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Gnosticism, Ancient and Modern: the Religion of the Future? Author(S): CHRISTOPHER LASCH Reviewed Work(S): Source: Salmagundi, No Skidmore College Gnosticism, Ancient and Modern: The Religion of the Future? Author(s): CHRISTOPHER LASCH Reviewed work(s): Source: Salmagundi, No. 96 (Fall 1992), pp. 27-42 Published by: Skidmore College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40548388 . Accessed: 23/03/2012 01:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Skidmore College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Salmagundi. http://www.jstor.org POLITICS AND CULTURE BY CHRISTOPHER LASCH Gnosticism,Ancient and Modern: The Religionof the Future? Gnosticism,Christianity's ancient rival and scourge,speaks to us,across the intervening centuries, with a certainurgency. First condemned as a heresysoon after its emergence in the second century, Gnosticism can be characterizedas thedoctrine that the fall of mantook place notwhen Adamand Eve defiedGod's willbut when God himself- moreprecisely, a lesserdeity in rebellion against the Absolute - createdthe world. Matter is evil;the disembodied spirit alone is divine;and salvation lies in the long- buriedmemory of ourown origin as sparksfrom the divine flame. Since thisknowledge is difficultto comeby, salvation is necessarilyrestricted to a spiritualelite. Sucha religion- andGnosticism is bestunderstood as a religion in itsown right, not simply as a hereticaloffshoot of Christianity - could takeshape only in a climateof the deepest moral confusion, when old faiths weredying and noneof thenew ones had clearlyestablished a claimto succession.Under Roman rule, Hellenistic civilization, still dominant throughoutthe Mediterranean, was showingsigns of age. Art,literature, andphilosophy consisted largely of commentary on earlier,more original works.Civic lifesuffered as powerpassed from localities to a far-flung imperialbureaucracy. Republican simplicity gave way to imperialgran- deur.The spreadof educationcreated a publicavid fornew ideas but 28 CHRISTOPHER LASCH impatientwith the mental discipline required to masterthem; learning madepeople sophisticated without making them wise. The rapid circula- tionof goods and ideas madefor a cosmopolitanoutlook, in thelight of whichthe cultural achievements of earlier times, however admirable and impressive,appeared narrow and provincial.At the same time,those achievementswere felt to have a vigorand spontaneity that could no longer be recaptured.Mythology, in particular, appealed to the educated classes as a richlyinventive, exuberantly imaginative body of untutored insights intothe cosmos, to be collected,savored, and reinterpreted bythose who couldno longer accept them as literaltruth. Eclectic in their tastes, the men and womenof thesecond century self-consciously cultivated discarded superstitions;the capacity for appreciation flourished as thecapacity for beliefdeclined. Thesecond century was a timewhen the accumulation of wealth, comfort,and knowledge outran the ability to put these good things to good use. It was a timeof expanding horizons and failing eyesight, of learning withoutlight and greatexpectations without hope - a timevery like our own.Hans Jonas, the preeminent historian of Gnosticism, says that he was "lured"into the "gnostic labyrinth" by the "thrill of this dimly felt affinity." The Hellenisticworld seems more familiar to us thanthe classical phase of ancientcivilization, the fruits of our studyof thisimperial age more directlyapplicable - tooreadily applicable, if anything - to ours."What I ... learnedout there," Jonas writes, "made me now better understand the shorefrom which I had setout." Recentcommentary on Gnosticismtends to divide into two types:call themscholastic and prophetic.The scholasticenterprise is drivenby questions internal to the various disciplines that have converged onGnosticism ,with a concentrationofpurpose bordering on the rapacious: ancienthistory, classical languages and literature,the history of religion, paleography,archaeology. Discoveries of new materials- notablythe gnostictexts unearthed in Egypt in 1945- havecontributed to thegrowth ofgnostic studies. But in all thisvast and growing body of scholarship, we findhardly a traceof the excitement, the sense of recognition that attracted someonelike Jonas to the study of Gnosticism in the hope of making sense notjust of theancient world but of themodern world as well. Politicsand Culture 29 The scholarlycommunity frowns on whatit calls presenüsm- an over-eagernessto read thepast in thelight of presentconcerns. Not withoutreason, scholars insist that the past must first