shadow of man, possesses only a shadow of consciousness. And it is to this one task that the Gnostics of the first centuries CE deliberately devoted themselves, choosing paths which were not only unorthodox but which, moreover, greatly scandalized their contemporaries: to create in man a true consciousness, which would permit him to impart to his thoughts and deeds the permanence and the rigor necessary to cast off the shackles of this world.

Gnostics did not believe the world was redeemable; it was wrong from the beginning, as was all of material existence.

“What haunts the Gnostics above all else, when confronted by matter — by its opacity, its density, its compactness, its weight (and they felt this weight, this materiality, in those states that seem most subtle: the trembling of water, the wind of the desert, the shimmering of the stars) — what haunts them is the intolerable awareness that this inhibiting matter is the result of an error, a deviation in cosmic order; that it is nothing but a poor imitation or a caricature of the original matter of the hyper-world. The heaviness, the sluggishness imparted to everything - from the air to a stone, from an insect to a man - is an unbearable constraint, an intolerable curse. And its consequences are multiple. For, added to the weight of matter and of living bodies, there is the inevitable heaviness of the spirit. Our thinking is bound by the same constraints as are our bodies; it collides against the same barriers and is dragged down by the weight of the same contingencies.”

In his book A Short History of Decay, the Romanian essayist Emil Cioran reflects the Gnostic spirit: “Injustice governs the universe. All that is made and all that is unmade therein carries the imprint of a corrupt fragility, as if matter were the fruit of an outrage in the womb of nothingness.” Given the Gnostics’ utter contempt for matter, they would have scorned Herbert Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” and dismissed it as a meaningless compromise with a world whose only salvation would be its destruction. Since cosmic destruction was not in their power to accomplish, the Gnostics settled for attempts at escape through assorted combinations of ascetism, libertinism, and mysticism—all of which, predictably, failed.

As it happens, most people, despite the suffering that existence entails, want to live. Religions or philosophies that encourage adherents to say No to life tend not to last long.

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Jacques Lacarriere's The Gnostics is the best book I have read on the subject. 

Wednesday with Pascal: The Gnostic Wager

{Is Pascal the existential Russian blue cat reading Jan Miel’s ‘Pascal and Theology’ for the obvious reason? I don’t know; I can’t account for Pascal’s reading habits. Nor do I know why, since Blaise Pascal was not considered or accused of being a Gnostic, Jan Miel’s book takes a lengthy detour into Gnosticism; but Pascal (the cat) goes along for the ride.}

“What were we? What have we become?” (Elizabeth Spires, “Easter Sunday, 1955”)

“The whole Gnostic cosmology is an attempt to solve the problem of evil.” (Jan Miel, Pascal and Theology)

All the new thinking is about ancient Gnosticism; that is, all my new thinking is about that topic. * Gnostic cosmology—the Gnostics’ account(s) of the origin and structure of the universe, the nature of human beings, and the existence of evil—is frequently dismissed as bizarre or bewilderingly complex--at least as compared to the simple cosmology found in Genesis, in which God speaks the universe into existence, takes a few days to put it in order, and pronounces it good. 

For some reason, Gnostics eschewed this straightforward reliable biblical narrative in favor of making up their own. As convoluted and implausibly speculative those narratives may have been, however, they all told the same story, briefly summarized here by Jan Miel:

The world, including men’s souls and bodies, is the creation of a demiurge, an emanation from the true God and hostile to Him. The demiurge’s world is full of evil and ruled by necessity. This demiurge came to be equated with the God of the Old Testament; Christians could try to save their souls through good works, but they could never see that their little drama of salvation was merely part of an immense pattern the true nature of which was known only to the “spirituals,” or Gnostics.

Silly Christians thought that feeding the hungry, ministering to the sick, and providing for the poor were the proper ways to enact the will of God. Gnostics knew better: 

This spiritual knowledge was the only true salvation. It did not depend on a choice or an act of the will; it was a recognition that choosing and willing are illusory or, at the very best, futile. Nor was this recognition an act of knowledge originating in man; it was the discovery of a secret knowledge revealed by the good God through enigmatic parables, rites, and myths, the meaning of which was passed on by the adepts who were capable of explaining these things allegorically.

