Patrick Gnosis

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Modernity as GnosisJ ames Patrick

Gnosticism, whether ancient or modern,is a dead end. That o f course is its attrac-tion. -Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic AgeGNOSTICISMPPEARS AT the beginning ofthe second century as an unnamed andunnameable collection o overlapping andsimilar systems proposed at the edge ofthe Church known to lgnatius of Antiochand Irenaeus of Lyons by groups o intel-lectual or enlightened adherents to theChristian cult. These knowledgeablebelievers published their insights regard-ing J esus and the way of salvation in aplethora of books and maintained a kindof shadow church that functioned partlywithin, partly at the periphery of thechurch lgnatius called simply catholic.The special danger posed by these gnos-tics or enlightened ones was the result inpart of the deceptive similarities betweentheir speculations and Christian ortho-doxy. They were, wrote Irenaeus, likeglass brilliants whose mere existence dis-credited real gems, their systems beingplausibly Christian, actually demonic.*At the heart of the controversy was afateful ambiguity that existed and still ex-ists in the very word spiritual, a wordboth Eliot and Lewis disavowed in thetwentieth century because they realizedthat its use by Arnold and the Hegelianshad more to do with vague aestheticismand the professorial pursuit of the occultthan with Christian scripture or tradi ti ~n.~In the early twentieth century as in thelate first, the word spiritual could meanwhat it had meant among ordinary reli-gious folk o the Augustan age, in mostEastern religions, and among certain Pla-

tonists; it could be taken as descriptive of aworld of thought or forms or ideas whichcould be defined only with reference to itsimmateriality or bodilessness. For theauthors of the New Testament, spiritualmeant something quite different: the per-fecting of Gods creation through its trans-position into glory. The outcome of thisPauline principle in the order of being stillawaits that consummation of history inwhich Christians profess belief, but themeaning of those doctrinesof resurrectionand transfiguration which the Paulineprinciple implies was aptly represented byC. S. Lewis when he stood the spiritualmetaphor as it occurs in gnostic use on itshead, making (in The Great Divorce) thevery grass of the world that will be tough-er, more solid, more real than the vapor-ous gray world which we currently in-habit.Gnosticism, viewed across the broad ex-panse of its almost numberless historicalmanifestations, is philosophically a pan-theistic monism in which reality is spiritual(in the gnostic sense) matter, and hencehistory, illusory. Psychologically, theGnostic loses himself in the sea of divinebeing, so that he is indeed no longer anacting individual, but at the same time theGnostic identifies God with his own will insuch a way that the Gnostics person andpurposes become divine. It is this that wesense in Stalin, Hitler, and the Inquisitors,but in even the most anonymous ex-amples there is the same linking o pre-sumptive power and the utter absence ofresponsibility.Access to this gnostic reality is an il-luminating experience or series of experi-ences which ends historical existence and


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relates the individual gnostic immediatelyto the divine. Between Gnosticism andfull-blown dualism there are obvious rela-tions, but the Gnosticisms of the West,though Manichean in effect, have seldombeen Manichean in theory. lndeed it isoften the gnostic system that is formallyleast overtly dualistic that is materiallymost effectively damaging, and, as AllenTate and Flannery OConnor have pointedout, it is this subtle Gnosticism which hasgiven a characteristic stamp to Americanreligi~n.~The study of Gnosticism had its ori-gins in the German scholarship of thenineteenth century,5 but itwasnot until acentury later that historians began to takeseriously the fundamental importanceof the gnostic construct for Westernmoral and political experiences, and notuntil 1952 that Eric Voegelins The NewScience of Politics, in which Gnosticismwas represented as the most influentialWestern counter-system, was published.6When Voegelin wrote The New Science o fPolitics, the contents, even the exis-tence, of the extensive gnostic libraryunearthed at Naj Hammadi in upper Egyptin 1945 was known only to specialists inCoptic or in the origins of Chri~tianity.~These texts, when read with the polemicsof lrenaeus and other Christian writers ofthe second and third centuries against theGnostics, made the content of gnosticthought accessible for the first time, andwhile many minor points of controversyremain, the broad outline of Gnosticismwas established.Voegelins presentation o the influenceof Gnosticism in Western thought hadbeen prescient. He accepted the argu-ment, popular among students of theorigins of Christianity in the 1950s, thatthe Church had experienced early in itshistory a crisis born of the existence of aprofound tension between the ultimaterealization of Gods purposes at the secondadvent and the notion of salvation as atranshistorical state of perfection? But,Voegelin argued, belief in the apocalypticreturn did not die, but was revived timeafter time, always with the millennia1 hope

