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Gnosticism, Ancient and Modern: The of the ? 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

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BY CHRISTOPHER LASCH

Gnosticism,Ancient and Modern: The Religionof the Future?

Gnosticism,'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 himself- moreprecisely, a lesserdeity in rebellion against the Absolute - createdthe world. Matter is evil;the disembodied alone is divine;and 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 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 of religion, paleography,archaeology. Discoveries of new materials- notablythe gnostictexts unearthed in 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 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 , 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 ,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 , 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" of ," 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 of a "community of the spirituallyperfect who can live togetherwithout institutional authority."Drawing heavily on Norman Cohn's investigationsof millennarianmovements in the , Voegelin interprets the idea ofprogress, culminating in twentieth-centurytotalitarianism, as a latter- day revivalof thegnostic search for a "terrestrialparadise."2 By con- Politicsand Culture 3 1 demningthe material world as thecreation of an evil , ancient and medievalGnostics made it possible for their successors to imagine that its imperfectionscould be eliminatedby a spiritualelite equipped with special insightinto the logic of history. The "essence of modernity," according to Voegelin,is tobe foundin the "growth of gnosticism," as a resultof which self-appointedelites endow themselves with god-like power to redesign theworld. If we add one morewriter to thelist, one less familiarthan the othersbut no less fascinatedby gnosticparallels, we get stillanother versionof contemporaryGnosticism. For Carl Raschke,a historianof religionteaching at theUniversity of Denver,Gnosticism is above all nostalgia- "a rear-guardaction against the ''of the modern, industrialworld." In everyage, itappeals to downwardly mobile intellec- tualsand aristocrats - in the modern world, to malcontents like Schelling, Schopenhauer,Nietzsche, Blake, Emerson, Carlyle, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Yeats,, and Jung. "Originally a philosophy of radical world-denial," Gnosticismin our time takes the shape of a "systematicaversion to the idea of progress."It reflectsa "totalloss of social conscience,"the "death of commonpurpose."

Theprophetic approach to Gnosticism, guided by a searchfor its contemporaryequivalents, seems to lose in historicalprecision what it makesup in moralpassion. What is thisGnosticism that can takesuch contradictoryforms? How canthe same term cover both existentialism and ,the most profound and themost simplistic varieties of contemporarythought? How canGnosticism describe, at one and the same time,feelings of existential dread and helplessness and, on theother hand, a boundlessconfidence in man'spower to remake the world to his liking? How can it embracean aversionto progressand a beliefin progressso extravagantthat it justifies every conceivable atrocity in thename of an earthlyparadise in the making? In one version,Gnosticism is a religionof hyperactiveworld-savers; in another, it is pervadedby a moodof passivity and .There is fairlygeneral agreement on thekinship between gnosisand Protestantism- but whichProtestantism, which gnosisl In Bloom'sversion of Protestant Gnosticism, the poison consists of aggressive 32 CHRISTOPHER LASCH anti-intellectualism;inLee's, ofa "withdrawalinto the self atthe expense of Christiancommunion; in Voegelin's,of a refusalto "leave thetrans- figurationof the world to the grace of God beyondhistory" - an assertion of theself-elected 's determination to "do thework of God himself, righthere and now,in history." Gnosticismhas toomany faces, it would seem, to offerinsights into the "essence" of modernityor anythingelse. In each of these interpretations,thecase forgnostic parallels and affinities has torest on a partialand highly selective account of thegnostic outlook. Emphasis on a singlefeature, to the exclusionof everythingelse, inevitablyhas a distortingeffect. Thus although gnostic , unlike Christianity, does notrequire a savior,it shouldnot therefore be assimilatedto antinomian religionsof an "innerlight." This phrase refers to an emotionof oneness withthe world, apartfrom the gnosticexperience of alienation. Insightcomes to Gnostics, moreover, in the of secret knowledge, not as theproduct of emotional upheaval - whichis whyit makes no senseto equateGnosticism with evangelical anti-intellectualism. The knowledge prizedby Gnosticsis preservedin obscure,difficult texts that have to be decodedbefore their hidden meaning can be discerned,and it is also misleading,therefore, to readGnosticism into the type of religionthat encouragesa direct,unmediated relation between the believer and God. Quiteapart from the difficulty that Gnosticism rests on knowledge,not (to saynothing of ), its God is fartoo impersonal and remote to enjoy a directrelation to humanbeings. Gnostics would regardthe propositionthat "you've gota friendin "as indescribablyvulgar. TheirGod has no personalattributes, nor can He (it) be understoodeven as JonathanEdwards's "being in general." Being, for Gnostics, is thevery antithesisof God. Being is wherethe troubleall began. Being means contingency,time, death, and destruction.God, theperfection of non- being,had no need to create.The creator-God- the God of the ,insome varieties of the gnostic creation-myth - was an imposter, a rebelagainst the true God, no friendto mankind. Comparisonsbetween Gnosticism and evangelicalChristianity are evenmore suspect when they stress the messianic as opposedto the antinomianelements in Protestantism.Messianism presupposes order in history,an intelligiblebeginning and end. For Gnostics, on theother hand, Politicsand Culture 33 historyhas no meaning at all. Fromthe gnostic point of view, the Kingdom of God- the symbolunderlying all formsof messianicfaith - is an anthropomorphicsuperstition. The gnosticreligion gives little support to theeschatological imagination and stillless to organizedefforts to build theKingdom of God on earth.It looksbackward to thetime before time. As Raschkesays, it is profoundlynostalgic; but that hardly means that we can findGnosticism wherever we findopposition to the idea ofprogress. Gnosticismoriginated in an age unacquaintedwith the idea ofprogress, a muchlater invention; and it has remained,through all its subsequent elaboration,largely indifferent to the question of whetherhistory moves ina straightupward line. Criticism of progress implies an interestin history thatGnostics find unaccountable.