Gnostic groups had no formal clergy or hierarchy, but they were hierarchical all the same, with “adepts” and “elders” dispensing wisdom to proselytes who in return dispensed financial and other types of support. ¹

Miel continues:

The spiritual meaning [i.e., the gnosis], once revealed, freed one from all illusion, including the laws and commandments. Gnosticism, insofar as it contained a fusion of Hellenistic philosophy and Judaic personal religion, was parallel to, but very different from, the Christian synthesis of John and Paul, for whom salvation was not in the hands of man but of a God who had made himself known in the person of Christ. Christianity did not depend exclusively on morality [“works”] or on knowledge, but on a personal, historical relationship. ²

Yet Miel acknowledges the resemblance(s) between Gnosticism and Christianity:

Gnosticism likewise was not moralistic (for Gnostics, moral acts were considered irrelevant to true salvation) nor was it rationalistic—the knowledge of the Gnostics could not be attained by the right use of reason; it was mythical. The Gnostic movement was a kind of intellectual pharisaism in which the key to salvation was not an elaborate set of laws but an elaborate set of beliefs; like moral pharisaism, Gnosticism was present at the birth of Christianity and has remained a permanent temptation throughout its history.

As much as Miel wants to distinguish Gnosticism from Christianity, he cannot avoid the echoes either of Paulinism (wherein we are saved not by works but by faith) or of Nicene (trinitarian) Christianity (with its ritual repetition of “an elaborate set of beliefs”). What kept Christianity from devolving into a Gnostic quagmire of spiritual speculation and philosophical abstraction (a la both Paul and John) was that, unlike the Gnostics (and Marcion), mainstream Christianity never completely cut the cord with the Judaism that birthed it. When the eschaton failed to arrive, when the heavenly trumpet did not sound, and when Jesus did not return on clouds of glory, Christianity resigned itself to an indeterminate period of waiting, of being in the world but not of it, and of learning from Judaism (slowly and grudgingly) to value life in a vale of tears; while the Gnostics, whose dissatisfaction with and contempt for this world surpassed even that of Paul and Augustine, speculated and abstracted themselves out of existence.

Which is not necessarily to say that they failed. For all I know, and despite their worldly oblivion, the ancient Gnostics may have succeeded in their spiritual task; they may have shed the chains of matter, ascended to the pleroma, and become archons, free of all worldly complications; while Christians who had been told it was their destiny to judge angels are now moldering in their graves.

The Gnostic wager was that this world was a fraud and a trap, a contention which has yet to be proven or disproven; given that it's the only world we have, it would be nice to know one way or the other.     

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*The so-called “new Gnosticism” is another kettle of fish entirely, one for which I have made known my distaste. Legend has it that if you repeat “Don’t immanentize the eschaton” three times, the ghost of Eric Voegelin will appear. Let us hope not.

¹ Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels et al) has made much of the idea that Gnostics were egalitarian, especially as regards the role of women. There is no evidence for the former claim and little to substantiate the latter; mainstream Christianity, too, has been credited (a good deal more plausibly) with elevating the status of women—of course, since no Gnostic group ever had the reach, the influence, or the power that the Christian movement came to have, Gnostics were never able to affect the reigning social structures in any significant way. In any case, Gnostics were not egalitarians; they explicitly considered themselves a spiritual elite, and they disdained the mass of humanity as unenlightened and beyond redemption. Only a small number of souls (“one in a thousand, ten in ten thousand”) had the capacity to grasp the saving gnosis. In fairness, some sayings of Jesus (e.g., “Many are called but few are chosen”) can also be interpreted as suggesting a spiritual elite.  

² One might say, “a personal, historical relationship” with a personal, historical God. The Gnostic God, in contrast to the demiurgic creator, had no personal relationship with mankind nor any role in history—at least, not until He sent Jesus to impart and manifest the secret, saving wisdom. Christian apologists, writing against Gnostic doctrines, accused the Gnostic God (if He existed) of unjustly poaching on the demiurge’s preserve—on the Gnostics’ own logic, why would this God, who had not created our world and who had no previous involvement with us, suddenly interfere, offering a way out of the world’s illusions and exposing the demiurge as a rank imposter? Many a Church Father impugned the Gnostic God as at best a fantasy or, worse, a thief, a rustler of human souls.

Artist's conception: "The Demiurge" (may not be according to scale)

Blaming the Gnostics

{Patrick Deneen’s recent essay on “Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism” is too irritating for me to ignore. For a man whose intelligence I once admired to declare that public health measures undertaken during a pandemic reflect “the [Gnostic] belief that the physical world [is] abhorrent” causes in me the same reaction that Greil Marcus had to Bob Dylan’s “Self-Portrait” album: ‘What is this shit?’}

“[Eric] Voegelin saw the rise of totalitarianism as a potent form of fully political Gnosticism - or the belief in human perfectibility through politics.” (Patrick Deneen)

One grows weary of pointing out that Eric Voegelin’s polemics against “modern Gnosticism” represented a grotesque misunderstanding of the nature of ancient Gnosticism. One grows especially weary when someone who should know better—in this case, Patrick Deneen—repeats Voegelin’s nonsensical claims. For instance, Deneen quotes this with approval from Voegelin’s New Science of Politics:

