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Modernity as Gnosis

James Patrick

Gnosticism, whether ancient or modern, is a dead end. That of course is its attrac- tion.

-Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age

GNOSTICISM APPEARS AT the beginning of the second century as an unnamed and unnameable collection of overlapping and similar systems proposed at the edge of the Church known to lgnatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons by groups of intellectual or enlightened adherents to the Christian cult. These knowledgeable believers published their insights regarding Jesus and the way of salvation in a plethora of books and maintained a kind of shadow church that functioned partly within, partly at the periphery of the church lgnatius called simply catholic.’ The special danger posed by these gnostics or enlightened ones was the result in part of the deceptive similarities between their speculations and Christian orthodoxy. They were, wrote Irenaeus, like glass brilliants whose mere existence discredited real gems, their systems being plausibly Christian, actually demonic.*

At the heart of the controversy was a fateful ambiguity that existed and still exists in the very word “spiritual,” a word both Eliot and Lewis disavowed in the twentieth century because they realized that its use by Arnold and the Hegelians had more to do with vague aestheticism and the professorial pursuit of the occult than with Christian scripture or t r a d i t i ~ n . ~ In the early twentieth century as in the late first, the word spiritual could mean what it had meant among ordinary religious folk of the Augustan age, in most Eastern religions, and among certain Pla-

tonists; it could be taken as descriptive of a world of thought or forms or ideas which could be defined only with reference to its immateriality or bodilessness. For the authors of the New Testament, spiritual meant something quite different: the per- fecting of God’s creation through its transposition into glory. The outcome of this Pauline principle in the order of being still awaits that consummation of history in which Christians profess belief, but the meaning of those doctrines of resurrection and transfiguration which the Pauline principle implies was aptly represented by C. S. Lewis when he stood the spiritual metaphor as it occurs in gnostic use on its head, making (in The Great Divorce) the very grass of the world that will be tough- er, more solid, more real than the vapor- ous gray world which we currently inhabit.

Gnosticism, viewed across the broad ex- panse of its almost numberless historical manifestations, is philosophically a pan- theistic monism in which reality is spiritual (in the gnostic sense) matter, and hence history, illusory. Psychologically, the Gnostic loses himself in the sea of divine being, so that he is indeed no longer an acting individual, but at the same time the Gnostic identifies God with his own will in such a way that the Gnostic’s person and purposes become divine. It is this that we sense in Stalin, Hitler, and the Inquisitors, but in even the most anonymous examples there is the same linking of presumptive power and the utter absence of responsibility.

Access to this gnostic reality is an il- luminating experience or series of experiences which ends historical existence and

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relates the individual gnostic immediately to the divine. Between Gnosticism and full-blown dualism there are obvious rela- tions, but the Gnosticisms of the West, though Manichean in effect, have seldom been Manichean in theory. lndeed it is often the gnostic system that is formally least overtly dualistic that is materially most effectively damaging, and, as Allen Tate and Flannery O’Connor have pointed out, it is this subtle Gnosticism which has given a characteristic stamp to American r e l i g i ~ n . ~

The study of Gnosticism had its origins in the German scholarship of the nineteenth century,5 but it was not until a century later that historians began to take seriously the fundamental importance of the gnostic construct for Western moral and political experiences, and not until 1952 that Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, in which Gnosticism was represented as the most influential Western counter-system, was published.6 When Voegelin wrote The New Science of Politics, the contents, even the existence, of the extensive gnostic library unearthed at Naj Hammadi in upper Egypt in 1945 was known only to specialists in Coptic or in the origins of Chri~tianity.~ These texts, when read with the polemics of lrenaeus and other Christian writers of the second and third centuries against the Gnostics, made the content of gnostic thought accessible for the first time, and while many minor points of controversy remain, the broad outline of Gnosticism was established.

Voegelin’s presentation of the influence of Gnosticism in Western thought had been prescient. He accepted the argu- ment, popular among students of the origins of Christianity in the 1950s, that the Church had experienced early in its history a crisis born of the existence of a profound tension between the ultimate realization of God’s purposes at the second advent and the notion of salvation as a transhistorical state of perfection? But, Voegelin argued, belief in the apocalyptic return did not die, but was revived time after time, always with the millennia1 hope

of Revelation 20:4-6: the promise that Christ would reign on earth with certain elect saints as His Church’s centerpiece. Yet, Voegelin suggested, a religion whose only historical representation depends upon a future event which one may or may not live to enjoy inevitably proved unsatisfactory. The way was then clear for the Augustinian rejection of the millennium as fabulous and Augustine’s identification of the Church as the locus of the millennia1 reign.g Thus history was de-divinized, de- positivized, by the existence of a kingdom representing the transcendent claim of Christ, which, throughout the long course of the investiture controversy, would successfully deny the secular power’s assertion that it represented comprehensive human purposes and ultimate human goods.