be takenon itsown terms.They have littleuse foranalogies or parallelsbetween past and present,let alone for lessons allegedly learned from the past. They look not for"affinities" but for influences, lines of intellectual descent; and academic historiansof Gnosticism remain understandably skeptical, in theabsence ofevidence that would allow us to tracean unbrokentradition of gnostic thoughtover nearly two millennia,of theclaim that gnostic ideas have shapedintellectual and political life in thetwentieth century. Itis hardenough to identify intellectual influences in the ancient world.Since the gnostic movements of the second century drew on a great arrayof religioustraditions, scholars have been hardpressed to decide exactlywhere they originated, how muchthey owed to Judaismand Christianity,and whetherit is possibleto speakof Gnosticismat all- a coreof doctrine distinct from any other doctrine. Many of them now take theposition that the label imposesan artificialuniformity on beliefsthat can be foundin anynumber of differentcombinations. We see herethe familiar,unavoidable, disheartening effects of academicscholarship in introducingnew qualificationsto everygeneralization, complicating everypicture until it becomes unintelligible to anyonebut an expert,and finallydissolving the object of study into its components, too fragmentary now to be reassembledinto any kind of syntheticview. Withconsiderable relief, we turn from this imposing but confusing and ultimatelyunsatisfactory body of scholarship- thisadmirable col- lectionof fragments,which refuse to cometogether - to thesecond type ofstudy, prophetic in thesense that it puts the study of Gnosticism at the serviceof social criticism.Best exemplifiedby thework of Jonas- in particularby The Gnostic Religion, a bookacknowledged as indispensable even by specialists- the second approachis bold, imaginative,and speculativewhere the first is cautiousand circumspect."Parallels" and "affinities"abound; "influences" are seldom to be seen.Here the study of Gnosticismis shapednot by questionsgrowing out of a traditionof specializedscholarship but by the suspicion that an understandingof the gnosticsensibility will shed lighton thespiritual condition of our own times.Historical scholarship becomes a formof philosophical and cultural 30 CHRISTOPHER LASCH criticism.The searchfor truth, reduced by writersof monographsto endlessinsignificant revisions of each others'work, emerges once again as a drivingpassion. Gnosticism commends itself as an objectof study, to thosewith a speculativeturn of mind,not because new informationhas cometo light or because gaps in the scholarly record remain to be filledbut becauseit is importantfor the modern world to understandhow it lost its wayand might regain it. Amongthose who regard Gnosticism as an importantcurrent in modemthought, the names of Harold Bloom, Philip Lee, ThomasMoinar, and Eric Voegelincome readilyto mind,along with that of Jonas.This abbreviatedlist is enoughto suggestthe broad range of contemporary movementswith which Gnosticism has beenidentified. Jonas links it to existentialism,which allegedly grows out of a similarexperience of homelessness.Existentialists share with ancient Gnostics, he argues,the crushingdiscovery that they are alone in a hostileor indifferent universe. The "generalstyle of extremism" in the most advanced twentieth-century thought,existentialist or otherwise,reflects a "splitbetween self and the world,man's alienation from nature, ... thecosmic solitude of the spirit, and theensuing nihilism of mundanenorms." PhilipLee and HaroldBloom findgnostic affinities in a quite differentquarter - inAmerican Protestantism, with its antinomian emphasis onthe individual's direct, unmediated relation to God. Thomas Moinar, on the otherhand, locates the modernequivalent of Gnosticismin the "scientificworldview," which reduces man to a machine.If Gnosticism is the"essence of modernity," itis because"both gnostics and adepts of the mechanicalmodel [of humannature] agree on downgrading,denying, eliminatingthe concept of thesoul."x Moinar sees a connection,in turn, betweenthe mechanistic model of manand utopianism,the attempt to organizehumanity into "machine-like collectivities." EricVoegelin, like Moinar, condemns utopianism as thedriving forceof modern politics but traces it to the gnostic dream of a "community of the spirituallyperfect who can live togetherwithout institutional authority."Drawing heavily on Norman Cohn's investigationsof millennarianmovements in the Middle Ages, Voegelin interprets the idea ofprogress, culminating in twentieth-centurytotalitarianism,
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