“With the prodigious advancement of science since the seventeenth century, the new instrument of cognition would become, one is inclined to say inevitably, the symbolic vehicle of Gnostic truth. In the Gnostic speculation of scientism this particular variant replaced the era of Christ by the era of Comte. Scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western society; and the immanentist pride in science is so strong that even the special sciences have left a distinguishable sediment in the variants of salvation.” ¹

“Scientism” may be taken as the attempt, via natural science and materialism, to unlock the operating secrets of the physical universe, the very universe which the Gnostics dismissed as an error, an abortion, or a prison. Gnostics never sought to understand the universe or to control it; they sought to escape it. Idiosyncratically, Voegelin equated (and confused) scientific empiricism with spiritual illumination and metaphysical speculation, perhaps because they all can be considered types of knowledge (“gnosis,” of course, means “knowledge”). Of course, revelation, tradition, and authority are also types of knowledge, but neither Eric Voegelin nor Patrick Deneen object to them.   

In any case, Deneen, inspired by Voegelin, proceeds to slap the “Gnostic” label on Liberalism, Progressivism, and anything else to the left of the political space where Deneen has planted his revanchist flag:

What was once a “reformist left” is today a radicalized messianic party, advancing its gnostic vision amid the ruins of the Christian civilization that once balanced these forces. What we today call “woke” is merely a new articulation of the revolutionary dream that was once vested in Communism. The examples are legion: the wholesale transformation and even elimination of the “traditional” - i.e., natural - family. The effort to define sexuality according to human desire, aided by technological interventions. An understanding of crime solely as a function of the social order. ² The disdain toward those who work in non-gnostic areas of life - the working class.  The effort to impose bio-political dominion over all of human life during the suddenly irrelevant “crisis” of the pandemic was but an extension of this deeply Gnostic impulse - the belief that the physical world was abhorrent, that we could through masking, distancing, and enforced medical intervention eliminate risk of disease and death.

That last claim is so ludicrous as to border on the idiotic, but Deneen isn’t done:

Voegelin’s fears have come true. The progressive ruling class that populates and runs the main institutions of American and European society are now the most thoroughgoing and ideological exemplars of political gnosticism. Their relentless efforts to extirpate any remnant of the predecessor “classical and Christian” society is daily on display. As Voegelin observed, gnostics necessarily become the most vocal anti-Christians, rightly detecting that they are the greatest threat to the “re-divination” of the political order. Those who bear the stamp of that belief - in significant part, in deference to the limits and realities of the created order - become marked as domestic enemies. ³

In his essay, and following Voegelin, Deneen repeatedly refers to “political Gnosticism”: “A feature of political Gnosticism,” he writes, “is its insistent denial of reality, history, and limits.” The adjective “political” carries a lot of weight there, especially given that the ancient Gnostics were not at all political, in part because politics did not exist at the time and in part because the Gnostics believed the physical world to be utterly beyond redemption, which makes dubious the very idea of “political Gnosticism”. Having invented the category, however, Voegelin was free to describe its inhabitants however he liked; as Deneen explains, “Voegelin described gnostics [as being] marked by ‘disregard for the structure of reality, ignorance of facts, fallacious misconstruction and falsification of history, irresponsible opining on the basis of sincere conviction, philosophical illiteracy, spiritual dullness, and agnostic sophistication.’” If Eric Voegelin said it, who are we to question the accuracy of his description?

As to the current issue supposedly at hand in the essay—Russia, America, and the war in Ukraine—Deneen declares that “the war over Ukraine continues to serve the Gnostic ambitions of America’s political classes.” Increasingly unhinged, he goes on to refer to America’s “rotten ruling class,” which he also characterizes as “the laptop class,” which is funny, because you just know that Professor Deneen owns, works on, and carries around with him a laptop. That aside, he frets about nuclear war and about the possibility that “our fellow countrymen and children will be asked to fight and die” for a regime that despises them and their beliefs.  

What any of that has to do with Gnosticism is anyone’s guess. Ancient Gnostics were anathematized and harried out of existence by the Church centuries ago, their writings destroyed, their reputations slandered; some of them, like the Cathars and Albigensians of southern France, were simply murdered (“Kill them all,” was the order famously given; “God will know His own.”) You would think that, after all this time, Gnostics could be allowed to rest in peace rather than being blamed for the woes of modernity.

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Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism (substack.com)

¹ “Sediment in the variants of salvation” is not as well known as Voegelin’s catchy “immanentizing the eschaton,” perhaps because, while the latter phrase is merely obscure, the former is completely unintelligible

² Deneen may have just read the libretto from “West Side Story”: “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!”  

³ Has Patrick Deneen been marked by the Biden regime as a domestic enemy? It doesn’t seem to have hurt his career in academia or on the lecture circuit, much less his book sales.