It was, then, this Augustinian articula- tion of society into two roughly balanced and opposing institutions which collapsed when Joachim of Flora proclaimed the realization in history of the age of the Spirit. This immanentization of the pneumatic self, a self identified with God, then paved the way for modernity, for the world of discourse informed by belief in the progression of world ages, in the realization of history’s purpose in world- historical leaders, in that intellectual prophecy which we now know as plan- ning or futurism, and in the creation of human communities of anonymous and autonomous persons devoid of order, mediation, or hierarchy. Voegelin calls the temper and principles that made this re- divinization of history possible Gnosticism, it being this immanentization of the divine purpose in the gnostic self which made modernity inevitable.’O

The thesis of The New Science of Politics, insofar as it touches Gnosticism and its influence, has served well, and re- tains its authority after thirty-five years. But more can be said, both of Voegelin’s historiography and of the progress and consequences of the gnostic idea.

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IF THERE WAS IN Voegelin’s analysis of the

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role of Gnosticism in the history of the West any serious weakness, it was related to his tendency, one reinforced by the typical scholarship of the period, to see the relation between Christianity and history in terms of a tension supposed to exist between those Christians who adopted what Voegelin sometimes calls a “stop- history” theology, at other times an “eschatological extravaganza,” between this view and his own conviction that creation is a mystery, the transfiguration of man and creation a still greater mystery, but one in which Christians could already share through life in the Spirit and in the Church. Here Voegelin’s analysis was influenced by a scholarly debate begun in the early twentieth century by Albert Schweitzer and others, who either suggested that Jesus’s promise that He would soon return proved false, or that His promise was misunderstood, that His Kingdom was in fact established in the Church by the Holy Spirit, so that, while one need not deny that Christ would come again, this future eschatology was less important than the realized eschatology which proclaimed Jesus’s presence in history.” Per- haps the greatest exponent of a realized eschatology was C. H. Dodd, who disliked and sought gently to discredit the Apoca- lypse, while encouraging an emphasis upon the mysterious presence of Jesus in the community of faith.I2 Influenced, perhaps, by this broadly represented analysis, Voegelin wrote as though the conflict regarding the relation between the Kingdom of Christ and this world’s history could be reduced to a conflict between the millenarians and their orthodox op- ponents. In fact, the orthodox of the first millennium were in a broad sense millenarians. The text at stake was not simply the brief text of Revelation 20:4-6, but the broad interpretation of history which is represented by Revelation 2 1-22:5, which describes the coming down out of heaven of the new heavens and the new earth, at the center of which is the New Jerusalem, within whose gates dwell the Lamb and His elect. Eschatological tension in early Christianity was arranged not around a

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conflict between historicizers (few in number in the early centuries) and spiritualizers, but is better understood as the attempt of the orthodox, represented by Irenaeus, Justin, Hippolytus, and the Roman bishops, to defend the theology of Paul (as interpreted by themselves) and of the Apocalypse against a horde of Gnostics and demi-Gnostics, “spiritual” and allegorical interpreters of Scripture, on one handI3; and against a few historicists like the Phrygian heretics, who thought the New Jerusalem was about to be realized in the tiny village of Pepuza on the other.’4 In fact, there was no pervasive interest in historicizing Christianity until the fourth century, when Eusebius of Caesarea began to write as though the reign of Con- stantine might be the millennia1 reign of Christ. This experiment ended with the failure of Roman political life in the early fifth century, and St. Augustine made the Church, not the empire, the inheritor of the millennium in The City of God.

But if the Christianity of the seventh century-to take the age of Gregory and John of Damascus-displayed little or no tendency to historicize the Gospel, it was also true that there was in it nothing of the astral, “spiritual,” eschatology of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. The souls of sleeping saints might be in heaven, just as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit were in heaven; but Christians awaited not the dissolution of creation, but its redemption, the transposition of this world of corruption into the Pauline world of glory at the second coming, when, as John had taught in his great vision, the New Jerusalem would descend upon this earth. Although Babylon, this present age, a cosmos organized against God, would fall in some way which the human eye could never see clearly or the human mind comprehend precisely, this creation would be delivered from death and corruption to life and glory.

This was the great principle of Irenaeus’ last chapter: real things do not pass away into nothingness but proceed into real existence; this world was not made for destruction, but would be

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brought by God in some mysterious way, beyond this world’s imperfect history, into the fullness of being.15 Citizens of modernity, even sympathetic readers, need not find this exposition of the relation between the transcendent order over which Christ reigns and this world’s history obvious or easy in order to appreciate the implied conclusion. But it was this prefer- ence for being, this love affair with an order of glory about to break in upon creation, which inhabits early medieval imagination, giving even the blackest centuries of that pre-gnostic world a bright- ness inaccessible to modernity.