* * *

Amongthose who see a kinshipbetween ancient Gnosticism and variousaspects of modernlife, Jonas comes closest to thetruth when he identifiesthe heart of the gnostic religion as a nihilisticdespair. Yet even this'"existentialist' reading of Gnosticism," inviting as itscounterpart a "'gnostic' readingof Existentialism,"is not altogetherconvincing. Gnosticismand existentialismlook verymuch alike if we confineour attentionto their common refusal to see God's handeither in historyor in nature.But as Jonashimself admits, the world is activelyevil for Gnostics, whereasfor existentialists itis merelyindifferent. "Merely" hardly catches thedifference: a hostile world is preferable, in some ways, to an indifferent one. The formerperception implies a vastcosmic drama, elaborated in gnosticmythology as a battlebetween good and evil, spirit and matter, that ends(at least on thepersonal level) in a returnto the primordial perfection of non-being- to whatother religious traditions know as Nirvana.The existentialistperception, more radically despairing, implies a universe utterlydevoid of moral significance; the human search for meaning finds no echo or supportin thesurrounding emptiness. Bothviews, it should be added,need to be distinguishedfrom that of Christianexistentialists like Kierkegaardand Pascal, whose God is remotebut by no meanshidden or inaccessibleand who see graceand faith- ideasthat play no partin gnostictheology - as thebridge between 34 CHRISTOPHER LASCH heavenand earth.Jonas understands Pascal to havebeen describingthe "silence"of the universe when he wrote, "Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of whichI am ignorant,and whichknow me not,I am fright- ened."But this terror had itsantidote in faith,according to Pascal, and it is morethan a littlemisleading to assimilatesuch statementseither to Gnosticismor to thekind of existentialism that takes the death of God as itsstarting-point. It is doublymisleading to confusethe death of God withthe disenchantmentofnature, the "loss ofthe idea ofa kindredcosmos" As EricVoegelin points out, it was Christianity,not Gnosticism, that brought about the disenchantmentof nature.The old cosmologiesprovided a reassuringview of the world in which the made their presence known inevery phase of everyday existence. Endowed with human attributes, the gods wereexperienced as a palpable,material, and immediateforce in humanlife, mating with human beings, alternately thwarting and abetting theirdesigns. Christianity replaced the mythical cosmos with a universe bereftof gods, in which the presence of a spiritualprinciple had to be taken on faith.Existential anxiety, which Jonas associates exclusively with Gnosticism,was by no meansunknown to ."Uncertainty," as Voegelin writes,"is the veryessence of Christianity.The feelingof securityin a 'worldfull of gods' is lostwith the gods themselves."Its "uncompromising,radical, de- of theworld" was precisely "whatmade Christianityso dangerous"- so destructive,that is, to the peace of mindof thosewho lived in thecomforting shadow of Mount Olympus.