 

 

Saturday Lecture: In Search of Gnosis

“It would be more correct to speak of Christianity as a branch of Gnosticism than to characterize Gnosticism as a Christian sect.” (Paul Carus)

Paul Carus, from “Gnosticism in Its Relation to Christianity”:

Gnosis was metaphysical or mystical insight, which comes in an unaccountable way by inspiration. But the main characteristic feature of Gnosticism was psychological and soteriological. Almost all Gnostic philosophers and teachers from Philo down to Plotinus were dualists who looked upon the soul as a spiritual entity temporarily entangled in the world of matter and longing for a return to its source. Material existence was in their opinion the cause of sin and evil, and to be delivered from the bondage of the body was the final aim of the soul and an end devoutly to be wished for.

The Gnostic aspirations were partly lofty and philosophical, partly ethical, going to the extreme of rigorous asceticism, partly fantastical, evincing a belief in visions and miracles after the fashion of common conjurers.

Gnosticism is commonly regarded as a Christian sect, but it is of far wider significance, and its proper appreciation throws a new light on the origin of Christianity and the early history of the Church. Gnosticism was a religious movement characterized by a seeking for Gnosis or enlightenment for the purpose of finding salvation. Its interests were concentrated upon the psychological problems of the soul and the metaphysical problems of the origin and end of the world, and when we bear in mind that in all its essential features it antedates Christianity we shall at once recognize it as a period of Sturm und Drang which immediately preceded the establishment of the Christian Church and paved the way for the acceptance of a religion whose claims and ideals, in contrast to the national religions of antiquity, were not only universal and supernational but at the same time personal and spiritual.

Gnosticism was full of vagaries, but it was possessed of a high ideal, and we shall appreciate its good sides if we regard the movement as a problem which stirred the human mind, rather than as a solution. The ideal which Gnosticism presented was great, but the efforts made by Gnostics for its realization must upon the whole be regarded as failures, and the Christianity of the Church is the result of the spiritual fermentation of Gnosticism. Christianity offers an answer to the questions of Gnosticism and is in this respect itself a Gnostic movement. Christians for a long time actually called themselves Gnostics, and some Church fathers, such as Clement, used the name Gnostic in the sense of Christian.

It was natural that the Christian Church, with increase of power, should begin to condemn all non-Christian Gnostics. By and by the very name began to be repudiated, and the kinship that obtained between the Christian solution of the religious problem and other Gnostic solutions lead to the idea of treating Gnostic teachers as heretical Christians.

While pointing out the pre-Christian existence of the Gnostic movement, we do not intend to slur over the differences that exist between the pre-Christian and post-Christian Gnosis; on the contrary, while we insist on their historical continuity, we would emphasize their difference, which is obvious and striking. The spread of Christianity marks an epoch in the evolution of the conception of the Gnosis inasmuch as the Christian Gospel forced a new issue upon the various Gnostic schools which could not be left unheeded.

The methods of the Gnostics resembled a chase after will-o'-the-wisps, and their results were mostly vain speculations and vague dreams. Apollos and Simon Magus may have been more brilliant and more ingenious than Peter and Paul; but the latter were more sober. There were enough most lamentable vagaries current among the early Christians. There was the belief in the imminent advent of Christ shared even by Paul, to which superstition many thousands fell victims by neglecting the duties of life. There was the communism of the Church at Jerusalem which made of their members destitute beggars, for whose benefit collections had to be taken up among the wealthier Christians of Greece. There was the chiliastic notion, with its apocalyptic excrescences. There was the belief in the resurrection of the material body from the grave, the restitution of the very flesh itself, most seriously insisted upon even in the Apostolic creed. But in spite of all these aberrations Christianity, as compared with the theories of the Gnostic teachers, was sobriety itself.

Christianity is not an accidental formation; it is a necessary result of the evolution of thought. The history of the Church is, especially in its beginning and during the Middle Ages, a sad medley of vagaries, intrigues, usurpations, and crimes, but through all the balderdash of dogmatic speculation, of mystical trash, of visionary theorizing, even in spite of the heresy trials, Bartholomew slaughters, and autos-da-fe, there goes the red thread of an upward aspiration which slowly, very slowly, leads to better and clearer conceptions, in constant search of the true Gnosis.