Voegelin’s analysis has certain weak- nesses. His acceptance of the Schweit- zerian view that the history of the early Church is best interpreted as a response to the failure of Jesus’s second advent is not easily defended from the texts of the first three centuries. “Millenarianism” is not used often by theologians of the pre- Nicaean period, even when they wished to describe the views of those whose hopes they considered too earthy, insufficiently ‘‘spiritual.”16 The modern use of that term, which Voegelin partially adopted, is itself part of the ongoing gnostic polemic against the broad position of the great orthodox writers, who, whatever they may have believed about the rather narrow problem of Revelation 20:4-6, certainly believed that the end of Christianity was a new man in a new creation. It was one of the great merits of Voegelin’s treatment of the Pauline themes of transfiguration and glory in his last work, The Ecumenic Age, that he had then seen quite clearly that the Church of Ignatius, Augustine, and Gregory was moved by its vision of a coming glory.’’

Perhaps in the interest of avoiding a kind of apocalyptic historicism, Voegelin erred by using a vocabulary in which mystery means something less than the mysterious renewal of all creation. And it might also be suggested that he did not see quite clearly that the Augustinian identification of the millennia1 reign of Christ with the age of the Church represented a kind of ecclesiastical historicism

that would pose problems of its own. From Augustine’s proposal to the proclamation of Boniface VI11 that every soul should be subject to the Roman pontiff,18 there is a direct path; and it might be argued that it was this historicism, the identification of the Church as institution, at least ambigu- ously, with the purposes of God which made possible the gnostic irruptions of Joachim, the spiritual Franciscans, and the whole motley crew of late medieval heretics, not least among them the Albigenses. For Gnosticism as Voegelin describes it has two faces, two moments. One is the moment of historical despair, when the soul has insight that this present world is illusion. The other is, as Voegelin rightly saw, the moment of immanentization, when the gnostic, egophanic self, identified with God, acting in a world without natures, forms, or hierarchy, uses passion and violence to bring into historical existence whatever utopia he sees. This is modernity.

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GIVEN THE GENERAL stability Of Voegelin’s historiography and taking into considera- tion the emendations proposed to his brilliant thesis, the locus and content of those ideas that mediated between the Gnosticism of the patristic and medieval periods (which included not only the here- sies of Valentinus, Basilides, and Marcion, but such successors as the Paulicians, the Bogomiles, Cathari, and Albigenses) may still be identified more completely than Voegelin was able to do in The New Science. There he proposed that as Chris- tianity permeates any civilization, it must inevitably be diluted by the adherence of many who are unable to accept its ten- sions and aridities, and that for this mass of half-converted adherents, gripped by the uncertainty of half-belief, gnosis will appear a providential solution, a welcome release.

Here also more can be said. Granting the truth of Voegelin’s outline, it can also be noted that as the Church became a dominant institution, moved perhaps too -

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much by Augustine’s conviction that it was or represented the Kingdom of God, the Christian mystery was almost inevitably historicized as a system which would emphasize the Church as institution and salvation as an objectified system. Indeed, in the decades after the death of St. Thomas, in the very shadow of Unam Sanctum, one can see the Christian mystery dissolving into the gnostic moments, into a subjective identification of the self with God (the Rhineland mystics, Thomas B Kempis, Luther) and the utterly objective identification of salvation as system. It is in this environment that attention turns from that love affair with reality which the liturgy East and West had represented to an operant act emphasizing (for the first time) a theory of the atonement; represented iconographically by the crucifix; dominated in theology by a transposition from the categories of corruption and glory (or death and life) to an interest in the fulfillment of law, the forgiveness of sins, the power of the keys, and access to the treasury of merit. Experientially, the fourteenth century is a world that witnes- ses the dissolution of reason in the acids of nominalist irrationalism, immediacy, and positivism. Men become either anxious seekers of absolution or spirituals whose beings are inseparable from the divine.

The key to this dissolution is the failed philosophy that denies both the self- identity and the locatedness of finite beings by denying the existence of natures and essences. Gnosticism, whether it is identified and named or not, is a sustained attack on the fundamental Western idea that things really exist, that finite beings are real, and that, to cite lrenaeus again, being real either they must really be established or they must be seen as mere illusion. From Valentinus to F. H. Bradley, it has been the work of Gnosticism to teach that there are no persons, things, or acts, that the world of experience is an epiphe- nomenal refraction of some single divine substance which is simultaneously God, man, and history. Allegory, antithesis, and paradox mark this philosophical bent. For gnostics the world is one vast allegory

whose meaning the enlightened know; a system of inevitably partial representa- tions related in indeterminate ways to an unknowable depth in being. Ultimately, in this system of (practically) conventional signs, one thing may be as true as any other, and it is indeed the very nature of being that things seeming most obvious are most deceptive. Hence the antithesis of Marcion of Pontus and the paradoxes of the Nag Hammadi texts. In Gnosticism nothing exists, since everything is a manifestation, but only a manifestation, of the one divine substance. God absorbs his children; there can be no really existent creatures, only the varied states of the ex- ternally existing manifestations of the divine.