of Revelation 20:4-6: the promise thatChrist would reign on earth with certainelect saints as His Churchs centerpiece.Y et, Voegelin suggested, a religion whoseonly historical representation dependsupon a future event which one may ormay not live to enjoy inevitably provedunsatisfactory. The way was then clear forthe Augustinian rejection o the millenniumas fabulous and A ugustines identificationo the Church as the locus of the millennia1reign.g Thus history was de-divinized, de-positivized, by the existence of a kingdomrepresenting the transcendent claim ofChrist, which, throughout the long courseof the investiture controversy, would suc-cessfully deny the secular powers asser-tion that it represented comprehensivehuman purposes and ultimate humangoods.It was, then, this A ugustinian articula-tion of society into two roughly balancedand opposing institutions which collapsedwhen Joachim of Flora proclaimed therealization in history of the age of theSpirit. This immanentization of the pneu-matic self, a sef identified with God, thenpaved the way for modernity, for theworld of discourse informed by belief inthe progression of world ages, in the real-ization of historys purpose in world-historical leaders, in that intellectualprophecy which we now know as plan-ning or futurism, and in the creation ofhuman communities of anonymous andautonomous persons devoid of order,mediation, or hierarchy. Voegelin calls thetemper and principles that made this re-divinization of history possible Gnosticism,it being this immanentization of the divinepurpose in the gnostic self which mademodernity inevitable.OThe thesis of The New Science o fPolitics, insofar as it touches Gnosticismand its influence, has served well, and re-tains its authority after thirty-five years.But more can be said, both of Voegelinshistoriography and of the progress andconsequences o the gnostic idea.

II F THERE WAS IN Voegelins analysis of the


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role of Gnosticism in the history of theWest any serious weakness, it was relatedto his tendency, one reinforced by thetypical scholarship of the period, to seethe relation between Christianity and his-tory in terms of a tension supposed to ex-ist between those Christians who adoptedwhat Voegelin sometimes calls a stop-history theology, at other times aneschatological extravaganza, betweenthis view and his own conviction that crea-tion is a mystery, the transfiguration ofman and creation a still greater mystery,but one in which Christians could alreadyshare through life in the Spirit and in theChurch. Here Voegelins analysis was in-fluenced by a scholarly debate begun inthe early twentieth century by A lbertSchweitzer and others, who either sug-gested that Jesuss promise that He wouldsoon return proved false, or that His prom-ise was misunderstood, that His Kingdomwas in fact established in the Church bythe Holy Spirit,sothat, while one need notdeny that Christ would come again, thisfuture eschatology was less importantthan the realized eschatology which pro-claimed Jesuss presence in history. Per-haps the greatest exponent of a realizedeschatology was C. H. Dodd, who dislikedand sought gently to discredit the Apoca-lypse, while encouraging an emphasisupon the mysterious presence of J esus inthe community of faith.I2 Influenced, per-haps, by this broadly represented analysis,Voegelin wrote as though the conflictregarding the relation between theK ingdom of Christ and this worlds historycould be reduced to a conflict between themillenarians and their orthodox op-ponents. In fact, the orthodox of the firstmillennium were in abroad sense millenar-ians. The text at stake was not simply thebrief text of Revelation 20:4-6, but thebroad interpretation of history which isrepresented by Revelation 2 1-22:5,whichdescribes the coming down out of heavenof the new heavens and the new earth, atthe center of which is the New J erusalem,within whose gates dwell the Lamb andHis elect. Eschatological tension in earlyChristianity was arranged not around a

conflict between historicizers (few in num-ber in the early centuries) and spiritual-izers, but is better understood as the at-tempt of the orthodox, represented byI renaeus, Justin, Hippolytus, and theRoman bishops, to defend the theology ofPaul (as interpreted by themselves) and ofthe Apocalypse against a horde o Gnosticsand demi-Gnostics, spiritual and allegor-ical interpreters o Scripture, on onehandI3; and against a few historicists likethe Phrygian heretics, who thought theNew J erusalem was about to be realized inthe tiny village o Pepuza on the other.4In fact, there was no pervasive interest inhistoricizing Christianity until the fourthcentury, when Eusebius of Caesareabegan to wri te as though the reign of Con-stantine might be the millennia1 reign ofChrist. This experiment ended with thefailure of Roman political life in the earlyfifth century, and St. Augustine made theChurch, not the empire, the inheritor ofthe millennium in TheCty of God.But if the Christianity of the seventh cen-tury-to take the age of Gregory and J ohnof Damascus-displayed little or no tend-ency to historicize the Gospel, it was alsotrue that there was in it nothing of theastral, spiritual, eschatology of CicerosDream of Scipio. The souls of sleepingsaints might be in heaven, just as theFather, the Son, and the Spirit were inheaven; but Christians awaited not the dis-solution of creation, but its redemption,the transposition of this world of corrup-tion into the Pauline world of glory at thesecond coming, when, as J ohn had taughtin his great vision, the New J erusalemwould descend upon this earth. AlthoughBabylon, this present age, a cosmosorganized against God, would fall in someway which the human eye could never seeclearly or the human mind comprehendprecisely, this creation would be deliveredfrom death and corruption to life andglory.This was the great principle ofIrenaeus last chapter: real things do notpass away into nothingness but proceedinto real existence; this world was notmade for destruction, but would be