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Paul Carus - Wikipedia

Professor Arguendo on Eric Voegelin's Gnostic Modernity

{Eric Voegelin looms large in postwar conservative thought; his work, unfortunately, is almost deliberately opaque. Fortunately, secondary works about him and his philosophy abound, e.g., Ted McAllister’s 1997 Revolt Against Modernity, which focused on the anti-modern/post-liberal ideas of Voegelin and of Leo Strauss. In the essay below, guest blogger Professor Arguendo discusses Voegelin through the prism of McAllister’s book.}

“The death of the spirit is the price of progress.”  (Eric Voegelin)

In Revolt Against Modernity, Ted McAllister summarized Eric Voegelin’s quarrel with the modern world: “Modernity,” in Voegelin’s opinion, “is a gnostic revolt against reality.” Because most people are not familiar with the meaning(s) and implication(s) of the term “gnostic,” and because ancient Gnosticism in no way resembled the modern project (“salvation through world-immanent action”) to which Voegelin linked it, Mc Allister was forced immediately to clarify what Voegelin meant: 

Gnosticism, in the Voegelian sense, is a belief in the power of knowledge to transform reality, to create earthly perfection. It refers to an existential core that has three primary components: one, a strong sense of alienation, a feeling that some essential part of one’s humanity is unfulfilled; two, a revolt against the conditions that create alienation; and three, a belief that human knowledge is sufficient to overcome these conditions, that humans have the power to transform themselves, or both.

Even setting aside Voegelin’s idiosyncratic use of the term “Gnostic,” his claim that modernity is the quest for “earthly perfection” remains hyperbolic if not tendentious. A less pejorative way of describing the modern project might be: “Dissatisfied with the often-dismal state of human affairs, modern men and women have attempted, using the knowledge available to them, to change, reform, and improve the conditions under which people live. That knowledge may or may not, at any given moment and in any given situation, be ‘sufficient,’ but it is nonetheless all we have with which to work.” Apparently, neither Voegelin nor his numerous acolytes were familiar with words like “ameliorate” or with the concept of “meliorism”; they could only conceive of challenges to the status quo as impossibly utopian and hubristic.   

In Voegelin’s analysis, modernity replays, as it were, the scriptural drama of Eden. Aping Adam, modern man’s reach exceeds his grasp:

Pressures springing from human experience demonstrate the uncertainty of human understanding, spawning the perpetual dream of grasping the whole of reality with the certainty of a god, a creator. Given the anxiety of human life, torn between the material world and the pneumatic pull from a palpable spiritual source, the greatest temptation is to believe in a symbolic expression of a deformed but fully intelligible reality. ¹ Modernity is just such a deformation.

The urge to comprehend reality, Voegelin asserted, required that reality be reduced to the limits of human comprehension. ² Voegelin preferred the pre-modern “Christian order” which, lacking as it was in our technological superiority over nature, had retained a sense of the mystery of existence, along with an acceptance of the limits of human knowledge. Modernity, by contrast, was not just deformed, it was also de-divinized: “The Christian order, articulated best by St. Augustine, had radically separated the mundane from the divine by emphasizing the eternal destiny of humans. Gone were the polytheistic societies in which the mundane and the divine commingled in the world. The Christian order secured the sense of human limitation while promising perfection in another world.”

Except that, as McAllister explains, when it comes to the divine, nature abhors a vacuum; or, as Bob Dylan put it, “You gotta serve somebody." Mankind, having banished (if not euthanized) God, had to seek (or to create) other deities: thus, “Modernity, as Voegelin meant it, is the process by which the world is re-divinized and the uncertainty of faith (as expressed in Hebrews 11:1) is replaced with the certainty of ideology. ³

One can argue whether humans require a divinized order; but it is the case that, for most of human history, such an order existed. But what if a divinized order seems stalled in its tracks? In view of the indefinite postponement of Jesus’ promised return, and given the prolonged reign of Deus Absconditus, it seems to have been inevitable that Western man would eventually decide to stop waiting around and instead to get busy constructing its own version of the kingdom. It was, after all, an empirically observable fact that, for over 1500 years after Jesus, the meek did not seem to be inheriting much of the earth at all.    

The undoing of the Christian order commenced, according to Voegelin, in the twelfth century, with seeds of modernity being planted in medieval soil: the mystic monk Joachim of Flora “began the gnostic revolt which governs the self-interpretation of modern society to this day’.” Joachim’s trinitarian eschatology divided history, like Gaul, into three parts, each part corresponding to a member of the Trinity and each being more spiritual than its predecessor. Joachim’s “Age of the Spirit” was to begin in 1260 and “would bring the perfect spiritual life”. Joachim’s schema, wrote Voegelin, was the basis for the progressive view of history which would become standard for modern ideologues. It eliminated the tension and uncertainty of history by giving it a goal and a sense of inevitability, which, to be clear, were “deformations” in Voegelin’s estimation. ⁴