Yet the heart of Western thought is the twin pillars of Genesis and Aristotle, and what these taken together teach is the existence of a world of real beings, beings whose very existence is good, formed as they are by the very fullness of being, by form, known in an intelligible light; the antithesis of that formlessness, emptiness, and darkness that characterize both the kingdom of chaos, and, strangely, Eastern religious experience. In Gnosticism the only form of man is the ghostly form left behind by the experience of illumination, itself a revelation of the most radical kind, unrelated to history, related only to the God whose name is not being or form, but unknowable and comprehensive poten- tiality, mere power.

Those who, like Lewis in The Abolition of Man, have seen the figure of Dr. Faus- tus as possessing a profound mythic significance for Western self-understanding have certainly been right. For Faust wanted no thing, no vocation, no posses- sion, merely the unfettered expression of his own will. And from Faust to Bacon the road runs broad and straight, for in a Faust- ian world the purpose of science is not noetic, is neither wisdom nor knowledge of the natures of things, but that successful production, at any cost and by any means, of those fruits desired by mankind. For not only does man have no nature and fail of existence as a creature or being having

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self-identity and relatedness, but nature itself loses its very forms. Bacon’s Nouum Organum required as a companion piece Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, for the assertion of technological transcendence over man and nature cannot be pursued successfully unless the world has been swept clean of those forms that imply, indeed require, the existence of order and a certain profound respect for the integrity of beings.lg Thus the metaphysical plat- form of modernity, pursued from Occam to the English positivists, has had as its central project the extirpation of the Aris- totelian-Platonic notion of form or natures or essences and the propagation of the thesis that the individuality of every being is merely subjective and conventional. Thus it is hardly surprising that at the end of this process there exists a populous race who, obedient to the folk Darwinism of their teachers, are willing to believe that no being has a determinate form, but that each may enjoy an indeterminate number of natures, passing down the interminable evolutionary corridor first as one creature then another. And at the end imagination is gripped by the paradox that everything is everything else, nothing itself. Persons as such, rational individuals capable of contracts, loyalties, politics, and faith, cease to exist.

And it is of course this attack on the very existence of natures and essences which constitutes the Gnostic mediation to historicism, for if there is nothing in nature which must be respected; if there are neither laws of nature nor natural law; if natures, with their implication of order, are illusory, the field is clear for what Voegelin calls the egophanic assertion which alone can foist form upon a formless world. It is no mistake that the exces- ses of the late empire occur just as the gnostic presupposition overtakes the classical world, or that the Church becomes positivized and brittle as its faith becomes marginally gnosticized, or that the intensely subjective intuition- ism of Occam and John Tauler occurs in a deratiocinated world from which essences have been expelled, or that the Cromwel-

lian terror occurs at the height of Puritan- ism, or that the mindless tyrannies of the twentieth century have occupied a field swept clear of those forms and distinctions belonging to a world of real, finite, informed being. Historicism is another name for Gnosticism.

In the gnostic-historicist world the great institutions-the state, the school, the Church-all die, failing because justice (the work of states), wisdom (the work of schools), and theology (the noesis of the Church) become inconceivable enter- prises. In gnostic civilization the objective form of justice is supplanted by an indeterminate and growing list of rights which are discovered in the gnostic self; education abjures any interest in knowledge in favor of the pursuit of unnameably deep and existential experiences, toward which students must be conditioned, or which they must conjure up for themselves; and the Church fails because its work, unless it has been infected by Gnosticism, is not the inculcation of experiences, which, if such exist, must surely be a work of supernatural agency, but is didactic, at least in its approach to mankind, its presentation of its dogmas, and its moral teaching. Its task is in the high and classical sense intellectual, resting upon and requiring an exposition of and adherence to truth which even its adherents and teachers now often consider formally impossible, it being a commonplace of the teaching of theology in modernity that theologizing consists of illumination regarding things experienced.

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THAT VERY MODERNITY which is touted as delivery from every traditional dogma in fact represents our lapse into a pervasive and ancient religion, a theosophy which dictates human behavior with dismal ac- curacy. For gnosis creates a morality; it does so inevitably, modern Gnosticism no less than ancient.

Beginning with the self, Gnosticism teaches that the form of man is essentially insight or enlightenment, for to be truly man is to be gnostic. And it of course

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follows from this axiom that only those who are in a state of enlightenment are truly human, that those who are not fail of the very definition of man. Hence the unborn, who cannot have had any significant experience of illumination, and the very old, who are beyond it, lose their claim to be considered persons. Furthermore, since a real being is one that experiences and can be experienced and is therefore a collection of impressions, the unborn fail of personhood on a second ground. They die in the darkness of the mother’s womb, and though their parts and pieces are seen as these are recovered or discharged, they are not experienced as persons. Indeed young animals, seals with soulful brown eyes, succeed in the gnostic definition that to be is to be experienced and to experience better than the unborn. Citizens of modernity cannot perform that task which the vulgar of the Middle Ages routinely ac- complished: we can seldom rise above the realm of accidents to see that a newly fer- tilized egg is a person in essence and by nature, as are the defective and the old. If a person is those experiences we consider valuable, the terminally ill and the defective, as well as children in the womb, fail of any claim to existence. Their fate is sealed.