The deathof the gods, not only in Greecebut in theother ethnic culturesof the eastern Mediterranean, marked the shift from a mythicalto a religiousunderstanding of existence.New symbolsof the unseen replaced the old ones, new ways of representingthe experienceof transcendence.Voegelin finds the emergence of a newkind of consciousness notonly in Christianitybut in classicalphilosophy, in developmentsin Judaismmore or less contemporaneouswith classical philosophy, and in variousother "spiritual outbursts" in the ancient world.3 These movements sharedthe common discovery that spirit revealed itself in humanlife as a forcemysteriously attracting human beings to the pursuit of truth. Not the Politicsand Culture 35 gods' controlof naturaland humanevents but the human search for the Absolute,which at the same time showed up the contingency of human life by contrast,announced the presence of thespirit. Whatever it was that pulledmen and women upward, from darkness into light, was experienced as divine;left to their own devices, men and women would have continued tomistake appearance for reality. The limits of their earlier understanding stoodout by contrastwith this new experienceof a transcendentpower openingtheir eyes to a higherorder of truth.Yet insightinto this higher truthwas elusive and intermittent,dependent on momentsof intense illuminationimpossible to sustainover a lifetime;and its effectwas thereforehumbling as muchas itwas exhilarating. Insight came only when peopleopened themselves to God insteadof countingon theirown wits. It came as a ,not as the accomplishmentof humanwill or ingenuity.

Theunsettling effects of these discoveries were magnified, in the Hellenisticphase of ancient civilization, by the collapse of ethnic and tribal culturesunder the impact of theimperial organization imposed first by Alexanderand later by the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean. The old gods had a decidedlynational character; they were too closelytied to particularregions and culturesto retainmuch credibility, at leastamong theeducated classes, in the cosmopolitan world of late antiquity. The claim thatany nation enjoyed special favors from heaven appeared increasingly unconvincinginthe Hellenistic melting-pot. Even , notwithstanding hisprophets' condemnation of tribal , now looked to his critics like a tribaldeity in his ownright. Clever people could see thathis "chosen people"had no privileged place in the cosmic scheme of things. As forthe ,their claim to superiority,ifit had any validity at all, now had to reston theirhighly developed art and learning,not on special favors conferredby theOlympians. In thisatmosphere, many people lost confidencein religion altogetheror embraced a dignified,cultivated stoicism that had little room forthe .Others gravitated to a varietyof inward-turning ,ranging from esoteric mystery cults to Gnosticismand Chris- tianity,all ofwhich (whatever their differences) drew a sharpdistinction betweencivic life and the life of the spirit.The imperialperspective 36 CHRISTOPHER LASCH reducedthe city-state, once the center of the world and the object of intense loyalty,to another provincial town. Except in itself, still aprovincial townat theheart of a vastempire, the sense of citizenshipsurvived only in Demosthenes'widely admired, oxymoronic announcement that he regardedhimself as a "citizenof the world." Among the religious, civic or nationalidentification seemed wholly incidental to religious identification. Theirself-assigned status in thebody politic was thatof aliens and exiles, conformingto thecivil code butreserving their deepest loyalty for God alone.It was said ofChristians that "they live in theirown countries, but as aliens;they share all dutieslike citizens and sufferall disabilitieslike foreigners;every foreign land is theircountry, and every country is foreign to them." The samething could have been said, with much greater justice, of theGnostics. Christians, after all, did notdeny the claims of thestate, evenif their fulfillment ofcivic obligations was perfunctory.Gnostics, on the otherhand, refused to admitthat states exercised any legitimate authoritywhatsoever. They often made a pointof flouting the , on the groundsthat were made forlesser mortals and notfor them, the childrenof light.When they chose to observethe prevailing laws and customs,it was ina spiritof pure opportunism, conformity carrying fewer risksthan outright defiance. Gnostics had no equivalentof St. Paul's adviceto giveCaesar his due. In theircase, disillusionmentwith secular authorityhad reached the extreme of totaldisbelief. TheCity of God couldnever have been written by a Gnostic.St. Augustine'simagery, from a Gnosticpoint of view,compromised the spiritualintegrity of theAbsolute by associating it with categories derived fromhuman politics. Augustine's treatise emphasized the tension between timeand eternity,whereas Gnosticism - theManichean form of which was one of Augustine'sprincipal targets - dissolvedthis tensionby condemningtime and contingency as therealm presided over by of Darkness.For Gnostics,the separation of religionand politicswas absoluteand unconditional. Politics meant the role of the strongest under thesign of .In a worldgoverned by emperors whose lust for power seemedto have no limit,in which the republican origins of Roman power survivedonly as a distantmemory, the gnostic devaluation of politics madea certainundeniable sense. Gnostic dualism offered the most radical, Politicsand Culture 37 in some ways themost intelligible and compellingperspective on the Romanempire and itsculture of cynicism, resignation, and disbelief.