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brought by God in some mysterious way,beyond this worlds imperfect history, intothe fullness of being.15 Citizens of modern-ity, even sympathetic readers, need notfind this exposition of the relation be-tween the transcendent order over whichChrist reigns and this worlds history ob-vious or easy in order to appreciate theimplied conclusion. But it was this prefer-ence for being, this love affair with anorder of glory about to break in upon crea-tion, which inhabits early medieval im-agination, giving even the blackest cen-turies of that pre-gnostic world a bright-ness inaccessible to modernity.Voegelins analysis has certain weak-nesses. His acceptance o the Schweit-zerian view that the history of the earlyChurch isbest interpreted as a response tothe failure of J esuss second advent is noteasily defended from the texts of the firstthree centuries. M illenarianism is notused often by theologians of the pre-Nicaean period, even when they wished todescribe the views of those whose hopesthey considered too earthy, insufficientlyspiritual.16 he modern use of that term,which Voegelin partially adopted, is itselfpart of the ongoing gnostic polemicagainst the broad position of the great or-thodox writers, who, whatever they mayhave believed about the rather narrowproblem of Revelation 20:4-6, certainlybelieved that the end of Christianity was anew man in a new creation. It was one ofthe great meritsof Voegelins treatment ofthe Pauline themes of transfiguration andglory in his last work, The EcumenicAge,that he had then seen quite clearly thatthe Church of Ignatius, Augustine, andGregory was moved by its vision of a com-ing glory.Perhaps in the interest of avoiding akind of apocalyptic historicism, Voegelinerred by using a vocabulary in which mys-tery means something less than the mys-terious renewal of all creation. And itmight also be suggested that he did notsee quite clearly that the Augustinianidentification of the millennia1 reign ofChrist with the age of the Church repre-sented a kind of ecclesiastical historicism

that would pose problems of its own. FromAugustines proposal to the proclamationo Boniface VI11 that every soul should besubject to the Roman pontiff,18 there is adirect path; and it might be argued that itwas this historicism, the identification ofthe Church as institution, at least ambigu-ously, with the purposes of God whichmade possible the gnostic irruptions ofJ oachim, the spiritual Franciscans, and thewhole motley crew of late medieval here-tics, not least among them the A lbigenses.For Gnosticism as Voegelin describes ithas two faces, two moments. One is themoment of historical despair, when thesoul has insight that this present world isil lusion. The other is, as Voegelin rightlysaw, the moment o immanentization,when the gnostic, egophanic self, iden-tified with God, acting in a world withoutnatures, forms, or hierarchy, uses passionand violence to bring into historical exis-tence whatever utopia he sees. This ismodernity.

/ IGIVEN HE GENERAL stability Of Voegelinshistoriography and taking into considera-tion the emendations proposed to hisbrilliant thesis, the locus and content ofthose ideas that mediated between theGnosticism of the patristic and medievalperiods (which included not only the here-sies of Valentinus, Basilides, and Marcion,but such successors as the Paulicians, theBogomiles, Cathari, and A lbigenses) maystill be identified more completely thanVoegelin was able to do in The NewScience.There he proposed that as Chris-tianity permeates any civilization, it mustinevitably be diluted by the adherence ofmany who are unable to accept its ten-sions and aridities, and that for this massof half-converted adherents, gripped bythe uncertainty of half-belief, gnosis willappear aprovidential solution, a welcomerelease.Here also more can be said. Grantingthe truth of Voegelins outline, it can alsobe noted that as the Church became adominant institution, moved perhaps too-


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much by A ugustines conviction that itwas or represented the K ingdom of God,the Christian mystery was almost inevita-bly historicized as a system which wouldemphasize the Church as institution andsalvation as an objectified system. Indeed,in the decades after the death of St.Thomas, in the very shadow of UnamSanctum, one can see the Christian mys-tery dissolving into the gnostic moments,into a subjective identification o the selfwith God (the Rhineland mystics, ThomasB K empis, Luther) and the utterly objec-tive identification of salvation as system. Itis in this environment that attention turnsfrom that love affair with reality which theliturgy East and West had represented toan operant act emphasizing (for the firsttime) a theory of the atonement; repre-sented iconographically by the crucifix;dominated in theology by a transpositionfrom the categories o corruption andglory (or death and life) to an interest inthe fulfillment of law, the forgiveness ofsins, the power of the keys, and access tothe treasury of merit. Experientially, thefourteenth century is a world that witnes-ses the dissolution of reason in the acids ofnominalist irrationalism, immediacy, andpositivism. Men become either anxiousseekers of absolution or spirituals whosebeings are inseparable from the divine.The key to this dissolution is the failedphilosophy that denies both the self-identity and the locatedness of finite be-ings by denying the existence of naturesand essences. Gnosticism, whether it isidentified and named or not, isa sustainedattack on the fundamental Western ideathat things really exist, that finite beingsare real, and that, to cite lrenaeus again,being real either they must really be estab-lished or they must be seen as mere illu-sion. From Valentinus to F. H. Bradley, ithas been the work o Gnosticism to teachthat there are no persons, things, or acts,that the world of experience isan epiphe-nomenal refraction of some single divinesubstance which is simultaneously God,man, and history. A llegory, antithesis, andparadox mark this philosophical bent. Forgnostics the world is one vast allegory