The allegorical world of Gnosticism is a world of conventional symbols any one of which could represent any other thing, none of which therefore provides grounds for real distinctions.20 Equality, which is an arithmetical metaphor, is then the most certain concept, for although we do not as Gnostics know what anything is, we can at least insist that nothing vaunt itself above its fellows. Equality is the most certain surviving concept, and it survives negatively, as the assertion that nothing is really different from, and of course nothing better than, anything else. The conclusion that things separate are in- herently unequal may be a defensible and necessary conclusion when the matter under review is radically segregated schools, but the slogan in fact draws its power from the deeper level of gnostic modernity in which equality is the only

available category. Since there are no dif- ferentiated beings that are real, persons, animals, and the environment are all equally of, and not of, one divine substance. The practical ground and popular proof of this conclusion lies within modern science, which can transmute and synthe- size in the best alchemical fashion, and perhaps especially within biology. Folk Darwinism can produce no real differences between man and the brontosaurus. Time is the only real difference, and the reintroduction of determinate forms and species would bring down the entire bio- logical thesis, which, after all, depends upon the axiom that there are no fixed natures that time cannot transmute into other natures.

If all differences are ephemeral or conventional and all beings really equal, the fervor for equality can be seen as something other than the search for justice long delayed. Three examples of this rage for the destruction of differentiating moral and ontological orders will suffice.

That the political systems and political behavior of the Western democracies and the Marxist oligarchies are identical and identical in such a way that honest dialogue, or mutual enlightenment, would reveal the superficiality of all claims that the behavior or principles of the West are superior, is an axiom of modern, gnostic, political discourse. If the fundamental truth of political behavior is the inevitable and fundamental expression of what Voegelin rightly calls egophanic behavior, then the only government possible must have as its goal the control of private ambition and passion through the unmoderated power of the Hobbesian state.*’ To the degree that Voegelin’s analysis is correct, differences between modern political systems will be merely aesthetic. If the authority of the state is merely its ability to exercise unlimited power on behalf of some utopia, if the modern state thereby adopts the gnostic principle, then its enemies, indeed the enemies of mankind, will be those who persistently attempt to reintroduce some transcendent principle of order. There is

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now in the West a deep philosophical uni- ty between the gnosticized libertines of popular culture and popular literature and the equally gnosticized and puritanical Marxists. Though the former is built upon mass satisfaction of the egophanic self and the latter upon ritually induced suffering, they share a consensus based upon deep philosophical commitments, and either will turn in metaphysical rage upon any politics that draws distinctions based upon the existence of real natures or tends to re-introduce any order whatsoever other than the Hobbesian dialectic of violence. The enemy of peace in socialist rhetoric is that man who suggests the existence of an objective order, rooted in being, or real thought.

Hence the primary philosophic task of Western metaphysics since Luther, and especially since 1790, has been the inculcation of the one truth that there are no given forms in things, that the world does not reflect and cannot be touched by reason. The rage of popular culture against fundamentalists, Solzhenitsyn, and philosophers of a classical bent is of a piece with the deep sympathy evinced by the same popular culture for the actions and motives of socialism, for popular culture is at one with socialism in its cer- tainty that there can be no order other than that imposed by the human will. That the operant egophanic agents in the West are still often individuals, while in the East the state is the principal egophanic agent, is not formally relevant. But note that our Western Gnosticism turns too easily to the Eastern gnosis of state terror and violence, all which is possible because sub- jects and rulers share the same enlightening knowledge that there is no order other than an order of violence, and, this being the case, the courage for resistance, based on the classical assertion that persons have a presumptive claim to their existence and integrity, is wanting.

A second example of the gnostic rage against order is surely the insistence that gender and sexuality are mere social con- ventions whose unreality the true Gnostic sees. Given the triumph of Gnosticism, it

was surely inevitable that synods and con- ventions of our senescent Christianity would be beseiged by women filled with rage and determined to enjoy that complete gnostic justice which requires practical assent to the propositions that pater- nity and maternity, masculinity and femininity are unreal distinctions. Saint Paul’s affirmation that salvation is available to all; that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, then becomes the lynchpin of a metaphysic, and Paul himself again becomes-as earlier ages had made him-a gnostic teacher.