Such a perspectivegave littlesupport to a politicsdesigned to recreateheaven on earth;nor does itdo so today.According to Voegelin andothers, the gnostic impulse underwent a process of ,in moderntimes, as a resultof whichthe search for perfection took on a politicalcharacter. A profounddissatisfaction with reality, always the hallmarkof Gnosticism, gave rise to ambitious schemes to redesign reality throughpolitical revolutions carried out by in possession of a higher truth.Hegel, Marx, and their disciples envisioned a neworder that would resolveall contradictionsand put an endto the history of human suffering. Buttheutopianvision,religiousorsecular, bears little resemblance toanything that can plausiblybe describedas gnostic.It derivesfrom the Christianapocalypse, more generally from Christianity's refusal to write offhistory and politicsas irredeemablycorrupt. Even in thefirst two centuriesafter , when Christians were a persecutedminority and thushad every reason to see politicsas thework of thedevil, the refrainedfrom a totalcondemnation of the civic order. Unlike their Jewish predecessors,Christians no longersaw themselvesas a nationbound to Godby a specialcovenant, a chosen people in the Judaic sense; but neither did theydeny the necessity or legitimacyof thestate. Nor did theytake the position that a Christianlife required a completerenunciation of worldlyconcerns. The churchitself - the metaphoricalbody of Christ (a conceptionfar removed from Gnosticism) - ministeredto corporealmen and women,not just or spirits.It concerneditself with their immediate welfare as well as theirultimate destinyon the Day of Judgment.When Christianitybecame the state religionof Rome,the interpénétration of politics and religionwas quite explicit.Not thatthis ever abolished the tension between religion and politics.The Constantinian settlement made secular authorities servants of God,not gods in their own right It held them accountable to a supematurally derivedstandard of political conduct, enforced - howevererratically and ineffectively- by a churchthat saw itselfas in theworld but not of it.4 Throughoutthe subsequent history of westernChristianity, sa- cred and secularcontinued to intermingleuneasily. The 38 CHRISTOPHER LASCH simultaneouslyreinforced the distinction between religious and secular authority(by deemphasizinggood works,including the conscientious performanceof civic duties) and blurred the distinction (by replacing the Churchof Rome withvarious national churches), but in spiteof these changes,the tension remained: the Protestant churches neither seceded fromthe worldnor allowed themselvesto be absorbedinto it. They continuedto insist that ultimate ends can neverbe achievedin politics but thatpolitics are not thereforeexempt from ethical judgment. ,Protestant or ,refused either to authorizea double standard,one forreligion and one forpolitics, or to treatreligion and politicsas identical. The tensionthat orthodox Christianity seeks to maintaincan be brokenin either of two ways. The first,the spiritualization ofpolitics, can legitimatelybe understoodas one of theantecedents of modernsecular utopianism,as longas it is also understoodthat this way owes moreto Christianityitself than to Gnosticism.Once you takethe position that historyhas a spiritualdirection and purpose and will culminate, moreover, inthe , it becomes difficult to discourage enthusiasts from claimingultimate sanction for contingent, highly particular ends. Partial truthsbecome absolute truths; national or ethnic conflicts become ; theAlmighty is invokedon behalfof themost outrageous cruelties, the mostgrotesque perversions of justice. This familiar misuse of religion has beenrepeatedly condemned in thename of religion,especially by those who speak fromthe prophetic tradition common to bothJudaism and Christianity.Still, the messianic tradition has an undeniableauthenticity of itsown, which can be tracedback to someof thevery same prophetic writingsas wellas to theChristian Book ofRevelation - themost fertile sourceof apocalyptic fantasies and of the apocalyptic of thought that underliesso manysecular utopias. Christian furnishes a powerful correctiveto the inclination to invest political action with ultimate religious significance,but it also providesplenty of encouragementto thosewho lookto politicsfor salvation.