whose meaning the enlightened know; asystem of inevitably partial representa-tions related in indeterminate ways to anunknowable depth in being. Ultimately, inthis system of (practically) conventionalsigns, one thing may be as true as anyother, and it is indeed the very nature ofbeing that things seeming most obviousare most deceptive. Hence the antithesisof M arcion of Pontus and the paradoxes ofthe Nag Hammadi texts. In Gnosticismnothing exists, since everything is amanifestation, but only a manifestation, ofthe one divine substance. God absorbs hischildren; there can be no really existentcreatures, only the varied states of the ex-ternally existing manifestations of thedivine.Y et the heart of Western thought is thetwin pillars of Genesis and Aristotle, andwhat these taken together teach is the ex-istence of a world of real beings, beingswhose very existence is good, formed asthey are by the very fullness of being, byform, known in an intelligible light; the an-tithesis of that formlessness, emptiness,and darkness that characterize both thekingdom of chaos, and, strangely, Easternreligious experience. In Gnosticism theonly form of man is the ghostly form leftbehind by the experience of illumination,itself arevelation of the most radical kind,unrelated to history, related only to theGod whose name is not being or form, butunknowable and comprehensive poten-tiality, mere power.Those who, like Lewis in TheAbolitionof Man, have seen the figure of Dr. Faus-tus as possessing aprofound mythic signif-icance for Western self-understandinghave certainly been right. For Faustwanted no thing, no vocation, no posses-sion, merely the unfettered expression ofhis own will. And from Faust to Bacon theroad runs broad and straight, for in a Faust-ian world the purpose of science is notnoetic, is neither wisdom nor knowledgeof the naturesof things, but that successfulproduction, at any cost and by any means,of those fruits desired by mankind. For notonly does man have no nature and fail ofexistence as a creature or being having


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self-identity and relatedness, but natureitself loses its very forms. Bacons NouumOrganum required asa companion pieceHumes Treatiseof Human Nature, for theassertion of technological transcendenceover man and nature cannot be pursuedsuccessfully unless the world has beenswept clean of those forms that imply, in-deed require, the existence of order and acertain profound respect for the integrityof beings.lg Thus the metaphysical plat-form of modernity, pursued from Occamto the English positivists, has had as itscentral project the extirpation of the Aris-totelian-Platonic notion of form or naturesor essences and the propagation of thethesis that the individuality of every beingis merely subjective and conventional.Thus it is hardly surprising that at the endof this process there existsapopulous racewho, obedient to the folk Darwinism oftheir teachers, are willing to believe thatno being has a determinate form, but thateach may enjoy an indeterminate numberof natures, passing down the interminableevolutionary corridor first as one creaturethen another. And at the end imaginationisgripped by the paradox that everythingis everything else, nothing itself. Personsas such, rational individuals capable ofcontracts, loyalties, politics, and faith,cease to exist.And it is of course this attack on thevery existence of natures and essenceswhich constitutes the Gnostic mediation tohistoricism, for if there is nothing innature which must be respected; if thereare neither lawso nature nor natural law;if natures, with their implication of order,are illusory, the field is clear for whatVoegelin calls the egophanic assertionwhich alone can foist form upon a form-less world. It isno mistake that the exces-ses of the late empire occur just as thegnostic presupposition overtakes theclassical world, or that the Churchbecomes positivized and brittle as itsfaith becomes marginally gnosticized,or that the intensely subjective intuition-ism of Occam and John Tauler occurs in aderatiocinated world from which essenceshave been expelled, or that the Cromwel-

lian terror occurs at the height of Puritan-ism, or that the mindless tyrannies of thetwentieth century have occupied a fieldswept clear of those forms and distinctionsbelonging to a world of real, finite, in-formed being. Historicismisanother namefor Gnosticism.In the gnostic-historicist world the greatinstitutions-the state, the school, theChurch-all die, failing because justice(the work of states), wisdom (the work ofschools), and theology (the noesis of theChurch) become inconceivable enter-prises. In gnostic civilization the objectiveform of justice is supplanted by an inde-terminate and growing list of rights whichare discovered in the gnostic self; educa-tion abjures any interest in knowledge infavor of the pursuit of unnameably deepand existential experiences, toward whichstudents must be conditioned, or whichthey must conjure up for themselves; andthe Church fails because its work, unless ithas been infected by Gnosticism, isnot theinculcation of experiences, which, if suchexist, must surely be a work of super-natural agency, but is didactic, at least inits approach to mankind, its presentationof its dogmas, and its moral teaching. Itstask is in the high and classical sense in-tellectual, resting upon and requiring anexposition of and adherence to truthwhich even its adherents and teachersnow often consider formally impossible, itbeing a commonplace of the teaching oftheology in modernity that theologizingconsists of i llumination regarding thingsexperienced.

111THAT ERY MODERNI TY which is touted asdelivery from every traditional dogma infact represents our lapse into a pervasiveand ancient religion, a theosophy whichdictates human behavior with dismal ac-curacy. For gnosis creates a morality; itdoes so inevitably, modern Gnosticism noless than ancient.Beginning with the self, Gnosticismteaches that the form o man is essentiallyinsight or enlightenment, for to be trulyman is to be gnostic. And it of course