Here one might pause to reflect that for Christians of orthodox conviction the full horror of this gnostic transformation is seldom realized. If the gnostic implication that Jesus’s masculinity was merely conventional is accepted, then the Incarna- tion itself is inevitably Arian, a mere economic occurrence directed toward the enlightenment of man. What the divine humanity that now is at the Father’s right hand (as Christians believe) might then be, poses questions that cannot be answered within the limits of traditional Christian speculation.

And, night following day, if sexuality is merely conventional, the belief that fruit- ful and charity-laden marriage is better than the sterile burning of men for men and women for women must itself be seen as merely conventional. The drive for “gay” rights is a linguistic and metaphysical project of high import for its advo- cates, and its goal is not that consenting adults be allowed to do as they will in pri- vacy. Its purpose is the exorcising from this world of the very ghost of form, or moral order, so that we may be assured that fruitfulness and charity, sterility and lust are metaphysically indistinct. Only in such assurance can gnostic souls find the peace that comes with final release from the burden of form.

My point is not that these things are grave disorders, which is obvious, but that such moral conclusions are the inevitable consequences of the gnosticizing of Western imagination and intellect, a

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possibility always at our elbows, which passed into actuality in the late Middle Ages and became characteristic of the culture after Luther and Trent. Protestant- ism, incited by the scholarly denigration of Aristotle that had gone on for two centuries, adopted the fundamental gnostic postulate by radically dissociating man’s destiny from man’s behavior. This was ac- complished formally in Lutheranism through the founder’s insistence that our deeds are irrelevant in the face of our illumination, and formally in Calvinism through the founder’s insistence that our deeds are not ours at all and are in any case irrelevant to our salvation in view of the enlightening truth that God’s will toward us may be either for salvation or eternal loss, but is in any event inexora- ble.

While classical Protestantism decayed, Catholicism retired to try to contain those viral Cnosticisms which it carried: Quiet- ism and Jansenism, beginning at the same time their attempt to comprehend and control that discredited ecclesiastical historicism which the great Church of the West had developed during the Baroque centuries. The Catholic attempt to contain the gnostic-historicist dialectic and to recover in clarity the mystery of redemption was generally unfruitful until the councils of 1869 and 1962, the first of which was an attempt to found the authority of the Church within itself, not in its successful domination of Christian kings, the second of which broke Christen- dom free of its historic but potentially fatal engagement with its imperial past.

While the Church struggled, the univer- sity declined into a marketplace of ideas in which truth was petty political success. That the malaise of the West should be represented by philosophers who assidu- ously promote skepticism and consider their work incomplete until the common- sense belief in real things and real knowledge has been eradicated among the ado- lescent, and by theologians whose major task is now the assertion of the ultimacy of intellect and of enlightenment against the ecclesiastical defense of revelation, is

hardly surprising. These theologians and philosophers are a gnostic elite, and they will flourish in any world in which truth and order are foregone impossibilities.

IV

FORM IS A GIFT, the gift of real existence from nature and from nature’s God. It is no mistake that St. Augustine, whose own experience encompassed the Manichean denial of the goodness of nature and whose education was rooted in a Plato- nism that easily moved toward the notion that creation is illusion, became the great doctor of form. The very forms of things, he wrote, cry out, “Cod made me!” And it is this love of form which has stabilized the West in its defense of the goodness of being against the powerful claims of nothingness and death, and of its defense of the existence of real things in the face of the gnostic and oriental conviction that nothing really exists. In this sense Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Genesis 1 are the char- ters of Western civilization, and no less than these Revelation 21 and 22, that sub- lime text in which the prophet sees an end of things which is not a destruction but a fulfillment.

If one looks at the city that is the heart of the West in the period when there first were churches and images, one will find that a single image dominated Roman iconography from Constantine to about 1 That image is the return and reign of Christ with the saints and apostles in the New Jerusalem. And it is belief in that world to come, that renewed community dwelling with the Savior in a new heaven and a new earth which defines Christian historiography. This image makes three assertions. It asserts against the gnostics and spiritualizers of every stripe that the root of being which God put in creation will be brought to the fullness of perfection, that creation and the flesh will not be destroyed but glorified. And at the same time the symbol of Christ reigning with the saints in the New Jerusalem de-divi- nizes the temporal order in which that hope is held and dedivinizes even the

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Church, for it is clear that in the New Jeru- salem there is no institution called Church. Furthermore, that New Jerusalem which Christ will bring with Him has no definable relation to time, but will be realized as God wills, not through human effort, but by the divine fiat. And whether this comes to pass or not-for we know it only by faith-it is nevertheless clear that the Christian hope is a symphony of gracious- ly formed being, in which, in some way yet unknown, God who became man is at the center of the city, as man, and still as God.