The “Gnosticism” of Voegelin’s eccentric understanding “represented an attempt to alter the human perspective”. ⁵ Rather than being actors in a cosmic drama not of our own making, modern humans would become co-authors and even, after God’s demise, sole authors of our destiny. By means of science, technology, and instrumental rationality, Modernity claims to have found an “Archimedean point” from which to view—and, more importantly, to transform—our existence. Voegelin's Gnosticism, says Ted McAllister, “is the closing of the soul and the construction of an alternative reality, ‘a counter-existential dream world’.” In his most famous formulation, Voegelin declared, “The immanentization of the Christian eschaton made it possible to endow society in its natural existence with a meaning which Christianity denied to it. The totalitarianism of our time must be understood as journey’s end of the Gnostic search [for heaven on earth].” ⁶

McAllister acknowledges that Voegelin’s account of modernity’s origins, like his understanding of Gnosticism, is unusual. “Few scholars,” he writes, “have given so obscure a figure [as Joachim] such a central place in the drama of history.” ⁷ Still, although “the distance between Joachim of Flora and Hitler is vast,” history is “filled with numerous figures who, infected with a belief in the saving power of knowledge, have played their roles in the deadening story of modernity. According to Voegelin’s account, each of these thinkers, in very different ways, believed that he had achieved the knowledge necessary to transform this world of woe into a paradise. Those dispossessed of utopian imagery nonetheless projected a progressive future fueled by human knowledge and control over the environment.”

Utopians and progressives, totalitarians and liberals, Bolsheviks and Democrats: all are infected with the virus of Gnosticism, Voegelin-style. Joachim of Flora, Protestant sectarians, Levelers and Diggers, Jacobins, Marxists, Fabian socialists, Pragmatists, nihilists, anarchists, Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Hitler, FDR, LBJ, Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama: all shared utopian dreams and Luciferian ambitions. Thus did Joachim of Flora, by however many degrees of separation, pave the way for the gas chambers and the gulags; or so Eric Voegelin claimed.

Arguendo, what is truly tragic in modern thought is the inability—on the part of partisans on both the Left and the Right—to distinguish among myriad visions of a better human future. Distinctions are critical, because not all knowledge is destructive; not every human project is utopian; not every tower is the Tower of Babel; and not every reformer is a revolutionary in sheep’s clothing. The sorting of political and ideological strains into only two categories, "us" and "them," is an attempt to escape the necessities of thought, which necessities include self-criticism and, at the very least, some grudging effort to appreciate other points of view.

However nuanced and however profound Voegelin’s thinking may have been (for those who could decipher it), he did no one any favors with his wholesale denunciations of modernity. Those denunciations have too often been substituted for genuine analysis of our modern dilemmas; they have also too often served the purposes of ideologues and demagogues alike.

[Respectfully submitted by Professor Arguendo]

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For the prospective Voegelin-head : Welcome to VoegelinView - dedicated to the thoughts of Eric Voegelin

For the merely Voegelin-curious: Eric Voegelin - Wikipedia

¹ Given the widely advertised “death of God” in the mid-19^th century, where Voegelin expected anyone in the 20^th century to find “a palpable spiritual source” is unclear.

² Modernity’s proudest achievement: ^“Honey, I Shrunk Reality”

³ Voegelin’s reference to “the uncertainty of faith” is confusing. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” That does not strike me as “uncertainty”. Rather, it resembles Bolshevism’s faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, which was matched only by its certainty of a future communist Utopia: which is to say, the distinction between religion and ideology seems specious, and the latter appears to be only a secular version of the former—a point Voegelin himself made elsewhere.

⁴ I do not see how this view of history differs from the Christian claim that the end of history was determined and demonstrated by Jesus. Christians are fond of nodding sagely and dismissing the world’s tribulations by saying, “We know how the story ends.” Good for them, but please don’t blame the rest of us for trying to arrive at a satisfactory ending of our own.

⁵ Of course, so too were Voegelin’s writings “attempts to change the human perspective.”

⁶ Gnosticism itself had no interest in such a search and would not have undertaken it under any circumstances.

⁷ McAllister was perhaps overlooking Richard Weaver’s singling out William of Ockham (1285—1347) as the source of modern decadence. More recently, Brad Gregory pointed an accusing finger at Duns Scotus (1265—1308). Who can forget the memorable ditty, “Roll over, Bill Ockham, and tell Duns Scotus the news?”

Sunday Sermon

Jacques Lacarriere (THE GNOSTICS):

What emotions does the sight of the sky inspire in us, if not praise, enthusiasm, and admiration? It is vast, infinite, immutable, omnipresent; it eludes the relative and the measurable; it is a parameter of the incommensurable. But in this concert, which we consider natural and which celebrates dawn, zenith, nadir, and twilight with equal assurance, discordant notes sometimes jar the ear. To be vast is good. To be infinite is too much. To possess planets and stars is an incontestable triumph. But to possess them by the million, to teem with stars which are so many eyes trained upon the world each night as if tracking our dreams, is to wield excessive power, to display a very suspect splendor. Something in this immensity turns and meshes its gears with a regularity so precise as to be disquieting; and exactly for whom--or against whom--this mechanism deploys its flaming wheelworks, we do not know.