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follows from this axiom that only thosewho are in a state of enlightenment aretruly human, that those who are not fail ofthe very definition of man. Hence the un-born, who cannot have had any significantexperience of illumination, and the veryold, who are beyond it, lose their claim tobe considered persons. Furthermore,sincea real being is one that experiencesand can be experienced and is therefore acollection of impressions, the unborn failo personhood on a second ground. Theydie in the darkness of the mothers womb,and though their parts and pieces are seenas these are recovered or discharged, theyare not experienced as persons. Indeedyoung animals, seals with soulful browneyes, succeed in the gnostic definition thatto be is to be experienced and to experi-ence better than the unborn. Citizens ofmodernity cannot perform that task whichthe vulgar of the Middle Ages routinely ac-complished: we can seldom rise above therealm of accidents to see that a newly fer-tilized egg is a person in essence and bynature, as are the defective and the old.If a person is those experiences weconsider valuable, the terminally i l l andthe defective, as well as children in thewomb, fail of any claim to existence. Theirfate is sealed.The allegorical world of Gnosticism isaworld of conventional symbols any one ofwhich could represent any other thing,none of which therefore provides groundsfor real distinctions.20 Equality, which is anarithmetical metaphor, is then the mostcertain concept, for although we do not asGnostics know what anything is, we canat least insist that nothing vaunt itselfabove its fellows. Equality is the mostcertain surviving concept, and it survivesnegatively, as the assertion that nothing isreally different from, and of coursenothing better than, anything else. Theconclusion that things separate are in-herently unequal may be a defensible andnecessary conclusion when the matterunder review is radically segregatedschools, but the slogan in fact draws itspower from the deeper level of gnosticmodernity in which equality is the only

available category. Since there are no dif-ferentiated beings that are real, persons,animals, and the environment are allequally of, and not of, one divine sub-stance. The practical ground and popularproof of this conclusion lieswithin modernscience, which can transmute and synthe-size in the best alchemical fashion, andperhaps especially within biology. FolkDarwinism can produce no real differ-ences between man and the brontosaurus.Time is the only real difference, and thereintroduction of determinate forms andspecies would bring down the entire bio-logical thesis, which, after all, dependsupon the axiom that there are no fixednatures that time cannot transmute intoother natures.

If all differences are ephemeral or con-ventional and all beings really equal, thefervor for equality can be seen as some-thing other than the search for justice longdelayed. T hree examples of this rage forthe destruction of differentiating moraland ontological orders will suffice.That the political systems and politicalbehavior of the Western democracies andthe Marxist oligarchies are identical andidentical in such a way that honestdialogue, or mutual enlightenment, wouldreveal the superficiality o all claims thatthe behavior or principles of the West aresuperior, is an axiom of modern, gnostic,political discourse. I f the fundamentaltruth of political behavior is the inevitableand fundamental expression of whatVoegelin rightly calls egophanic be-havior, then the only government possi-ble must have as its goal the control oprivate ambition and passion through theunmoderated power of the Hobbesianstate.* To the degree that Voegelinsanalysis is correct, differences betweenmodern political systems will be merelyaesthetic. If the authority of the state ismerely its ability to exercise unlimited

power on behalf of some utopia, if themodern state thereby adopts the gnosticprinciple, then its enemies, indeed theenemies of mankind, will be those whopersistently attempt to reintroduce sometranscendent principle of order. There is


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now in the West a deep philosophical uni-ty between the gnosticized libertines ofpopular culture and popular literature andthe equally gnosticized and puritanicalMarxists. Though the former isbuilt uponmass satisfaction of the egophanic selfand the latter upon ritually induced suffer-ing, they share a consensus based upondeep philosophical commitments, andeither will turn in metaphysical rage uponany politics that draws distinctions basedupon the existence of real natures or tendsto re-introduce any order whatsoeverother than the Hobbesian dialectic of vio-lence. The enemy of peace in socialistrhetoric is that man who suggests the exis-tence of an objective order, rooted in be-ing, or real thought.Hence the primary philosophic task ofWestern metaphysics since Luther, andespecially since 1790, has been the incul-cation of the one truth that there are nogiven forms in things, that the world doesnot reflect and cannot be touched byreason. The rage of popular cultureagainst fundamentalists, Solzhenitsyn, andphilosophers of a classical bent is of apiece with the deep sympathy evinced bythe same popular culture for the actionsand motives of socialism, for popularculture is at one with socialism in its cer-tainty that there can be no order otherthan that imposed by the human will. Thatthe operant egophanic agents in the Westare still often individuals, while in the Eastthe state is the principal egophanic agent,is not formally relevant. But note that ourWestern Gnosticism turns too easily to theEastern gnosis of state terror and vio-lence, all which is possible because sub-jects and rulers share the same enlighten-ing knowledge that there is no order otherthan an order of violence, and, this beingthe case, the courage for resistance, basedon the classical assertion that personshave a presumptive claim to their exis-tence and integrity, is wanting.A second example of the gnostic rageagainst order is surely the insistence thatgender and sexuality are mere social con-ventions whose unreality the true Gnosticsees. Given the triumph of Gnosticism, it