These are, to Christians, mysteries of faith. To citizens of the West they are reminders of the love affair with form and being which moved the thought and art of our first millennium. Gnostics then as now found it incredible. Indeed if there is any one theme by which the history of religion in the West could be comprehended, it might be the encounter between orthodoxy and the spiritualizers within the Church who denied that God could really become man-pious men like Arius and Nestorious, who offered God a defense He had not chosen to undertake for Himself by insisting that God could not really inhabit and transform finite being. The importance of this construct is not always fully apprehended. To be finite in the classical world (and in modern Gnosticism), to be formed, is to be mired in partiality and error. And although Israel was always the exception to this historical despair, even in Israel it was assumed that God Himself could never enter his creation and take it to Himself in a manner that perfected created beings. To the Greeks, foolishness; to the Jews, a scandal.

But to anyone remotely interested in being, in existing, words of life. For if God can inhabit and renew and glorify man, and in man know all creation, then existence is no sin, and the drive toward death that informs a gnostic culture can be aban- doned. The matter surpasses any religious interest, touching the most fundamental reflection of every human being, each of whom must ask as men and women sur- rounded by technological behemoths and

political leviathans, “What right do I have to exist?” Perhaps the saddest aspect of Auschwitz and the Gulag, of the acceptance by the world of routine slaughters, is the lurking conviction that man, facing the gnostic state, has no just claim to his own existence. That right is now eclectic, con- jured up or allowed to lapse by electronic images which display at one time the pitiful image of a child who will die without a donor heart, but maintaining silence regarding countless others who in the same hospital will be slaughtered. Gnosticism is full of paradox, but the greatest of all is the secret knowledge that what the egophanic self longs for most fervently is death. Christianity taught the West that this one great exit is denied; that man must be, and be eternally, that there is nothing on earth more precious than the existence of a self made in God’s image and ordered by God toward its own fulfillment and God’s glory. The Christian West was inhabited by men to whom it was ap- pointed once to be born, once to die, to undergo judgment, and to enter eternally into glory or loss. In the end, life in the garden-girt city with God who became man or else in hell. It is implicit in that account that it is better to be in hell than not to be, for even if one were shut out of the garden of life eternally, to be, to exist, is a gift so great that endless ages of suffering would 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 course these things are unproved. But in the order of history it is surely this insistence on the unequivocal goodness of being and the utter necessity of form, which for man is moral form, that has made our experience an adventure rather than an ordeal. And it is the courage and the glory and the weight of this moral adventure that permeate Western experience, even in our decay. Newman was certainly right when he wrote, to the chagrin of his con- temporaries, that it would be better that the sun and stars fall from the sky than that one man deliberately violate in one

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small way the moral form given us by God.23 And the corollary is surely that if men, by what the tradition calls grace, were to fulfill that moral form, the planets might dance before them.

It is this sense of the danger and courage and glory that belong to our love affair with being which lies just beneath whatever still is good in us and our civilization, and its loss to the formless eva- nescence of modern Gnosticism that threatens us with a banality worse than death.

G. K. Chesterton, after a lifetime of controversy with that great modern gnostic George Bernard Shaw, noted that in the fray he had always defended the sacred limitations of man against the soaring il- limitability of the Shavian superman. In the end, Chesterton wrote, the difference was a religious difference:

, . . that the Shavians believed in evolution exactly as the old Imperialists believed in expansion. They believe in a great and groping thing like a tree; but I believe in the flower and the fruit; and the flower is often small. The fruit is final and in that sense finite; it has a form, and therefore a limit. There has been stamped upon it an image, which is the crown and consummation of an aim. . . .z4

And that aim is that things should not pass into nothingness, but should be, and to be is to bear an image and a form.

’The bibliography is immense, but those newly interested in the influence of Gnosticism might begin with Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of an Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston,‘1958), or another of Jonas’s works. Very re- cent scholarship usually takes into account the studies of Elaine Pagels, who has revived the almost traditional position that Gnosticism was orthodoxy, suggesting that it, not the religion of Irenaeus, is the Christianity of the future. See The Gnostic Gospels (New York, 1979). 21renaeus’s work was entitled A Refutation o f Knowledge Falsely So Called, and is still, despite his hostility to the Gnostics, the best source for the study of the relation between gnosis and early Christianity. T. S. Lewis to Dom Bede Crif- fiths, 16 April 1940, in Warren H. Lewis, ed., The Let- ters of C. S. Lewis (New York, 1966); T. s. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1951), p. 485. Idealism tended to be a religion in the early twentieth century. The relation between academic philosophy and the London Society for Psychical Research has not

been studied in detail, but both the academic philosophy and the search for experiences of the supernatural were, of course, deeply Gnostic. 4See especially Allen Tate’s “The Angelic Imagination,” in Essays of Four Decades (Chicago, 1959), pp. 401-23.

