A Universal Apology — Point Eighteen: That Same Old Gnostic Crap Again
Several judgment calls, which of necessity are personal rather than objective, influenced my decision to join the Catholic Church.
Third was my judgment that the sacraments are a useful, if not crucial, part of Christian life. Protestants regard the clerical sacraments as barriers to faith rather than bridges. Here we come to a deep and horrible lie, and it is the oldest lie recorded in history or scripture.
Consider the tale of the Garden of Eden. Whether one thinks it literally true or not, clearly it is figuratively true, perhaps the best and clearest figure of man’s rebellious place in the world that anyone could ever draw.
For what is the woman asked by the serpent? The question was what God really forbade, or why He forbade it. If God forbid the parents of mankind from partaking of divine wisdom because He wished them not to be gods like Himself, then God is not the highest good, but instead (so the satanic reasoning goes) the highest good consists of rebellion against God, to take by unlawful means the joy His lovelessness forbids you.
On a personal note, I was astonished, and slightly appalled, when a fellow science fiction writer whose name I will not demean by repeating, a man whose work I respect, approached me once with that exact argument, telling me that God Almighty had created mankind in order that man should rebel against Him. He said Christians were cowards for not engaging in a general insurrection against Heaven. Through science, or perhaps though some other means, we were meant by God to make ourselves gods. I asked him politely if he knew the doctrine, which I believe is present in all mainstream Christian denominations, that all the faithful will be rewarded with divinity and apotheosis, crowns and gold and more, in return for our obedience? The conversation rapidly became surrealistic, as his wits wandered in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness from accusation to accusation, and I bowed out of it as soon as I realized he was merely using me as a convenient substitute-target for some anger he had against his father or some other authority figure he feared and resented.
I bring this up to point out how shocking it is that the argument never changes. It is an accusation that Heaven is a barriers between you and joy. The Ten Commandments are not instructions, like those the stewardess gives at the beginning of every flight, telling you how to act for your own safety and wellbeing during the journey, but instead are like the instructions of a kidnapper or petty despot, who seeks to inflict loss and misery on whomever obeys him.
It is literally the oldest heresy in history. The Gnostics of the First Century said that God was evil and rebellion against Him was true godliness.
It is the most famous lie in make-believe: when the White Witch promises foolish Edmund that she shall make him a prince in Narnia, or the Green Witch promises a mesmerized Rilian the selfsame thing, in both cases the evil one is promising something which the prince by his nature was given to him by Aslan. My respected writer colleague was asking me to rebel against a divine authority to achieve the very thing the divine authority promised me if I did not rebel. I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen, but did he really think it was thrilling or exciting or daring to be told the selfsame falsehood, the same old Gnostic garbage, that fooled a make-believe English schoolboy in a children’s book?
It is also something that was present in my earliest science fiction reading and in the middle period and in my latest. It is a recurrent theme, and everyone seems to act as if it is new idea, but I have come across so often that I am sick of it. It was in A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay explicitly, and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert Heinlein satirically, and in CHILDHOOD’S END by Arthur C Clarke in a figurative way, and in AEGYPT by John Crowley in an explicit way, called by name, or THE SHADOW MEN by A.E. van Vogt, equally as explicit but not called by name. I have run across this same Gnostic garbage when I first started reading it, and in things I read just this year.
The Gnostic lie is that God stands between you and the happiness you deserve. God is not the source and fountainhead of life and pleasure and joy and glory, according to this lie: God instead is the cruel stepmother keeping joy away from you, perhaps out of jealousy, perhaps out of spite, perhaps for no reason whatever.
Naturally, when I heard this selfsame criticism told against the Church, my suspicions were provoked.
The argument was that praying to an infinite God whom I can neither imagine nor comprehend was going to be blockaded if, in addition to praying the Our Father to Him, I also pray the Hail Mary to Our Lady, whom I can imagine very clearly indeed, and comprehend her sorrows. The argument was that confession to Christ in solitary prayer was going to be blocked if I also confessed to a priest and received the absolution which he, in the name of Christ and by His power is authorized to bestow. The argument was that decorating a Cathedral with images prevented it from being a church. The argument was that thinking Christ was present in the bread and wine was an insult to Christ, and true piety consisted of thinking Christ was not present and that the bread and wine was some sort of respected symbol. The argument was that reading the Bible would be halted if I also read the Patristic Fathers. Reading what John wrote which Polycarp said was sacred was okay because it was sacred, but reading what Polycarp wrote was not okay. Praying would be blocked by praying the rosary.
I could not believe that the will of the Omnipotent Will could be so easily blocked.
And so on and so on, accusation after accusation. The pattern of accusation was that any normal human practice of worship was pagan and corrupt, that the specifically Christian forms of worship such as the sacrament of the Eucharist was an apostate addition to the original purity of worship, but that the forms of worship of the ancient Jews, such as animal sacrifice, were pure, and so that in order to remain pure we had to do away with the Eucharist and also the animal sacrifice.
The accusation was that the Catholics were acting like Pharisees, adding the doctrines of men to the laws of God; but the reality was that the reformers, with their prohibitions on everything from bishop’s miters to prayers for the dead to crowing a statue of Mary with flowers, to prohibiting alcohol and Mayday and prohibiting everything under the sun except divorce and contraception, they were the ones adding extra prohibitions and doctrines of men.
My experience was that everything, and, yes, I mean every SINGLE thing, that the reformers told me was block or barrier to true worship and true intimacy with Christ was in practice a bridge and a help.
I am not saying the warnings against idolatry and phariseeism and rites that become rote are not well meant. I mean that, for better or worse, my experience is that the beam in the accuser’s eye is much larger than the mote in the eye of the accused.
I do not expect to persuade any man who has not had the same experience, but neither can I ignore what experience teaches just because not everyone has had it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