So, in this simple look directed at the celestial vault, [we] find [ourselves] confronted with the ultimate nature of reality: what is this matter which is by turns full and empty, dense and tenuous, luminous and dark, of which our sky is made? Is this dark shore, this tenebrous tissue, this interstitial shadow wherein the stars seem pricked like incandescent pores, constituted of matter or of space? Is the "real" sky nothing but its light, these winking eyes on the ocean of night, or is it at one and the same time that which shines and that which does not, a fire flaming and dark by turns? Do its shores and its black abysses comprise a nothingness, an absence of light, or are they the concrete material which interposes itself between our earth and the distant fires which it obscures?

This question...is implicit at the very starting-point of [Gnostic] thought. Since man is a fragment of the universe, and since the body of the one and the space of the other proceed from a simple material, both must obey the same laws. Man is a mirror in which one can discover the reduced and condensed image of the sky, a living universe carrying within him, in his body and his psyche, fires and dark shores, zones of shadow and of light. Are these lights and shadows simply forms split off from a single material, or two materials of opposing nature? All our existence, all our choices as thinking hominids are vitally implicated in this simple question.

What struck [the ancient Gnostics] most forcibly, as they watched throughout the Egyptian nights, is the dark portion of the sky--the vastness, the omnipresence, the heavy opacity of that blackness. It hangs over us like a veil, a wall of shadow encircling the earth, a tenebrous dome through which appear, here and there, through chinks, faults and gaps, the glittering fires of another world. A gigantic black lid seals in our universe and encompasses us with its opacity.

You Just Might Be a Humanist!

Robert M. Price, author of such books as DECONSTRUCTING JESUS and THE REASON DRIVEN LIFE, is (according to Wikipedia) a member of the "Jesus Seminar," a "secular skeptic," and a self-described "Christian atheist". He is therefore perfectly positioned to explain, for those who are interested, the distinction between "secular humanism" and "religious humanism" (the latter being in turn distinct from the specifically "Christian humanism" espoused by the likes of Jacques Maritain). 

Price begins his explanation by citing the ancient Gnostics who held that humanity itself was "divine". He sees this as crucial:

What distinguishes religious from secular humanism [is] a belief in the divinity of human nature. Such belief may not be a necessary condition for religious humanism, but it seems to me a sufficient one. That is, if you believe human nature deserves the epithet "divine," you qualify as other (or, if you prefer, more) than a secular humanist.  

According to Price, Ludwig Feuerbach's humanism also falls into the "religious" category: 

Feuerbach held that theologians are correct when they say we can discern the divine attributes. They are right to believe in such things as divine love, justice, mercy, sagacity—even in eternal life and omniscience. Theologians are merely wrong in ascribing these to some divine person beyond humanity. On this argument the grandeur of human nature, of the human race collectively, truly is divine. It is also a terrific burden to bear. Our problem is that we shirk the burden of our own divine greatness. We create the devil as the scapegoat for the evil that we do, both trivial and titanic; and we create God as a paradoxical scapegoat to take the burden of our righteousness—we don't want responsibility for either! 

In other words, there is no "God" and "Humanity" is his name. 

On the one hand, says Price, humanists are engaged in a secular reenactment of the medieval split between "realism" and "nominalism": 

Do you believe there is such a thing as capital D Divinity? Do you think calling human nature "divine" really adds anything to a description of it as "profound" or "impressive" or "venerable"? Or is "divine" just a metaphorical value judgment, as in "That dress looks divine"? If you're an Idealist and you believe there is an extra something beyond great impressiveness, a literal divinity, to human nature, you would certainly qualify as a religious humanist. But if to you "divine" is just a metaphor, then you are a secular humanist. 

On the other hand, religious humanists often privilege an "experience of the sacred" that transcends mundane existence: 

Scholars including Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade thought a unique form of religious experience exists. Schleiermacher called it "the feeling of absolute dependence." Otto called it the "numinous" experience. It is a creature-feeling of ontological humility before the overwhelming greatness of the Holy. A religious humanist might experience the numinous when contemplating the greatness of human nature in a choice piece of music or a painting or a sonnet. It is a deep chill that makes one feel one's own unworthiness—though also perhaps one's own potential. 

Not surprisingly, the ever-skeptical Robert Price is unconvinced: 

What if the feeling of reverence before the great and awesome is not singularly religious, but rather simply part of the aesthetic judgment? One might then feel less inclined to call an awe-experience triggered by a product of human art "religious." The core issue here is not whether one has or lacks aesthetic sensitivity. It is whether one regards the particular thrill of the numinous experience as containing something not encompassed by the idea of the aesthetic. If you think it's all just aesthetics, you are secular. If you think there is something unique in the numinous experience, even when called forth by products of human artistry, you are religious. 