1847 F. C. Baur (1792-1860), one of the founders of the modern society of the history of Christian thought, concluded in his critical study of the Gospels that John was written under gnostic influence. Gnostic influences have since repeatedly been discovered in canonical scriptures, especially in the Pauline and Johannine writings. 6Eric Voegelin, The New Science o f Politics: An Introduction (Chicago, 1952). Voegelin’s death on January 19, 1985, ended a distinguished career in which the greatest monu- ments were his four volume Order and History (Baton Rouge, 196g74) and Anamnesis (Munich, 1966; Notre Dame, 1978). Although there were some shifts and certainly much profound development, the germ of his thought is in The New Science of Politics. ’A good introduction is J. M. Robinson’s The Nag Hammadi Library: A General Introduction to the Nature and Significance of the Coptic Gnostic Library from Nag Hammadi (2d. ed., Claremont, Cal., 1977). 8Voegelin, The New Science, 108. gVoegelin, The New Science, 109. ’OVoegelin, The Ecumenic Age: Order and History, vol. 4 (Baton Rouge, 1974). “The seminal work was Albert Schweitzer’s The Quesr for the Historical Jesus, published in Tubingen in 1906 and in English four years later, but the search for a “realized” eschatology had been inspired by the positivist conclusions of D. F. Strauss, who had concluded in his Leben Jew (Tubingen, 1836) that history was a closed, rationally integral system that mystery could never penetrate except in subjective ways. Religious experience, such as Paul’s experience of the resurrected Christ, was possible, inspir- ing, and perhaps therapeutic, but any end toward which this world’s history might be drawn would have nothing to do with Jesus’s second advent. Gnosis was possible, but not the traditional last things. IT. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Deuelopments: Three Lectures (London, 1936). Chris- tianity had developed by overcoming eschatological disappointment and emphasizing religious pneuma- tology. The Apocalypse was a false trail. I3This is a history as yet unwritten, which would trace not two but three strains in early Christian thought regarding the relation between Christ and history. The historicist strain would consider (perhaps) the Montanist belief in the reign of Christ in this creation, the Euse- bian identification of the millennia1 reign with the Christian Empire, and the post-Augustinian identification of the reign of Christ with the Church. The spiritualizing, gnosticizing strain would be represented by the Valentinians and their allies, the Ari- ans, those North Africans who feared a “material” eschatology (Clement, Dionysius), the Nestorians, and the iconoclasts, all of whom assumed that the Origenistic belief in the complete “spirituality” of reality was orthodox. The third strain, represented by Rome, Irenaeus, and Methodius of Olympus, ex- pected the return of Jesus to a mysteriously renewed and glorified creation, in which he would reign with

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the resurrected and glorified saints. But the theologians of this third line of development did not ex- pect the reign of Christ to be simply continuous with this creation, nor did they claim to know the day or hour. It was this interpretation that preserved the orthodox sense of the Pauline theology of glory and triumphed at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. 14Eusebius tells this story, the only account of the new prophecy or Montanism based in sources roughly contemporary with it, in his Church History, V, 16-18. 15Refutation, V, 33. 16The critical figure was Jerome, who in his early, Origenistic enthusiasm de- nounced the “thousand-yearists” and who perhaps never really broke free from the “spiritual” theology that dominated Egypt and the East before the vic- tories of Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria. 17

Voegelin, Ecumenic Age, pp. 239-71. 18The tension between the two kingdoms that constituted medieval society came to a crisis in the confrontation between the pope and Philip the Fair in 1302. Boni- face’s claim was in one sense not only defensible but necessary, in another insufferable, and it was the work of the national kings from Philip to Henry Vlll to construe it as an arrogant usurpation of regal authority and to resist when possible. Whether the papacy fully realized that the kingdom it represented was not of this world, especially after Gregory VII, is debatable; but in attempting to under- stand the problem it is always essential to try to read out of imagination such modern solutions as the

separation of church and state (the United States), the privatization of religion (the West generally), and the nationalization of the cult, as in sixteenthcen- tury England and modern Russia. None of these soh- tions was available in 1302. IgVoegelin’s account shares much with the analysis of the modern understanding of the self found in Jacques Maritain’s Three Reformers (New York, 1936), and in Enthusiasm, Ronald Knox’s study of the pneumatic self. 200ne may choose one’s own metaphysical villains, there being candidates aplenty, but perhaps the most damaging text in English intellectual history is the chapter, “The Ancient Philosophy” in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, I, in which the principles of sufficient reason and noncontradiction are both rejected. 21Voegelin, The New Science, pp. 152-62; 179-87. 220f the ancient patriarchates only Rome remains, but there the iconographic evidence is uni- form and impressive. There was from about 350 to about 1100, from the first St. Peter’s to San Marco (facing the Capitol) a single, Biblical image or set of images, central to which was always the return of Jesus to reign in the New Jerusalem, which consisted of a glorified and holy people in a glorified creation. The most imposing remaining early example is Santa Pudenziana, but Santa Prassede and SS. Cosmas and Damian are also important. 23John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London, 1947), p. 224. 24G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (New’ York, 1954), p. 232.

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