was surely inevitable that synods and con-ventions of our senescent Christianitywould be beseiged by women filled withrage and determined to enjoy that com-plete gnostic justice which requires prac-tical assent to the propositions that pater-nity and maternity, masculinity andfemininity are unreal distinctions. SaintPauls affirmation that salvation is avail-able to all; that in Christ there is neitherJ ew nor Greek, male nor female, thenbecomes the lynchpin o a metaphysic,and Paul himself again becomes-asearlier ages had made him-a gnosticteacher.Here one might pause to reflect that forChristians of orthodox conviction the fullhorror of this gnostic transformation isseldom realized. I f the gnostic implicationthat Jesuss masculinity was merely con-ventional is accepted, then the Incarna-tion itself is inevitably Arian, a mereeconomic occurrence directed toward theenlightenment o man. What the divinehumanity that now is at the Fathers righthand (as Christians believe) might then be,poses questions that cannot be answeredwithin the limits of traditional Christianspeculation.And, night following day, if sexuality ismerely conventional, the belief that fruit-ful and charity-laden marriage is betterthan the sterile burning of men for menand women for women must itself be seenas merely conventional. The drive forgay rights is a linguistic and metaphy-sical project of high import for its advo-cates, and its goal is not that consentingadults be allowed to do as they will in pri-vacy. Its purpose is the exorcising fromthis world of the very ghost of form, ormoral order, so that we may be assuredthat fruitfulness and charity, sterility andlust are metaphysically indistinct. Only insuch assurance can gnostic souls find thepeace that comes with final release fromthe burden of form.My point is not that these things aregrave disorders, which is obvious, but thatsuch moral conclusions are the inevitableconsequences of the gnosticizing oWestern imagination and intellect, a


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possibility always at our elbows, whichpassed into actuality in the late M iddleAges and became characteristic of theculture after Luther and Trent. Protestant-ism, incited by the scholarly denigration ofAristotle that had gone on for two centu-ries, adopted the fundamental gnosticpostulate by radically dissociating mansdestiny from mans behavior. This was ac-complished formally in Lutheranismthrough the founders insistence that ourdeeds are irrelevant in the face of our il-lumination, and formally in Calvinismthrough the founders insistence that ourdeeds are not ours at all and are in anycase irrelevant to our salvation in view ofthe enlightening truth that Gods willtoward us may be either for salvation oreternal loss, but is in any event inexora-ble.While classical Protestantism decayed,Catholicism retired to try to contain thoseviral Cnosticisms which it carried: Quiet-ism and Jansenism, beginning at the sametime their attempt to comprehend andcontrol that discredited ecclesiastical his-toricism which the great Church of theWest had developed during the Baroquecenturies. The Catholic attempt to containthe gnostic-historicist dialectic and torecover in clarity the mystery of redemp-tion was generally unfruitful until thecouncils of 1869 and 1962, the first ofwhich was an attempt to found theauthority of the Church within itself, not inits successful domination of Christiankings, the second of which broke Christen-dom freeo its historic but potentially fatalengagement with its imperial past.While the Church struggled, the univer-sity declined into a marketplace of ideas inwhich truth was petty political success.That the malaise of the West should berepresented by philosophers who assidu-ously promote skepticism and considertheir work incomplete until the common-sensebelief in real things and real knowl-edge has been eradicated among the ado-lescent, and by theologians whose majortask is now the assertion of the ultimacy ofintellect and of enlightenment against theecclesiastical defense of revelation, is

hardly surprising. These theologians andphilosophers are a gnostic elite, and theywill flourish in any world in which truthand order are foregone impossibilities.IV

FORM IS A GIFT, the gift of real existencefrom nature and from natures God. It isnomistake that St. Augustine, whose own ex-perience encompassed the Manicheandenial of the goodness of nature andwhose education was rooted in a Plato-nism that easily moved toward the notionthat creation is illusion, became the greatdoctor of form. The very forms of things,he wrote, cry out, Cod made me! And itis this love of form which has stabilizedthe West in its defense of the goodness ofbeing against the powerful claims of noth-ingness and death, andof itsdefense of theexistence of real thi ngs in the face of thegnostic and oriental conviction that noth-ing really exists. In this sense AristotlesMetaphysicsand Genesis 1 are the char-ters of Western civilization, and no lessthan these Revelation 21 and 22, that sub-lime text in which the prophet sees an endof things which is not a destruction but afulfillment.

If one looks at the city that is the heartof the West in the period when there firstwere churches and images, one will findthat a single image dominated Romaniconography from Constantine to about1 That image is the return and reignof Christ with the saints and apostles in theNew J erusalem. And it is belief in thatworld to come, that renewed communitydwelling with the Savior in a new heavenand a new earth which defines Christianhistoriography. This image makes threeassertions. It asserts against the gnosticsand spiritualizers o every stripe that theroot of being which God put in creationwill be brought to the fullness of perfection,that creation and the flesh will not bedestroyed but glorified. And at the sametime the symbol o Christ reigning withthe saints in the New J erusalem de-divi-nizes the temporal order in which thathope is held and dedivinizes even the