Though Price makes clear that his own humanism is secular through and through, he recommends a "live and let live" attitude between the two camps: 

Is it better to be a religious humanist or a secular humanist? I don't know if that's even a proper question. These are coordinates, like "liberal" and "conservative." Which are you? I suspect you are liberal on some issues, conservative on others. This doesn't invalidate the two categories. They are helpful precisely in that they allow you to plot yourself on a chart, as it were, to understand yourself better. It's the same with religious and secular humanism: maybe you're a hybrid. Maybe you're an unstable mix, shifting and changing in your inclinations. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. 

It is clear to me, from all the above, that I am best described as a God-haunted atheist humanist with vaguely religious inclinations (in)formed by Christian upbringing and theological curiosity; infected with Original Sin, Gnostic despair and existential dis-ease; and plagued by an inability to stop asking unanswerable questions like What are people for? and What's it all about, Alfie?  ¹

Having resolved that, maybe now I can get a good night's sleep. 

http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_reli_secu_hum.htm

¹ Or, as Bob Dylan put it: "Little boy lost / he takes himself so seriously / he brags of his misery / he likes to live dangerously..."

You Just Might Be a Gnostic!

Here at The Little Red Blog, I have now and then made reference to Gnostics and to Gnosticism; and I will continue to do so in the future, because it's my blog and who's going to stop me?

In fairness to my patient readers (both of you), however, I feel the need to do a bit of explaining about the nature of Gnosticism; while the subject can be quite arcane, I think the following should help clarify the basic points.  

If you believe the world is flawed because it was created in a flawed manner, you might be a Gnostic. 

If you often feel as if you are a stranger living in a world that is flawed and absurd, you might be a Gnostic. 

If you believe the blame for the world’s failings lies not with humans, but with the creator, you just might be a Gnostic. 

If you think that there is a true, ultimate and transcendent God, who is beyond all created universes and who never created anything in the sense in which the word “create” is ordinarily understood, you might be a Gnostic. 

If you are persuaded that this world is the work of a demented or misguided Demiurge, a flawed consciousness, a being who became the creator of the material and psychic cosmos, all of which he created in the image of his own flaw and who, unaware of his origins, imagined himself to be the ultimate and absolute God: you might be a Gnostic. 

If you happen to believe that humankind contains a perishable physical and psychic component, as well as a spiritual component which is a fragment of the divine essence, you are probably a Gnostic. 

If you believe humans are generally ignorant of the divine spark resident within them. This ignorance is fostered in human nature by the influence of the false creator [who is] intent upon keeping men and women ignorant of their true nature and destiny, you might be a Gnostic. 

If you think that anything that causes us to remain attached to earthly things serves to keep us in enslavement to [the Demiurge], you just might be a Gnostic. 

If you believe humans are caught in a predicament consisting of physical existence combined with ignorance of their true origins, their essential nature and their ultimate destiny. To be liberated from this predicament, human beings require help, although they must also contribute their own efforts, you might be a Gnostic.  

If you think that revelation from on High is needed to bring about salvation. The indwelling spark must be awakened from its terrestrial slumber by the saving knowledge that comes “from without”. Ignorance -- whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities -- is dispelled only by Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by Messengers of Light, you might be a Gnostic. 

If you are opposed to “ethics” or “morality” [as] a system of rules [which] originate with the Demiurge and are covertly designed to serve his purposes, you could well be a Gnostic. 

If, on the other hand, you believe morality consists of an inner integrity arising from the illumination of the indwelling spark, and you embrace this spiritually informed existential ethic as ideal, then, buddy, you might be a Gnostic.  

If you think that commandments and rules are not salvific; they are not substantially conducive to salvation. Rules of conduct...are not relevant to salvation; that is brought about only by Gnosis, then you might be a Gnostic. 

If you believe in non-attachment and non-conformity to the world, “being in the world, but not of the world”; a lack of egotism; and a respect for the freedom and dignity of other beings: yeah, you guessed it—you might be a Gnostic.   

Finally, if you believe that human beings must come by Gnosis to know the ineffable, divine reality from whence they have originated, and whither they will return. This transcendental knowledge must come to them while they are still embodied on earth, and that Death does not automatically bring about liberation from bondage in the realms of the Demiurge. Those who have not attained to a liberating Gnosis while they were in embodiment may become trapped in existence once more: then you can be pretty darned sure that you are a Gnostic.

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{Apologies to Jeff Foxworthy; all italicized passages taken from Stephan Hoeller's essay "The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism".} 

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http://www.gnosis.org/gnintro.htm Stephan Hoeller