The rediscoveryof Gnosticism,in ourtime, coincided with the riseof totalitarianism, and it was all tooeasy to see theformer in the latter. The totalitarianphenomenon had about it an unmistakableair of the Politicsand Culture 39 archaicand atavistic,a returnof therepressed. The grandiosevisions of Hitlerand Stalin, the religious fervor that seemed to inspire their followers, theirfanatical conviction that a higherdestiny excused every atrocity - theseseemed to well up out of some long-buried past, some underworld of thereligious imagination. Gnosticism, the archaizing religion par excel- lence,was theobvious choice forcommentators who wishedto trace totalitarianismto religiousantecedents. Neo-orthodox movements in Christianity,meanwhile - themselvesthe product of the same world crisis thatproduced totalitarianisms - appealed to some of these commentators as thebest line of defense,especially against "godless ." Thosewho understood the Utopian politics of absolute ends as aboveall a kindof heresy,a betrayalof traditionscentral to westerncivilization, naturallysearched for its origins in Gnosticism,for Christians the heresy of heresies.5 But Gnostics,whatever their other faults, have seldombeen temptedto play God by realizingHis purposesin history.Utopianism seducesthose who believe that history has a spiritualpurpose in thefirst place. Gnosticism,which uncompromisingly rejects any Providential viewof history,escapes this particular temptation. Itpays a heavyprice for its escape, however. If the Christian view ofhistory invites the danger that politics will be confusedwith religion, the gnosticview relaxes the tension between politics and religion in the other direction.It removes the political realm from ethical criticism altogether. Gnosticshave little use forany kind of ethics, least of all foran ethicsthat mightgovern civic life.From their point of view,the political realm is beyondredemption. At best, politics offer a meansof keeping the rabble at bay. In theancient world, Gnostics supported the state when it suited theirpurpose, but they asked nothing of the state (except that it protect their lives and property)and gave nothingin return.They recognizedno authorityover themselves - neithersecular nor , for that matter. Religionpresented itself to them not as a bodyof sacredcommandments butas a sourceof spiritualenlightenment. Christians and turned to religionfor ethicalguidance, seeking a definitionof the good life. Gnostics,on theother hand, wanted to know "who we were,what we have become;where we were, wherein we havebeen thrown; whereto we speed, wherefromwe areredeemed; what is birthand what rebirth." Such was the 40 CHRISTOPHER LASCH knowledge,according to theGnostic sage ,that "makes us free." If the gnosticimpulse finds expression in our time- in the scientificdream of solvingthe mysteries of theuniverse, in ,more generally in a moodof extremityand existentialnos- talgia- itis becausewe too,like so manywho lived in thefading glow of theHellenistic civilization, have lost confidence in the world around us. It is hardto findpeople who feelat homein thisworld, and thosewho do invitethe suspicion of deadenedsensibilities. Our civic culture is dying, ournational loyalties now look parochial from a worldperspective ,and the globalcirculation of information seems to condemn all formsof ethnic and religiousparticularism to eventualoblivion. In theglobal meltingpot, particularismcan survive,we are told,only if people accepta rigorous separationbetween politics and culture, politics and religion in particular: witnessthe horrifiedreaction to Islamic fundamentalism.The global markethas no place forpeoples who assert their own traditions in public or claimsuperiority for those traditions. Ethnic and religious diversity is tolerated,even celebrated, but only as a kindof tourist attraction. Civic life is swallowedup by the market;buying and sellingbecome the only activitieswe havein common. As thecommon world, sustained by traditions now under attack as hopelesslyparochial, recedes from view, our grip on theworld around usweakens - oursense of it not just as "theenvironment" but as ourhuman home.An ancientdualism reasserts itself as a plausibledescription of existence:the world as we knowit is a wilderness,a madhouse,a living ,escape from which (whether in space ships or suicide, in daydreams, incarefully engineered revivals of old superstitions,orsimply in a kindof cultivatedinattention) holds out the only hope of freedom. Gnosticism, the faithof thefaithless, suits the twentieth century as well as it suitedthe second,and it may turn out to suit the next century better still. Its greatest opportunity,perhaps, still lies ahead.We can expectmany people, still onlydimly aware of itsundeniable attractions, to fallon it as a religion seeminglymade to orderfor the hard times ahead. Politicsand Culture 41 Notes