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Church, for it is clear that in the New J eru-salem there is no institution called Church.Furthermore, that New Jerusalem whichChrist will bring with Him has no definablerelation to time, but will be realized asGod wills, not through human effort, butby the divine f iat. And whether this comesto pass or not-for we know it only byfaith-it is nevertheless clear that theChristian hope isa symphony of gracious-ly formed being, in which, in some wayyet unknown, God who became man isatthe center of the city, as man, and still asGod.These are, to Christians, mysteries offaith. To citizens of the West they arereminders of the love affair with form andbeing which moved the thought and art ofour first millennium. Gnostics then as nowfound it incredible. Indeed if there is anyone theme by which the history of religionin the West could be comprehended, itmight be the encounter between ortho-doxy and the spiritualizers within theChurch who denied that God could reallybecome man-pious men like Arius andNestorious, who offered God adefense Hehad not chosen to undertake for Himselfby insisting that God could not really in-habit and transform finite being. The im-portance o this construct is not alwaysfully apprehended.To be finite in the clas-sical world (and in modern Gnosticism), tobe formed, is to be mired in partiality anderror. And although Israel was always theexception to this historical despair, evenin Israel it was assumed that God Himselfcould never enter his creation and take itto Himself in a manner that perfectedcreated beings. To the Greeks, foolishness;to the J ews, ascandal.But to anyone remotely interested in be-ing, in existing, words of life. For if Godcan inhabit and renew and glorify man,and in man know all creation, then exis-tence isno sin, and the drive toward deaththat informsagnostic culture can be aban-doned. T he matter surpasses any religiousinterest, touching the most fundamentalreflection of every human being, each ofwhom must ask as men and women sur-rounded by technological behemoths and

political leviathans, What right do I haveto exist? Perhaps the saddest aspect ofAuschwitz and the Gulag, of the accep-tance by the world of routine slaughters, isthe lurking conviction that man, facing thegnostic state, has no just claim to his ownexistence. T hat right is now eclectic, con-jured up or allowed to lapse by electronicimages which display at one time thepitiful image of a child who will diewithout a donor heart, but maintainingsilence regarding countless others who inthe same hospital will be slaughtered.Gnosticism is full of paradox, but thegreatest of all isthe secret knowledge thatwhat the egophanic self longs for mostfervently is death. Christianity taught theWest that this one great exit isdenied; thatman must be, and be eternally, that thereis nothing on earth more precious than theexistence o a sef made in Gods imageand ordered by God toward its own fulfill-ment and Gods glory. The Christian Westwas inhabited by men to whom it was ap-pointed once to be born, once to die, toundergo judgment, and to enter eternallyinto glory or loss. In the end, life in thegarden-girt city with God who becameman or else in hell. It is implicit in that ac-count that it isbetter to be in hell than notto be, for even if one were shut out of thegarden of life eternally, to be, to exist, is agift so great that endless ages of sufferingwould not outweigh the fact of our exis-tences as persons made with that danger-ous capacity to know, or not to know,God, to love him, or to rebel.In the order of philosophy of coursethese things are unproved. But in theorder of history it is surely this insistenceon the unequivocal goodness of being andthe utter necessity of form, which for manis moral form, that has made our experi-ence an adventure rather than an ordeal.And it is the courage and the glory and theweight of this moral adventure thatpermeate Western experience, even inour decay. Newman was certainly rightwhen he wrote, to the chagrin of his con-temporaries, that it would be better thatthe sun and stars fall from the sky thanthat one man deliberately violate in one


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small way the moral form given us byGod.23 And the corollary is surely that ifmen, by what the tradition calls grace,were to fulfill that moral form, the planetsmight dance before them.It is this sense of the danger and cour-age and glory that belong to our loveaffair with being which lies just beneathwhatever still is good in us and our civili-zation, and its loss to the formless eva-nescence of modern Gnosticism thatthreatens us with a banality worse thandeath.G. K. Chesterton, after a lifetime o con-troversy with that great modern gnosticGeorge Bernard Shaw, noted that in thefray he had always defended the sacredlimitations of man against the soaring il-limitability of the Shavian superman. Inthe end, Chesterton wrote, the differencewas a religious difference:

, . . that the Shavians believed in evolutionexactly as the old Imperialists believed inexpansion. They believe in a great andgroping thing like atree;but I believe in theflower and the fruit; and the flower isoftensmall. The fruit is final and in that sensefinite; it has a form, and thereforea limit.There has been stamped upon it an image,which isthecrown and consummationof anaim. . . .z 4

And that aim isthat things should not passinto nothingness, but should be, and to beis to bear an image and a form.The bibliography is immense, but those newly in-terested in the influence of Gnosticism might beginwith Hans J onas, The Gnostic Religion: The Messageof an Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity(Boston,1958),or another of J onass works. Very re-cent scholarship usually takes into account thestudies of Elaine Pagels, who has revived the almosttraditional position that Gnosticism was orthodoxy,suggesting that it, not the religion of Irenaeus, is theChristianity of the future. See The Gnostic Gospels(New Y ork, 1979). 21renaeusswork was entitled ARefutation o f Knowledge Falsely So Called, and isstill, despite his hostility to the Gnostics, the bestsource for the study of the relation between gnosisand early Christianity.T.S. Lewis to Dom Bede Crif-fiths, 16 April 1940, n Warren H. L ewis, ed., The Let-ters of C S. Lewis (New Y ork, 1966); T. s. Eliot,Selected Essays (L ondon, 1951), p. 485. Idealismtended to be a religion in the early twentieth cen-tury. The relation between academic philosophy andthe London Society for Psychical Research has not

been studied in detail, but both the academicphilosophy and the search for experiences of thesupernatural were, of course, deeply Gnostic. 4Seeespecially A llen Tates The Angelic Imagination, inEssays ofFour Decades (Chicago, 1959), pp. 401-23.1847F. C. Baur (1792-1860),one of the foundersof the modern society of the history of Christianthought, concluded in his critical study of theGospels that John was written under gnostic influ-ence. Gnostic influences have since repeatedly beendiscovered in canonical scriptures, especially in thePauline and Johannine writings. 6Eric Voegelin, TheNew Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago,1952). Voegelins deathon J anuary 19, 1985, ended adistinguished career in which the greatest monu-ments were his four volume Order and History(Baton Rouge, 196g74) and Anamnesis (Munich,1966; Notre Dame, 1978).A lthough there were someshifts and certainly much profound development,the germ of his thought is in The New Science ofPolitics. A good introduction is J . M. Robinsons TheNag Hammadi L ibrary:A General Introduction to theNature and Significanceof he Coptic Gnostic LibraryfromNag Hammadi (2d. ed., Claremont, Cal., 1977).8Voegelin,The New Science, 108. gVoegelin,The NewScience, 109. OVoegelin, The Ecumenic Age: Orderand History, vol. 4 (Baton Rouge, 1974). Theseminal work was A lbert Schweitzers The Quesr forthe Historical J esus, published in Tubingen in 1906and in English four years later, but the search for arealized eschatology had been inspired by thepositivist conclusions of D. F. Strauss, who had con-cluded in his Leben J ew (Tubingen, 1836) thathistory was a closed, rationally integral system thatmystery could never penetrate except in subjectiveways. Religious experience, such as Pauls experi-ence of the resurrected Christ, was possible, inspir-ing, and perhaps therapeutic, but any end towardwhich this worlds history might be drawn wouldhave nothing to do with Jesuss second advent.Gnosis was possible, but not the traditional lastthings. I T . H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and ItsDeuelopments: Three Lectures(London, 1936). Chris-tianity had developed by overcoming eschatologicaldisappointment and emphasizing religious pneuma-tology. The Apocalypse was a false trail. I3This s ahistory as yet unwritten, which would trace not twobut three strains in early Christian thought regardingthe relation between Christ and history. The histori-cist strain would consider (perhaps) the M ontanistbelief in the reign of Christ in this creation, the Euse-bian identification of the millennia1 reign with theChristian Empire, and the post-Augustinian identi-fication of the reign o Christ with the Church. Thespiritualizing, gnosticizing strain would be repre-sented by the Valentinians and their allies, the Ari-ans, those North Africans who feared a materialeschatology (Clement, Dionysius), the Nestorians, andthe iconoclasts, all of whom assumed that theOrigenistic belief in the complete spirituality ofreality was orthodox. The third strain, representedby Rome, Irenaeus, and Methodius of Olympus, ex-pected the return of J esustoa mysteriously renewedand glorified creation, in which he would reign with


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the resurrected and glorified saints. But the theo-logians o this third line of development did not ex-pect the reign of Christ to be simply continuous withthis creation, nor did they claim to know the day orhour. It was this interpretation that preserved the or-thodox sense of the Pauline theology of glory andtriumphed at the Second Council of Constantinoplein 553. 14Eusebius ells this story, the only account ofthe new prophecy or M ontanism based in sourcesroughly contemporary with it, in his Church History,V, 16-18. 15Refutation,V, 33. 16Thecritical figure wasJ erome, who in his early, Origenistic enthusiasm de-nounced the thousand-yearists and who perhapsnever really broke free from the spiritual theologythat dominated Egypt and the East before the vic-tories of Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria. 17Voegelin, Ecumenic Age, pp. 239-71. 18The tensionbetween the two kingdoms that constituted medie-val society came to acrisis in the confrontation be-tween the pope and Philip the Fair in 1302. Boni-faces claim was in one sense not only defensible butnecessary, in another insufferable, and it was thework o the national kings from Phil ip to Henry Vlllto construe it as an arrogant usurpation of regalauthority and to resist when possible. Whether thepapacy fully realized that the kingdom it repre-sented was not of this world, especially afterGregory VII, is debatable; but in attemptingtounder-stand the problem it is always essential to try to readout of imagination such modern solutions as the

separation of church and state (the United States),the privatization of religion (the West generally), andthe nationalization o the cult, as in sixteenthcen-tury England and modern Russia. Noneof thesesoh-tions was available in 1302. IgVoegelins accountshares much with the analysis of the modern under-standing o the self found n Jacques MaritainsThreeReformers (New Y ork, 1936), and in Enthusiasm,Ronald Knoxs study of the pneumatic self. 200nemay choose ones own metaphysical villains, therebeing candidates aplenty, but perhaps the mostdamaging text in English intellectual history is thechapter, The Ancient Philosophy in HumesTreatiseof Human Nature, I, in which the principlesof sufficient reason and noncontradiction are bothrejected. 21Voegelin, The New Science, pp. 152-62;179-87. 220fhe ancient patriarchates only Romeremains, but there the iconographic evidence isuni-form and impressive. There was from about 350 toabout 1100, from the first St. Peters to San Marco(facing the Capitol) asingle, Biblical image or set ofimages, central to which was always the return ofJ esus to reign in the New J erusalem, which consistedof aglorified and holy people in a glorified creation.The most imposing remaining early example is SantaPudenziana, but Santa Prassede and SS. Cosmas andDamian are also important. 23John Henry Newman,ApologiaPro Vita Sua (London, 1947),p. 224.24G.K.Chesterton, Autobiography (New Y ork, 1954), p.232.

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