Gnosticsdivided humanity into three categories : hylics, creatures of bodily appetite; psychics, whosemind or was stillearth-bound; and pneumatics, the spiritual who alone had accessto the privileged knowledge of their divine origin. Thus it can be saidthat they valued thespirit more highly than the soul, strictly speaking. Moinar' s pointseems more than a little strained.Glorification of the spirit does notexactly suggest a mechanicalmodel of .

2 Voegelin,who sees so much,does not see thatthe idea ofprogress, in itsmost compelling form,is quitedistinct from the expectation of .It restson theexpectation that the wideningof men's horizons,the constantexpansion of the desirefor a moreabundant existence,will generate an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy thisdesire. The idea ofprogress owes nothingto themillennarian imagination, nor does it provideany more than incidental support for totalitarianism. In thenineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, it was oftenentangled with utopianism, to be sure;but its persistence, longafterthe ideological collapse of utopianism in the 1940s, indicates that it does not depend onthe vision of future perfection. On thecontrary, the idea ofprogress is appealingprecisely becauseit envisionscontinuing development, along current Unes, without any foreseeable endingat all. 3 In TheOrigin and Goal ofHistory (1 953), KarlJaspers refers to the period between 800 and 200 B.C. as theAxial Age, in which "man becomes conscious of Being as a whole,of himself andhis limitations." All the"fundamental categories within which we stillthink today" date fromthis period, according to Jaspers.Although Voegelin quibbles with the concept of an ,his interpretationof owes a greatdeal to Jaspers's accountof a spiritualexplosion that gave riseboth to philosophyand to thegreat . 4 The doctrineof ,fully elaborated in thefifth century by Leo I, servedas thebasis on whichlater defended the superiority of spiritualover temporal authority. In theeastern empire, on theother hand, this doctrine was neveraccepted. Justinian and his successors,claiming to be Christ'srepresentatives on earth,asserted control over spiritual as well as temporalaffairs. The absence of an independentspiritual authority in eastern Christendommay help to account for the long history of despotism in , which inherited theidea thatrulers presided over the church as wellas overthe state. If we wishto uncover religiousantecedents of Soviet totalitarianism, we woulddo betterto studythe history of the EasternOrthodox Church than to blameeverything on theGnostics.

5 This obsessionwith heresy can be foundeven in thoseunconcerned with the Utopian "heresy."For Philip Lee, whoapproaches Gnosticism from the point of view of a practicing clergyman,the gnosticimpulse is dangerousbecause it leads Protestantsto ignorethe corporatelife of the church.Orthodox Christianity, as Lee understandsit, teachesthat 42 CHRISTOPHER LASCH

collectiveritual and witnessare an essentialpart of religion.The gnosticelements in AmericanProtestantism, on the otherhand, encourage the "personal, private vision and commitmentof the individual believer.'* At a timewhen the Protestant churches no longerask communicantsto believe inmuch of anything, Lee's attemptto rehabilitatethe concept of heresy ought to command a certainrespect. "Within the church," he notes, heresy has become itself a "hereticalword"; andit is hardnot to join himin viewingthis as a loss. It is notclear, however, that a return toan earlierorthodoxy represents the best answer to the spiritual confusion of our time. The experienceof transcendence cannot be reducedto a setof . By turningreligion into orthodoxtheology, as EricVoegelin observes in Anamnesis,the Christian churches helped to provokethe Enlightenment's assault on religion.In ourday, those who now rejectthe Enlightenmentitself "first encounter these older dogmatisms" when they "turn around"; but althoughthose dogmas are "closerto reality"than the enlightened revolt against , "they,too, suffer from a kindof loss ofreality which has provoked the ideological rebellion sincethe eighteenth century." Criticism of the secular ideologies ascendant during the last twocenturies cannot stop with "traditions" and "" - with what Voegelin calls "secondaryideologies" or counter-ideologies. As Voegelinsays, it needs to push even farther back,"beyond the traditions, to thepredogmatic reality of knowledge."